Without Order and Design

 Walking down the hall to my classroom, I catch sight of a hand-drawn notice posted outside another teacher’s classroom: “Bring By Design today.”  Instinctively, my first thought is that someone knows when to underline a title and when to enclose it in quotation marks. That makes this English teacher smile. (We are easily pleased.) Feeling almost foolish for taking delight in a correctly-punctuated four-word imperative, and wishing to justify what might otherwise appear an obsession, I defend myself to myself with my current favorite quotation: “God loveth adverbs.” Perhaps the occasion to discuss that fine sentiment in this context will present itself one day. Suffice to say here that the point is order. Our God is a God of order—including in our use of language.

            Following that line of thought, I consider the subject matter indicated by the beautifully-underlined title: By Design. Art class? Could be. The principle of order is a fundamental one there, where students learn to express their God-given creativity, to reflect the image of their maker as they make.

            Perhaps a math class is doing some work with design: geometry plane and solid, algebraic equations, ratios, probabilities. I once read a novel that took as its unifying motif the building of a cathedral. The story was good, but the fascination lay in the history of the discovery of architectural principles: the aesthetic and structural importance of proportion; the innovations that would lighten the weight of the dome; the simple but slow-to-occur idea to construct thinner walls as the height of the building soared, so that windows could admit more light (a symbol, to the medievalist, of the very presence of God); the design of flying buttresses to support those windowed walls when they tended to lean outward.

            In fact, By Design is the supplementary reading some of our science classes are incorporating into their curricula this year. In that context, too, the power and beauty of order and design reflect the nature of the God of nature. This issue of Fiat Lux explores the field of science as a revelation not only of God’s omnipotence, but also of his character. The laws that keep the earth spinning on its axis and maintain the necessary percentage of oxygen in the air we breathe are the will and work of the One who assures us that we may count on seed time and harvest as long as his created world endures.

Without order and design, the sentence falters as communication; the painting or sculpture fails as art; the accounts will not balance; the cathedral crashes to the ground; the universe ceases to be.

 

By Grace,

Joyce Herring

for the editors