Book Review: Dennis P. Hollinger, “Creation and Christian Ethics”

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Creation and Christian Ethics: Understanding God’s Designs for Humanity and the World

Dennis P. Hollinger, Baker Academic, 2023
ISBN 978-1-5409-6717-6, 296 pages, Paperback, $21.29

When considering the important doctrines in Scripture for the ethical and moral life, study and application of the key themes found in creation are too often relegated to “in the beginning” rather than the ubiquitous application God places on it throughout Scripture. In his book, Creation and Christian Ethics: Understanding God’s Designs for Humanity and the World, Dennis Hollinger highlights that numerous authors in Scripture reference back to creation as a guide to proper living in their time, including Jesus (Matt 19:4). The creation account, and the priorities it established, provides a framework for ethics in our lives today. The book’s methodology is mainly a topical approach, covering how God’s good creation gives the paradigms necessary for flourishing in all of life.

Creation provides a moral framework, as Hollinger states, with “contours and directions for how humans, the apex of divine creation, should live and orient [our] lives” (p. 25). The consistent argument of the book, based on God’s creation order, is that the “value and sacredness of humans is not dependent on their functionality (such as reasoning or relationality), status, or being valued by others. It is intrinsic within the human person simply because they are Homo sapiens, a member of the human family” (p. 78). This grounding in creation has significant ethical ramifications that extend into every sphere of life, including three themes I identified in the book: bioethical life and death decisions (intrinsic dignity—made in God’s image); relational capacity and dependence; and stewardship and creation care in relation to work and rest.

First, in chapter 3, Hollinger addresses how the imago Dei not only impacts the ethics surrounding abortion and euthanasia but also how it rejects the atrocities of racism and ethnocentrism, all by buttressing dignity in ontological reality rather than empirical functions. Dignity is known by general revelation (e.g., in creation) in addition to special revelation, as has been seen historically in many policies across the world, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations following World War II. Despite differing worldviews (religious and secular), “they could agree, though without acknowledgment of their agreement’s source, because all humans are made in the image of God and thus have a sense of the dignity that flows from it” (p. 82). Hollinger notes effectively, in light of the morally evil act of physician-assisted suicide, that “compassion can never be the moral trump card” (p. 93). I think this captures the distinction between sympathy and the culturally misapplied version of empathy, as “the contemporary push to elevate empathy is frequently tied to the demotion and denigration of [sympathy],” which leads us to “surrender the truth out of misguided compassion for the hurting.”[1] The intrinsic dignity of created humans made in God’s image means we cannot surrender the truth of the sanctity and sacredness of life to expressive and duplicitous autonomy, nor to a change in telos from physician as healer to a reliever of suffering.[2]

Second, in chapters 5 and 6 we see the outflowing of relationality from being made in God’s image, including the covenantal marriage union as one with sexual (male and female) and societal implications. Hollinger rightly frames all of the goods in societal institutions as being built upon the first institution God created: marriage of one male and female, and from this union the family that naturally is produced and further formed inside the Church and body of Christ. Our creaturely nature also refocuses us on the limitations and dependence with which we were created: as ensouled bodies (or embodied souls) made “very good” in true finitude and dependence on God prior to the Fall (chapters 9 and 10). O. Carter Snead reinforces when he states, “human beings experience themselves and one another as living bodies, not disembodied wills.”[3] While God created humanity very good in the beginning (something we cannot perfect further), he alone can restore all to pre-Fall conditions, which refutes ethical arguments made for eugenics, human enhancement, and utopias. As embodied souls, this opposes the pervasive idolatry of autonomy and self-expressivism that goes against our givenness in physical sexuality (as male and female). Carl Trueman describes this idolatry as “the modern self [that] assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same.”[4] While we are far more than “just” our physical bodies, we are no less than the good gifts of our created bodies.

Third, first-order created institutions for relationships (marriage, family, and church) allow humans then to fulfill the stewardship mandate by working, resting (sabbath worship), and cultivating creation well for God’s glory, as seen in chapters 7, 8, and 4, respectively.

This book offers an effective and helpful summary of how creation is vital to Christian ethics and ethics in general. When reading the book, I found myself annotating verses or other authors’ similar arguments, only to proceed to the next paragraph or page and see that Hollinger references that exact point. While other Christian bioethicists address ethics from foundational biblical principles, Hollinger’s primary foundation of creation is a unique and necessary perspective to consider.[5] Overall, his book provides a helpful summary for framing a biblical worldview and Christian ethics in creation. However, it is limited in application to those with a biblical worldview (or at least deists), as he himself concedes, who hold to the truth in Scripture that is evidenced in God’s creation. We are to root “our ethics in creation and Scripture,” so that we “learn to articulate ethical commitments in a broader language in those [secular] contexts” (p. 277).

One argument that could be developed more is the unique roles and blessings found in affirmation and acceptance of the good gifts given to male and female, prior to and after the Fall (Gen 2:18, 3:16–19). While Hollinger does not directly address the topic of egalitarian or complementarian views, he does hint at his egalitarian view with the statement “in the creational paradigm of Genesis 1–2, we do not find specific roles for the male and female other than their reproductive roles” (p. 123). However, some within the evangelical community may disagree with this conclusion and instead advocate a contrasting biblical understanding of male/female roles.[6] Therefore, more attention to the theological and interpretive differences between the egalitarian and complementarian perspectives might further enhance the amazing picture found in creation of the glory of God and the design for the fulfillment of human flourishing in Christ.

While Creation and Christian Ethics intentionally does not provide the logistical step-by-step for ethical decision making on all the ethical dilemmas, it does provide the fundamental starting point in order for Christians to pursue faithfulness through creation and God’s Word.

 

References

[1] Joe Rigney, Leadership and the Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2025), 12, 26.

[2] Nigel Cameron, The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates (Bioethics Press, 2001), 88.

[3] O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2020), 88.

[4] Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), 22.

[5] Other Christian ethics authors include Oliver O’Donovan, Normal Geisler, Stanley Grenz, Wayne Grudem, Richard B. Hays, and Scott Rae.

[6] For instance, Köstenberger and Köstenberger argue, “God’s plan for humanity is one of partnership in which the man, as God-appointed leader, and his wife alongside him jointly represent the Creator by exercising dominion on the earth.” Andreas J. Köstenberger and Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger, God’s Design for Man and Woman: A Biblical-Theological Survey (Crossway, 2014), 34. See also, David S. Dockery, ed., Complementarianism: A Continuum of Perspectives on Men and Women in the Church (B&H Academic, 2026).

 

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