Bios is one of two New Testament Greek words commonly translated “life.” Bios describes where we live. We see it everywhere.
We live in a biosphere of delicately balanced natural forces. Biology dazzles us with the amazing complexity of living organisms and the biodiversity of their intricate interrelationships. We search for biofuels, although we live fearful of biohazards, bioweapons, or, even more unthinkable, bioterrorism. To combat our anxiety, we seek inner peace through biorhythms or biofeedback. In a more innocent age, some of us watched 70’s TV shows that featured a bionic man and woman.
Is the natural world known through biology the same creation God repeatedly calls “good” and finally pronounces “very good” in the Genesis story?
No, human rebellion against God (that the Bible calls sin) was so cataclysmic, so all-encompassing, it not only warped and damaged human beings but impacted creation itself. After the Fall, Adam must work hard to stay alive: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:17). The apostle Paul declares, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:22).
Although today’s biosphere is clearly less than God originally intended, it is still a magnificent compass pointing back to its Creator. The bios has God’s fingerprints all over it.
Often Christians quickly skip over the bios-life all humans share to focus on zoe, the word for spiritual or eternal life. While we identify the grace of God with zoe (“For by grace you have been saved…”), God’s grace is present in bios as well. There are theological and practical reasons why we must not miss it.
First, when we skip over bios, we miss the grace of God all around us.
While it’s common to recognize glimpses of God in a baby’s birth or an awesome sunset, St. Augustine invites us to go deeper. Here is his reflection on Jesus’ miracle turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana:
“For He who made wine on that day at the marriage feast, in those six water-pots, which He commanded to be filled with water, the self-same does this every year in vines. For even as that which the servants put into the water pots was turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner and also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the doing of the same Lord. But we do not wonder at the latter, because it happens every year: it has lost its marvelousness by its constant recurrence.” (Library of Nicene/Post-Nicene Fathers)
Augustine reminds us that the bios includes everyday miracles of God’s grace. God is the author of all wine, whether its vintage is many years or a split-second. In fact, recognizing special revelation (e.g., Jesus’ split-second miracle) stimulates our imaginations to appreciate what we might be missing because it seems so ordinary. The ordinary is shot through with grace.
Theologians from the Reformed tradition call this “common grace.” It is common to all God’s creation. Jesus is describing common grace when he tells His disciples that his Father in heaven “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45b). The sun and the rain and the biosphere itself are all God’s gifts to all humankind, whatever their attitudes toward God might be.
In his book Wishful Thinking, A Theological ABC, Frederick Buechner captures common grace:
A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.
Second, when we skip over bios, we miss the value of all human creatures.
God granted human beings an awesome right and privilege: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
The first phrase, ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, ‘subdue the earth,’ means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, and compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations—nothing less. (Nancy Pearsey, Total Truth)
Abraham Kuyper, a 19th century theological giant, taught that fulfilling the cultural mandate is part of God’s common grace:
God is glorified in the total development toward which human life and power over nature gradually march on under the guardianship of “common grace.”
One who saw this was John Calvin, who, because of common grace, rejected the notion that only Christians can know truth:
“To charge the intellect with perpetual blindness, as to leave it no intelligence of any description wherever, is repugnant not only to the word of God, but to common experience. We see that there has been implanted in the human mind a certain desire of investigating truth, to which it never would aspire unless some relish for truth antecedently existed.” (Institutes, II, 2, 12)
Human original sin shattered but did not destroy God’s image (Gen. 1:26-27), which still lives in every human being. Calvin emphasizes that not all has been lost:
“Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind, us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator.
If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver.” (Institutes II, 2, 15)
Calvin calls God’s Spirit a fountain of truth that “overflows” into the bios. If we denigrate such truth, we insult the Giver of all truth. This is the important Reformation principle that “all truth is God’s truth,” whoever finds it. God authors all truth.
Some truth we get only because God chooses to reveal it to us, whether through the written word in Scripture or, pre-eminently, the Word Incarnate in Jesus Christ. But human minds, functioning in what one might call bios-power, can still discover truth through human curiosity and intelligence.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours alongside the beds of friends waiting to be rolled into surgery. Occasionally they shared their comfort in having a Christian surgeon. I understand what they mean.
However, for me, even more comforting would be knowing I had the very best surgeon in the area, Christian or not. If “all truth is God’s truth,” then God offers healing through the skills of any surgeon sincerely seeking truth. If the best surgeon I can find also happens to be a Christian, I will be doubly blessed.
The human race’s scientific learning curve has grown exponentially since Calvin was writing in the mid-1500’s, not to mention art, poetry, literature, music, and architecture. Of course, all disciplines can be debased or used in ungodly ways. But we can value the incredible accomplishments God has given humankind the gifts and grace to discover.
In his book Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch speaks about God’s common grace gifts of both nature and human potential:
“It is not just nature that is God’s gift to humanity. Culture is a gift as well. In the biblical view culture is not simply something we have made up on our own—God was the first gardener, the first culture maker.
As in Genesis 1 he asks us not to do something fundamentally different but rather imitate him—in Genesis 1, to imitate his creativity and gracious dominion over the creation…[and so] in Genesis 2, to imitate him by cultivating the initial gift of a well-arranged garden, a world where intelligence, skill, and imagination have already begun to make something of the world.”
As we live our Godly callings to be culture makers, we have opportunities to value the intelligence, skill and imagination of people very different from us.
Unfortunately, some Christian traditions have a “circle the wagons” dualistic mentality. They denigrate anything or anyone outside the circle of faith. How tragic that they cannot give God the glory for great discoveries or works of culture from outside the circle! Such a worldview often includes a narrow misunderstanding of the grace of God, assuming followers of Jesus are its sole recipients.
No, God’s common grace of sun and rain sustains all our existence. God’s common image affords all human persons equal dignity. All truth is God’s truth. In a world rife with ethnic, cultural, and religious divides, it is our Christian responsibility to proclaim these truths.
When we no longer speak to or about others as fellow creatures of God, it becomes far easier to treat them in unspeakable ways.
