From Laws to Liturgy: An Idealist Interpretation of the Doctrine of Creation

Abstract

Christian idealism is an interpretative framework for developing the doctrine of creation in the parallel contexts of theology and philosophy. It recommends itself by its explanatory fecundity and consilience. Against physical realism’s claim that the physical world is ontologically fundamental and mind-independent, idealism holds that it is constituted by facts about the organization of human sense experience. The sensory regularities in turn may be explained by a prephysical temporal reality of angelic minds who causally constrain human experience within a divinely decreed nomological system. Idealism is here re-attached to a tradition of Christian Platonism, recovering and updating the traditional notions of the aeon, angelic government, and the divine ideas, so as to be capable of explanatory work in regard to the philosophical problems of perception and induction. In so doing, Christian idealism enables theologians coherently to articulate the thesis that the ontological objectivity and empirical immanence of the world, as grounded in the phenomenological laws of nature, is explained by the liturgical function of the cosmic Church hierarchy. An idealist theology thus develops the doctrine of the cosmic liturgy, that the various works of God in heaven and earth are analogously unified in a single sacramental economy of the Eucharist.