“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”
Genesis 1:28
“I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity (futility), not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”
Romans 8:18-22
I would like to begin this morning by briefly reviewing Aristotle’s Four Causes. Everything in creation as well as the relation and role of everything in creation with everything else may be understood systematically by understanding the Four Causes. But nothing is simple, is it? And things are not what they always appear to be. Take for example a cross. But there are many crosses and though they have similar characteristic, they are still quite different. Over there on the Gospel wall, behind the deacon’s prayer desk, is the processional cross. What caused that cross to come into existence as we have it? If we systematically ask questions derived from the four causes we will learn a great deal about the processional cross as well as its relation to other things in the world. First there is the material cause of the processional cross, which is the material of which it is made and the material cause of that cross is brass. The material cause of the real Cross of Christ, which gives the processional cross meaning, is wood. Your material cause, Duke’s, my boxer, or a snake’s material cause is flesh. The second cause is the formal cause of the processional cross and that is the shape or the form, the arrangement of the material that makes it a processional cross and so the formal cause is a t-shape. The Cross of Christ is typically pictured as t-shaped as well. We human beings are shaped like primates, my boxer is in the form of a dog and snakes are reptiles without legs. The third cause of the processional cross is its efficient cause, which is not focused on the thing itself, but rather on who or what crafted it. So the efficient cause of our processional cross is a real craftsman who took pieces of bronze and formed them into the processional cross. The efficient cause of the Cross upon which our Lord was crucified was probably a group of Roman soldiers. My efficient cause was my mother and father, and the same is true for you and for Duke’s efficient cause and for snakes everywhere. Every snake is some mother’s baby! The fourth cause sometime called final cause comes from the Greek word teleology, which mean end, but not as ending something, but as in reaching its destination and that means that finality is built into things. Finality is the purpose for which the thing was made. Innate, intrinsically, essentially in all that exist there is an end, a purpose for which it is and toward which it is moving. The finality of the processional cross is to lead the procession to the Altar at the beginning of the mass and then at the end of the mass to lead the procession from the Altar of the Church back into the world. Our finality as human beings and the finality of my boxer and snakes and doves and everything else in creation is what we want to understand as we undertake this study of Romans and especially our study of chapter 8. The finality, the final cause of all creation – man and beast, trees, rocks, cloud, oceans of stars and galaxies and empty space – the end for which we exist and toward which all of creation is in procession is the worship of God the Father, through God the Son, in the power of God the Holy Spirit. But like I said earlier, nothing is simple.
Around 1605 Francis Bacon wrote the highly influential Novum Organum, a book on scientific method in which he argued that the only causes relevant to science were the investigation of material, efficient and formal causes. Finality, the notion that if something exist it has an innate purpose for which it exist and toward which it is moving was eliminated from scientific enquiry because even if a final cause existed it is beyond our capacity as human beings to know the final purpose of things so it is best to concentrate on what we can know with certainty which is efficient and material causes. The first three causes have to do with physics, which leads to mechanics, while final cause leads to metaphysics, which leads to magic.
What is my point? Well, one point I wish to make is that Bacon was right about the physics and the accumulation of knowledge based on material, formal, and efficient causes, but he was wrong to eliminate finality because as a matter of fact human being do have the capacity to know and understand the purpose of things created and furthermore there are consequences when final cause is eliminated.
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”
Genesis 1:28
In the first Genesis narrative of creation that we all have know all our lives both man and woman are created on the 6th day of creation:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Genesis 1:27
Then having created man and woman in his image God then bestowed both a blessing and as well as the injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it…” The Hebrew verb that is used here for subdue is usually used to refer to the enslavement of enemies and it has a harsh sense to it but what I want you to keep in mind is that man’s fall into sin had not at this point occurred. There were no enemies to subdue and the world far from being harsh is world of blessed and peace in which Adam and Eve enjoyed a singular relationship with God that no other human being with the exception of our incarnate Lord, have come close enjoying. In light of the fact that creation is hardly an enemy that required raining in what does might the verb mean? I want to suggest that the narrative is not one of harshness toward creation, but rather it is just what we have always known it to be, a narrative paradise in which our first parents, created in God’s image, were blessed by God and then given a dual commandments that linked their fertility and reproduction to their dominion over creation. Domination over creation meant also domination over one’s self in a manner that only our first parents and incarnate Lord knew. There is one more point that I wish to make concerning man’s mastery over creation, an injunction that included mastery over all living terrestrial creatures:
“and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Genesis 1:26
Man’s rule over nature excluded eating any of the living creatures they were to rule over and it was to express itself in the agricultural framework of the garden in which he and his wife were placed:
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”Genesis 1:29
Furthermore, no living creature was permitted to feed upon another living creature because God has provided plant life for his blossoming creatures:
“And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”
Genesis 1:30
My point is that the Genesis narrative presents a creation at peace with itself and with its Creator, which image provides us with God’s final cause for creation. And here is the point I want to underline: God never abandoned his final cause for creation, which is most perfectly and beautifully, portrayed the Incarnation of his Son, which is the peaceable wedding of Heaven and Earth, of matter with Divinity in the one Person of Jesus Christ. In the Incarnation, in the life and Person of Jesus Christ we can know God’s final cause for creation. This is the way St. Irenaeus put it:
“This is our Lord, who in the last times was made man, existing in this world, and who in an invisible manner contains all things created, and is inherent in the entire creation, since the Word governs and arranges all things; and therefore He came to his own, in a visible manner, and was made flesh, and hung upon the tree, that He might sum up all things in Himself.”
With this in mind I want us to turn back to our text from Romans 8:20 &22 which bring us back to our world and its deviation from God’s final cause:
“For the creature was made subject to emptiness, meaninglessness, unreality… (Creatures) enslaved to decay, to rottenness because of man’s sin… the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain…”
Romans 8:20 & 22
Here is another point I want to make: when we dismiss God’s finality for his creation, we replace it with our own finality. As I have said, right in the middle of his narrative Paul sums up our story as a history of pain made manifest in the bleating, bellowing and groaning of God’s creatures who have gone from being worshipped to being dinner, or entertainment or garbage – a means to any end man the atheist desires as he bleeds the world dry. Mankind’s final cause for creation is tragically the supermarket, the shopping mall where worshippers gather daily, and the final futility of the city dump.
The idea that Paul is opening up in Romans reaches its conclusion here in chapter 8: all of God’s creation was from the very start bound to man, bound to Adam – not at all free and self-governing but wholly dependent upon man because God has made man and in own image and established him as his deputy to oversee creation. Thus Paul tells us that creation, appropriately submissive to its head, awaits the happy day of the resurrection.
“And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our bodies.”
We too wait and groan within ourselves along with creation, as we anticipate the victory of God and the redemption of the material world. We wait for the “redemption of our bodies,” but we do not look for an eternal vocation apart from our bodies. The material world is not our enemy, nor is it a prison – it is our home. We sigh, we groan together because there is an oneness, a unity, and a sense of belonging – of being-at-home with the material creation that we know deep inside ourselves. This sense of oneness with the creature is sorely impaired, but the longing is profound and we have a revelation from God affirming the truth of that intuition. And so Paul gives us a vision of our destiny as children of God that includes the destiny of this earth – from whose own soil and substance the hand of God sculpted our bodies in the beginning. And from her gardens and rivers and steams, from bird and beast and reptile – a redeemed order will come together as a fit habitat not only for the children of God but for God himself who has taken the form of a Gardener, the Last Adam, and who will return to his creation with his siblings in tow.