Theology of Potions

You might think that potions are simply imaginary things in stories, but we have potions today. A potion is a mixture of things from the world that has a power. That’s it. And in the history of literature, potions can be used for good or for evil.

Now you may think potions are just these things in literature and they’re not true, but nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly the potions in fictional literature don’t work in our world, but why should we expect that something from another world would work in ours? Our world has different rules and laws, so our potions must be made differently.

Creation by Dividing and Combining

In Genesis 1, God creates by dividing and separating things, bringing other things together, and he does this to make it good or better. And he tells us that we are to do the same thing.

We normally think about potions as strange or esoteric things, but our potions are just as strange. And they’re strange for two reasons: first, we don’t know what things are fundamentally; and second, the distance of things from their effects.

First, we don’t fundamentally know what creation—what stuff—is. That is, we know down to a certain level of subatomic status, but we don’t know what the fundamental building blocks of creation actually are. Think about how strange this is: we do all this stuff every day, and there’s a big fat question mark at the bottom of all of it. That’s weird.

And it’s also weird because in our potions, the distance between the things out of which our potions are made and their effects can be very far.

What Is in a Potion?

Here’s what I mean. I wanted an example of how the dividing and bringing together of creation is the way we do things in our world. So I thought, let’s just take something really basic like acetaminophen—Tylenol. Cool. So I Google search, I Wikipedia, and I get this stuff. Okay, I still don’t understand what Tylenol is made out of. I want to literally know what it’s made out of.

Luckily my brother-in-law is a chemist. So I’m like, “Hey Micah, what’s acetaminophen?” And here’s our conversation: so it comes from oil.

Our potion, acetaminophen, is so far away from the fundamentally naturally occurring source that it’s hard to even find what it is. And when we hear what it is—oil—we feel a little uneasy, kind of how we feel when we see a pot mixed with a newt and a chicken foot, right? It’s weird.

And this is even a common trope in some areas in the health world. The health practitioner will tell you that a food or medicine contains things that sound weird or uncouth, and tell you that these things are also used in another thing that’s definitely not healthy, and so you shouldn’t eat it. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of creation.

A Fundamentally Divine Task

Our whole divinely given job is to break apart creation and to bring it together in creative ways for the greater good. Think about God’s potions like creation. We have the periodic table of elements that gets mixed and matched in different ways under different conditions and produces this beautiful variety of life we see.

So making potions is a fundamentally human and thus fundamentally divine thing we do. Sometimes we call it science, sometimes carpentry, sometimes software, but they’re all potions. And either the potions work or they don’t; either they’re employed for good ends or evil ones.

But here is the most important point: potions aren’t just for fairy tales. Everyone believes in potions.

Watch the original episode.