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Reading through David Fergusson’s new book on the doctrine of creation, I was pleased with how he handled the doctrine of providence especially as it relates to evolutionary science. It seems to me that he strikes a good balance in stressing the importance for Christian theology in allowing science to be science, while also registering gentle warnings against what increasingly gets labelled as “scientism” – that is, a reductionist scientific materialism. So, without further ado, here’s Fergusson. David Fergusson, Creation , Guides to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 88–89. Even after science has done all its work, there will be ways of understanding and describing phenomena that draw upon different conceptual resources. There are questions, commitments, and insights that by their nature require description in terms not reducible to the methods of the natural sciences. No single discipline has an exhaustive or totalizing role to play. If the engagement with Darwinism h

David Fergusson published a new book earlier this year dealing with the doctrine of creation. It is somewhere between an introductory overview and a precis of several important foundational moves for a constructive doctrine of creation in the contemporary Western context. All of this makes it a nice little read, and I recommend it. I also wanted to share a piece here or there with you, gentle readers, to whet your appetites for more. The rather lengthy quote below comes after Fergusson provides a quick reading of the most important biblical discussions – both OT and NT – of the doctrine of creation. These four “important features,” then, represent the payoff of this reading. They also serve as the rough contours of the doctrine of creation as a whole. David Fergusson, Creation , Guides to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 9. (I’ve thrown in some bold to help with navigating the paragraph, and to emphasize a couple of good lines.) Some important features of the doctrin