We may discern two major theological contributions from the period, both of which are important for biblical faith and for the Christian tradition. First, there is little doubt that creation faith is fully and formally articulated by the Jerusalem establishment. Viewed negatively, creation faith is royal propaganda, daring to claim that the king-temple-royal-city complex is the guarantor of both social and cosmic order, and that center of reality protects persons and communities from the dangers of anarchy. Positively, creation faith speaks to a community that has lost interest in survival questions and that is prepared to think more broadly about large issues of proportion, symmetry, and coherence. Thus it is precisely creation faith that rescues the Bible from a parochial discernment of human issues. However, from the point of view of the prophets we are put on notice. In fact, creation faith tended to give questions of order priority over questions of justice. It tended to value symmetry inordinately and wanted to silence the abrasive concerns of the have-nots. It wanted to overlook the angularities of historical brothers and sisters and focus on large issues over which the king could preside. Hence a prophetic alternative knows that creation faith brings with it certain costs and that these costs are paid by marginal people who do not figure in the ordering done by the king.
This, of course, is not to imagine that creation faith was first articulated in tenth-century Israel, for there are certainly older evidences. But it does seem likely that in the tenth century creation faith first received its programmatic statement in Israel. And as the Mosaic community had sought and worked a sharp discontinuity with the imperial consciousness, now the theological enterprise involved a return to those very imperial perceptions and concerns.
I would expect that you think I'm going to go into the parallels between the Solomonic establishment that, according to this very well informed point of view, fixed the form in which the creation account is passed down in scripture and which has such an inordinate hold on the conventional profession of faith among the discredited "white evangelicals" and the Mammonist Republican-fascist party which used the resentment of biblical fundamentalism (itself a modern, political reaction to modernism) as a means of gaining and cementing political power for itself. Which certainly could be where this is going and which could have a lot to be said for it. But I'm going to go into two different aspects of the uses of creation theology.
The fact is that the opponents of the "evangelicals" also hold their own, rigidly insisted on, rigidly ideological creation faith which has been the focus of a lot of my debunkery here. Modern, materialist, scientistic atheism and even religion which holds with scientism and, to an extent they won't admit, materialism shares that same faith. "Darwin Sunday" is an expression of that and in the context of the contrast between the prophetic voice and that of the royal establishment in all of its in-egalitarian injustice and service of the rich, the educated, the famous, it couldn't be more telling.
Of course, I'm not equating Darwinism, natural selection, with the fact of evolution which is far better established in both paleontology and genetics than in Darwinism, I have always fully accepted that evolution is solidly established, though I have come to believe natural selection is not, in fact, a real thing, that it is, as Darwin, Wallace and so many others admitted, a theory fully founded on the assumptions of Malthusian economics, claiming that the totally artificial, totally man made laws that created and maintained the British class system were natural laws when they were nothing of the sort. As Karl Marx astutely pointed out in his reassessment of natural selection, even as it invoked Malthus's economic dogma based in the self-interest of Malthus and the British elite who adopted it, Darwin had to invert the meaning of Malthusian economics to impose the British class system on the entirety of life on Earth. And, I'll note in passing, Marx was one of the most effective of the critics of both Thomas Malthus (he pretty well established that he was a plagiarist) and his theory. Though I think hardly more penetrating than the English radical William Cobbett.
And this Darwinist incarnation of aristocratic creation theology, whether taken up by a professed "christian" or a scientistic materialist whether it is the Hoover Institute Radiologist playing an epidemiologist for Trump, Scott Atlas or the NYU Law professor Richard Epstein who practices, "Darwinist economics" and whose disastrously wrong paper making predictions about Covid-19 are said to have been highly influential in influencing the Republican-fascists' radical negative eugenic policies, aka "herd immunity". Of course that assumes that a very large percentage of "the herd" is going to die of it just as Malthusian economics encouraged policies that would increase the number of dead among the poor and destitute.
The intersection of those two types of "creation theology" can be seen in the well known, and if not radically altered, abominable 1848 hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander
1.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
2.
Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.
All things bright ...
3.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate. . . .
Well, no, the laws of Britain did, as those did in Ireland, where she was born the daughter of the agent of large estates of Irish lands held by an English earl, then a duke. That she wrote those words at the height of the potato famine makes me wonder how much food was exported from those estates as ordered by the British government to keep the price of food in England low and to maximize the profits of the "rich man in his castle", even as millions starved.
So, yes, there are dangers inherent in creation theology, though I think those under the modernist version of that are far greater as can be proven through the history of governments that held with Malthus, first, then Darwinism.
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But there is another side of creation theology that is, in its effect as in its motives, far different. Theology of the creation influenced everything from St. Macrina's very early opposition to slavery, her brother Gregory of Nyssa in that and in his universalism was clearly influenced by her. And there are many other lines of creation-based theology that are certainly anything but a boon to the wealthy and powerful. Off the top of my head, much of environmental theology centered on the stewardship of the natural world, the conservation of environments and species, the kindness to animals, the egalitarian theology based on our common heritage regardless of ethnicity, race, gender, gender orientation, class, the abolition of class, etc, the universalist egalitarianism of so many others is frequently expressed in terms of not only creation theology but in the hope of universal reconciliation, identification, with the Creator.
Brueggemann's excellent point that though the expression we have of creation theology in the book of Genesis, and I'd guess elsewhere it is mentioned, was almost certainly not the origin of it but used it to the ends of those who wrote it down is an essential part of this study. These texts are the product of a very long development and transmission, they went through many hands, some of them altering them for their own purposes or remembering them or commenting on them to reflect their own point of view. The reading-writing class generally not being the destitute and the impoverished or even the working poor, you have to read the texts keeping that in mind, just as the fact that the writers and tellers were almost certainly 100% or nearly so is essential to having a real understanding of what they mean. If that means the texts are "tainted" that's true of virtually every text published, today. Modern as well as ancient and translated. But to refuse to consider them because of that loses you a lot more than an informed and cautious reading of them will.
There is every possibility that the facts that Brueggemann sets out as to this particular writing of creation in the Solmonic period is, to an extent, an accident of history and not a definitive characteristic of creation theology in general. Like the theology of ends, whether of an individual or the entire biosphere of the Earth, it can both originate from and end in quite different places and for quite different ends. There are things in it that do both, or, rather, can serve both. Whether or not it does that is a choice we make. Whether we fall into temptation or are delivered from evil may depend on divine assistance but we're not helpless to choose.
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