by Ken Myers
Years ago, we produced a small brochure to introduce the work of MARS HILL AUDIO. On the front panel were the words: “CREATION is a gift of God. CULTURE is the way we receive and honor that gift.”
The celebration of Easter is an occasion to rejoice in the life and hope effected by Christ’s resurrection. But it is not a life or a hope that turns its back on creation or culture. In Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Eerdmans, 1986), Oliver O’Donovan argued that the fact of the resurrection is the foundation for Christian ethical deliberation (and, I would add, for Christian thinking about culture):
“ . . . [B]ecause it is a reversal of Adam’s decision to die, the resurrection of Christ is a new affirmation of God’s first decision that Adam should live, an affirmation that goes beyond and transforms the initial gift of life: ‘The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit’ (I Cor. 15:45). The work of the Creator who made Adam, who brought into being an order of things in which humanity has a place, is affirmed once and for all by this conclusion. It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause. If the creature consistently acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? It might have been possible before Christ rose from the dead to answer in good faith, Yes. Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call ‘gnostic’, the hope for redemption from creation rather than for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead . . .’ (I Cor. 15:20). That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued. The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created.”
Later, O’Donovan insists: “Man’s life on earth is important to God; he has given it its order; it matters that it should conform to the order he has given it. Once we have grasped that, we can understand too how this order requires of us both a denial of all that threatens to become disordered and a progress towards a life which goes beyond this order without negating it. But when the gospel is preached without a resurrection (as it was preached by the romantic idealists more or less throughout the nineteenth century), then, of course, the cross and the ascension, collapsed together without their centre, become symbols for a gnostic other-worldliness.”
Having quoted 1 Corinthians 15:23, O’Donovan comments: “The sign that God has stood by his created order implies that this order, with mankind in its proper place in it, is to be totally restored at the last.”
Happy Easter!
