IT IS INEVITABLE THAT THE TRUTH about ultimate origins, which lies beyond direct human experience, will remain a mystery (Basil, Hex. I; Calvin, Inst. 1.14). What is known of the meaning of creation is only partially understood through reason, but known more abundantly through the Creator’s personal self-disclosure through the revealed Word (Justin Martyr, First Apol. 13; Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 2).
Christian faith in God the Creator relies primarily on Scripture’s witness to divine revelation. Partial insight into the truth of revelation may also occur through scientific investigation and rational inquiry (Augustine, Catech. Instr. 18).
“God has placed the knowledge of himself in human hearts from the beginning. But this knowledge they unwisely invested in wood and stone and thus contaminated the truth, at least as far as they were able. Meanwhile the truth abides unchanged, having its own unchanging glory…. How did God reveal himself? By a voice from heaven? Not at all! God made a panoply which was able to draw them more than by a voice. He put before them the immense creation” (Chrysostom, Hom. On Rom. 3).
The universal church has always believed that the one true God made all things (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.9.1, 2). God is ungenerate, without beginning, the original cause of the coming to be, sustenance, and destiny of all creatures (Letter to Diognetus 7.2; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q44; Westminster Conf. 4). The making of the world by God is an indispensable clause of the creed and hence article of Christian faith (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q46).
The created order was made out of nothing (ex nihilo), without preexisting materials (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.10, 11; Augustine, Conf. 12.7; Dordrecht Conf. I). This counteracts the pantheistic implication that matter is eternal. It also rejects the dualistic implication of another kind of equally eternal power standing contrary to God. Humanity is not made “out of nothing” (as is God) but out of “the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:19), just as wild animals and birds were “formed out of the ground” by God (Gen. 2:19). There is no other source of creation than the will of God (Heb. 11:3; Calvin, Inst. 2.2.20), which obviously loves being in preference to not being. That is clear from the evidences of creation.
The world was not created coeternal with God (Augustine, CG 11.4, 5; Conf. 11.14). The world was not put together out of pieces of God (Augustine, Conf. 11.5, 12.7). The creation is only of God, and only God could create the world (Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 1.1). Cosmic creation is a work peculiar to God (Athanasius, Four Discourses Ag. Arians 2.16). Though it may unfold in an evolutionary process, the evolutionary process itself does not create itself but is created.
Time did not always exist. The world was created with time (Augustine, CG 11.6). Space and time came into being only with creation, not prior to it. There was a condition of non-being, or “time” so to speak, when time was not. Our contemplation of the creation of time and space is filled with enigma since we are creatures of time, made conscious always in time and through time. In time we meet the created order as intrinsically intelligible (Theophilus, To Autolycus 1.4–5; John of Damascus, OF 2.3), wondering from where its intelligibility derives.
Turning to God’s Action—What God Does
Creation and providence are pivotal teachings of Christianity (Basel Conf. I) profoundly shared with Judaism and, to some degree, with other monotheistic faiths. Providence—the care of God over all things—will be discussed in the following chapter. For now the activity of God (sometimes called opera dei—the work, energy, or workings of God), as distinguished from the being of God, is now our central concern, especially as it appears in creation.
Christian teaching asks not only about who God is, but what God does—how God’s power, mercy, and patience are manifested in creative, preservative, redemptive, and consummating activities (Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catech. 12; Calvin, Inst. 2.3–5). God’s essence is best viewed through the outworking of God’s energies, the working (energeia) of God in and through creatures (Chrysostom, Concerning the Statues, hom. 10.8, 9; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Trin., Answer to Eunomius, sec. bk.; Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.20).
Hence Christian teaching does not deal only with “God in himself” as if God could be viewed abstractly apart from God’s works or cosmic activity. God is known through what God does. These works of God are stated in summary form under three great headings: creation, redemption, and sanctification (Luther, Small Catech.; Anglican Catech.), terms that summarize the whole range of activities of the triune God, and that correlate with the creedal summary.
These activities of God correspond indirectly with the work of the Father, Son, and Spirit. They find their unity in the one God, yet the effects of creation, redemption, and consummation are subjectively experienced by the faithful as gracious in different ways: (1) finite creatures learn that they are radically dependent for their existence upon Another (who wholly transcends all things, God the Father); (2) when human beings fall into sin they discover they are being helped by Another (help comes from afar, from a distant Other who comes close, the Son born of woman); and (3) when human freedom seeks to respond to the mercy and love of God it is assisted by Another (God’s own Spirit). Accordingly, the one God—Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier—is none other than the One God who is named in Scripture as Father, Son, and Spirit.
Already we have established that God is, and is triune. In Part Three we now seek greater clarity about what the triune God does (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 1.2; Chrysostom, Concerning the Statues, Hom. 5–7; Calvin, Inst. 2.3, 4; Chemnitz, LT 1:112). We shift our attention from God’s being (nature, character, and existence) to God’s working. We are turning from who God is to what God does. God originally creates and continually provides for creation.
God’s First Act: Creation
The first of all God’s good acts is the creation of the world. How could it be otherwise, for how can anything be good unless it exists? Chronologically and logically, creation is the proper starting point of any talk of the historical activity of God, for history begins with creation.
If Christian teaching is to speak of the God of history, there must be a stage on which history is played out. Note that there is a redemptive intent from the beginning in creation, so there is a subtle sense in which God’s saving purpose—love for the world—is antecedent to God’s creating action (1 Cor. 2:7; 2 Tim. 1:9; Titus 1:2; Rev. 13:8; John 1:1–20; Eph. 1:5–11; Barth, CD 2/2).
But there is a less subtle sense in which creation is prior to redemption, for how could one have something to redeem if that something did not exist? Our sequence is the standard order of the ecumenical teaching consensus, seen as early as Theophilus of Antioch, who having spoken of the nature and existence of God (To Autolycus 1), then turned immediately to discuss the works of God in creation and providence (2.1–21).
In considering creation prior to our full discussion of Christology, however, there is no hint or suggestion that creation is separable from Christ. For Pauline, Johannine, and Synoptic texts all make it clear that creation is the work of the triune God—the Father of all, the Son who is with the Father in creating, and Creator Spiritus, working in perfect union (Matt. 28:19; Mark 1:10–11; John 1:1–4; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:13–16; Phil.2:5–11; Heb. 1:1–4; Augustine, Sermon 232.5).
The Living God and the Gift of Life
No one can reflect upon the Creator without also reflecting upon creatures (inanimate and animate, material and spiritual) whom God thought it important enough to create (Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catech. 5, 6). So the Christian teaching about creation includes all creatures including ourselves. It asks why God would want creatures, especially those with potentially bad habits of human freedom. No gift we are given is more remarkable than the extraordinary gift of simply being given anything at all, the unpurchasable gift of living as free human beings.
Some complain it is unfair that living creatures were never once consulted first about whether they wanted to be alive. Consider the structural inconsistency underlying such a complaint. For one to have been consulted first about whether one wanted to live, one would have had already to be, that is, to have life of some kind. That would still leave unattended the question of how the one being consulted got there. The conclusion holds: Life is radically given to us prior to any conceivable choice of our own. No creature who has ever lived has earned it or asked for it.
The gift of life preconditions all other gifts. Nothing can experience, receive, or elicit any good outcome without first having been given life. Even if something “good” were to happen to a stone, it could not recognize or receive it because it is not alive (at least in any recognizable sense). The inexorable rule is this: Nothing lives without having first been given life. The gift is unmerited. No creature got here by choosing to be alive (Basil, Hex. 9; Calvin, Inst. 3.9.3).
The inanimate cannot choose to be animate. The nonexistent cannot choose existence. Any creature that is sufficiently alive to be aware of life has already received creation’s most astonishing gift—life itself (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q18; Luther, Smaller Catech. 1). An incalculably valuable gift calls for an unreserved, grateful, active response (Catherine of Genoa, Spiritual Dialogue, CWS: 132).
The Biblical Perspective on God the Creator
The creation teaching is widely diffused throughout the Scripture in the psalms, the Prophets, the synoptic Gospels and letters (Tertullian, Ag. Hermogenes 23–36; Basil, Hex. 2–6). Although Genesis is the most quoted and prototypical reference, the classical exegetes have often turned for wisdom about creation to other powerful scriptural affirmations of God’s creating will, such as Isaiah 40, Amos 4:13, Psalms 90 and 104, Jeremiah 10, John 1, Acts 17, and Colossians 1 (Augustine, Trin. 16). The locus classicus texts on creation are extensive (Job 26:7–14; 38:4–11; Pss. 33:6–9; 102:25; Isa. 45:5; 45:18; Neh. 9:6; Rom. 1:20; 9:20; Heb. 1:2; 11:3; Rev. 4:11; 10:6; Chrysostom, Hom. on Acts, 38).
Genesis
The account in Genesis 2 and 3 is often referred to as the Yahwist account since the author’s preferred name for God is Yahweh. It is more concerned with the creation of human beings, man and woman, and their dominion and destiny from the beginning, including the account of the fall and the alienation of human freedom (Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 2.1–17; Augustine, CG 13. 12).
In the Yahwist account there is from the beginning an acknowledgment of human freedom as a gift accountable to God and of human sexual differentiation as a divine gift to male and female, since God wills to bless both through these differences (Gen. 1:27). Always easily distortable, human freedom and sexuality are a crucial part of God’s good creation and intention, intended for generativity, love, moral discipline, productivity, dominion, and stewardship of the earth (Chrysostom, Hom. on Ephesians 20).
The Genesis narratives, taken together, express much of the heart of the Jewish and Christian teaching on creation: that we are given life by one who is wise and free, who creates us for our good and whose goodness is displayed throughout the creation. There are never assumed to be two or more gods at work in creation. Under the category of true God there can be only one (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.2.1–5; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 6). These Yahwist motifs will be treated more fully later under the topic of human existence.
The Bible’s first concern is more with the priestly account of the orderly creation of the world, light, life, and nature (Gen. 1:1–2:4a). The priestly prologue, Genesis 1:1–2:4, serves as a kind of all-embracing introduction to the history of salvation (Basil, Hex., 1–2). It is the Bible’s way of beginning the longest and best of all stories. It begins by constructing the stage on which covenant history is to be played. Even when the covenant is broken, God in due time heals that brokenness and calls humanity back to covenant relationship, redeeming creation after it falls. The creation narrative sets the scene and provides the context in which God’s purpose is being worked out in the whole of history (Origen, Ag. Celsus 6.50–70).
Creation is not, according to the Hebraic tradition, primarily objective, descriptive scientific talk of how nature evolves or emerges, as if this were merely a matter of accurate observation, or as if the fate-laden historical choices of previous humans did not make much real difference to the destiny of the free creature (Chrysostom, Concerning the Statues, hom. 7). Rather, the scriptural witness to creation is from the first line more like a drama, the beginning of the acts of God, the first of many mighty deeds, upon which hinge both life’s current meaning and the eternal destinies of participants (Ephrem, Comm. on Gen. 1).
The drama is all about a relationship. It is the thorny, conflicted, seductive, unpredictable unfolding epic of a covenant relationship between Yahweh and Adam, Yahweh and Abraham, Yahweh and Israel, Yahweh and humanity. The real story of creation is about the Creator-creature relationship, not about creatures as such, as if creation in itself could be considered a detached occurrence or autonomous event (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.10.1–4).
The Bible does not rule out scientific studies or other ways of approaching the primitive history of the world. The natural emergence of the cosmic, geological, vegetative, and animal spheres can remain open for all reasonable forms of investigation. The creation narratives do not pretend to describe in empirical detail, objectively, descriptively, or non-metaphorically, the way in which the world came into being. Rather, they proclaim the awesome primordial fact that the world is radically dependent on the generosity, wisdom, and help of God, the insurmountably good and powerful One (Dionysius, Div. Names 8.7–9; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q44–46).
The world is not God. It is as different from God as the gnat’s eye from the Omniscient One. Being finite, the creation itself is not eternal. It lies within a cosmic parenthesis—between the beginning and end of all things. The whole world and everything in the world owes its being to the free, sovereign act of God (Tho. Aq., Compend: 96). God created the world by a word. God speaks—as simple as that—and there it is.
The world is not an oozing out of some part of God—not an emanation—which would mean that the world gradually seeps or leaks out (e, out, manare, flow) of the edges of the being of God, according to the analogy of fragrance emanating from flowers. Theories of emanation have been consistently rejected by Jewish and Christian teachers because they fail to make a sharp distinction between God and the world (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Her. 10).
God minus the world is still God. If God should turn out to be indistinguishably merged with the world, Christian teaching would become another pantheism, which reduces God to the world. It collapses God and the world into one continuous amalgam. Only when God is unmistakably distinguishable from the world, the Uncreated from the created, can we have theism in its classic Jewish and Christian sense (Tertullian, Ag. Hermogenes 17–31; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q45; Calovius, SLT 3:899).
The Days of Creation: Hexaemeron
The word day (yõm) has several levels of meaning. It is used in biblical Hebrew to mean not only a twenty-four-hour day but also a time of divine visitation or judgment, or an indefinite period of time, as in Psalms 110:5, Isaiah 2:11, 12, and Jeremiah 11:4–7; 17:16 To insist on a twenty-four-hour day as its only meaning is to intrude upon the text and to disallow the poetic, metaphorical, and symbolic speech of Scripture (Pss. 2:7; 18:18; Isa. 4:1, 2; Jer. 44:1–23). Thus when we say “day” in Hebrew we may be referring to the first period, or second period, and so on. Classical readings of Genesis 1 focused upon the first six periods as an orderly series of divine acts of (1) creating, (2) ordering (distinguishing), and (3) adorning of the world, followed by rest.
Classic consensual interpreters have written detailed expositions on the making, distinctions, and adornments enacted by God in these six days (hexaemeron) of divine creativity (Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.11–18; Basil, Hex.; Chrysostom, Hom. on Genesis; Ambrose, Hex.; Augustine, Literal Interp. of Gen.; Dionysius, Div. Names; John of Damascus, OF 2.2–3; Bede, Hex.; and Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q66–74). Each of these six days before the day of rest is introduced by the words “And God said” (Augustine, Literal Interp. of Gen. 1.8). The first chapter of Genesis has produced extended theological meditations on the acts of God the creator, orderer, and beautifier, following this pattern:
The First Day. (Gen. 1. 3): Light, with night following day is created (Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.11–13; Basil, Hex. 1–2), the first of three days of the work of distinction or divine differentiation of creatures (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q67). It is fitting and necessary that the production of light occur on the first day, since “that without which there could not be day, must have been made on the first day” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q67). God says “Good.”
The Second Day. (Gen. 1:6): The vault of heaven, waters below to form the sea and waters above to form the rain, and the firmament are created (Theophilus, To Autolycus 2. 14; Basil, Hex. 3; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q68). Good.
The Third Day. (Gen 1:9–13): Seas, the lands, and plant life, yielding fresh growth and bearing seed, are all created (Basil, Hex. 4; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q69). The precious gift of life first appeared in plants, but remained “hidden, since they lack sense and local movement,” and therefore “their production is treated as a part of the earth’s formation” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q70). Good.
The Fourth Day. (Gen. 1:14): Luminaries, sun, moon, stars, giving light, governing night and day (Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.15, 16; Basil, Hex. 6)—the first of three days of the work of the adornment of creation (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q70). “The sun, the moon and the stars” are good, but “do not bow down to them.” (Deut. 4:19). They render a threefold service to all humanity: for light to see by; for the changes of the seasons, “which prevent weariness, preserve health, and provide for the necessities of food” and for weather, fair or foul, “as favorable to various occupations” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q70, italics added). It is for these varied purposes that the lights are said to “serve as signs both for festivals and for seasons and years” (Gen. 1:14b; Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 5.6).
The Fifth Day. (Gen 1:29): Countless living creatures of the water and creatures of the air (Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.16; Basil, Hex. 7; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q71). Water is adorned with fish, and air adorned with birds. In the Genesis account we behold the creation of “different grades of life” from the life of plants, which vegetate, to the life of great and small “living creatures that live and move in the waters,” to “every kind of bird.” Then we come to the creation of land animals that are more complex, having the capacity for motion, as “living souls with bodies subject to them.” Through this progression, “the more perfect is reached through the less perfect,” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q73) in a food chain by which higher life forms feed off the lower. God thus creates an amazingly intricate and beautiful creation that is well fitted for many evidences of providential care, which all the animals illustrate. Good.
The Sixth Day. (Gen 1:24): More complexly sensate living creatures are given life: each “according to their kind: cattle, reptiles, and wild animals,” and finally humanity, male and female (Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.17, 18; Basil, Hex. 9; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q72). Humanity, as finitely free, is both very like and very unlike the preceding animals, since grounded in nature yet capable of freedom, self-transcendence, and consciousness, refracting the divine image. Humanity is unlike plants and animals, which “may be said to be produced according to their kinds, to signify their remoteness from the Divine image and likeness, whereas man is said to be made ‘to the image and likeness of God.’” Yet humanity is like the various animals in that all receive the blessing God gives by “the power to multiply by generation.” Much the same blessing of sexual generativity given to animal life is distinctly repeated in the case of humanity “to prevent anyone from saying that there was any sin whatever in the act of begetting children,” (Tho. Aq., ST I, Q73) yet to further bond human sexual fidelity through love, so as to provide fitting care for the nurture of children. Hence human life is viewed as a paradoxical, potentially disjunctive, interfacing of nature and transcendence, of finitude and freedom, of animal-like passions and likeness to God, of sexuality and fidelity. Adam and Eve are given ordered freedom amid this complex interfacing that the ancient Christian writers called a compositum of body and soul.
The Seventh Day. Divine rest. God “blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day he ceased from all the work he had set himself to do” (Gen. 2:2, 3). “Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God.” The seventh day is said to be sanctified “because something is added to creatures by their multiplying and by their resting in God” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q74).
The first three periods prepare the world for the next three periods, in which living inhabitants are set in a well-prepared place and provided a rhythm of life. There are living beings for each of the four elemental regions of air (birds), earth (plants, animals, humanity), water (fish), and fire (the sun is needed for the warmth and illumination of all). The seventh day is for rejoicing over the goodness of the former six, providing a pattern for human life—working six days and resting on the seventh.
In this way the work of God the Creator is beheld in its intrinsic moral and spiritual intelligibility as a complete act of creation in which heaven and earth were produced, yet without form; a work of distinction, in which heaven and earth were given order and beauty; and a work of adornment in which, just as our bodies are adorned with clothing, so God adorns the world with the production of things that live and move in heaven and on earth. All the elements for life—air, earth, fire, and water—receive their form through the divine work of making differences among creatures (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q70).
Let It Be: Heaven and Earth
The Genesis narrative is written in a recurrent permissive form in six movements: “Let there be” (vv. 3, 6, 14, 15, 20, 24). The created order springs directly from the word of God, the simple divine address: “God said” (vv. 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). It is produced, ordered and approved—all by God’s speech. The command is given, and it is. God said, in effect, “I permit creation,” and it was there. “There is nothing too hard for thee,” declared Jeremiah (32:17). God does not have to strain to create the world.
Creation is viewed as a divine language that only God can speak (Tho. Aq., GC: 260). It is ordered at once by the divine will and just as quickly received and approved. The permission, command, production, ordering, receiving, and approval are all set forth in the brief first chapter of Genesis (Tertullian, Ag. Praxeas 12).
God’s approbation of the goodness of creation builds majestically from good, to more complex good, to “very good” (Gen. 1:4, 10, 14, 21, 31; Basil, Hex. 9; Wesley, WJW 6:206–15). God brings forth out of nothing, according to his sovereign will, the visible universe and the invisible or spiritual sphere. Creation is entirely an act of divine freedom (Augustine, CG 11.24).
Scripture speaks of heaven as the abode of God. Moses prayed that God would “look down from heaven, thy holy dwelling-place” (Deut. 26:15). Jesus prayed to “Our Father in heaven” (Matt. 6:9). It is a key mark of Christian confession that God created not only the earth but also the intricate extent of the heavens (Gen. 1:1; Tertullian, Ag. Hermogenes 17–34) that embrace all cosmic creation transcending the earth.
The Angelic Hosts
An angel (angelos) is a messenger of God, a spiritual creature endowed with free will and capable of divine praise, yet unencumbered with bodily existence (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 3.8; John of Damascus, 2.3; Quenstedt, TDP 1: Wesley, WJW 6: 361). Angels are incorporeal, lacking bodies (Athanasius, Four Discourses Ag. Arians 2.19; Tho. Aq., ST I Q51, I). They are not limited to the here and now (Gregory Nazianzus, Second Orat. on Easter, Orat. 45.5; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q51). “An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature” (John of Damascus, OF 2.3). Since endowed with free will, angels may be tempted. Fallen angels who have disavowed their uncorrupted essence and have conspired in disobedience (Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 14; Augustine, CG 12.6; Chemnitz, LT 1: 122; Quenstedt, TDP 1: 443; Wesley, Of Evil Angels, WJW 6: 380–81) are to be discussed at the end of this study.
Jesus himself was a recipient of the ministry of angels (Matt. 4:11; Luke 22:43). A countless number of angels are said to surround the throne of God (Heb. 12:22; Rev. 5:11). Little may be said descriptively of the transcendent depiction of angels except the brightness of their countenance, a luminosity unlike any of this world (Matt. 28:2–4; Luke 2:9; Acts 1:10). “They have no need of tongue or hearing but without uttering words they communicate to each other their own thoughts and counsels…. It is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing…. They behold God according to their capacity, and this is their food” (John of Damascus, OF 2.3).
Why are we still discussing angels in the modern world, where naturalistic assumptions seem largely to have undercut even the possibility of angels? Because our purpose is to represent accurately the classical Christian understanding of God the Creator, which virtually without exception has affirmed the spiritual world, created by God. The sacred texts tell of superpersonal intelligences—angelic hosts. The liturgy, the Scriptures, and the hymnody are filled with such images. In Scripture and most Christian history, any view of the world that lacked angels would have seemed implausible, lacking something essential to creation. The early creeds typically affirmed the gift of the heavens and the world of spirit that transcends all empirical vision, not merely the earth and physical matter, as if all that makes a difference is the world that is seen.
Christianity has passed through many worldviews. It still requires some empathic effort for the modern worldview to enter into the worldview of those who make known to us the revelation of God that both transcends and penetrates all particular worldviews. Even within the frame of contemporary scientific worldviews (and there are many, even as there are many premodern worldviews) it is hardly reasonable to rule out superpersonal intelligences in this vast cosmos that we still know so incompletely.
Covenant Creation and the Covenant People of God
God Creates the Covenant People out of Nothing
The prophets of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries BC grasped and developed this surprising analogy: God created the people of Israel out of nothing, just as God creates everything else. As God creates Israel as a nation “from nothing” (as later Latin writers would speak of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing), so does God create all things (Augustine, Conf. 12. 7). The people of Israel were nobody. God created them from dust. As Israel was not a people except for Yahweh, so the prophet declared that the world would be nothing except for Yahweh (Isa. 43:16–21; Jer. 31:17–25).
Hence, the creative power of God is to be found not only in the beginning but in the process of history, amid the currently unfolding human story (Augustine, CG 3.17–31). God not only creates Israel, but when Israel is frayed down to nothing God then wonderfully re-creates Israel (Isa. 40:1; Jer. 30:12; Dan. 3:1). Out of the awareness that Israel had been created by the divine mercy and covenant, the prophets then reflected back on the creation of all things by analogy to Israel’s special creation (Augustine, CG 16.36–43; Calvin, Inst. 2.8.29; 2.10.1). Even when Israel abandoned its destiny, and covenant responsibility, God remembered, sustained, and re-created the covenant. Thus a “new covenant,” a “New Jerusalem” is attested by Jeremiah and others (Jer. 31:31; Isa. 65; Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.9).
The cosmos is viewed by analogy from Israel’s post-exilic historical experience. God is always doing something new in history, always creating or re-creating a new people, ever restoring that which has fallen to nothing (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 4–15). Through the unexpected turns of history, Yahweh is making known unchanging divine covenant love (chesed, Ezek. 16; Isa. 54:5; Mark 2:19; Calvin, Inst. 1.5.1–12; 1.17.2). The messianic expectation of God as creator of a new people is directly grounded in Israel’s actual historical experience, from being no people to becoming a people, and having lost their national identity rediscovering it as secured by Yahweh (Hos. 1:8–11).
Creation is Made for Covenant
The prophets give a wrenching account of a durable relationship between the steadfast God and the wavering people of God. The relation of God and Israel mirrors the relation of God with the whole of humanity. Creation itself is seen as evidence of covenant from the beginning, but the meaning of the covenant is only gradually revealed by means of actual historical events (Augustine, CG 11.21; Gallic Conf., art. 7–8; Westminster Conf. 4). The covenant intention of God is present from the beginning, but it becomes clarified and appears more palpable only slowly through a twisted history in which the covenant relationship is declared, established, tested, redeemed, and consummated. God creates the world in order to enter into a covenant relationship with the world particularly through Israel, by whom God’s covenant love is mediated to the rest of the world.
Covenant is not merely an idea, but a history; it takes time—centuries, in fact—gradually to manifest itself and become experientially embraced. It is something like a friendship—it does not just momentarily happen. Can you imagine a personal relationship that appears suddenly, totally, with no possibility or need for further disclosure? Friendships are more often experienced through a history of disclosure. We discover, through knowing and dealing with some other person, whether that person is reliable or not, is caring or not. Covenant history is something like such a gradually developing relationship (Hos 1; Jer 31, Is. 53–54). Such human relationships have to be fought for and won, defended, reworked, and tested. This is the kind of relationship that comes to exist between God and Israel, something like a rocky marriage or an important but embattled friendship. Many events are remembered and recollected to establish an awareness of God’s dependability. The relationship does not simply or flatly exist, but must be hammered out through a series of hazardous and wonderful experiences (Hos. 1:1, Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.20–25).
Throughout all these experiences, God is creative, continuing to create, re-create, and sustain this covenant relationship. It is through this kind of history that the people of Israel understood themselves to be recipients of the covenant love of God, yet they understood the whole of that history to be already present in the preknowing, eternal mind of God and saturated with the corrective will of God from the very beginning (Augustine, CG 5.9; Tho. Aq., GC,).
Nehemiah grasped the correspondence of God’s activity as Creator and Redeemer in these terms: “You are the Lord, you alone; you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. To all of them you give life, and the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham; and you found his heart faithful before you, and made with him a covenant” (Neh. 9:6–8). The analogy: Abram (hence Israel) is called to being and faith by the One who calls all into being (Bede, On Ezra and Nehemiah 3.29).
The constancy of the laws established by God for the universe was viewed by the prophets as a sign that the covenant would endure forever. The analogy is between the natural order, which is reliable, and divine creation, which depends upon the divine faithfulness (Isa. 45; Lactantius, Div. Inst. 3.28; Tho. Aq., GC: 82).
The Hebrew prophets were keenly aware of the radical difference between God and world, eternal and temporal power, Giver and gift (Pss. 113–4; Isa. 30:28). “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?” (Isa. 40:12). It is the one God who creates the world, permits its freedom to fall, acts to redeem what has fallen, and brings the whole story to fitting consummation (Athanasius, Incarnation of the Word 20–32; Second Helvetic Conf. 6).
Creation Looks Toward Consummation
The Hebrew prophets envisioned a future in which the whole universe would share in the renewal of all things. History awaits “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17; 66:22,;. 2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1). The new heaven and the new earth are not alien to the old heaven and the old earth but a fulfillment of it (Cassiodorus, Expos. Of Ps. 148.6).
When the primordial design of God has been distorted by human sin, God continues to re-create and restore covenant relationship. Hence God’s creative action is not something that exists only at the beginning of time but remains and persists here and now, to be beheld both in personal and national life (Isa. 40:26–28; Mal. 2:10).
In this way the prophetic vision of beginnings is linked firmly with an eschatological vision of endings. The prophets beheld both the beginning of history and the end of history as God’s active work. They hoped for a culmination of distorted history in a way that would be consistent with the divine purpose from the beginning (Augustine, CC 12.21–25).
God’s Wisdom in Creation
The priestly account had focused on the six days of creation followed by Sabbath rest. The Yahwist narrative (Gen. 2–3) told the drama of the creation of humanity and the original divine-human relationship broken by sin. The prophetic accounts viewed God’s purpose in creation in the light of God’s creative activity in ongoing covenant history.
The wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and certain Psalms) provided new variations on these themes attesting God’s purpose in creation. These writings shifted the focus more toward God’s creative activity in nature, wisdom, and practical judgment, while sustaining all of these previous themes.
In this genre, the world becomes a spectacular object of human research, observation, and enjoyment (Ps. 104; Eccles. 1:5). The created order evokes astonishment (Ps. 19), humility (Job 38:1–42:6), and hymns of praise (Pss. 48:10; 68:32–35). Its orderliness and beauty are testimonies to the eternal wisdom of God: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:3, 4; Augustine, On the Psalms 8). “The heavens show forth the glory of God,” while this firmament, this creaturely sphere, shows myriad evidences of God’s handiwork (Ps. 19; Augustine, On the Psalms 19).
There are creation hymns in the Psalms that speak of the whole world as filled with the wisdom of God (Pss. 104; 136:1–9; Origen, OFP 2.9; Gregory Thaumaturgus, Four Hom., Hom. One). Creation mirrors the incalculable wisdom, power, and glory of God (Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.10, 11; Origen, OFP 1.2.9–12; Lactantius, Div. Inst. 7.5–6).
Wisdom is present with God from “the beginning of his works, before all else that he made, long ago. Alone, I was fashioned in times long past, at the beginning, long before earth itself. When there was yet no ocean I was born, no springs brimming with water. Before the mountains were settled in their place, long before the hills I was born” (Prov. 8:22–25). All creation is good as given because it is imprinted with the providential image of Wisdom (Athanasius, Four Discourses Ag. Arians 2.78, 79; Basil, Hex. 9. 3–6).
This corresponds with another theme in the wisdom literature: the beauty of God, and of God’s world, rightly leading to praise (Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 38. 10). The earth is an appropriate object of celebration, provided we avoid idolatry (Tertullian, On Idolatry; Calvin, Inst. 1.11.12; Wesley, WJW 7:268). The divine majesty appears in these works (Ps. 139:14–17; Eccles. 3:11). God is a master craftsman who pours out his creative activity upon the world. The world reflects this artistry and is made radiant by a glory that points back to its Creator, mirroring the divine generosity (Basil, Hex., 6; Chrysostom, Concerning the Statues, hom. 10. 5, 6).
The apostolic witness did not set itself over against Moses, the Prophets, or the wisdom literature in their views of creation, idolatry, covenant, and the divine handiwork. These earlier Hebraic teachings on creation became transmuted in the light of the apostles’ experience of Jesus of Nazareth (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.20; Athanasius, Four Discourses Ag. Arians 2. 19–24). The prophetic tradition of creation was reappropriated, yet reconceived through the lens of their relation with the Son, the unique Revealer of the Father’s purpose in creation (Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 5.5; Cyril of Alex., Treasury of Holy Trin., FEF 3:212).
The early Christians prayed in much the same language as did Jews before them “to the sovereign Lord, maker of the heaven and earth and sea and everything in them” (Acts 4:24), but with the understanding that the creator had been revealed as the redeemer in Jesus. God created the world by direct address (2 Cor. 4:6). God called into being what did not exist (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.10.1–4, 3.8). These were all typical phrases found in Jewish celebrations of divine creation.
Creation Seen in the Light of Redemption
In John’s prologue, the world is created by the Word of God who is made flesh in Jesus. The Word of God in Jesus is coeternal with the Father. (John 1:1–17; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 8.21; Gregory of Nyssa, Ag. Eunomius 2.8–11). The Word of God is God himself, Creator of the universe. The Creator, made known personally in Jesus, comes into our history to present himself clearly to our view.
John’s Gospel begins in a conscious parallel to Genesis 1: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The evangelist could not make any more dramatic affirmation than to identify Christ with the Word present in creation, by whom the world was made. There was no better place to start in making contact with Jewish belief than to identify the Word spoken in Jesus as the same Word who is from the beginning (Col. 1; Tatian, Orat. Ag. Greeks 7). “The Word, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him” (John 1:2, 3; 1:14; Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 3.11, ANF 1:426–29; Athanasius, Four Discourses Ag. Arians 1.11–21; Ambrose, Of the Holy Spirit 2.1–4; Of the Chr. Faith, 1.54–57).
Paul took a similar beginning point in the letter to the Romans: God’s divinity and eternity are known through creation. Look at the creation carefully, and you will see some stamp, some distinct impression of the Creator’s purpose. God’s invisible nature is known through that which is visible (Rom. 1:20). This is the very One who is made known in Jesus: “Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is—to him be glory for ever! Amen” (Rom. 11:36; Origen, Ag. Celsus 6. 65; Gregory of Nyssa, Ag. Eunomius 2.7).
In Jesus’ resurrection we meet “the God who makes the dead live and summons things that are not yet in existence as if they already were” (Rom. 4:17). Acts reports that Paul spoke to the Athenians of “The God who created the world and everything in it, and who is Lord of heaven and earth,” who is “himself the universal giver of life and breath and all else. He created every race of men of one stock, to inhabit the whole earth’s surface” (Acts 17:24–26).
The same One who creates, redeems. The Son is “the image of the invisible God; his is the primacy over all created things. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible orders of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers: the whole universe has been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15–17; Origen, OFP 2.6; Basil, Hex. 1.6; On the Holy Spirit 16). In Christ all things were created and now subsist. It is he who sustains the universe by his word of power. (Athanasius, Defence of the Nicene Definition 3.7). In Hebrews it was written, “By faith we perceive that the universe was fashioned by the word of God, so that the visible came forth from the invisible” (Heb. 11:3; Gregory Nazianzus, Second Theol. Orat. 6; On Pentecost, Orat. 41.14; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 9.1, 2).
In this way the New Testament church affirmed the received Jewish tradition’s celebration of God’s goodness in creation and of the utter dependence of all things upon God, yet added a decisive point of interpretation: the Father’s creation is seen in the light of the Son, to whom fitting response is enabled through the Spirit (Augustine, Trin. 3.4; 5.13–15).
The work of creation is “always applied in Scripture not partially but to the whole, entire, full, complete Godhead” (Dionysius, Div. Names 2: 65). “For in the [Nicene] Creed, to the Father is attributed that ‘He is the Creator of all things visible and invisible’ to the Son is attributed that by Him ‘all things were made’ and to the Holy Ghost is attributed that He is ‘Lord and Life-Giver’” hence, “to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity…. God the Father made the creature through His Word, which is His Son; and through His Love, which is the Holy Ghost,” who “quickens what is created by the Father through the Son” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q45). The prophets, priests, and apocalyptic writers had been waiting for the final disclosure of meaning in history, which the apostles viewed as having occurred in Jesus life, death, and resurrection (1 Cor. 1 Augustine, Literal Interp. of Gen. 9.15.26, FEF 3: 86).
The New Creation
Christ reveals the purpose of creation. The Spirit works to create a new community of faith, hope, and love, a resurrected fellowship in fallen history. The New Testament doctrine of creation is not just about the first thing that happens in time but also about the new creation occurring in the community of faith. The new creation is happening in our hearts (Chrysostom, Fourth Instruction, 12). By analogy to the first creation, where there was once nothing, now there is new life (Clement of Alex., Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? 12). Christ “reformed the human race” (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.24.1). “When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun” (2 Cor. 5:17; Epistle of Barnabas 5). The focus is not on primal events, but on a report of the renewal of believing individuals in communities in the here and now. The analogies are spiritual gestation, embryonic formation, and the joy of birth (Recognitions of Clement 9.7; Wesley, WJW 5:212).
The expectation of a new creation is a motif that had already appeared powerfully in the Prophets (Isa. 65:17; 66:22; Jer. 31; Lam. 3:23). It took on deepened meaning in the New Testament view that the new creation had palpably begun in the community of Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. Where two or three are gathered together (Matt. 18:20), there the living Christ is in their midst and the new age begun. “Circumcision is nothing; uncircumcision is nothing; the only thing that counts is new creation!” (Gal. 6:15; Calvin, Inst. 2.11.11; Wesley, WJW 1:161).
This new creation is already begun, not only in the life of the faithful, but also extending by way of hope into the life of the world. Paul’s vision of the new creation has relevance not only for human history, but for the whole cosmos: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Rom. 8:19–22; Methodius, From the Discourse on the Resurrection 2).
We get the impression of the cosmos laboring for birth on a multi-phased scale stretching into all the ages, hoping (in a way that only an entire universe might “hope”) that God would fulfill the promise of cosmic redemption, and end the frustration caused by the consequences of sin, even though this mysterious struggle in which we are now engaged remains now ambiguous. Even though we may not here and now fully grasp God’s will, in God’s own time it will be known as reconciling all things (1 Cor. 13; 2 Cor. 5) so as to bring the whole cosmos within range of the redemptive purpose of Christ (Eph. 1). “The creation will perish in order that it may be renewed, not destroyed for-ever, so that we who are spiritually renewed may dwell in a new world, where there will be no sorrow” (Methodius, On the Resurrection, 1.9).
It is a primordially good world that God creates; only later is it to become distorted by the companionate finite wills that God permits. Doubtless the world has its dark corners and cruel characters. Ever present is the potential for destructiveness, loss, and distortion (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 7.4). But if we could see it as a whole as God sees it, we would see the cosmos as unimaginably good in its complex entirety. God pronounced it good at the outset, good in its outcome, and good in its whole (Gen. 1:4, 13; 18; Archelaus, Disputation with Manes 21; Ambrose, Hexaemeron 2.5).
Any world not created good is not God’s world. Any bad world, irretrievably evil, is different from the Jewish-Christian view of God’s world (Augustine, Literal Interp. of Gen. 9.15.26; Dionysius, Div. Names 4.1). Judaism and Christianity have had to fight steadily against alternative views of the world, whether pantheistic or dualistic. An evil can only emerge out of some good. Goodness is God’s diminishable but not wholly defeatable work and gift (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 5.16). Even those things that appear evil were created for some good purpose unforeseen by human eyes (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 7.4, 5).
Humanity is given dominion and stewardship over the earth. The world, according to the Genesis account, is not given purposelessly, and not given with eyes closed to its potentially harmful contingencies, and not apart from a redemptive plan in mind. The stewardship of creation was entrusted, according to Hebraic religion, to one particular part of the cosmos—humanity. “You shall have dominion” (Gen. 1:26, 28) implies that you take care of it. God entrusts the world to your care and benefit. In the guardianship of this fragile world you are called to respond fittingly to the One who gives and transcends all creaturely values (1 Pet. 4:10; Epistle of Barnabas XIX-XXI; Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 2.4–6). Humanity is called to order the world rightly under the permission and command of God, to make appropriate use of God-given rational capacities, strengths, imagination, and courage, and to shape the world in a fitting response to God’s unpurchasable gift of life. All this is implied in the notion of stewardly dominion over all that God gives in creation (Luke 16:1–12; Origen, Ag. Celsus 4.73–88).
The natural order is purposefully offered as the arena in which myriad acts of human freedom may engage in making human history. Nature is to be greatly respected, nurtured, and cared for, but not worshiped. The natural ordering of the cosmos is necessary for freedom to have reliable causal chains in which freedom can test out its capacity for responsiveness to the Creator (Athanasius, Ag. Heathen 19–27; Basil, Hex. 9; Calvin, Inst. 1.11.1, 2.1–5).
God’s Goodness Wills to Communicate Itself
Why did God create something rather than nothing? Something exists because God willed something rather than nothing. It is out of God’s will to create, which comes from God’s goodness and wisdom, that the world is created.
But why this world with personal beings in it, and not another without them? Because God willed to communicate personally with companionate beings (John of Damascus, OF 2.12–30; Calvin, Inst. 1.15.1–4). God determined to communicate the divine glory and goodness to creatures proportional to their capacity to receive (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q47). “God Who is good and more than good, did not find satisfaction in self-contemplation, but in His exceeding goodness wished certain things to come into existence which would enjoy His benefits and share in His goodness” (John of Damascus, OF 2.2; Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 38.9).
God’s goodness is so good that it would be less good if God had held his goodness mutely from view and did not communicate it to human beings. God’s power is so powerful that it would be less powerful if it did not make itself known in tenderness as love. God’s justice is so just that it would be less just if it never risked making a historical realm in which to allow divine justice to be played out, struggled for, recognized, and wherever possible work out. God’s joy is so joyful that it would be less joyful if it never had anyone or anything else with which to share its joy. So it could hardly be imaginable, assuming God’s incomparable goodness, power, justice, and joy, that God would create nothing (Augustine, Conf. 11.1–10).
That which is good wishes voluntarily to communicate itself. It does not wish simply to withhold itself from communication—for an uncommunicated and unknown good is less good than one communicated, known, and beheld. God’s love is not to be hidden as if under a bushel basket (Mt 5:4; Incomplete Work on Mt., Hom. 10; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q44, 45). Consequently, that which is unsurpassably good would most certainly will to communicate itself in some way to some world. Especially this is so if the unsurpassably good being is personal, and desires to awaken in finite persons a corresponding awareness of the goodness of creation. This is a greater creation than would exist if there were nothing but rocks, illimitable space, and inert matter that could not significantly respond. The sole motive of creation is God’s gracious willingness to share goodness with creatures (Augustine, Sermon on Mount 1.6.17; Salvian, The Governance of God 4.9–11; Clement of Alex., Strom. 2.21).
No particular world is necessary to God. Creation is the free act of God. There is no external compulsion or necessity upon God—nothing outside God prior to the beginning that says, “God, for some reason apart from yourself, you must create a world.” “It is not therefore necessary for God to will that the world should always exist” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q48). God could have refrained altogether from creating, had it not been that God’s goodness irrepressibly takes joy in being shared.
If God is to enjoy a relation with the world, then there obviously must be a world. As becoming known posits another knower, so becoming loved and enjoyed posits an accompanying lover and enjoyer (Paulus Orosius, Seven Books Ag. the Pagans 7, FC 50: 283; Raymond Lull, The Book of the Lover; Catherine of Genoa, Spiritual Dialogue I, CWS: 109–14; Kierkegaard, Works of Love). If there is to be a history of this rocky relationship in a divine-human covenant, then there must be a place, a locus, a world in which it occurs. “For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures.” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q47).
The Created Good Liable to Fall
God could have freely created any world, this world or any other world, but this is the one God chose to create—not those supposedly “better” ones our minds proudly imagine we could have invented had we been in charge. God’s purpose is in fact being fulfilled precisely through the struggle and destiny of this world of freedom under accountable conditions, not those fantasized others (Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catech. 6).
Christian creation teaching takes a middle course between (a) the radical optimism of utopians, who neglect the power of evil, and (b) the radical pessimism of the Marcionites, Gnostics, Manichaeans, and others who consider the world as maya or illusion, something to be escaped from as much as possible. Both modern naturalistic optimisms and modern historical pessimisms are resisted by the central Christian tradition, which celebrates a hope based upon the goodness of God in creation, linked always with a realistic awareness of human fallenness. That fallenness is not just attributable to fate, but resides precisely in human willing, corporate and personal (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 4.18–21; R. Niebuhr, NDM I).
This fallen world might seem less good than those that we might in imagination abstractly conceive. But we view it with our clouded eyesight. Yet even under these very conditions of risk, it remains a remarkably good world. It unites in an astonishing finite harmony the many widely different levels of creaturely goodness. Thomas Aquinas celebrated the tremendous variety in God’s design, the profusion of things in the world: “God makes creatures many and diverse, that what is lacking in one is supplied by another. Goodness in God is simple and consistent. Among creatures it is scattered and uneven. Contrast and oddness come not from chance, not from flaws in the material, not from interference with the divine plan, but from God’s purpose. He wills to impart his perfection to creatures as they can stand it” (ST 1 Q47). Hence the whole universe participates in the divine goodness more perfectly than any single observer ever could conceive.
God does not make things badly. God is intent upon creating and sustaining a creation that is proportionally as good as sluggish matter can be. God has created a history of human freedom that is proportionally as good as distortable freedom can be, viewed in the long run of universal history, whose future only God can see. Yet all creaturely goods remain derivative and consequent goods. Some creatures, especially human beings with intelligence and self-determination, are ingeniously capable of twisting and knotting the created goodness of the world (Ambrose, Of the Chr. Faith, 3.20; Wesley, Original Sin, The New Birth).
Repeatedly the Christian tradition has had to fight the notion that the created order is created in a profoundly defective way, or that it is sinful simply by existing (Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 1.2–23; Athanasius, Incarnation of the Word 43). Sin is not caused by God, but by skewed human freedom. Sin is of our making, not God’s. Creation is good. Sin is a fabrication of the freedom of creatures (Athanasius, Ag. the Heathen 2). Freedom is created good, even if prone to fall (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 2.1; Augustine, Nature of the Good; Ag. Manichaeans 36, 37).
Against World-Hating
In the first two centuries AD, Christian teachers had to face Docetists, Gnostics, Manichaeans, and other dismal theorists who detested the Jewish and Christian insistence that creation is good. They thought this was a dreadful world. They could not imagine that God could have been so ill advised as to create this sordid place. They thought finitude was demeaning and matter intrinsically alienating. They concluded that such a bad world could not have been created by a good God. From its beginnings Christianity has had to deal with these world-haters who throw away so much of their free will by despairing over their God-given human condition of finite freedom.
The early Christian worshipers responded to Gnostic competitors in a traditional Hebraic way: even though the times are distorted and fallen, still it is God who made the world and wishes to restore it. Augustine battled against Manichaeans who were saying that matter is so bad that we must remove God from the embarrassment of having created this regrettable world. Augustine had to show that God creates a good world by wisdom and grace, and through the abuse of freedom it becomes distorted (Augustine, Ag. Manichaeans).
This Gnostic/Manichaean view has enduring political significance even today. For if the world is evil, it can be treated with contemptuous neglect. Christianity attested the value of this world to God by celebrating God’s own determination to become flesh and share in human history. Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions, argued William Temple in Nature, Man, and God, because of the incarnation. Humankind is created as a unique interface embracing those two creaturely worlds, “a sort of connecting link between the visible and invisible natures” (John of Damascus, OF 1.12).
Summing up: Dualism is rejected; creation is ex nihilo; creation is good; the three persons of the Trinity act as one through creation, giving it, redeeming it, and bringing it to consummation.
The Happiness of God in Creating
Creaturely life is given in order that we might “glorify God, and enjoy Him forever” (Westminster Catechism I). The glory (kabod, doxa) of God attested by Isaiah (40:4, 5) and Ezekiel (1:29), which was manifested in salvation history and is destined to “fill the earth” (Num. 14:21, 22), was beheld by the shepherds at Christ’s birth (Luke 2:9), in his earthly life (John 1:14), at the transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8; John of Damascus, OF 2.2) and the resurrection (John 11:24–25).
God is glorified in an extraordinary way by the creation of intelligent beings capable of praising and thereby of reflecting God’s own glory in temporal, historical, physical, and moral acts (Ambrose, On the Decease of Satyrus 1.45, 46). God’s glory is manifested in creation. That does not tarnish God’s goodness, but enhances and enlarges it (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 9).
God did not create humanity for human pride or merely to make humans egocentrically happy about themselves. That, for most of the biblical writers, is a form of pride, despair, and hence unhappiness (Arnobius, Ag. the Heathen 22–25; Luther, Sermons on the Catech., MLS: 224–25). When we pursue happiness only for ourselves, we forfeit a deeper, wiser happiness (Wesley, WJW 6:431, 443, 7:267). The end of creation is indeed the glory of God, but this does not diminish the value of human life.
Rather, God offers us a higher happiness, ordered in relation to the proportional variety of goods more available to humans than any other creatures (Epistle to Diognetus 8–11). Indeed, the purpose of creation is to make us happy in that sense, to make all creaturely life blessed, and to permit happiness to abound in creation, as seen in relation to the source and ground of happiness (Catherine of Siena, Prayers 13; Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis 8, CWS: 250–61).
The One who in the fullest sense is happy is the eternally happy One: God. All creatures are in some way capable of sharing in that eternal happiness (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q26). Thus the glory of the Creator and the happiness of creatures are inseparable. Human happiness is not an incidental part of the original purpose of God in creation, but central to it (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man).
The possibility of the praise of God by creation is increased greatly when beings are created who are capable of speech, memory, will, and understanding. God is glorified in an extraordinary way by intelligent creatures capable of reflecting God’s own glory in an actual historical world (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 2.10–16).
If something is to be happy, it must first be alive (Basil, Hex. 7–8). God not only produces matter and the space to hold created beings and enable life, but time’s duration to sustain and enable them (Pss. 27:1; 36:9; Jer. 17:13).
Time
Repeatedly, Christian teaching has sought carefully to clarify the relation of eternity and time. With the creation of the world came the beginning of time. With the world, time began. Before time existed, nothing was but God (Augustine, CG 11.6). “There was no time, therefore, when you had not made anything, because you made time itself” (Augustine, Conf. 11.13, 14).
Time and space were coordinately created together. Both are intrinsic to the created order—not uncreated, hence not God. That time is created is opposed to the idea that God inserted the world into a time that was already proceeding, or into a preexistent framework. The world and time are not coeternal with God (Augustine, CG 11.1–13). Christians have found it more precise to say that the world was created with time (cum tempore) than in time. That means that in the very act of creating the world, God created time. “Eternity is neither time nor part of time” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Orat. on Easter, Orat. 45, 4). Time was not proceeding before the creation of the world (Augustine, Conf. 11.13). The work of God is done in history, yet God eternally transcends history. Time is finite, measurable, divisible in parts. Eternity is infinite, unmeasurable, not divisible in parts (Augustine, Conf. 11.15).
While affirming the distinction between eternity and time, it is still possible to affirm that the universe is from the temporal point of view “everlasting,” in the particular sense that before it no time was and at its end there will be no time. Thus creation is rightly said to be as old as time itself, yet eternity encompasses all times. Hence eternity is not chronologically “antecedent” to time, but, rather, time logically presupposes eternity. For there was no time “before” creation—the “before” implies a time, and a “time” before time is evidently self-contradictory (Augustine, Conf. 13.48–53).
The eternal is simultaneously present to every moment of time, including past and future time. In the light of the incarnation, the now is rightly viewed as eternity currently manifesting itself as time (Kierkegaard, Phil. Frag. I). God had eternity in which many different potential creations could have been conceived. Any world that God creates, however, must have a beginning (Augustine, Tractates on John, 1). Everything in time must have a beginning and an end; only God is without beginning and without end.
The Creator endows the world with time, the Redeemer restores time, the Spirit consummates and sanctifies time. God is the one source and end of time. God is not bound to time in the same way that creatures are. “For He is the Maker of time, and is not subject to time” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. on the Holy Lights 12). “In Christ he chose us before the world was founded, to be dedicated, to be without blemish in his sight, to be full of love” (Eph. 1:4; Ambrose, Of the Chr. Faith 1.9–12).