[upbeat instrumental music] - Most Americans know of Jonathan Edwards as a hellfire and damnation
preacher who delivered what is perhaps the best known
sermon in American history, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Now, how many of you have read that? Wow, that's impressive. Some have called it the best
sermon in American history. Some have called it the worst. But few Americans know
that Edwards was arguably the greatest religious mind in
the history of the Americas. One measure of his greatness
is the recent completion of the Yale edition of the
Works of Jonathan Edwards. It is 73 volumes, each
volume four to 800 pages. 26 of those volumes are in print, and the rest are electronic. The three-volume reference work
that came out 25 years ago, Encyclopedia of the American
Religious Experience, three volumes, each 500 pages. If you go to the index, the
name that has the most citations all over these three
volumes is Jonathan Edwards. But if few Americans are
aware of Edwards's stature as the premiere American
theologian, fewer still know of his place in the
history of Christian thought. Several decades ago, Patrick
Sherry published the book Spirit and Beauty: A History
of Theological Aesthetics. Three theologians, he argued,
in the history of Christianity related God to beauty more
than any of the others, and those three were Augustine, Balthasar, Hans Urs von Balthasar,
the 20th century Swiss Catholic theologian, and
Jonathan Edwards, 18th century. Of the three, though,
he showed it was Edwards who made beauty most central
to his vision of God, more than anyone else in the
history of Christian thought. Now, a central part of the
Edwardsian vision of God, a God of beauty, is his
typological view of reality. And this, well, in the
book that was up there, is a fleshing out of what
I think he would have done if he were living in the 21st century, types in all of reality. Now, by a typological
view of reality, I mean, his insistence that every
square inch of the cosmos is a sign that speaks and reveals. The message of these signs
is a beautiful message, and it's as near infinite
as the universe itself, because it was made by the infinite God. But the message has a
code that must be cracked, word by word, sentence by sentence, to tell the story that is
inscribed in the cosmos. And the story is of the
infinite personal Being who decided to create a
cosmos, oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need a lot more water. My water's gone. So, the story is of an
infinite personal Being who decided to create a
cosmos with a little speck called Earth, populated by
creatures called human beings. These little creatures abused their spectacular privileges and
rejected Him; yet, he won them back by becoming one of
them, subjecting his infinite self to their torture and
murder, and then rising back to life, and in the
process, winning those magnificent but perverse
creatures back to Himself. Now, according to Edwards,
this counterintuitive story, full of glory and beauty,
thank you so much. I'm probably gonna need
one or two more after this. This counterintuitive story,
full of glory and beauty, is told by every square
inch of the cosmos. Now, to be more precise,
a tiny part of the story is told by each tiny part of the cosmos. But if a person does not have what Edwards called
the sense of the heart, which is given by the Holy
Spirit, then that person will never crack the code
that deciphers the signs which Edwards and much of
the tradition called types. He or she will not get that
little bit of the story, and probably not the whole story at all. Now, in other words, that
person will not be able to read the signs, for they
will be in a foreign language. Now, Edwards used exactly those sorts of words for this story. He said, it's a language one has to learn, just like learning a
language of this world, but you have to go to the
other world, as it were, to learn the language of this message, because the message comes
from the other world about this world, even though
every bit of this world is inscribed with a part of the story. Now, most Christians before
Edwards shared this vision of God's revelation through the creation. They said amen to the Bible's
proclamation in Psalm 19 that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. They saw God's glory through the things that had been made, as
Paul put it in Romans one. Not only had they sensed
something beautiful in the glories of the world around them
and above them and in them, but they've also sensed something of what Hugh of Saint Victor called God's wisdom in and through the creates he made. They resonated with Jesus's
saying that the lilies of the field and the birds of
the air show that God would provide for his people, since
God provided for them, and yet loved his people far more
than the lilies and the birds. And if God was speaking
through lilies and sparrows, they surmised that he was
probably also speaking through wine and bread
and vines and lights, as Jesus's connections to
those things suggested. But in the modern age, fewer
Christians have been able to see messages like this in the creation. They've been affected by two things: growing secularism, which
refuses to acknowledge that we in the world
are the creation of God, and certain theologies that
discount even believers' abilities to discern
meaning in the creation. Now, we've all heard about
the first cause of Christians being less about to understand
the meaning of creation, secularism and its gradual
disenchantment of the world. We've heard from
historians and sociologists that as more and more
people became convinced that the world's origin could
be explained by science, the cosmos came to be regarded
as a predictable machine made by God, and then when
faith in God dissolved, it was seen as a cold cosmos
arising from randomness and therefore, inimical to
lasting personhood and love. Now, most of us learned in
college history classes, and maybe you're learning
now in your college history classes, that this
disenchantment of the world started with what's been called
the Copernican Revolution, which supposedly made humanity
the center and measure of all things, replacing the
infinite God with finite man, broken in his relationships
and partial in his vision. It made sense to us who
took those college classes many, many years before
you were born that moderns started to turn their focus
from what was beyond limit, God, to what they could
know within their limits, human beings and their nearby world. Now, if we take a bit of
philosophy in college, and I've already met some
philosophy majors today, we learn that the German
philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Now, you just got an illustration
of someone who stutters. He stutters right in the middle
of a lecture, imagine that. I did a, probably the
most fun book I ever wrote was a book called Famous Stutterers, 12 famous stutters, from
Moses to Marilyn Monroe, a secular book, but I had
a lot of fun writing it. [audience laughs] So, Kant, so, we learned
from the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, who limited
knowledge even further by saying that we can never
know things as they really are, the Ding an sich, the
thing in itself, either God or things closer to us, and
that we can really only know our own thoughts about God
and things outside of us. We might have also read
about the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his
so called leap of faith, and I say so called because that's a term he probably never used himself. But there's little doubt
that he did persuade generations of readers that they must leap over reason in this world
to get to ultimate truth. It's unfortunate if this is all
they learn from Kierkegaard, if it's all you learn from
Kierkegaard, but probably, being a Tory, you've learned
far more about Kierkegaard, for he rightly stressed the
flip side of reason's inability to know the triune God
directly, namely, the soul's, apart from reason, the
soul's capacity for communion with the triune God in its
subjective or personal knowledge. Now, there's also, so it's
not only modern philosophy that has contributed to the
disenchantment of this world. It's also modern theology, and what you could call the
denominational difference. The 16th century
Protestant Reformers argued that the late medieval Catholic theology had too much confidence in reason. Luther and Calvin insisted
that Roman theologians of their day failed to recognize
sufficiently that reason, like every other part of the
human person, was tainted by the fall, and for this
reason, could not be relied upon to see in the creation
anything truthful about God. Since reason was a gift
of nature and not grace, Protestants tended to conclude
that the world of nature is fundamentally different
from the sphere of grace, so that the beauties of the
world have no fundamental or primary relation to the beauty of God. And even if they do, sin
has so damaged our eyesight that we cannot see that relation rightly, and in fact, our sin-damaged
eyes are not capable of seeing anything about the true God
from reason and nature alone. But more important for
Protestants, God has shown us everything we need
to know in the Bible, and the main story in the
Bible is about salvation, and especially justification. According to the Protestant Reformers, too many Catholics had
misused the creation to argue for what Luther
called a theology of glory, which assumed that they
could know what was important to know about God through
reason and nature alone. Luther proposed that the only way to know the true God was through
the cross of Jesus Christ. Protestants generally agreed with this, as did many Catholic theologians
in the next centuries. But while Catholics continued
to sustain a robust theology of creation, Protestants
tended, not universally, but tended to let their
understanding of creation become eclipsed by their overwhelming
emphasis on redemption. Some even went so far
as to claim that there's no such thing as revelation
through the creation. But that didn't become widely accepted among Protestants until the 20th century. From the Lutheran and Reformed scholastics in the 16th through the 18th centuries, all the way up until the First World War, the vast majority of
Protestant theologians taught God's revelations in his two books, the book of scripture
and the book of nature. Now of course, the first,
the book of scripture, they said, is necessary to make any sense of the book of nature,
but the book of nature is chock-full nonetheless of
revelations of God's glory, seen by those whose eyes
the Holy Spirit has opened. But in the 20th century, many Christians, especially Protestants,
lost sight of this vision. Part of the reason was the rise of Nazism and its so-called theology, well, yeah, it really was a theology,
of blood and soil. This was taken to be an
example of natural theology. Now, natural theology is the name for Christian theologies that
find meaning in this world. So these, you know, the
Nazi natural theology seemed to be proof that
claims for revelation in the world outside the
Bible lead only to idolatry, as Nazism was an obvious
example of idolatry, worshiping a false god, the god of
the Aryan race, basically. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth
was particularly effective in persuading his fellow
theologians, all the way through the 20th and now in
the 21st century, that all natural theology is a betrayal
of the biblical vision. Barth went to the classic
texts, not only Acts 17, which has Paul's speech to
the Athenian philosophers, but also Psalm 19 and Romans one. In Psalm 19, Barth pointed to verse three: their voice is not heard,
arguing that the voices of creation are dumb and mute. After all, he wrote,
the Old Testament shows that no one outside of
Israel knew the true God. On Romans one, Barth
argued, following Luther, that all the so-called
revelation of God to man through nature results
only in condemnation. Therefore, Barth reasoned,
since the testimonies of God in nature are
invariably misunderstood, they're not revelation at all. They falsify rather than illumine. The only true knowledge we have of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. By implication, all the
supposed types that observers have said for centuries, for
millennia, that they found in nature and history,
and that supposedly point to the true God, are really counterfeit, pointing instead to things
other than the true God, merely imagined in
likeness to the observers. And so, in a word, they are idols. The search for types is a wild goose chase with a pagan god at its end. But I would suggest that Barth was practicing eisegesis
rather than exegesis. He was reading into rather
than out of the text. When the psalmist said of
the voices of the creation that they're not heard, he
probably meant that their voice is not understood rather
than it's not sounded. For he went onto say that these voices go out through all the earth and
reach to the end of the world. Now, the point seems
to be that their voices are sounded to all the
world, not just Israel. Something is being proclaimed
to the world outside of Israel, even if it's not
always understood or received. Mm, aha, excellent, thank
you, water number three. And in Romans, Paul says the same thing. In seven different ways, he
claims that God is making himself known to what seems to
be every human heart and mind on which he has written his
law, that's Romans 2:15. That's the first way. Back in Romans one, he
claims that what can be known about God, that's the second
way, is plain to them, that's the third way, because
God has shown it to them, that's the fourth way, and
then ever since the creation of the world, his eternal
power and divine nature, invisible though they are,
have been understood and seen, those are the fifth and sixth
ways, through the things that he has made, so
they are without excuse. For though they knew God,
that's the seventh way, they did not honor him as
God or give thanks to him. Now, Barth is right that
Paul suggests that this general revelation usually
leads to condemnation. The apostle says that
these same human beings exchanged the truth about
God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature
rather than the Creator. But, I think we have to
remember three things. First, Paul is speaking of the
universal tendency of every human being to turn away
from God to self and world. This was true of every believer
before the grace of God turned him or her back to God. It speaks of the fall,
not redemption from fall. It speaks of the tendency to
misread the signs in creation, not the legitimacy of
the signs themselves. Just because our sinful
tendency before redemption is to misread does not
mean that once redeemed, we cannot learn to read properly. Second, Paul repeatedly
declares that the message comes through loud and clear;
namely, that there is a Creator who is divine and eternally powerful. Third, scripture suggests
that some fallen creatures see something in the signs
to encourage a search for the true sign Maker. Paul told the Athenians on
Mars Hill that God, and this is in Acts 17, "God allotted
the times of human beings' "existence and the
boundaries of their places "where they should live so
they would search for God "and perhaps grope for him
and find him," close quote. Those are verses 26 and 27. So Psalm 19 and Romans one, and Acts 17, teach that there is natural
revelation from God. God speaks through nature of his existence and power and deity. Now, most use this
revelation most of the time for idolatrous purposes, but
it's revelation nonetheless. Scripture suggests that some
unbelievers use this natural revelation as an incentive
to search for the true God, and this search, if it's successful, always leads to the
Trinitarian God of scripture, and is both inspired by
and led by the Holy Spirit. Human nature by itself
without the Holy Spirit is powerless to see the
meaning of the signs or to follow them to the true God. But the Holy Spirit uses God's signs to open eyes to see his glory in creation. So what can we say about Barth? "He rightly warned of
our temptation to confuse "culture with Christ, and disastrously so. "But his rejection of
scripture's testimony "to natural revelation was more the result "of an a priori view of
revelation than an unprejudiced "reading of the scripture text itself." Now, those are the words of the great Dutch theologian
Berkouwer; hence, Barth departed from the majority
view of the great tradition, which majority always
taught that while there's no saving knowledge of God in
nature, there is nevertheless true knowledge available
to the unregenerate by reason alone, and that the regenerate have available to them
a near-infinite panoply of revelations in human nature
and the nature of the cosmos testifying to the truths
not only of creation but also of redemption by the triune God. So, Barth departed from Basil,
and Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas and Calvin and Jonathan Edwards
on this understanding, and even from many of the
Lutheran and Reformed scholastics of the 16th through the 18th centuries. Now, lemme return to Edwards. Listen to him talk about the extent of God's messaging throughout the cosmos. Here's a quote, and I think
I put it in your handout. "I am not ashamed to own that I believe "that the whole universe,
heaven and earth, "air and seas, be full of
images of divine things, "so much so that there's room
for persons to be learning. I think he wrote here Torrey
Honors college students. [audience laughs] His handwriting is
notoriously hard to read, but I think it might be in there. You know, "to be learning
more and more of this language "and seeing more of that which
is declared in it to the end "of the world without
discovering it all," close quote. God has a reason for his
method, said Edwards, and the reason is, namely, that
God is a communicating God. I love that adjective that Edwards uses over and over for God. God is a communicating God. God is all about displaying
and revealing himself through an infinite number of means. He is ever speaking. He is ever imprinting his
creation with messages. He is ever revealing more
and more of his beauty. But that characteristic of being
an ever-communicating being is only penultimate, not ultimate. It is an end of purpose of his
works, but not his final end. The last end of all God said and did in creating and then redeeming,
and all that God does, is to bring glory to himself. Now, 18th century skeptics said that idea sounded awfully selfish of
God, and Edwards replied, well, yeah, that's
selfish, if bringing joy and beauty and love to
his creatures is selfish. So the purpose of imprinting
the entire creation with his divine signs is for the sake
of God's glorifying himself, but that happens only
when his creatures find their greatest joy in seeing his beauty, and that beauty is, in a word, love. And all the beauties of
this world, from the beauty of the intricate design of a
simple cell in a simple leaf from a simple tree to the
phantasmagoria of a distant galaxy seen from the top of a
mountain on a cloudless night, to the splendor of
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, to the beauty of the most
beautiful woman in recent history. Well, you know who the
most beautiful woman in recent history was, I
think, in the last 50 years? Mother Teresa. All of these earthly
beauties are but refractions of the beauty of the
self-denying servant love of the three persons of the Trinity. In Edwards's language,
all of these beauties are types or images,
for which the anti-type, and the anti-type is the
referent or thing to which the type points, is the eternal
beauty of the mutual love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, Edwards had plenty of critics in his day, even on typology. Liberals of his day, and believe
me, 18th century liberals denied the Trinity and the blood atonement and an eternal hell just as they do today, the liberals denied types also. Now, others criticized
him for going too far, for finding a type under every bush. And Edwards's response was,
in effect, no, there really are two types under every
bush, both the insects under the bush and the
roots that feed the bush. Now, Edwards defended himself
by going to the Bible. He argued the usual case,
that the Old Testament is full of types that point to
New Testament anti-types, but Edwards went far further. Not only is the Exodus
a type of salvation, and not only are Kings David and Solomon types of Messiah Jesus as king, but every stroke of the pen in
the Old Testament is typical. Now, how do we know that? Well, because Paul said
so in I Corinthians 10, after recounting certain
events when the Israelites were wandering in the Sinai
wilderness that, quote, now, these are Paul's words, "all these things were
written for our instruction." Now, here's Edwards, quote. "Thus almost everything
that was said or done "that we have recorded in scripture "from Adam to Christ was
typical of gospel things. "Persons were typical persons. "Their actions were typical actions. "The cities were typical cities." Now, mind you, that means the cities were types that speak volumes of meaning. "The nation of the Jews and other nations "were typical nations. "The land was a typical land. "God's providences toward
them were typical providences. "Their worship was typical worship. "Their houses were typical houses, "their magistrates typical magistrates, "their clothes typical
clothes, and indeed, "the world was a typical
world," close quote. Now, like much of the
church for most of the last 2,000 years, Jonathan
Edwards believed that, quote, "Mount Zion and Jerusalem "are types of the church
of saints," close quote. But unlike much of the church
in the last 2,000 years, Jonathan Edwards was not a
supersessionist who believed that the church entirely
replaced or superseded Israel. So the Jewish Israel, now,
the supersessionist view is that Jewish Israel after 30 A.D. was no longer important to God and still is not important to God, and the land of Israel is
no longer important to God. That's supersessionism, and Edwards was not a supersessionist. Edwards departed from
the long, long history starting in the fourth
century of supersessionism. And unlike many evangelicals,
who insist, in Enlightenment fashion, that every text
has only one meaning, and unlike many Christians who think like Occamite nominalists
that the simplest explanation is always the best, using
Occam's Razor, Edwards followed the great tradition's fourfold
sense of scripture and was able to see multiple layers
of meaning in the same text. He was also able to do ontology, that is, talk about being and existence
in the way the Bible does it. In other words, he employed
the christological principle of coinherence and the
Trinitarian principle of perichoresis, both of
which mean that God's reality, and therefore creaturely
realities, are able to have two or more things going
on at the same time. At the same time, Christ
is both God and man. The Father is in the Son,
and the Son is in the Father, and the two, by the
Spirit, are in the believer at the same time that the
whole church is Christ, and the whole world is in
God, in some mysterious sense. In him we live and move
and have our being, Paul tells us, by the
inspiration of the spirit of God. Therefore, a scripture text
about Jerusalem or Mount Zion can refer as a type on
the one hand to the future Gentile church at the same
time that it speaks in a quite literal fashion about the
future of Jewish Israel. It can do both at the same time. Edwards went further than most
of the tradition on typology, insisting that the New
Testament is full of types, too. The dove on Jesus's head at his baptism was a type of the Holy Spirit. So were the tongues of fire
on the heads of the 120 and the rushing of wind at Pentecost. Oh, good, thank you. Furthermore, the New
Testament itself, he argued, teaches us to look outside
the Bible for types. When Jesus proclaimed
that he was the true light and the true vine and the
true bread, he implied that all lights and vines
and breads in this world are pointers to or types of
their anti-types in Jesus. Paul did the same for seed
and sowing in springtime when he used them in I Corinthians 15 to argue for the resurrection of bodies. Unless God intended seed and planting to be types of spiritual realities, Paul's argument would
not have made any sense. Now, Edwards wrote, quote,
"If the sowing of seed and its "springing were not
designedly ordered by God "to have an agreeableness
to the resurrection, "there could be no sort of argument "in that which the apostle Paul alleges, "either to argue the resurrection itself "or the manner of the
resurrection, either its certainty "or probability or
possibility," close quote. Now, for Edwards, if types are in nature, they're also in non-biblical history. He wrote in his enormous
Types of the Messiah notebook, which comes in the Yale
edition to about 150 pages, that, quote, "many things in
the state of the ancient Greeks and Romans," close quote,
were typical of gospel things. For example, he compared the
celebration of a military triumph in the Roman empire
to Christ's ascension. Just as the Roman emperor's
triumphal chariot was followed by senators and ransomed citizens,
so Christ was accompanied on his return to glory by principalities and powers and ransomed
citizens of heaven. The Roman procession was closed by the sacrifice of a great white ox. So too, Christ at the ascension entered the holy of holies with
his own sacrificed blood. The Roman emperor treated
the people in the capitol with gifts, and Christ
treated his church with gifts. Now, Edwards went further still
to the history of religions. He proposed that God has
planted types of true religion even in religious systems
that are finally false. Now, this idea is hard for most
Christians today to fathom, but Edwards was nothing if not
a daring thinker, yet always within the bounds of the
great tradition, of orthodoxy. His adventurous step was to
say that the near-universal practice of sacrifice in
world religions was planted by God as a type of the
perfect sacrifice of God's Son. Even the ghastly practice
of human sacrifice, inspired by the devil, he said, was
permitted by God to prepare people's for the human
sacrifice made by the God-Man. Edwards also taught that pagan idolatry, in which deities were believed
to inhabit material forms, was a type of the true
inhabiting, the incarnation. Furthermore, he believed pagan sacrifices show the heathen that
sin must be suffered for, and that they therefore
needed God's mercy. Yet Edwards warned that
typology can go off the rails. It's not a problem to
see types everywhere, because they are everywhere. No, the problem comes when you interpret them
wrongly, as sometimes happens. Now, Origenist speculation,
as it has been called because of the tendency of
Origen to take the material things of scripture as
types of spiritual things, can flee from history,
which Edwards and most of the typological traditions says is the proper domain of orthodox typology, and the tendency of Origenism to move to allegorical generalizations
about human existence was an example of where
typology can go off the rails. Now, Edwards said the guard rails on orthodox typology are twofold. First, it must stay within the
orthodox story of redemption, which is rooted in historical events. They compose the great anti-type. The story is a huge story, with a near infinite number of types. But it's a different story
from the myriads of heretical stories and the myriads
of human speculations that might not be heretical,
but are merely imaginary. Second, typological
interpretation takes practice, just as it takes practice
to learn any language, to learn to read the story. Here are Edwards's words,
worth quoting at length: "Types are a certain sort
of language, as it were," and that phrase, as it
were, is one of Edwards's favorite phrases you
find all over his corpus, his corpus of probably 10 million words. So "Types are a certain sort
of language, as it were, "in which God is want to
speak to us, and there is, "as it were, a certain
idiom in that language, "which is to be learned
the same that the idiom "of any language is,
namely, by good acquaintance "with the language,
either by being naturally trained up in it,
learning it by education," and in parenthesis, he has,
"but that's not the way in which corrupt mankind
learned divine language," close parenthesis, "or by
much use and acquaintance "together with a good taste
or judgment by comparing "one thing with another
and having our senses, "as it were, exercise to discern it." He's drawing on Hebrews five there, about the mature person who
learns by practice discernment, "which is the way that
adult persons," he says, "must come to speak any language, "and in its true idiom, when
it's not their native tongue. "Great care," now, this is
still Edwards, "should be used, "and we should endeavor
to be well and thoroughly "acquainted, or we shall
never understand or have "a right notion of the idiom
of the language of typology. "If we go to interpret
divine types without this "very well exercised acquaintance, "we shall be just like
one that pretends to speak "any language that hasn't
thoroughly learned it. "We shall use many barbarous expressions "that fail entirely of the
proper beauty of the language, "that are very harsh in the ears of those "who are well versed in the language. "God hasn't expressly
explained all the types "of scriptures, but he has done so much "as is sufficient to
teach us the language." So, in conclusion, was Edwards
promoting a natural theology that presumes that nature can
lead people to the true God? Not at all. That was the natural theology of deists several centuries ago,
and of liberal theologians of many stripes in the last
two centuries to the present. They have thought that ordinary
reason can ascend to God using the ladder of evidences in nature. Their god is not the
triune God of scripture, but a remote deity that
is remarkably like them. And according to them, this
deity created the world to function on its own,
and he rarely intervenes. In historic, orthodox natural theology, God is the triune God of
the Christian scriptures. The Bible provides the typological map that charts and explains the
types in the book of nature. God does not occasionally
intervene in our world, according to the great tradition and
according to orthodoxy, because that very notion
of intervening presumes a separation of the world
from the being of God. Instead, scripture reveals
that God continually sustains the world's
being, that's Hebrews 1:3. Christ holds the world
together, moment by throbbing, or nanosecond by throbbing
nanosecond, Colossians 1:17, and in God, we live and move and have our being, that's Acts 17. God fills the heaven and
earth with his glory, and we can see degrees of
that glory in the innumerable types that point to his
beauty and triune life. But the Bible's also clear that only the eyes of faith can see all this. The skeptic cannot see most of the types. He can see some of the
types, but the skeptic will never be able to rightly
understand any of them. He or she needs the
spectacles of scripture, as Calvin taught, which
alone contains the grammar for the language of types,
and apart from that grammar, the language of types is gobbledygook. So the seeker or skeptic needs
an eye operation to be able to use the spectacles, and the
Holy Spirit is the surgeon. But if that surgery takes
place, the whole earth, the whole world, the whole
cosmos, looks different. It becomes dazzlingly
beautiful, full of God's glory, and in a day in 2018,
especially in California, when the beautiful is
more attractive to seekers than the two other transcendentals,
the good and the true, the revelation of God's beautiful glory in creation has
missiological significance. It can release believers from false guilt when they sense God speaking
to them through the creation, and it can open up once
more for theologians, after more than a century
of neglect, exploration of the book of nature for
signs of the divine glory. Thank you. [upbeat instrumental music] - [Announcer] Discover
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