Cutting through Time

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Few writers capture the natural world better than John McPhee, and his 1971 book Encounters with the Archdruid is one of his best. In it, he tells the story of arch-conservationist David Brower meeting up in the field with, in turn, a mining expert, a developer, and the US head of dam-building. The last encounter involves a rafting trip down the Colorado River, which causes McPhee to reflect on one of his driving passions, geology. He is speaking of the layers of rock through which the Colorado has driven down through the millennia:

"The Tapeats Sandstone is the earliest rock from the Paleozoic Era, and beneath it the mind is drawn back to the center of things, the center of the canyon, the cutting plane, the Colorado. Flanked by its Bass Limestones, its Hotauta Conglomerates, its Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granites, it races in white water through a pre-Cambrian here and now. The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time."

For some, the mere thought of process in creation, let alone the vast quantities of time needed for such processes to proceed, is enough to trigger floods of anxiety. Does this not threaten to take away the glory of God in creating the world?

Hardly. The thought of God taking his time to create is precisely what Genesis 1 is at pains to stress, however we might interpret the word “day” in the text. The fact that he might have taken more time than we expect to have brought the world into its present state simply gives us more space to contemplate his infinite majesty. Indeed, it’s hard to see how a stock phrase like “infinite majesty” can find any purchase in our minds apart from rooting it in the very large numbers provided for us by geologic time.

The point is not to pick at numbers: once we get past ten thousand years or so, we lose any meaningful existential connection to the figures. (It is like trying to measure the distance to the sun with a ruler – you are not going to get close, even if you stand on tip-toe.) The point is that the Bible invites us to think of the world as really old, and to think of God as even older than that.

There is something else at work here as well. God not only takes his time to create, he also creates a world with what Colin Gunton calls Selbständigkeit or a “proper independence”. This is not the absolute independence imagined by the atheists or Deists, but rather the meaningful existence of the creation as something other than God. This is best captured in Genesis in the account of the creation of plants: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so (Gen. 1:11).” God creates in the beginning; but he also (literally) sows the seed for the perpetuation of creation through the ages.

As we wander through God’s world then, or as we watch the Colorado wander along its course through the canyons, we should be alert both to the record of what he has done in the past, and the wonder of what he is still doing in the present. Only then will we develop the confidence that he is indeed willing and able to bring the promise of creation to its fulfillment in the ultimate future…however long he takes to do it.

The Residue of Another Day

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

When I came through the front door of the house the other day, Cec, my wife, hardly had to look up. She knew precisely what I had been doing that afternoon. I wore the residue of my day’s avocation like a woolly cloak. Although she hadn’t followed me step by step through the day, she knew with certainty my life had something to do with rich black dirt, back yard greenery, mulch and twigs , and…sweat. I had spent the entire day accumulating such, little by little. What to do with the excesses of the day? Off to the shower I went.

We talk a great deal these days about building lives of character, both in our churches but also in terms of a larger value-laden conversation we have with our culture. More times than not we speak of the enterprise in simple subjective terms as if character were a commodity that is manufactured solely from within ourselves. Like hardboiled New England farmers we think of character building as picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and “just doing it!”

Without diminishing our own initiative in living lives of integrity, I am increasingly thinking of character as an external phenomenon, as those things in life that cling to us. I used to meet regularly with a group of men on Wednesday mornings, and we used to talk often about the nature of temptation and the fact that none of us seem to get through a day without feeling the often-times grimy effects of the culture around us. How do we keep ourselves clean when our entire environment is so contaminated?

Indeed, in many respects, we are the sum total of the residue that clings to us. None of us—not even those of us who live between parsonage and pulpit—live outside the realm of our influences. And isn’t it the case that the influences that are least apparent to us are the most destructive spiritually? And we wonder why the Apostle Paul is so intent on disciplining us to put on the whole armor of God to combat the influences that so easily cling to us.

But, to speak of Christian character only in terms of the boot black that rubs off on us from our world is to look at one side of the story. What of the godly residue that we brush up against in the context of the influences God places in our lives each day? Can you name the five most influential individuals in your life, past and present? Who has God put in your life that has shaped you, one person, perhaps, who has altered your thinking and behavior in dramatic ways? Who has left a residue on your life? And, what character residue are others receiving from you as a result of your influence on their lives?