What Is a Practical Doctrine of Creation | Kevin Hector

Lecture Title - Freedom, Necessity, and the Love of God: Schleiermacher on Creation When theologians tell the story of modern theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher is almost always cast as the villain. He is customarily portrayed as a sort of arch-accommodationist, a theologian who all-too-willingly revises Christian commitments so as to render them acceptable by the lights of science. As it happens, however, the customary portrayal of Schleiermacher is wrong, and his actual approach to science turns out to be much more robustly theological—and, I think, more interesting—than is usually recognized. In this chapter I argue that Schleiermacher defends a distinctively theological diagnosis of characteristically modern, science-induced anxieties about the possibility of freedom in a mechanistic world governed by the laws of nature. I conclude by arguing that there are several interesting insights we might glean from Schleiermacher’s approach, the most important of which is (what I would term) his practical doctrine of creation, that is, his emphasis on the sort of practices and dispositions one would have to cultivate such that one could treat the world—including oneself—as God’s good creation. This approach, in turn, opens up a different way of thinking about the practice of natural science, a way that, at least to my unscientific ears, sounds promising. Kevin W. Hector (PhD Princeton Seminary) is Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is author of many articles, chapters, and books, including Theology Without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023). The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issues—for the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Word—lay persons and scholars alike—for the sake of tomorrow’s church, academy, and world. Visit the HCTU website: https://henrycenter.tiu.edu/  Subscribe to the HCTU Newsletter: https://bit.ly/326pRL5 Watch the HCTU on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HenryCenter Connect with us! https://twitter.com/henry_center https://www.facebook.com/henrycenter/ https://www.instagram.com/thehenrycenter/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/thehenrycenter