A review of The Seven Pillars of Creation

Creation has long been a neglected child in biblical-theological studies; it is ground often left to creationists and naysayers. Only in recent years has the Bible's creation theology been addressed in a major way, not least because of the impact of the environmental movement. Alongside this theological shift as been an increasing pace of advancement in scientific understandings of the world. How to relate theology and science has often been a matter of contention in both church and society. This study by William Brown, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, is an important and positive contribution to an ongoing conversation.

Brown's own scholarship has been a significant factor in these developments. His 1999 book on the biblical theology of creation, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible, charted new directions, including explorations of the relationship of ethics and cosmology. His new book continues that study from a somewhat different angle of vision, explicitly integrating biblical and scientific viewpoints. The result is a learned treatment of creation that sets a very high standard for the next generation of scholars probing this theme.

The book's title is drawn from the seven pillars of creation in the Old Testament (see Prov. 9:1), each of which adds a distinctive contribution to the manifold nature of creation: the two accounts of creation in Genesis 1-3; Job 38-41; Psalm 104; Proverbs 8:22-31; and excerpts from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah 40-55. These pillars cannot be homogenized into a single, comprehensive account; they are testimony to divergent biblical views of creation.