Murray Rae: Jesus Christ, the Order of Creation

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

This is really helpful @jongarvey. @Philosurfer, thank you also for helping out in this series of reviews.

I had a few questions.

1. What is your assessment of his ideas here? What is most helpful? What is missing the mark?

@jongarvey

I’m pleased to see, in a footnote, that he defines “freedom” in this setting as “capacity to be truly oneself,” in a Thomistic sense, and not “autonomy” in the modern, Promethean sense.

2. Tell me more about this. I think I know what this is, but it seems important to fully grasp this. I’m also curios what the atheists will think about this vision of freedom.

@jongarvey

Above all, though, the chapter challenges us to turn away from Christ as only a private object of devotion, to the recognition that all things centre on him, and this is a public truth:

The confession of Christ as the very logic of creation is not a private affirmation about what particular individuals hold to be of value. It is a claim, cosmic in scope, about the way reality itself is constituted. The one who so orders all things for our good commands, as love alone can command, the joyful response of faithfulness and love.

3. In what senses does he mean this to be worked out?

In many ways I like this. It seems to be a corrective to the generic theism of the ID movement and lowest common denominator engagement between faith ad science.

However, is he trying to bring scientific discourse into some sort of christianized version of science? Or is he suggesting some thing more aligned with A Secular-Confessional Society, where Christians allow science to be secular, but work out in public how they relate their understanding of Jesus to scientific knowledge?

If it is the latter rather than the former, how does he explain this?

If not, I’m not sure how we could expect it to work out. Can you fill this in some more?