Learning may a postlapsarian necessity, but it was a prelapsarian gift. Awareness and questioning; the mutual existence called male and female--how we complemented each other, imaging God together; the Adamiac naming of the creation; and the vocational gift of the garden, all these remind us that the purpose of art and imagination, of science and work, is to stir us up to know God.
The arts and the sciences, which we often now treat as conflicting visions of reality, were meant to meet in the personal character of knowledge, in the metaphor making and modeling, and in the iconic referencing we see in the Garden of Eden. This is all the opposite of idolatry and the false exaltation of our heretic images. We were meant to share in the created order, its differentiation, classification, and inherent goodness. We were created to make and name and model.
As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote:
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.
This ability to model and name and make, shared in such differing ways by the arts and sciences, was also never intended to produce a uniform content. Miroslav Volf, following Cornelius Plantinga, notes that in Genesis 1, God is about both "separating out" various aspects of creation, distinguishing between light an dark, earth and sky, sea and land, plant and animal, and "binding together" these creational entities in a web of co-dependence. God, especially, binds human beings to his creation with the responsibility of being its stewards and caretakers. In God’s pattern, differentiation encompasses both "separating-and-binding (Exclusion 65-66). Human nomenclature, logic itself, requires that we distinguish things one from another. What this model of differentiation reminds us of is that a thing can be understood not only as a point in and of itself, but also as a part of a larger process or system. When we define or differentiate something, we place boundaries around it, but to place boundaries around something is not to close it off from the larger system. Boundaries are permeable.
What this creation narrative suggests is that God designed human beings for difference/diversity. We shouldn’t be shocked that humans take on differing cultural characteristics and patterns. Our cultural creativity is an extension of being the imago dei. Nor should we be surprised when these cultural and disciplinary creations shift and evolve. A biblical balance is needed that not only recognizes boundaries but also sees how porous they are. We must also recognize how these differences bind us together. Cultures are diverse, and because they are so, they carry on debates and dialogues.
This negotiation over meaning is an aspect of God's creational intent for them--looking back to the Triune divine life. This flourishing diversity, therefore, points to a cultural and pedagogical practice that is always dialogical. The subcreative abilities of human beings, the naming and modeling and making, reveal themselves in numerous styles and trends and practices within various peoples. Ideally, the end of shalom was meant by God to guide the debates and practices within traditions that give rise to new cultural combinations and creations, and this higher end of love and fellowship should shape all incompleteness this side of the eschaton. In an unfallen world, if you will, there would still have been diverse models that complemented one another. Humans would still have learned within creational limitations and worked together to uncover more truth.
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