The following is an excerpt from Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity pg 25-26.
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Dignity
The God Imagination begins with, of all things, an artistic sense of poetry. There is a rhythm to the verses of the story which conveys a rich, creative experience. Poetry is interesting because it can communicate easily identifiable content on the surface, and hide a deeper message in plain sight. And unless we see the hidden message, we’ll miss the full meaning of what is really going on.
The verses contain a distinct rhythm of creative act and response. God creates and then steps back to judge it. God creates light…and it is good. God creates the water and dry ground…and it is good. God creates vegetation…and it is good. God creates day and night…and it is good. God creates water creatures…and it is good. God creates land creatures…and it is good. God creates humanity…and it is very good.
It’s very easy to see the content. Over and over again God distinctively creates and brings forth a world through the act of naming. God creates the light and separates it from the darkness. God creates the sea and land creatures and separates the kinds. Each element possesses its own distinct purpose. The act of distinguishing gives presence and recognition to the created order. But through this entire process, each time God stops and notices something – its value.
Content is obvious. Value is not. It’s easy to sense the presence of something but harder to judge the value of it. No one argues whether there is light or darkness. We just see it. No one argues whether there are land or sea creatures, or water and dry land. They are obvious, even empirically provable. But when it comes to the value of each, it’s not so easy, especially when it comes to the last part about us humans.
In fact, it’s easy to just skip over the value part. It’s easy to miss the hidden message. But what if the second part is the meaning of the story? What if the purpose of the poetry offers us a hidden key to the Kingdom, one unlocking the answer to the very question humanity will wrestle with throughout the entire story?
The God Imagination reveals God’s divine judgment on creation. We need to know how God sees the situation. Value is the defining question of our existence. It is the central underlying question in all conflict, social interaction and human experience. It is the one question embedded in the tree in the Garden. And in this moment God renders the answer.
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