Creation & Salvation

Last week I gave props to Ken Myers, suggesting Mars Hill for your Christmas shopping. Well, he's back, I just read his December letter from the Mars Hill Audio Journal, in which he challenges some of our common thinking about creation & salvation. How do you link these two ideas? Do you believe that time & space as created by God will one day be destroyed so that those who are saved will be saved to a timeless-spaceless other-existence called heaven? Consider some excerpts.

"American Christians seem much more willing to fight about the fact of Creation (against Darwinism) or fight with one another about how many hours Creation took than they are to order their lives around the structures that God has placed in Creation. Christians want to insist on the fact of Creation even as they are willing to ignore the meaning and significance of the order of Creation."

Is our interaction with creation simply an objectifiable fact which we arm ourselves to defend our belief in God? Does our interaction with creation also include our living experience with other created things/people as subjects of the king? How does the order established in Genesis 1 & 2 order our lives? How do we interact with living things (plants, animals, places) and people in a way which glorifies our creator?

"There has been since the beginning of the Church a temptation to read the story of God's saving work as an account of human liberation from Creation rather than human redemption in the context of a renewed Creation."

Do you consider the earth and its cultures as things which must be loathed or left behind in order to pursue more spiritual things? How does your salvation include ways in which you live (treat, consider, care for, enjoy) redemptively with other created things? What if heavens looks a lot more like earth than heaven?

"The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies." (Romans 8:19-23)