Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 60:238 (Apr 1903)
Article: The Prayer Of Creation
Author: Clarence Greeley

BSac 60:238 (April 1903) p. 297

The Prayer Of Creation

Reverend Clarence Greeley

The Prayer of Creation suggests the scope of Christianity. Man is God’s image; Christ his “express image.” That is the ideal view. But, in this workaday world, ideals seem to have a hard time. Modern science and the West Aryan nations teach us to look first to the earth for our deities, and to regard our tasks as quite fragmentary, modest, and terrestial; that our little globe is, if not “in den äussersten Zweigen,” nevertheless, spatially considered, only a relatively insignificant and “vanishing point” in the universe, and each of the countless stars we see, at best “only a ray by night.” Man is variously termed a local incident in timeless evolution, a drop in the ocean, or a speck in space. Surely we have no commanding view. Is man the measure of the world? Can the Christ come out of Nazareth? Can individuality be universal?

But Paul’s standpoint is spiritual rather than spatial. He is not geocentric, heliocentric, or Christocentric “after the flesh.” Perhaps it is not too much to say, that for him the soul is the Bethlehem of the universe, in which God is born through creation’s travail,—

“The mind is like the sky
Than all it holds more vast, more high.”

As Browning says, “This earth’s no goal, but starting-point for man.”

We are not attempting, in this article, so fruitless a task as the prediction of the final form of society. “It is now more than usually impossible to prophesy the future.” No

BSac 60:238 (April 1903) p. 298

cosmic theory is complete. The summit of creation is in the clouds. We are not trying “to reconceive the Christ.” The prayer of the age is not for a new religion, but for the actual content of Christianity. Does Christ answer creation’s prayer? Is Jesus Christ the proof of God? We simply insist on the Pauline thought, expressed also in Ephesians and Colossians, of the objective and cosmic significance of Christ,—on the obvious truth that Christianity, if the absolute religion, must answer the prayer of creation (Rom. 8:19) for the perfection of the microcosm, man, whose will, as Dorner says, has a universal reference to nature; or, more concretely, the focus of art, science, politics, and the like is in the life of this, the perfect religion. The divinity in God, must be, at least, as large as the humanity in man.

This article has been suggested by the perusal of such statements as the following, of rather frequent occurrence, in religious literature: It ought to be no longer possible for Japanese, studying in London, to go home, and advise against the adoption of ...