The Goodness of Creation’s End: Beatitude and God’s Goodness

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
The (Relative) Goodness of Our Concrete Materiality

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
The Goodness of Created Existence

Our purpose in what follows is to help answer the following question: what do Christians mean when they confess that creation is good? This question is both timely and difficult. Admittedly, creation’s goodness is not always self-evident to us. Evils in this world are often more apparent to us than its goodness, especially in times…
How We Say What We Say about God and Creation: Kathryn Tanner on Creation

Over a series of seminal works, Kathryn Tanner has established herself as one of America’s leading theologians working at the intersection of theology and culture. Active in the Episcopal Church, Tanner has been a member of the Theology Committee that advises the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops. She is a past president of the American Theological…
2017–18 Henry Center Calendar of Events

Classical Christian creeds begin with a confession about the doctrine of creation, declaring that God is “Creator of heaven and earth.” Yet, within many evangelical and Protestant contexts, the doctrine has received scant theological and pastoral attention, having been subsumed under the more important (and supposedly separable) matters of redemption and sanctification. The reemergence of…
What We Forget about Creation

Sometimes Christians treat Genesis 1-3 as a kind of prolegomenon to the biblical narrative. These chapters are important, it is thought, primarily to set the stage for the real business of Christian theology—those issues involved in the doctrine of redemption. Moreover, when we do engage the theology of creation more directly, our interest tends to…
Terms of the Divine Art: Aquinas on Creation

In a well-known passage from his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas makes a distinction between two different kinds of doctrine, each of which “pertain to the faith” in different ways. First, there are doctrines that constitute “the substance of the faith in itself” (per se substantia fidei); second, there are doctrines…
Augustine, Genesis, & the Goodness of Creation

Augustine (A.D. 354-430), the “Doctor of Grace” from north Africa, is arguably the most significant theologian in the Western tradition. He had once been a Manichee, during which time he would have affirmed a kind of good vs. evil dualism, as well as seeing matter as evil, and seeing creation as an act of necessity….