The Doctrine of Creation

A Constructive Kuyperian Approach

Bruce Riley Ashford,Craig G. Bartholomew

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830854912
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christianity Today Book AwardECPA Top Shelf Book Cover AwardApart from the doctrine of God, no doctrine is as comprehensive as that of creation. It is woven throughout the entire fabric of Christian theology. It goes to the deepest roots of reality and leaves no area of life untouched. Across the centuries, however, the doctrine of creation has often been eclipsed or threatened by various forms of gnosticism. Yet if Christians are to rise to current challenges related to public theology and ethics, we must regain a robust, biblical doctrine of creation.According to Bruce Ashford and Craig Bartholomew, one of the best sources for outfitting this recovery is Dutch neo-Calvinism. Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and their successors set forth a substantial doctrine of creation's goodness, but recent theological advances in this tradition have been limited. Now in The Doctrine of Creation Ashford and Bartholomew develop the Kuyperian tradition's rich resources on creation for systematic theology and the life of the church today.In addition to tracing historical treatments of the doctrine, the authors explore intertwined theological themes such as the omnipotence of God, human vocation, and providence. They draw from diverse streams of Christian thought while remaining rooted in the Kuyperian tradition, with a sustained focus on doing theology in deep engagement with Scripture.Approaching the world as God's creation changes everything. Thus The Doctrine of Creation concludes with implications for current issues, including those related to philosophy, science, the self, and human dignity. This exegetically grounded constructive theology contributes to renewed appreciation for and application of the doctrine of creation—which is ultimately a doctrine of profound hope.

The Doctrine of Creation as an Article of Faith

THE CREEDS ARE WONDERFUL, compressed statements that need to be recovered, celebrated, and appropriated afresh today. Consider an analogy with a large-scale map. If you love your country, then you will understand the value of a such a map enabling you to see the overarching shape of the land in which you live. Similarly, the creeds map for us the great and indispensable landmarks of the geography of Christian belief.

Their indispensability is revealed in the pages of church history. J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Creeds probably remains the standard work in English on the history of the early creeds. Reading Kelly, it is fascinating to navigate the origins of the creeds in the Old Testament and New Testament and developments among the early church fathers and on toward the medieval era. Kelly rightly notes that “the creeds of Christendom have never been dry-as-dust documents. . . . They have been theological manifestos, shot through with doctrinal significance and sometimes deeply stained with the marks of controversy.”1

Luke Timothy Johnson alerts us to the importance of the creed for today. “I think that the Christian creed enunciates a powerful and provocative understanding of the world, one that ought to scandalize a world that runs on the accepted truths of Modernity.”2 He notes that at least from the mid-nineteenth century onward, part of being an intellectual has involved a distaste for creeds, especially those of Christianity. Indeed, “for Modernity, belief in a creed is a sign of intellectual failure.”3 Johnson rightly notes that when we reflect on the creed, we ought to bear such cultured despisers of the faith in mind because we live in modernity, and even many believers who recite the creeds weekly espouse the worldview of modernity without realizing it.

Johnson helpfully discerns three functions of the creed: it is a personal and communal profession of faith, it is a rule of faith, and it provides a definition of faith. As he asserts, the provision of a definition of faith remains vital today. When Christians say the creed, we affirm certain truths and commit ourselves to live by them. In so doing we reject other beliefs that many of our contemporaries believe to be true. Being a Christian means consciously espousing a specific worldview and the concomitant practices of the church as one seeks to embody that worldview in daily life.

Faith is a way of knowing reality, and Christians ought to insist on the realism entailed in our confession. Faith connects us with the true shape of the world and is not “less real” than the limited but impressive “ways of knowing by which the wheels of the world’s empirical engine are kept spinning.”4 We need formative practices that establish us again and again in a view of the world that includes “all that is, seen and unseen.”

As we begin our immersion into the doctrine of creation, the creeds thus position us within the heart of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. They provide us with a large-scale map of the geography of Christian doctrine, and it is no mistake that they begin immediately with creation. The Apostles’ Creed begins,

I believe in God, the Father almighty,

creator of heaven and earth.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed begins,

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

Our concern in this volume is that act of creation with which the creeds begin. Donald Wood points out that the first article of the Nicene Creed draws three relations to our attention:

• the relation between the Father, “the maker of all things,” and the Son, “through whom all things came to be”
• the relation between God and creation
• the relation between heaven and earth5

To the relationship between Father and Son, we would add the equally significant relation between them and the Spirit as the source and giver of life. Implicitly the Apostles’ Creed and explicitly the Nicene Creed see the act of creation as that of the triune God. In chapter four—and throughout—we will attend to the trinitarian nature of God as creator. The third relation is dealt with in chapter seven. Here we will focus on the second relation.

The Nicene Creed originated in the fourth century AD out of the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople. A delightful tradition arose of linking the Apostles’ Creed directly to the apostles,^a but it is in fact later than the Nicene Creed, originating in the eighth century. However, the Apostles’ Creed is a descendant of the much earlier Roman Creed or Symbol.

Creedal language has its origins in both Old Testament and New. Gerhard von Rad drew attention to creedal statements in the Hexateuch (Deut 26:5-10; 6:12-24; Josh 24:2-13) as the basis from which the larger narratives were developed. Von Rad noted that there is no mention in these creeds of the Sinai event, nor of creation, both of which he argued were added later. He found similar, albeit later, historical summaries in Psalms 78, 105, and 136, of which he observed, “These historical summaries in hymn form are still thoroughly confessional in kind.”^b

Von Rad did us a disservice in making creation subsidiary and secondary to redemption. He also failed to refer to one of the most significant creedal statements in the Old Testament—namely, the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4. With its emphasis on God as “one”—the only God and the only one to whom Israel owes allegiance—the Shema’s influence on the Nicene Creed may be seen in the opening line and in “one Lord.” Just as creation is implicit in the one-clause christological creedal statements we find in the New Testament, such as “Jesus is Lord,” so too is it implicit in the Old Testament creedal statements.

We cannot here discuss the development of creedal statements in any detail, and readers are referred to the major works in this area.^c Suffice it to note that in the New Testament creation is implicit in the one-clause christological creedal statements but explicit in some of the two-clause ones. Particularly noteworthy are the following: “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6), and “In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you . . .” (1 Tim 6:13).

The same foundational emphasis on creation is found throughout the church fathers, a study of whose doctrines of creation makes for a research feast. Creedal language among the Fathers has its origins in baptismal formulae and in catechetical instruction. One of the earliest and most famous is found in Shepherd of Hermas 2: “First of all, believe that God is one, Who created and fashioned all things, and made all things come into existence out of non-existence.” J. N. D. Kelly notes that Hermas was familiar with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit triad, so that “First of all” suggests a trinitarian pattern for the catechesis of which this is a fragment.^d

Both the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creeds refer to creation as the first divine action, and both refer to “heaven and earth,” a merism for everything. The Nicene Creed adds “of all that is, seen and unseen.” In our view this addition is more of an unpacking of “heaven and earth” than a significant addition. A legacy of Greek philosophy and of the Platonic tradition in particular was to privilege the unseen over the seen. The Nicene Creed makes clear that both are part of God’s good creation. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes, we tend to be in the reverse situation today, one in which the reality of the unseen needs to be emphasized.^e The Nicene Creed also includes references to creation in its reference to Christ as the one “by whom all things were made” and to the Holy Spirit as “the Lord and giver of life.” Its doctrine of creation is thus more strongly and overtly trinitarian than that of the Apostles’ Creed.

^aCf. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds.

^bGerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 123.

^cSee Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Wolfram Kinzig, ed., Faith in Formulae: A Collection of Early Christian Creeds and Creed-Related Texts, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Liuwe Westra, The Apostles’ Creed: Origin, History and Some Early Commentaries, Research on the Inheritance of Early and Medieval Christianity 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); etc.

^dKelly, Early Christian Creeds, 67.

^eJohnson, Creed, 99.

The Nicene Creed speaks of the Son as “eternally begotten” but of heaven and earth as made by the Father and through the Son. The language of “begotten” points to the necessary relation between the Son and the Father, whereas “maker of heaven and earth” evokes the contingency of the creation and its utter dependency on God’s resolve to create.6 Wood rightly reiterates this in Robert Sokolowski’s “now-familiar counterfactual terms”:

In the Christian understanding, if the world had not been, God would still be. Furthermore, God would not be diminished in any way, in his goodness and perfection, if the world were not. While the world is understood as possibly not having been, God is understood as not being perfected in any way, as not increasing in goodness, by virtue of the actual existence of the world.7

At base the doctrine of creation means that apart from God everything that exists owes its existence to God’s free act of ushering the world into existence and sustaining it as such. This receives added emphasis in the Nicene Creed’s “seen and unseen.” Both cr...