How Do Christians Understand COHERENCE, How ALL THINGS are Held Together? Basic Bible Doctrine

How does everything fit together?  How does life make sense?  There must be an intersection and unification of heaven and earth, supernatural and natural.  From the very first statement in Scripture, unity and wholeness were necessary—“the heavens and the earth” meant “everything from A to Z” in the Hebrew mindset. There is a unity of Truth.[1] All “truth” is inclusive within His “Truth.”  Since God alone made “the heavens and the earth”[2] and the whole of creation gives Him praise[3] Christian thinkers must answer the question “how do our studies give praise to God?”[4]

If there is an ordered, structured, stable universe and God finds it a reliable measure of righteousness, how much more our dependence upon “the heavens and the earth” for objective study?![5] The so-called “scientific method,” for instance, can be idolized without the requisite understanding of The Creator’s synthetic creation.  This is the reason why God “calls heaven and earth to testify against His people”[6]: the coherent creation represents the completeness or wholeness of God’s righteousness.

Making sense of reality, finding consistency, knowing that all things literally stick together is the definition of coherence.  True in the material world, so it is in terms of clock schedule and measurement.  Genesis 1:1 establishes a beginning while the end of the book (49:1) anticipates an end (Deut 31:29).  Jesus “holds all things together” (Col 1:17)—matter, space, and time.

There is no separation, no dichotomy, no bifurcation of “spiritual,” “physical,” “social,” “emotional,” “intellectual,” etc.  The Greek concept of segmentation goes against the Hebraic concept of wholeness, completion, fulfillment in shalom.  Instead of separating aspects of life into pieces, our responsibility in the Christian academic community is to restore all things because of Jesus’ reconciliation.[7]

Believers can enjoy the ordinary because it all comes from The Extraordinary Creator. Connections to the everyday life of the Hebrews (cf. Leviticus 11-14) makes the point, for instance, that God is interested in everything  There are no “spiritual problems”; no dichotomy exists between the so-called “secular” and sacred—the whole world and all of life belong to The Creator (cf. 1 Chronicles 29:10-16; Psalm 24:1; 50:9-12; 89:11).  It is up to Jesus “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:9-10; Col 1:19-20).

The concept of coherence provides a framework under which Christians think and live.  Teaching God’s intention for unity in creation and life produces the following guidelines for service in the Christian community:

1. A coherent, comprehensive, consistent, cosmic, creational approach to study must be premised upon an all-encompassing Christian worldview;
2. Every sphere and system is completely subservient to and in compliance with the Trinitarian mystery of “the One and the many”;
3. There can be harmony through interdisciplinary study (i.e., math’s function, music’s precision, art’s aesthetic);
4. There should be a seamlessness of Christian knowing, being and doing;
5. Constant research answering the question “how does one area of study affect another?”;
6. Individual Christians focused on their own God-given gifts and enjoyment of certain aspects of creation should interact with each other, looking for “touch-points” of synthesis between disciplines;
7. There are no “brute facts,” there is no “neutrality,” since all things are created and sustained by God;
8. No one thing, idea, or person is more important than another if all things are dependent upon each other;
9. If Christ’s Lordship transcends all of life there is no separation between belief and behavior, between the importance of one vocation over another, between what is seen or unseen, between faith and learning;
10. If God created everything (Prov 8:30; Heb 11:3) then everything belongs to God (Ps 24:1); thus, everything is dedicated to God (Lev 25:23) and serves God (Ps 119:91); since God gave us everything (Ps 115:16), everything has been given to us for our enjoyment (1 Tim 6:17).

“The Biblical Doctrine of Coherence” was first written in 2002 by Dr. Eckel for an ACSI biblical integration enabler and has been used in various venues since.