I am honoured that John M. Frame has agreed to write the Foreword to Thinking Through Creation, which I reprint here in full.
Readers who approach this book with a background in Reformed and presuppositional thought will find much that is familiar here. Watkin ably argues the proposition that Scripture presents not only a way of salvation but a distinctive world view—a philosophy in which God is creator-Lord and the world is his creature-servant. Only this Biblical worldview presents the supreme being as simultaneously absolute and personal. This God is transcendent, not in the sense that he is limited to a realm beyond ours and cannot be known, but in the sense that he is fully able to exert supreme power within the world he has made. And therefore he is also immanent, not as a mere spiritual haze within experience, but as a personal being who creates relationships with human beings and directs nature and history toward his personal goals. If God were an impersonal force, then the meaning of the universe would reduce to power. But because he is personal, even tri-personal, the deepest truth of the universe is to be found in personal relationships—indeed, in love.
Watkin also expounds the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity, the original loving relationship. Like Van Til, he finds the Trinity to be the root of all one-and-many relationships in the universe.
But Watkin carries this discussion further than have his predecessors. In Chapter Two, Watkin shows the importance of God creating by his word, so that formlessness and emptiness are filled by form and content, resulting in a world that is “unnecessarily diverse and abundant.” That “unnecessary” abundance shows that the world is not only an object of science, wonderful as that is, but also a place of beauty and art than inspires the great aesthetic gifts of mankind. The world’s diversity is a diversity of ways in which the very richness of God’s own nature, his goodness, is displayed in the world. The materialists and rationalists of philosophy have tried to reduce the world to something much less than this, but because it is God’s creation it will not be reduced.
Chapter Three focuses on God’s creation of mankind in his image and explores that biblical concept in great depth. Watkin explores substantial, formal, and relational interpretations of the divine image and the “complementarity” of male and female. He discusses also the creation mandate and the concept of work, work limited by Sabbath rest. Along the way he answers important questions: What does it mean to “fill” the earth and “subdue” it? To what extent can we imitate God’s creative work without trying to usurp his prerogatives? To what extent should we seek to preserve the natural environment, and to what extent use it for our own purposes? What about the rights of other human beings to participate in the bounties of the creation?
I was moved and delighted at the depth of Watkin’s analysis, and the richness of insight that God has taught him through the study of the Bible’s creation account. He is a good writer and illustrates his points very well. You will note for example his diagrams illustrating “diagonalization.” Scripture, he says, rejects many common dichotomies between concepts in secular thought. For example, philosophers have placed before us the choice between morality governed by an impersonal structure, and morality governed by an unstructured personal entity. But Scripture says that morality is governed by a personal being who has his own structured morality. There is a “diagonal” relationship between personality and structure, meaning that we do not need to choose between the two of them. Watkin is a surprise: a well-trained philosopher who is also a clear and helpful writer.
I hope that through the publication of this volume his work will become much better known in America and that he will become a major player in our discussions of Christian philosophy. Thinking Through Creation is an edifying book. It glorifies God.
