Creation and Industry to the Glory of God
A version of the following essay was originally delivered at the Fundamentals of Baptist Education conference at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, on October 5, 2024, during the panel entitled “Rooted in Creation.”
I am tasked with discussing creation. We want to take a Biblically informed perspective on creation and think about how that guides a Biblical education. I am an engineer and a layperson. Like everyone in an ostensibly democratic society, however, I am accustomed to taking responsibility for my own epistemology; for thinking clearly about it, for taking it to its logical ends, and for communicating my reasoning.
I am an engineer and layman. Accordingly, and first, I am going to commit the typical engineer fallacy and pretend that I am an authority on all the sciences. Second, I am going to equivocate on lots of terminology. Third, I am going to talk about glory, but I won’t define it for you.
Industry, that is, all constructive know-how ranging from bricklaying to coding to soybean farming to entrepreneurship to engine design, seeks out glory, and I suggest that glory-seeking is essentially good and Biblically grounded, and that it should be both cultivated and advertised in a Christian college environment.
Christians have a complicated relationship with technology. I know that I am not alone in my concern for the impact of modern technologies on our ecosystems, relationships, and bodily health. For the nostalgic Christian, industrialization has accompanied a widespread loss of public faith and a certain moral degeneration. And in the academy, secular as its mainstream has become, Christian educators often struggle to justify the uniqueness of their STEM programs other than that they are practical, pre-professional, or attract some margin of additional students. What does Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem?
There are credentialed thinkers more intelligent than myself who have explored the connections between faith and science. In most cases, I defer to their authority. But what do we tell the high schoolers who are interested in technology and their parents, who are easily drawn to well-funded state schools that promise expansive access to state-of-the-art equipment and research, and also to the classical schoolers who have been well-taught in theology and history, who intuitively grasp a strong vision of the kingdom but who struggle to marry that vision to the cold practicality of industry work? We tell them to seek glory, and then we equip them to find it.
To elaborate I will begin with the good old creation mandate. God said “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28), and “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). And God commissioned us in this way while seemingly the only good land was the Garden, and as for the rest, “No bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up–for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land” (Genesis 2:5) – so it was presumably uninhabitable. If we were supposed to have all these kids, weren’t we going to overpopulate Eden? Overwork the soil? Pave paradise and put up a parking lot?
My contention is this: industry, in almost any sense of the word, is good. In this century we wring our hands and chatter our teeth over protecting our good land, but the stewardship commission looks to something greater – conquering what is unfruitful and making it so. Currently, only 11% of the earth’s land is arable. The God of life demands that we bump these numbers up, and for that we need biologists, geologists, engineers, climate scientists, and many others. A loose review of the discourse suggests that all of the above disciplines are currently choked into a fearful mindset that prioritizes efficiency, predictability, and risk-aversion. Here are a few of the Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st century, according to The National Academy of Engineering: make solar energy economical, enhance virtual reality, advance health informatics, prevent nuclear terror, and develop carbon sequestration methods. How many of these sound exciting? How many are based in fear? Contemporary academic discourse teems with fearmongering and encourages us to be ever smaller, quieter, and safer.
Like Rousseau, many contemporary scholars and activists idealize peaceful, unobtrusive indigenous peoples as normative models for human society. Importantly, this caricature is itself based on a profound misrepresentation of indigenous societies, which, like all human societies, manipulated their environments freely and at scale – see Charles Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Apparently, we should be little more than lowing cattle – yet I’ve heard that cattle are a problem now, too. You will live in the pod and eat the bugs, as the saying goes. Otherwise, you will exhale too much CO2, trample too much topsoil, eat too much beef, or play your music too loudly while we’re all trying to sleep, for heaven’s sake. The secular mind conceives of all things as tradeoffs, equilibria, all systems as static and net-zero. Its gross uncle is paganism, which relies on a similar cold logic, and both find their natural ends in child sacrifice. The true follower of the Way multiplies his talents while the blasphemer buries his one.
Our God-given imperative to dominate the world entails more than multiplying ourselves and filling bellies. The Westminster Shorter Catechism helpfully puts one of its most profound questions at the very start: What is the chief end of man? The answer: man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
Fantastic; how do we glorify God? It should be obvious to any Protestant that glorifying God does not merely entail hymn singing, which is admittedly glorious. To over-spiritualize this commission would make us Gnostics, believing the things of the spirit to be of complete importance while the things of the body are unimportant, mean, or temporary. Yes, moth and rust destroy, but we will be resurrected in the final day with glorified versions of our familiar bodies, and God has already revealed to us that he loves and cherishes even what is temporary. By His wisdom we commune with Him through the medium of temporal reality and our everyday relationships with one another. Christ, who exemplifies humility and the rejection of the flesh, will someday return as a conqueror. His glory will be palpable.
Now if I tell you, listener, to seek out glory, what do you hear? That you should seek political office? Throw a touchdown pass? Climb the social ladder? Perhaps you imagine hiking to a grand view in the mountains. Yes, yes, and yes. These are all manifestations of glory. So are grand works of architecture like the Sagrada Familia, the Eiffel Tower, and the Logos library with its glorious dome. I imagine that watching Freddie Mercury in concert was glorious, and he certainly gained glory through his performances. Some of these examples of glory threaten us – are they not obsessions, idols; unbecoming of followers of the Way? Like all good gifts, they can of course be idols to us. When great works like the Titanic or the tower of Babel or the song Spanish Fly displace God in their respective ways, their originators and often the works themselves do come to all kinds of ruin. But weighty things draw us in – immensely, awfully. For C.S. Lewis, this was what he called “pure Northernness.” For me, it’s waterfowl and any song by Gregory Alan Isakov. But glory – having it and creating it – speaks to our very humanity, and I genuinely do not believe we can understand or desire God without both appreciating and imitating temporal manifestations of glory.
What does all this have to do with industry? In fact, industry plays a special part in our glory paradigm. I have argued that we must imitate God in order to glorify him. But industry, as I have defined it, is really just the increasingly sophisticated ability of humans to unlock greater glories – taller steeples, faster vehicles, more transcendent EDM. And yet that is not always our experience of it. Remember the list of engineering challenges. It seems we are always looking to technology to reverse the disastrous effects of prior technology. But the only way out is through, and industry, even the old fashioned virtue of industry, is what gets us there. We can either lean into our natural predilections to build families and great houses for them, or we can be faithless, hopeless, and love nothing.
So if glory-seeking is fundamental to our humanity as God intended it, and if it is dreadfully neglected in the unbelieving world, then we have the opportunity to distinguish almost any educational discipline according to that principle. We can say that ambition is natural and God-given, and encourage it in our students. We can emphasize the hands-on side of our curricula, not because we care about corporate interests or practicality but because creating glorious things requires that we constantly dialogue freely with the material world, and the rat race will not and cannot accommodate such experimentation. The University can. Finally, we use the classroom as a place to share the great things that have been made, offering the reminder that comfort, safety, and comedy are not our highest joys.
Glories glorify God. To put this in better focus, consider parenthood. If God is our father and we are his children, then we bring glory to him the same way our children bring glory to us. I consider my son, who is almost two years old, to be the most glorious thing I have ever encountered. If you asked me how he specifically brings glory to me, I would suggest that it is by being what he is and by imitating me. Children are interesting that way: they are most delightful when they are most child-like, and yet they are most child-like when they are trying their hardest to be like us, the adults. My toddler, Jack, saw me moving rocks around the yard in a wheelbarrow the other day, and he promptly furnished a five-gallon bucket, dropped three river rocks into it, and dragged it aimlessly around the yard for a good hour. I was never prouder of him. He was so glorious in that moment because he was doing what I was doing, but also because he was so comically inept at it. I have to believe God looks at us the same way. We see His glory in creation, we crave to reproduce it, and he is pleased when we do.
To close, here is a word from R.J. Snell, in his book Acedia and its Discontents:
“God gives to one of his creatures–the human person–the work of being like God, not only in the capacity to act freely, but also to love and delight in all good things. Making us like himself, God charges us to work freely, perfecting both the world and ourselves through our labors, for in the self-donation of our work we enrich the world and fulfill ourselves.”
Image Credit: Unsplash
The comments about your son brought a smile to my face even as I recalled my own sons helping me. No one I think can fully appreciate Paul’s statement in Philippians until they see their own son or daughter engaged so enthusiastically with them in some activity: “… that he served with me in the furtherance of the gospel like a child serving his father (Phil 2:22).”
No forbidden apple or literal fruit, the eating of which is encouraged by a talking snake, is mentioned in the well-known ancient Bible story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. However, the identity of this unknown forbidden fruit of pleasure in the world’s oldest and greatest mystery story can be explained by procreation and the family Adam and Eve do not have until after their eviction from Eden at the end of Genesis 3: Adam and Eve disobey the Genesis 1:28 commandment–the first commandment–to “be fruitful and multiply [in the Garden]” when they become one flesh incorrectly (Genesis 2:24) by eating from the wrong tree in the allegorical Garden’s center (Genesis 2:9). So they disobey not just one commandment, but two at the same time. Finally, it is interesting that half of Eve’s punishment in Genesis 3:16 is painful childbirth–because she chooses to not have children in the Garden of Eden and God wants to remind her of her decision?
The entire evidence-based exegesis is included in the preceding four sentences. But why was this confusing allegory, whatever its meaning, constructed in the first place, as the original literal story most certainly came first, a story that confused absolutely no one, unlike the allegory into which it evolved? The widely held belief that the forbidden fruit in the Bible story is an apple illustrates among other things how confirmation bias serves as a terrible mechanism that cripples our critical thinking as it prevents discussion, criticism, and evaluation of the validity of the proposed exegesis that begins with Genesis 1:28, continues through Genesis 2 and 3, and concludes with Genesis 4:1. So the struggle continues in an effort to protect the self-esteem of so many who have held lifelong beliefs they are unable to change.