This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
The Doctrine of Creation Is Doxological
Dr. Tyler Wittman challenges some of the ways that we can unknowingly skip the theological step when talking about Genesis’s creation account and what a better approach looks like. Dr. Wittman also discusses how creation is still good and how rightly seeing ourselves as created beings helps us rightly see God as our creator.
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This volume in the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series explores the doctrine of creation, inviting readers to delight in the Creator and respond in worship.
Topics Addressed in This Interview:
Matt Tully
Tyler Wittman is an associate professor of Theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and is the author of Creation: An Introduction, which is part of Crossway’s Short Studies in Systematic Theology series. Tyler, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Tyler Wittman
Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Matt Tully
Tyler, I’m super excited to talk with you. This doctrine of creation is one of those topics that I’ve just been interested in for a lot of my life. It’s just a fascinating area of study, both from the scientific side and the cultural side, all the way through to the theological. And you’ve written a new book that really is trying to engage that theological understanding of the doctrine of creation. I love how you open your new book with a seemingly simple question, What is creation? Of course, my mind immediately went to the outdoors. I looked out my window, and I thought of trees and squirrels and water and birds. That’s, obviously, part of the answer, but you really want to get at something more fundamental. What does it mean for something to be creation? You offer a pretty interesting answer in the book. So, I wonder if you could just share what your answer was to that question, and start to unpack why that’s so significant.
Tyler Wittman
I start off with a pretty strange little answer to that question, which is that it’s song. It’s the Creator’s song. When I agreed to do this book, I started just reading a lot about creation. For me, that’s going back and reading a lot of dead people, right? I was reading a lot of the church fathers, I was reading stuff in the Middle Ages, I was reading stuff from the Reformation era, post-Reformation, and then on into the modern period. And it struck me that especially in the Renaissance, medieval and, and patristic literature, there’s this sense that there’s a kind of musical quality to creation. I remember just being struck by this and jotting it down always. Whenever I would run across it, I would think, Oh, there’s the song theme again. There’s this song theme again. That obviously fired up the imagination of the fathers, and then it started dawning on me that it actually fires up the imagination of Tolkien and Lewis—beloved writers. And not only just evangelicals, but also like Catholics as well. There’s a sense that these guys capture something essential to the Christian imagination. And I feel like theology should inform our understanding of things. It should help us to live, but it should capture our imagination in some sense, and our affections. And so the multi-pronged reason here was just that it was there in the material, I felt like it had some biblical resonance, and I wanted to try something new as a writer in communicating theology.
Matt Tully
How would you summarize the types of themes that you think people often might think about when someone mentions the doctrine of creation, contrasted with what you wanted to focus on in this book?
Tyler Wittman
Anyone listening to this can just pause for a second and just spit out an answer to, What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about creation? And I’m betting that most people probably said something related to evolution, the age of the earth, science and religion, that kind of stuff. This book was in the background for a while, and then it was kind of at the forefront for a while, but it was a good four years I was working on it. And during that time, people would say, “You’re writing a book on creation, so what are you going to say about . . . “—and it would be some science and religion issue. And that didn’t lead me away from those issues; actually, I decided to stay away from those issues at the outset, because I had some theological reasons for doing so. But I think that’s what most people do. And from my perspective as a systematic theologian, I see those issues as important issues, but I think they belong more to apologetics. And I don’t want to make any strict division between theology and apologetics, but theology does come first. An apology is a sort of defense and a sort of giving a reason for something in the face of certain objections and so forth. But you kind of have to know what you believe before you do that. And so I think the way I approached this book was thinking about how I believe in apologetics and I think that’s important, but before we get to that, we kind of need a little bit of catechesis. And just knowing myself, when I came into seminary, the kind of things that I had in mind and the kind of concerns I had in mind thinking about creation were largely apologetic, but I didn’t really know the doctrine. And so I felt like if anybody out there is in any way like me, they probably need a bit of catechesis on this. So that was kind of my interest.
Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful thing, because I do think it’s true that we can so quickly gravitate towards those apologetic concerns, discussions, arguments, and even uses for the Bible that we can maybe neglect, to a damaging extent, really immersing ourselves in the rich theology of creation that the Bible does give us. We can miss that because we have an end use case that we’re trying to get to too quickly. And one of the things you say in your book is that “Scripture cannot be treated like a science textbook, encrypted with pre-scientific language and categories. Its cosmological language is instead richly symbolic, using pictures to teach us a theological cosmology that reaches higher and deeper than any scientific account can.” I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit more for us and tell us both what you’re trying to say and maybe what you’re not trying to say with a sentence like that.
Tyler Wittman
I believe that comes in the course of talking about the six-day account of creation in Genesis 1. The “hexameron” is the technical term for that. One thing I’m trying to do in that chapter was just trying to walk people through what the six days of creation are actually trying to tell us about living in this world that God has made. And I think that’s really what they’re about. So, that’s the primary intention. And then at the end, I do have some gestures towards what I think a fuller, theologically serious and rigorous account would have to account for. And I think if there’s two things I’m personally convinced that the text is not doing, it’s not doing the sorts of things I think two camps typically assume that it’s doing. And I’m kind of in this middle space, where I don’t think either of those camps are actually focused on the right things in the text. On the one hand, you’ve got the people who are really convinced that this is a blow-by-blow account of how it was done over the course of six twenty-four hour periods, and those were the first six twenty-four hour periods of the cosmos. That’s the young earth creation science sort of crowd that looks at it that way. The assumption there is that the Bible, in these chapters, really is talking about scientific facts. It’s doing so in different categories and so forth, and we kind of have to read into the details and, like reading with a decoder ring or something like that, to kind of get the scientific truths out of it. And then on the other hand, you’ve got the people who also assume the text is talking about scientific material, but they just think that it’s doing so in a really blundering fashion, and that that’s not the stuff that is really important. What’s really important is the sort of worldview underneath it or something. Which I think is just a generally unhelpful way of approaching Scripture, with the husk-kernel mentality, where have to extract meaning.
Matt Tully
They might embrace a view of Scripture that it could even have some of these scientific errors in it, but that’s not the main benefit of Scripture, so they can easily just ignore those.
Tyler Wittman
That’s exactly right. And in that crowd, you’ve got maybe more of the people who say there are gaps and even scientific blunders, where we can then supply modern, scientific theories and so forth to show the harmony between these two things. And I think both those schools of thought can have people who affirm the full inspiration of Scripture and everything and who are really genuinely loving Jesus and so forth. I’m not trying to cast dispersion on them. I just don’t think they’re tracking with what Genesis 1 is doing. So, I don’t have some kind of scientific agenda in this book. As I read it and prayed over it and studied it more and more, I just really became convinced that I don’t think that’s what Genesis 1 is doing. I found the most plausible reading of it is the one I set forth in the book, and as readers will see, I think it’s sort of reorienting us in the cosmos as creatures who are meant to worship God. And that sounds kind of basic, but I think there’s a lot to unpack. And I try to unpack it in that first chapter. And so when I’m talk about symbolism, one of the things there is that I’m always telling students that the Bible is a picture book. It communicates to us with words, but then also in those words, there are a lot of pictures. This is my own way of trying to teach students what the fathers would call figural exegesis or something, where God doesn’t just speak to us with words; he speaks to us with things. For example, the temple is a picture of a deeper truth. The incarnation, for instance. When you read David and Goliath, Goliath’s got this kind of scaly armor. When I tell my kids this story, I’m reading it to them and I’m like, “Why do you think he’s got scaly armor? Just think about the picture.” They’re immediately like, “He’s kind of like a snake.” They’re making the connections to Genesis 3 and so on. I think the Bible does that on purpose, and so I think a lot of that’s going on with a lot of the funny imagery (funny to us, as twenty-first century Westerners). There is funny imagery in the Bible when it talks about the world, and I think that imagery is doing something, like a lot of the Bible’s pictures. And so that’s what I’m driving at.
Matt Tully
Some people could hear that and would want to acknowledge the existence of types in Scripture and metaphors and this imagery that then is carried throughout the whole canon and develops in really interesting ways. They would say they affirm all of that, but for some reason when it comes to the doctrine of creation, they might feel wary of this kind of thinking, because it could, in the worst forms of it, seek to almost divorce Scripture from real history. And it kind of makes Scripture this spiritual account of spiritual realities that don’t necessarily have anything to say about real history. But we know, as Christians, that our faith is rooted in real history, real events. And so what would you say to somebody who’s worried as they hear you articulate why you wouldn’t want to read Genesis 1 in an overly scientific or historical way? How is that not in danger of going too far?
Tyler Wittman
As I’ve soft pitched the basic argument to friends and family members, some people have been concerned over precisely this. And I’m saying if you think I’m liberalizing here or something, I think that history begins to be narrated in Genesis 2:4. I’m not saying it begins to be narrated in Genesis 12, for instance, with the calling Abraham. I’m biting the bullet there. If I had to do a full address treatment of this, I’m arguing for a historical Adam and Eve. Why? Because I think the Bible teaches that. Personally, I’m a hardcore inerrantist, and I believe in the full inspiration of Scripture. So, like I said, there’s no agenda; there’s just the agenda of the Bible. I’m trying to say what the Bible says. I’m articulating this, it’s because I think that’s what the Bible’s doing. And I think that God knows better than we do. And so if he has these pictures in mind about the world and if he has something he’s trying to tell us about the world that we live in and how we should relate to it, then we can’t have apart from those pictures, apart from that figurative stuff. That doesn’t take away from history, because the Bible still talks about history and it has its own categories for doing that. But it’s always talking about it differently than we talk about it. That’s the point I often have to communicate with students, too, when we talk about the Scriptures and inerrancy. It’s inerrant in everything that it affirms. And then, of course, the key question becomes, What does it affirm, and how does it affirm it? But the standards for history are just different—what looks like good historiography in different parts of the canon than what they are to twenty-first century Americans. Luke’s specific kind of historiography has a very particular first-century context of medical professionals writing firsthand testimony to things that are contemporary. That’s a very particular historiographic genre that was emerging at that particular time that kind of broke with the canons of what would’ve been acceptable historiography from just a century earlier or even decades earlier. So when you’re an analyzing the historical affirmations of Numbers, and it’s Numbers, you know, and then Luke’s account and how the temptations of Christ are different in Luke’s account (in a different order than they are in Matthew), you just have to realize that the Bible is historical—it talks about historical realities—but it does it in its own way, and we can’t bring our own expectations to it. We have to learn from the Bible. And it always has a point to the kind of artistic ways that it’s telling us about history.
Matt Tully
Some of our listeners may be familiar with the name Cornelius Van Til. He is a well-known Reformed theologian and philosopher, and he’s very famous for his emphasis on the Creator/creature distinction, that keeping both the idea of the Creator (God) and the idea of all of creation separate—very separate—was foundational to our Christian worldview. I found a letter to Carl Henry that he wrote. He writes, “The presupposition of the Creator/creature distinction is basic to everything else. We must refuse to say one single word about the nature of reality as a whole before we introduce the Creator/creature distinction.” Do you agree with that? How important is this concept, and how do you see that play out in the text?
Tyler Wittman
I think that’s actually a very important point. It’s something that I’ve personally learned from the fathers and I think from the medieval theologians in particular. Actually, my PhD dissertation was actually on the Creator/creature distinction and how we think about that. I was thinking about it in terms of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, maybe much to Cornelius Van Til’s chagrin.
Matt Tully
We won’t go there right now.
Tyler Wittman
We won’t go there right now. I think it’s a pretty important point. I don’t think you can actually do justice to the realism in the Bible about the incarnation without this fundamental sense of the Creator/creature distinction.
Matt Tully
What do you mean by that? Unpack that.
Tyler Wittman
If you want to know where I’ve really learned my chops on the Creator/creature distinction, I would say it’s a little book called The God of Faith and Reason by Robert Sokolowski. It’s a very Catholic book, but it’s also got a lot of really good gems in it. The late Robert Sokolowski, a really good phenomenological philosopher who taught at the Catholic University of America for a long time, talks about this at length. It’s kind of like the secret insight that Anselm is after in his on ontological argument and a bunch of stuff. But here’s how it caches out. When you think about the incarnation, the essence of the Creator/creature distinction and one of the key insights is that God is not part of the world and he cannot be part of the world. It’s very much tracking with divine simplicity, the importance of God not having parts and not being able to be a part. But his basic insight is God plus the world does not equal something bigger than just God. And you only get that insight and you could only come to that conclusion if you have this fundamental sense, like I said, of God’s simplicity, where God is not the sort of thing that can be mixed or added to other sorts of things to make bigger things. Sometimes I’ll explain it in terms of there’s a metaphysical billiards table that is like all of created reality. And I think oftentimes people think of God as just sort of like a boulder on the billiards table. He’s just the biggest thing that can push around the other things and crush them, if need be. But that’s not what he is. He’s not on the billiards table at all. He’s not in the room. He’s not something that you can see, taste, and touch. He’s God. He’s a different kind of reality because he’s not even a kind of reality. You just have to get your head around this fundamental distinction of God, so that he’s actually radically transcendent of everything. And just because he’s radically transcendent of everything, and he’s different, and he can’t be mixed up together with things, and he doesn’t have to compete for space with other things, and he doesn’t have to compete for power and agency with other things, then he can be radically imminent to all things.
Matt Tully
His transcendence doesn’t equate with distance from us.
Tyler Wittman
Absolutely not. No. It just equates with unmixability or inconfusability. You can’t confuse God with the world or mix him with the world. And so then you get the Chalcedonian definition, when it talks about Christology and our Lord’s incarnation and the hypostatic, personal union of the two natures of divinity and humanity in his one person. It talks about him being unconfused, about it not being mixed together. There’s no change, there’s no separation. Well, that’s transcendence and imminence language that comes together, and so you really can’t have that without this background of the Creator/creature distinction. It’s not like God plus the human nature equals something even better. And so I think it also helps accent all of God’s outer works towards us—from creation, to the incarnation, to the eschatological consummation of all things. All these are works of mercy. God’s not growing or learning. These all works of mercy. These are all works of grace. These are all works of him just showering his goodness on us. And so I think it’s pretty axiomatic for thinking about the pillars of our faith, and I think it is important for thinking about the things in creation, too, just from a practical, pastoral perspective. You think about Romans 1. Paul is talking about the high stakes of really keeping creatures as creatures and not elevating them to the place of the Creator, where it does such disastrous work on our souls when we confuse created things with the Creator. It makes us out of whack. It distorts our affections and our desires and corrupts our minds.
Matt Tully
That’s one of the things I love about that distinction. It just gives you such a bigger view of God. And yet then you come back to the incarnation, you come back to the person of Jesus, and it becomes all the more amazing that this God could come to us in such a personal, intimate way. But how does that distinction between Creator and creature protect us against heresies that we can sometimes fall prey to? What can this rigorous distinction help us avoid?
Tyler Wittman
Oh boy. That’s a much larger discussion. You hit the nail on the head. Pantheism, or sometimes what’s called panentheism, a sort of modern offshoot of that. These are basic errors about how God relates to the world and how he is present to the world. And I think they lose sight of the distinction aspect of it. I think panentheism, obviously, loses sight of the distinction entirely. Panentheism can have some pretty sophisticated advocates who do maintain a lot of the distinction between the Creator and the creature, and yet they do sell away part of it, because they want God to be part of the whole that is the cosmos.
Matt Tully
The whole is bigger than just God then at that point.
Tyler Wittman
Yeah. Basically. God is the soul of the world, or something like that. The world is his body—these kinds of things. Sometimes there’s the womb imagery that’s taken to literalistic—links that make you blush. There are a lot of versions of this that come out in different kinds of authors. And I think at the end of the day, what you end up losing in those sorts of versions is you end up losing a sense of God’s—this funny Latin lone word that we have—his aseity. And what that just means is (if we’re going to just really ruin it in English) “from himselfness.” God has life, and knowledge, and wisdom, and power from himself. He doesn’t have it from some of the reality. He doesn’t have to negotiate it with anything else. It’s all from himself. And that means that all these gifts come to us from him. And so I think that’s the key. I remember first falling in love with systematic theology when hearing about God’s aseity in a systematic theology class in seminary underneath Stephen Wellum at Southern Seminary. I think he also wrote a book in this series on the person of Christ. And I just remember when he was talking about the aseity of God. I was like, Oh, God’s big. Way, way, way, way, way big. Bigger than big. And I remember so many questions in my mind just falling into place, like suddenly having fresh terrain where I can explore. These questions opened up, in other words, with a much bigger horizon than I think had previously been the case. I was able to rethink grace and human freedom, divine sovereignty and human freedom. That’s recast if God is really big and transcendent and there’s a Creator/creature distinction and I’m not on one end of a tug of war with God.
Matt Tully
And only one person can be active in one moment.
Tyler Wittman
And then reading Robert Sokolowski later, and then other authors as well who’ve talked about this extensively. And you start realizing this is largely how Christians always thought about the matter, but I had just gotten myself into some weird patterns of thinking because I was divorced from that.
Matt Tully
How does the doctrine of aseity and this Creator/creature distinction relate to this idea of creation ex nihilo? That’s this Latin phrase, I believe, and it means creation “out of nothing.” It’s something that, again, if you’ve grown up in the church, you’ve probably heard that, you probably even had a general sense for that’s what the biblical view is. But why is it so important? I think we can kind of just take it for granted sometimes. Why do we not want to lose that, and why did some of our early church fathers have to fight for this doctrine?
Tyler Wittman
If people ask what are the two most important things we need to learn about the doctrine of creation, I would say creation out of nothing and the goodness of creation. Personally, after studying it a lot, I think those are the two most important pillars of the thing. But creation out of nothing is so important because it helps us to see the God who creates here and has aseity. He has a blessedness. He is perfect. He is complete in himself. In the book I say creation out of nothing is not just one way God could have created; it is the way God creates. It’s how he creates. It’s almost like the only way he could create is to create out of nothing. What we mean there is that everything around us is created. He creates everything. In other words, he doesn’t stumble upon some kind of cosmic heap of Legos and think, I’m kind of bored. What can I make with this stuff? And the reason we don’t believe that is because Scripture doesn’t teach that, and that’s also how creation happens in all these pagan myths. It’s some version of the Lego discovery story. Although sometimes a lot of people have to die, and then the Legos end up being dead corpses. There are all sorts of graphic stuff that goes on in these other pagan creation myths. And I think the most striking thing about Genesis 1 is just how undramatic it is. There’s just no drama. Whereas in all these other creationist myths, there’s just so much drama.
Matt Tully
It’s so simple.
Tyler Wittman
Yeah. It’s simple. It’s placid. It’s just this sort of peaceful, serene scene of the Lord speaking things, or singing them, into existence and things sort of resonating back to him, almost liturgically—Here we are. I think creation out of nothing helps us to fundamentally realize that everything that exists exists because God willed for it to exist annd created it to exist as the thing that it is. So, in other words, when we look at the things that are around us, the things that we are, the things in our lives, we don’t have to sort of try to find this sort of seam running through all things, where the God part that he created has been sort of joined up with some sort of incorrigible material that he found lying at hand that has some other unknown dark source, possibly, to it. In other words, you don’t end up with a dualistic worldview, where you’ve got God as the source of everything good, and then this material that was lying at hand as a source of everything bad or something. It really forces us to reckon with sin more seriously as sin, as the source of evil. There could be a much longer answer to that question, but it’s pretty important to just doing justice to the Bible’s insistence on the fact that God creates all things and the fact that God is God God, and that he’s not limited by anything.
Matt Tully
That even speaks to that second main thing that you said was a takeaway for the book was just that creation itself is good. Speak a little bit to just the goodness of creation within a biblical framework.
Tyler Wittman
I’ve got a lot to say on this. I’ll try to summarize. The fact that I exist and what I am is good, even though there is a very catastrophic level of corruption and damage—some of which I have inherited from Adam, and some of which I have contributed, and some of which is just sort of foisted upon me by the world around me. We live in a broken, fractured world subject to futility and in the throes of sin.
Matt Tully
That’s a hard thing to do, to hold together both the inherent goodness of creation, just by virtue of being creation from God, with the brokenness of creation. And that brokenness touches all of us and everything around us. How do you hold those two things together?
Tyler Wittman
I think you hew pretty closely to Scripture. Scripture talks about everything being good. I touch on this especially in the final chapter of the book where I talk about our relation to things. And I talk about this in terms of priestly sacrifice and kingly or royal dominion. I talk about what those things look like, in terms of sacrifice and gratitude. The reason I go there is because I think that’s where the Bible goes, but also you really see it crop up in one of the key goodness of creation texts, which is 1 Timothy 4. Paul’s sort of saying everything’s good. All things that have been created by God are good and are therefore to be received with thanksgiving, because they’re consecrated and they’re made holy by the word of God and with prayer. So, there’s this priestly interaction with good things. I unpack what that means in the book, but sort of walking away from that for a second, I think the point there is just to say, for example, marriage is good. Why? Because God created it. Food is good. Why? Because God created it. Let me reduce this to a practical example that many readers will probably resonate with. There could be any host of reasons why you might want to stay away from wine. Maybe you’re in a situation like I am, where you’ve told your employer that you won’t drink it. And so you stay true to your word, and you don’t. Maybe your family has a history of alcoholism, and so you just employ wisdom and you say you’re not going to do that. Maybe you’re in a context where a lot of peoples’ consciousness would be harmed by that. But at the end of the day, you can have a whole lot of reasons why you might want to abstain from alcohol, but one of those reasons can’t be that it’s evil. In other words, the way you look at it, like any other created reality, is that there are good uses and there are bad uses. And so are there certain things that God has created in this world that are not for our use? Augustine actually talks about this. He’s combating people who have a very dualistic worldview, of good and evil running through you created things. He says sometimes a created good is there, and the way that you use it is to stay away from it. You just don’t mess with the stuff. And that might be why we say some plants shouldn’t be rolled up and smoked. That’s a kind of silly example of that’s how you don’t use that particular plant.
Matt Tully
Affirming all creation is good doesn’t mean that every use of it is good.
Tyler Wittman
Exactly.
Tyler Wittman
There is this important recognition that it’s all good and it all serves some purpose. And the other bit is sometimes you don’t know what that purpose is, and so just be okay with being ignorant about it, because history is just strong with examples of people or societies or governments who are like, We don’t understand what this is for, so let’s tear it out. Let’s destroy it. And then it wreaks untold havoc because they’ve taken this element out of the ecosystem, or suddenly started surgically removing this, or whatever because they don’t understand it. So, there’s just a lot we don’t know about the world. And I think a recognition that it’s good reminds us that the plant’s there for a reason, and so maybe we should be slow as we seek to manipulate the world around us. And we do so with fear and trembling. And so that’s one hand of the goodness of creation bit. I think the other aspect is that when we identify what is good about life, about our bodies, about how God has made us in this world, we realize that there’s a path that God means for us to walk to flourish, as the sort of creatures that he’s made us to be. And so the goodness of creation helps us to recognize what that path looks like. What are those goods he’s given us, and how are we supposed to use them as goods? And so I think there’s a lot of stuff we could talk about here that might be closer to theological anthropology, where we talk about the goodness of the fact that we are body/soul wholes. We’re these whole things of body and soul, and why is it that a life did that is mediated so heavily through digital media or screens, why is that like actually inhumane? And what might be some of the demonic aspects of that, in the sense that what are some ways that those things really encourage us to live in ways that are out of tune with the way that God has made us and draw us away from goodness? Because that’s always what I think Satan, our enemy, and his legions are trying to do is they’re trying to take away from the goodness of life. That’s what they’re good at.
Matt Tully
That could be a whole other conversation about just the ways that we can so often, as Christians, fall prey to this duality when it comes to our own persons, our own being—thinking of our physical bodies as the less important side of who we are, our spiritual life. And that leads to so many mistakes that we can make and ways that we fall into error. But we’ll save that for another conversation. Maybe as a final question for you, Tyler, you call the doctrine of creation in the book “thoroughly doxological.” And doxology, obviously, is just another word for our worship, our praise of God. And this doctrine has that really important end or point as we study it. And you even point to, as one example, there’s hymn-like structure to Genesis 1, and that becomes a really important idea through the book as well. So, unpack a little more for us what you mean that the doctrine of creation is doxological, and why is that important for us to think about as we are meditating on these ideas?
Tyler Wittman
I think in one sense all doctrines are doxological in that they’ve only really been received. Doctrine just means teaching. That’s what the word means. And so they’ve only been learned, right? You’ve only really been taught these things well if they end in praise. So, I think that the common divisions we like to make usually between doctrine and ethics or doctrinal and practical theology, I think those are kind of artificial and we really should have a tight coordination of these things like you see in like Petrus van Mastricht’s Theoretical Practical Theology, where every doctrine begins with exegesis and dogmatics, and that it ends with the practical fruits of these things. Well, I think he’s still explicating what the doctrine means when he’s talking about the practical fruits of these doctrines. There’s a whole lot of doctrinal material baked into that. So, I think all doctrine is doxological in that general sense. I think that the doctrine of creation is more specifically doxological. What I mean is that if we’re asking that question that we started off with—What is creation?—and we talk about song, one of the things that metaphor helps us to see is precisely this aspect that created life is, as I argue in the book, it’s this opportunity to sing this common doxology with all of creation. And that’s why at the end of the book I’ve got Psalm 148 translated by my good friend Ethan Jones, who teaches with me here at New Orleans. He’s a poet and writing some good stuff on poetry and the Psalms. I just asked him to translate this psalm, because it’s this portrait of all these creatures worshiping God. All these creatures, even the heavens. You’ve got birds and everything and angels. And so I just think if the Bible talks that way, that tells you something about what creation is meant to be.
Matt Tully
I think sometimes, though, we might read that psalm and just think that’s David, or the psalmist, just kind of being poetic and just using poetic language. But you seem to be suggesting that we should take this more seriously, perhaps, than it’s just a clever and beautifully written song. It’s saying something true about reality.
Tyler Wittman
That’s exactly right. I want to say we can have both. It is David being clever, but clever in the way that an inspired prophet of God is, who’s proclaiming the oracles of God to us. And one of the ways he’s proclaiming that to us is in the form of a song that. And think about how it comes to the end of the psalter, right? The end of the psalter is all concerned with our response to God, and here you have this sort of cosmic response. And so I just think that, to me, is one of the most illuminating passages in Scripture about what it means to be a creature, and why I think maybe this metaphor of song is so helpful, because it shows what is at the very core of what it means to be a creature. It doesn’t just mean, Here you are, you’ve got this limited lifespan, make a decision for heaven or hell, and I hope it goes well for you in your few days on earth. The Bible has some stuff to say about that, and certainly, that’s not the whole of what it says about created life. It says those things within a broader portrait of the fact that what you’re made for is to be with God and to taste his goodness, to taste and see the Lord is good. That’s what it means to be a creature. Squirrels know this. Trees know this. The sky knows this. And if you don’t know it, and if no other human knew it, these very realities, even rocks, would yell them at us and would tell us. And I think when Jesus is telling us these things, he’s teaching us about the doctrine of creation, about what it means to be a creature. And so when we think about our live and who we are, when we think about other creatures around us and even the food that’s on our plates and all the rest—the whole created life—we have to think about how does all of this fit into this grand symphony of praise to God? Because that’s the fabric of reality. It’s the fabric in which I have been woven, and that’s the wonderful thing that God has made.
Matt Tully
Tyler, thank you so much for helping us to probably see the created world and what it means to be a creature, what it means to see a tree out my window and the significance of that and what God intends for us to see about that in his word. We appreciate it.
Tyler Wittman
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
