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The Idea of Creation
It is not a question between mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness. For mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam, to Anarchism or to passive obedience, to treating the universe as a clockwork of matter or else as a delusion of mind. It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the contradictions, who can laugh and walk easily through the world.
Are you surprised that the same civilisation which believed in the Trinity discovered steam?
—G. K. Chesterton, “Why I believe in Christianity”
Creation as a Primary Concept in
the Christian Worldview
the Christian Worldview
The biblical canon opens with the majestic declaration of creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1).1 Rather than speculating about the existence of God or offering an abstract meditation on the nature of the world, right from the outset, Scripture lays down creation as the framework within which everything that follows takes place. The creative act is therefore primary and comes before anything that biblical faith can say about the world.
Understanding the world as God’s creation requires the coexistence of two truths. Firstly, everything that exists has received its being from God and remains, even after the creative act has been performed, totally dependent on him. Biblical monotheism does not allow for any compromise: apart from God himself, everything is created. Nothing and nobody can claim independence from the Creator; no being ends up halfway, partly divine, partly dependent on the Creator. Secondly, creatures have real existence, and one that is distinct from that of the Creator: “By conferring on the work of his hands a life of its own the Creator stamps it, as it were, with the seal of his own approval, and raises it above the level of a worthless and ephemeral formation to that of a permanent existence. The creation is not merely a game of caprice, something which might equally well disappear again without a trace, a divine fantasy, as in the Indian conception, but possesses a God-given right to existence in itself.”2
The beginning of Genesis forcefully teaches these two truths—radical dependence and distinct existence. The creature’s dependence follows from the text’s strict monotheism. Nothing exists independently of God’s creative act; nothing and nobody stands in the way of his plan. Creation happens by the divine word, which is not met with any resistance: “the text contains not the slightest hint of any battle whatsoever.”3 At the same time, God’s evaluation of the creation (Gen 1:31) presupposes its real existence. The picture that is painted allows for a degree of internal autonomy in the creation: God’s word confers on the earth the possibility to produce plants (Gen 1:11–12); the plants and animals are created with the ability to reproduce (Gen 1:12, 22, 28). But it is the seventh-day rest that especially underlines creation’s distinct existence (Gen 2:1–3; Exod 20:11; 31:17). It expresses the “constancy of the divine creative will.”4
In this way creationism5 introduces a radical asymmetry in its conception of reality: the creation, possessing its own solidity, is juxtaposed with its Creator, on whom everything depends, and who does not depend on anything. Thus are ruled out, right from the start, other views that do not allow for this discontinuity. The world is not an illusion; neither is it an emanation of God’s nature, an extension of his being.6 Equally, nothing exists prior to the work of creation that could limit its scope. Thus, the world is assigned its own category of being: the created order refers to God as its Creator, but is not to be confused with him: “Christian ontology requires radical separation between the Creator and the creature. God is not merely the highest or most perfect part of the world, as in all the philosophical systems of antiquity. The Christian God’s being is incommensurate with that of the created world.”7
Traditionally, Christian theology has expressed the discontinuity between the Creator and the creation by the affirmation that creation is ex nihilo: the creation comes from “nothing,” in the strict sense of the word. God’s sovereign freedom implies that he depends on nothing and nobody in order to create; at the same time, he is not obliged to create; the creation is not an extension of his essence. As pseudo-Justin remarked, “The creator . . . has no need of anything, and it is of his own power and will that he creates what is created; the demiurge gets from matter the power to carry out his work, and thus he governs what comes into being.”8 Creation ex nihilo therefore expresses a double denial: the creation does not rely on preexistent matter, nor is it a divine emanation. As Saint Augustine wrote, “Thou createdst heaven and earth; not out of Thyself; for so should they have been equal to Thine Only Begotten Son . . . And aught else besides Thee was there not, whereof Thou mightest create them, O God, One Trinity, and Trine Unity; and therefore out of nothing didst Thou create heaven and earth.”9 Acknowledging these twin aspects of creation ex nihilo is the only way to bring together the perfect sovereignty of the Creator and the total dependence of the creation, in its real existence.
It would be wrong to conclude that the discontinuity in the concept of being only implies divine transcendence; the idea of creation also encompasses and points to the immanence of God. To be sure, creation upholds the radical separation between God and all created things. Monotheism itself is at stake: an idol is none other than a creature that claims divine status. The biblical God is a “jealous” God: “I—the LORD is my name—, I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to idols” (Isa 42:8). But the Creator God is not a distant God; he is intimately present with all of his creation, and this as transcendent Creator, to whom everything owes its existence. In fact, the two aspects of God’s relationship with the world refer to one another and are incomprehensible if taken separately. As the Creator is not on the same level as his creation, his presence and action are not in competition with the creature: “God is so powerful that the more really he acts, the more reality the creature possesses in its being, in its action and in its freedom: ‘Dei Providentia causas secunda non tollis sed ponit.’”10 Indeed, the ontological dependence of creation cannot be conceived in all its radicality without God’s intimate closeness to what he has made. It is as Creator, radically distinct from his creature, that God is more present than any creature could be to itself. As Saint Augustine said, “But Thou wer...