Creation

The doctrine of creation teaches a worldview, not a scientific theory. Its point is really about God’s relation to the world.

Following from my last post, the triune God creates. The Bible witnesses to the involvement of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the act of creation (see, for instance, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Job 33:4, John 1:3, Genesis 1:2. and Psalm 104: 30). In order to retain the oneness required for Trinitarian understanding, it is not three beings who create, but rather the one God with a triune substance who creates. So the threefold participation is often characterized by prepositions: for instance, created by the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

It is of course an ancient and fundamental insight that the world we live in must have a source. Aristotle himself argued for a first cause in the unmoved mover (and this argument was utilized later by Thomas Aquinas). Science seeks to explain the origin of the universe and many dismiss the Bible for its unscientific description of the origin. Of course the Bible claims that we worship the God who made us, but the theological meaning of creation cannot be reduced to an explanation of how the universe started.

For Christians the longstanding claim has been that God made the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This claim became important because of other options that could have been advanced in the intellectual climate of the early centuries of Christian faith.

One feature of this intellectual climate was that God shaped this world out of preexistent matter the way an artist shapes material (clay, wood, pigment) into what the artist imagines. In this view, Matter and Mind each existed eternally and Mind gave ongoing order to Matter. Something like this view was a real possibility for the very early theologians (Genesis 1:1-2 can be read as God giving order to chaos), but they did not adopt the idea of an ongoing eternal ordering of Matter. Genesis pointed to a specific act of creation.

The importance of Genesis could not be simply assumed at first. Its importance was questioned by some groups of Jesus followers in the early centuries. There were some groups which came to be known as Gnostic (from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge).

I mentioned in the post on the Bible that the canon excluded some writings about Jesus. Many of the writings excluded from the New Testament were written for groups of people who looked to Jesus for salvation but who held Gnostic ideas about secret knowledge. These groups wrote their own accounts of Jesus and he looked very different from the Jesus of the Gospels preserved in the Bible we know. These groups tended to organize around the teaching of their different founders, but there were some common attitudes that marked a way of viewing the created world that humans live in. They did not view this world and this life as good, but rather as something to be escaped. There was a spiritual world with higher knowledge that was their true home. They were attracted to Jesus as the one who revealed the spiritual knowledge that provided entry to this spiritual world. The existence of this alternative among Jesus followers led to a struggle of ideas and the need to define what it meant to be Christian.

Gnostic ideas not only affected the collection of New Testament materials but also raised a serious question about the Jewish scriptures already in use by followers of Jesus in those centuries before the canon was formalized. Genesis relates God’s creation of the material world, the very world Gnostic groups held in contempt. The God who created the material world, then, could not be the God Gnostics worshipped. For Gnostics, the God depicted throughout the Jewish scriptures was some lesser deity who created the material world. Much Gnostic teaching included some account of how the ultimate reality produced other spiritual realities by fragmentation of its own self. This fragmentation produced a spiritual world of spiritual beings, some of whom “fell” into the material world and needed to find their way back to the spiritual world.

The existence of groups with these views forced the need for other groups of Jesus followers to affirm things that they saw as essential to their faith. The creeds begin with an affirmation that God (the Creator in Genesis) made heaven and earth, thus linking Christian faith with the older scriptures. Christian understanding of creation is not about offering an explanation that competes with science but rather about our relation to God and our place in the world: The material world that God created is good. Human beings are creatures of this world so we are good; but even though we are made in the image of God, we are not ourselves the ultimate reality. Rather we depend on God.

Of course, human beings fall short of God’s intention for us, so the next post will examine the way Christian theology accounts for the discrepancy between who God made us to be and who we actually are.