"For the millennia that passed before the Enlightenment, the vast majority of humans on the planet believed that in the beginning, God--or gods or some impersonal mass of cosmic energy--created the heavens and the earth. Scientific discoveries and philosophical developments that emerged in the seventeenth century would undermine this belief in the West. But this chapter isn't about creation. It's about the far more subtle change of perspective that germinated in the Enlightenment and later took root deep in the modern Western mind, permanently affecting the way Westerners--including Western Christians--understand the way the world works.
For Christians before, during and after the Enlightenment, belief in creation includes an important assumption about the relationship between God and his creation. Christians have always believed that God not only created the universe but also actively maintains it. All things have their being in God's creative act, and they continue to exist because of his ongoing support (Acts 17:28; Colossians 1:17; Revelation 4:11). God knows the number of hairs on our heads and when a sparrow falls from the sky (Matthew 10:29-30). Scripture attests that God has established certain natural processes to keep the universe spinning the way it should. In the very beginning, God made the moon to mark the seasons; likewise, 'the sun knows when to go down' (Psalm 104:19). It doesn't need daily instructions. Plants and animals produce 'according to their kinds' (Genesis 1). Nonetheless, the conviction remained that God is intimately involved even in these seemingly natural phenomena. God 'sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,' after all (Matthew 5:45). In fact, the Bible teaches that God's relationship with his creatures and creation is such that he can at times interrupt the natural order of things to bring judgment on the unrighteous--as when the sun stood still until Israel 'avenged itself on its enemies' (Joshua 10:13) or when God parted the Red Sea and secured deliverance for his people (Exodus 14:21-30). The most significant case of God's intervention in the natural order, of course, was when he raised Jesus from the dead.
In short, God's people have always recognized divinely ordained laws and patterns in nature. At the same time, they have maintained that God is not confined by these laws. His intimate relationship with his creation enables him to bend his 'natural' laws when it suits his purposes. Most non-Western Christians still feel this way. They don't believe in coincidence. I (Randy) was praying with a group of Indonesians about a serious matter. We were uncertain if God wished us to proceed. On that clear day, we suddenly heard a boom of thunder. I scarcely noticed and continued praying. My friends all stood up to leave. Clearly God had spoken (Psalm 18:13).
The Western understanding of this relationship between Creator and creation was among the first casualties of the Enlightenment. Through advances in mathematics, physics, astronomy and medical science, Western intellectuals learned more about the fixed rules or laws by which the universe operates. For some Western Christians, such discoveries increased their awe of and dependence upon the Creator God. New England pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards, for example, believed that 'the things of the world are ordered [and] designed to shadow forth spiritual things.' Based on the orderliness of creation, Edwards concluded, 'We see that even in the material world God makes one part of it strangely to agree with another; and why is it not reasonable to suppose he makes the whole as a shadow of the spiritual world?' So, for example, 'The sun's so perpetually, for so many ages, sending forth his rays in such vast profusion, without any diminution [sic] of his light and heat, is a bright image of the all-sufficiency and everlastingness of God's bounty and goodness.' The more Edwards learned about the laws--the divine laws--that governed the cosmos, the more he understood about the Creator himself.
Many other Western Christians, however, became convinced that the universe is a closed system in which God no longer plays an active role. On the whole, the Western world did not abandon the idea of a Creator until the nineteenth century. What changed first was our understanding of God's relationship to the cosmos. Sure, God created the heavens and the earth. Before Darwin's theory of evolution sparked humans to look at other aspects of the universe through the lens of natural law, most folks assumed God made the material world. However, Westerners increasingly assumed that God no longer tampered with the world he had made. He was a master watchmaker who skillfully creates a quality timepiece, winds it up and then lets it run on its own. No longer was God assumed to be the sustainer and maintainer of the universe. He was now a distant deity whose relationship to creation ceased after the event of creation. He left the world to operate according to rules and laws, which he prescribed. The God of the deists, whom we've been describing, was a creative genius, but he was not an engaged father. Increasing knowledge of the natural world did not, in general, inspire greater awe of and dependence upon God, but less.
This new view of God's relationship to the universe had enormous implications. It has affected how Westerners view all of life and, truly, all our relationships. If God created the universe to operate by prescribed rules, we think, he must have created everything to operate by established rules. The most faithful way to emulate God's activity in the world is to establish rules for nations, states, cities, and families. Our job as humans is to create little universes with rules that imitate the rules God put in place to govern creation. God planned laws and principles in the world, this view says, and it is the duty of humans to discern them and apply them to our different needs. This new perspective is clear from writings that shaped Western culture, especially North American culture, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations powerfully and persuasively demonstrated how economics behave according to fixed and predictable laws, just like the universe itself. Common Sense applied natural law to politics. Ben Franklin looked to natural law as a guide for morality. Franklin was raised by pious Calvinist parents but rejected traditional religious views by his teen years, when he had decisively become a deist. He set out to identify morality in nonreligious terms. 'I grew convinced,' Franklin explained in his autobiography, 'that truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.' Nature and experience told him that. The command of God impressed him very little. 'Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such,' because a person could determine how best to live simply by discerning the laws that governed human behavior. To be moral, one must determine what principles or laws produce the desired results in society. There effectiveness approves their value.
Today Westerners have a tendency to view all relationships in terms of rules or laws. The way we relate to the cosmos, to each other and to God is determined in large part by reference to natural and even spiritual 'laws.' This, of course, influences the way Westerners read the Bible. In this chapter we'll look at two ways this view of reality affects the way Westerners misread the Bible: relationships as rules, and rules excluding relationships." pgs 157-160
- E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'brien
from: http://www.amazon.com/Misreading-Scripture-Western-Eyes-Understand/dp/0830837825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357955233&sr=1-1&keywords=misreading+scripture+with+western+eyes
Richards, E. Randolph and O'brien, Brandon J. Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders To Better Understand the Bible. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2012.
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