Artificial Intelligence for Social Good
Nigel Biggar (2022) argues that there is a created order in the world, but then humans, due to their sinful nature, have degraded and distorted that order.
Engineering13 min read
Disciplinary Briefs
In-depth scholarly responses exploring links between the theology and specific research areas.
Yale University
Contemplating Dis-Order: A Literary Perspective
My own perspective on this topic arises from my primary work at the intersection of literature and religion. This does not mean I am disinterested in the kind of broader philosophical and theological work Biggar undertakes in this ‘brief’ – indeed, the opposite is the case, including within my conce…
Fine & Performing Arts9 min read
Yale University
Embodied Goodness in Human Beings, Art, and Liturgy
A prominent theme in Professor Biggar’s essay “Order” is that of embodied goodness – that is, of the goodness possessed by God and by things of divine and human creation. There are some writers who hold that there is no embodied goodness, no objective worth or praiseworthiness in things. Things have…
Humanities18 min read
University of Navarra
Is Natural Order Still a Way of Access to God?
Nigel Biggar’s theological brief ‘Order’ is inspiring for natural sciences on many grounds. In this disciplinary note, I would like to focus on the link between the objective order of nature and our subjective understanding thereof —an assumption that, according to Prof. Biggar, “is basic to the nat…
Humanities6 min read
Auckland University of Technology
Valuing Profusion and Disorder in Creation, Language and Society
Nigel Biggar has made a fine statement of the actuality and character of created order, and the way it relates to moral order. His stress on the pervasiveness of morality through creation, and of the way of life which this implies for politics, international relations, and the academy, is both winni…
Humanities9 min read
American Bar Foundation
Dynamics of Disorder in Legal Change
Nigel Biggar’s Theology Brief on Created Order opens up a rich vein of inquiries for a sociologist of legal change. Biggar writes of an objective and rational moral order ordained by God. He juxtaposes this normative order with varieties of human orders—social, legal and political. This impels conve…
LawSocial Sciences15 min read
University of Hong Kong
God’s Moral Order and the Limits of Positive Law
In the Theology Brief on Order, Professor Nigel Biggar made a comparison between God’s Moral Order and Human Order. On the one hand, God’s moral order is a “divinely created order of values, and the moral principles and rules that it generates.” It is a guide to human behaviour, and provides “a fram…
Law9 min read
Harvard University School of Public Health
Public Health and the Created Order
In this short essay, I would like to offer some comments on the relation of the created order, and Nigel Biggar’s reflections on the created order (Biggar, 2022), to the discipline of public health. I will structure my comments around three propositions.
Public Health7 min read
University of Oxford
Not the World We Ordered: International Relations and the Ukraine War
In his theology brief on Order Nigel Biggar shows that, while positive law is man-made or posited, there is no human order without law; that, as Christians, we see the law in the light of revelation, sometimes but not always placing us at odds with those who do not contemplate the law in a similar p…
Public Policy6 min read
Order in Market Economies
The market economy is an example of a human order in civil society which arises from the desire and willingness of economic actors to trade with each other in goods, services, and in factors of production such as the land, labour and capital that are utilised to produce those goods and services. The…
Social Sciences10 min read
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
The Created Universe and Naturalistic Cosmos: A Cross-Cultural Conversation with a Chinese Theologian
I find Prof. Biggar’s “Order” essay enlightening and evocative as it relates to my cross-cultural field of Pauline and Confucian studies. [ 1 ] Biggar’s thesis that, “Modern Western culture warms to freedom and shies away from order... Different histories, however, produce different biases,” is invi…
Theology15 min read
No disciplinary briefs in that discipline.