Andree TROOST: Cosmic Law-order and Coherence

Dealbh le Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh

COSMIC LAW-ORDER AND COHERENCE 

by ANDREE TROOST

Extract from 

"What is Reformational Philosophy? 

An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd" 

Paideia Press, 2012

     The standard separation (and not just distinction) between “norms and facts" is therefore philosophically incorrect and demonstrably has a non-Christian origin in secularized paganism, a mode of thought that tried mentally to eliminate the divine from the non-divine. This existence of all creatures in the correlation of law and subject, this two-sidedness of all things, is one of the fundamental ideas of Reformational philosophy (in Dooyeweerd's version). The correlation is also referred to as the meaning of existence. We should bear in mind, however, that the "meaning" of things involves more than just this correlation, as we shall see later.

     […]This transcendent unity, viewed in terms of the law-side, is the unity of the divine Creator's will - of God's creative word that calls into being this or that, thus or so onto paths of unfolding and developing. All things have come into being from and through this Word, also in time. Viewed in terms of the subject-side, this unity is the temporally transcendent fullness or root unity of all creation, that is to say, it is the pre-existing and transcendent Christ, who is God and man. Thus the unity of reality, which all major philosophers have sought from the beginning right up to our own day, has a law-side and a subject-side, a divine and a creaturely side.

     This unity is not an imagined unity but a revealed unity, a unity that can only be known and acknowledged in faith. It is a unity that reminds us that in all the diversity and all the coherence within that diversity that we experience in our temporal life, we are constantly dealing with - as our worldview would express it - the one will of the Creator God, the creative will which he actualized first of all in Christ, the "first-born of all creation," the "alpha" (Rev. 3:14). It is there that we find the one source or root of all creaturely diversity as unity: in the will and law of God, revealed in Christ. There is found, also in terms of the subject-side, the unity of all created reality, which qua unity is likewise summed up and realized in Christ.

     Scripture points in the same direction when it says about the law-side: "For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not kill" (James 2:10-12). The commandments are all united in God's will. And as regards the subject-side, Scripture says that all things (ta panta) "consist" in Christ, are "held together" in Him (Col. 1:17), are "joined together" under Him as under one head (Eph. 1:22; 4:15-16).

     When this (root) unity in creation, and particularly the unity on the law-side of creation, is not recognized, we can rightly speak of an undeified and uprooted outlook on reality, or of a horizontalist view of reality. Such a view negates both God's immanence and reality's enduring bond with the Word through which and in which it has been created.

     So we should not go along with the present-day aversion to so-called “metaphysical speculations" when dealing with the full and true reality that is accessible only to the eye of faith and faith knowledge. There are more things in man's temporal sensory modes of experience than can be accounted for in traditional philosophy. This is not a fantasized “other" reality, some super-natural or meta-physical reality, but our own everyday reality, that is to say (philosophically speaking), insofar as its supra-temporal fullness or root unity is concerned, according to its law-side and its subject-side - its "transcendent depth dimension," its participation in Christ who is its "alpha" or "root" (Rev. 3:14; 5:5; 22:13,16).

THEOLOGICAL RELEVANCE

     The above view of reality is very important for theology, for instance in the doctrine of creation, which to my knowledge has not yet found an acceptable solution to the exegetical problem of all things being “created in Christ" (28) -not even in the "Christomonism" of Karl Barth (29). As a result, the prevailing theological doctrine of creation has remained considerably poorer than is warranted by Scripture. So far, the New Testament enrichment of the Old Testament creation account has been conspicuous by its absence from systematic theology, despite many exegetical discourses on "the cosmological significance of Christ" in connection with Col. 1:15-20.

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(28) Cf. my article "Geschapen in Christus" cited in chap. 1, n. 14.
(29) Nor in the recent extensive studies by Christian Link, schöpfungstheologie angesichts der Herausforderungen des 20. Jahrhunderts [Creation theology in the face of the challenges of the twentieth century] 2 vols - (Gütersloh, 1991); and Abraham van de Beek, Schepping. De wereld als voorspel voor de eeuwigheid [Creation: The world as prelude to eternity] (Baarn, 1996).

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