On Exaggerating Creation’s Role In Biblical Law And Ethics -- By: Richard W. Neville

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 66:1 (NA 2015)
Article: On Exaggerating Creation’s Role In Biblical Law And Ethics
Author: Richard W. Neville


On Exaggerating Creation’s Role In Biblical Law And Ethics

Richard Neville

([email protected])

Summary

Recent claims that creation theology is the broad horizon of Old Testament theology carry with them the potential for making easy connections between creation and ethics in biblical law. This potential is beginning to be realised in assertions that creation has an implied presence in Israel’s law and that Israel’s economic life was carried out within a worldview shaped by creation principles. These kinds of statements make it possible for the reader to discover creation at any point in the law that modern sensibilities would wish it. And yet the evidence presented here suggests that this will lead to the misreading of Israel’s law. Care needs to be taken that the marginalisation of creation theology in the twentieth century does not give way to a twenty-first century misrepresentation of creation’s role in Israel’s faith.

1. Introduction

Walter Brueggemann has documented the fall and rise of creation in Old Testament theology.1 In his Theology of the Old Testament he speaks of the ‘enormous shift now taking place in the larger patterning of the Old Testament faith with reference to testimony about a God who creates’.2 A key feature of this paradigm shift has been the recognition that creation theology is the broad horizon of biblical

theology.3 Terrence Fretheim has added a canonical feature to this ‘reclamation of creation’ by insisting that the placement of Genesis before Exodus be taken seriously. He makes the case for treating Genesis as the canonical horizon for Exodus, and ‘indeed the entire Old Testament’.4 ‘Exodus is to be understood in the light of Genesis, and redemption and law in the light of creation.’5

This recovery of creation theology and the canonical priority of the creation accounts in Genesis is bearing fruit in discussions of Israelite legal ethics. In his volume on Old Testament theology Bruce Waltke observes, ‘Implicitly, the Pentateuch unites creation and ethics…the creation narratives undergird the Ten Commandments.’6 In the third volume of his Old Testament theology John Goldingay provides a sense of how broadly the creation order impacts legal ethics.

Implicitly, a creation theology underlies othe...

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