All Things Come By or Through Nature? This Month's Fox Reading and Discussion Call

Saturday, during our reading and discussion of Fox's Journal (See Works of Fox, Vol. 1, pp. 83-86)  an opening began growing in my mind concerning Fox's temptation.

"All things come by nature," said the tempter. And, as is usually the case, the lie is coated with enough "fact" to make it easy to swallow the poison. 

First of all we need to establish a working definition of what nature is. My definition, that which was opened to me, is nature is the vehicle by which God works. There are, obviously, avenues not open to the manipulation to man, but that does not make them any less "nature". Thus Fox could say that he saw the "virtues" in the creatures and could see how the three professions purporting to cure the maladies of humanity were deceptions because they did not see the virtues. 

Here we get to the poison of the temptation. If we follow the stream back up the course of creation, where does it stop? If we declare that nature is the headwater, we have created an idol, a false god. The true voice which Fox heard saying, "There is a living God who made all things," was not a declaration about the avenue through which all things were made but about the source. Nature is not the headwater, merely the outflow.

If our eyes are filled with nature, and go back no further, we cannot see the virtues of the creation any more than could the physicians, priests, and lawyers of Fox's day. The debate and furor over evolution vs. creation is just a smoke screen to mask the true issue. The critical matter is not whether natural selection and survival of the fittest played a role in the origin of the species. The critical matter is "Where are the headwaters?" As long as the tempter can keep your mind engaged in the struggle over the smokescreen, so you will also not see the virtues in the creatures nor understand how to work under Christ to set creation back in its course. The first thing in that work, and always the first thing is to come to the headwaters, to come into that dialogic relationship with our Creator where we learn from Him. "In the beginning was the Word...all things were made by Him." Just as the Word was a creational being in the beginning, so He is a re-creational being now. All things are restored to its rightful order by returning to this one who speaks things into being, into order. It is this that gives us the power, the virtue, to become a child of God.