Quotes about Creation

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order. And with that failure many other things have been lost as well.

We humans have thus, by abrogating our own vocation, handed our power and authority to nondivine and nonhuman forces, which have then run rampant, spoiling human lives, ravaging the beautiful creation, and doing their best to turn God's world into a hell

humans finding themselves called to play a vital role in the larger purposes of the creator for the creation.

If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world.

We are his poi?ma', his 'poem', his 'workmanship', wrote Paul (Ephesians 2.10), 'created . . . in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared' — not simply 'good works' of moral behaviour, but the fresh creativity whose rich variety reflects the lavish creativity of God himself, thereby offering a sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is lord and they are not (Ephesians 3.10—11).

The question ought to be, How will God's new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?

we should never forget that when Jesus rose from the dead, as the paradigm, first example, and generating power of the whole new creation, the marks of the nails were not just visible on his hands and his feet. They were the way he was to be identified. When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission. A

Jesus is the 'Word' of God. Jesus is the Wisdom through which the world was made. Jesus is, in some senses, the new Torah. And, in a move which has stupendous consequences, Jesus is the true Shekinah, the true presence of the one true God, the truth of which the Jerusalem Temple was simply a foretaste.9

When we sing, the sound made even by small-scale earthbound creatures such as us rings around the rafters that we cannot otherwise reach.

And what if Israel's God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation?

Heaven and earth are not to be split apart; they are to be brought together; and the spirit is the sign and means in the present by which that future becomes real in advance. The spirit is the powerful breath of that new creation, bringing signs and foretastes of the heaven-and-earth reality to birth here and now.

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.