leads to recycling. This includes the birth–death cycle for all living things.
But love is made perfect in weakness.
T OWARD A CREATION THEOLOGY OF LOVE 27
We can rationally accept the abundant evidence for common descent of
life on earth, including humans. An entire lifetime can be spent working
with, fi ne tuning, and adding to the evidence for the essentially chemi-
cal relationship of all living things, from viruses to humans. To be sure,
chemical means relatively big to really big molecules; but it also means
the small molecules and the elements. When we include these, we see
how living things are truly one with the dust of the earth. It is humbling
to realize that all of the atoms making up our molecules right now were,
not long ago, part of some other entity, living or nonliving. This is espe-
cially true of carbon, the basis of our bodily being. In God’s economy, the
atoms represented in the beautifully symmetric periodic table are all that
is necessary for the material universe, nonliving and living, to exist. This
reality is breathtaking and most of the evidence for it has been developed
in the last 200 years.
Genesis 1:2–3 begins with these words, “The Spirit of God was hover-
ing over the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.”
The Spirit of God is part of a separate reality that is, nevertheless, very
close to and very effective upon our better understood physical/material
reality. This is even more amazing if we consider love to be God’s essence.
With this view, the cosmos is a fundamental, overwhelming expression of
God’s love.
The powerful love of God made possible the laws of physics and chem-
istry. What came into being from this is immense, complex, ever changing,
and diverse. It may be, given the limitations imposed by natural laws, that
an entire universe was required in order to arrive at one material being
(species) upon whom God could confer intelligible free will and have hope
for real fellowship. This free will is necessary if a sentient being is to be
able to accept God’s authority freely. Thus, we were created in the image
of God—free will, body, mind, spirit, and all. One might conclude that
it takes a universe to make a world. This is a homely way to express the
Anthropic Principle, books about which are easy to fi nd. I like the simple,
even inspiring, way this Principle is explained by John Polkinghorne. 28
“Made in the image of God” means many things, and this includes
a God-given authority to make our own decisions. But we still have to
308 B. K. (BEV) MITCHELL