The present small volume is a collection of six essays he has written in a major reconsideration of creation as a theological theme. Two convictions propel Welker’s understanding of the issue. First, he is attentive to the emerging interface with science in an important reconsideration of what creation is, with reference to new knowledge and with a concern for environmental issues. Second, he is aware that very much theological thinking has become a series of unexamined, reductive clichŽs that now need to be held up to rigorous scrutiny. Moving from these recognitions, Welker charts out new ways of thinking about creation.
In the first essay, the one I judge to be the most important in the book, Welker considers the ways in which “bourgeois theism” has understood creation as a unilateral act of a transcendent God in a single act of solitary sovereignty. Welker suggests that in Genesis 1-2, the “normative” texts on the subject, such reductive transcendence is not what is offered or affirmed. Rather, creation is “the construction of associations of interdependent relations,” a formation and maintenance of interactions and interrelations among creatures. From this, two other fresh theses emerge.
First, the creature is engaged “in the activity of separating, ruling, producing, developing and reproducing itself,” that is, in the very actions and functions conventionally assigned to God. The creature is an active agent in the processes of creation.
Second, God who presides over the process of creation not only acts, but also reacts to the initiatives taken by the creature. These sorts of affirmations of course sound strange in the midst of classical Calvinism; but it is exactly Welker’s point that such classical thought has operated with assumptions and categories that are at some remove from the affirmations of the text.
(From the perspective of Old Testament studies, it is to be noticed that this proposed change from unilateral act to an interactive process is exactly the point long urged about Genesis 1-2 by Terence Fretheim in his “process hermeneutic.”)
From this premise Welker considers in turn a series of related issues including natural revelation, angels, image of God and human dominion, and sin and fall. Welker’s small book, not at all an easy read, is reflective of his larger research program, an insistence that theological work now is called and pushed beyond conventional categories with which the church has grown comfortable. The move beyond will much more likely permit theology to make thoughtful contributions that will be taken seriously in other disciplines that now may be the engaged dialogue partners of theology.
Welker has no doubt that such considerations are indeed faithful to Calvin’s own propensity to engage in the most lively and urgent questions of the day. It occurs to me that Welker’s work may invite a fresh embrace of the courage and daring that marked Calvin’s own work.
