Seerveld on Bible and creation

While we as God's people necessarily go first to the Bible (Ephesians 6:4) for the Lord's disciplining and setting our consciousness straight: while we search the gospels, proverbs, Psalm 19, the prophets and epistles to be convicted in depth of the reality of creation, the historicity of sin, the lordship of Yahweh revealed in Jesus Christ and the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit among his people until the Lord finally returns: that is, while we go first of all to Holy Scripture to get biblical eyesight, biblical insight, and to receive the fear of the Lord which is the headstart of wisdom, then we who become adopted children of God and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit must needs go search creation for drafting our fallible, christian solutions to the problems facing us in our sin-cursed world and society-which still belongs to the Lord and us!


That's nothing new. But I'm saying with the authority of God's written Word, Psalm 19, that no follower of Jesus Christ need be uneasy about whether study of biology, psychology or aesthetics is full-time kingdom service for the Lord. According to Psalm 19 creation is a revelation of God's will; so if you are humbly studying plant creation, emotional or artistic creatureliness, and are busy trying to discern the will of God there to foster obedience and the blessing it brings, what more can one ask for a kingdom mission and full-time christian service? Of course, if your biological theory is Lamarckian or Teilhard de Chardinian and your psychology is soft-Skinnerian or Jungian, and your aesthetics is Crocean or a mixture of Hume and Dewey, you should be very uneasy as a Christian, because your study is supposed to be christian! (intrinsically doxological) scientific analysis. Otherwise you perjure: the plants, the emotional and artistic reality whose tongue-talk God finds good and wants translated into a true, praiseworthy interpretation.

We must not succumb to the temptation to use the Bible as an answer sheet to check out our biological taxonomy, as a chart of personality types, or like a Ouija board to determine "what now is art and music?” That would be a cheap misuse of the Bible and express an illegitimate, Immature desire for a ready-made, instant christian culture that shoves off on god what he entrusts us to do historically, generations mindful of the generations still to come. What we need is a richer grasp of creation in our christian philosophy and evangelical theology, and a new, urgent sense of doing scholarship as a community of saints, so that we can live with the spill-over of Christ's promise in John 14-17 that the Holy Spirit will indeed lead us who are faithful to the end in the way of Truth (of. especially 16:12-15).

Calvin Seerveld Rainbows for the Fallen World ch 1.