‘Maker of heaven and earth’

WHEN I used to be an undergraduate, first learning tips on how to confer with others in regards to the Christian faith, the approach was to begin with sin and redemption. Name our human woe, then point to God, who, although justly angered by our sin, has come to us in Christ to place things right.

That’s one obvious solution to find the gospel among the many themes of the Creed. Another evangelistic move starts elsewhere, with the indisputable fact that there’s a world in any respect. Then, from the world, it really works back to the fact of God, the creator and sustainer of all things: “maker of heaven and earth”. This is the tactic, as an illustration, in Aquinas’s famous “Five Ways” to approach the existence of God.

If the fact of God is doubtful, creation-based arguments will be useful: going from “heaven and earth” to their “maker”; from what has been caused to the Cause; from the contingent to the Uncontingent.

That said, arguments about God from creation have are available for an important deal of criticism over the past century, not least from the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, whose worries on this front have reverberated like a thunderclap for the reason that Nineteen Twenties.

Barth wanted to withstand any embrace amongst Christians of belief in a generic God or advocacy for generic religion. He anxious that arguments from the creation to a Creator reach only so far as the tasteless “god of the philosophers” — or of the Gentiles, not the God of the gospel.

That isn’t to say that Barth found no value within the doctrine of creation, but that he urged us to treat that doctrine as “excellent news” (the themes of those columns) — not only pretty much as good, but in addition as news. That is to say, we must always not let the concept of creation turn into a commonplace: it should all the time be startling. Don’t suppose that other parts of the creed present some great reversal while creation is clear. It shouldn’t be obvious that there needs to be anything in any respect. It shouldn’t be obvious that God, who is ideal without creation, should make anything in any respect. Nor can the character of God — who God is, which is the supreme excellent news — simply be inferred from what the world is like. The doctrine of creation and the doctrine of God rest on revelation. It matters, for the gospel, who God shows himself to be: that the “maker of heaven and earth” is “God the Father”.

WHEN it involves what has been made, the Church has more excellent news to proclaim, although that, again, comes from understanding the world throughout the enlightenment of religion quite than supposing that the world teaches us all that we’d like to know just by extrapolation.

One vital angle of the excellent news about creation is the goodness of what God has made. God created “out of nothing”, which is to say, without using any pre-existing material. There was no “stuff” there alongside God to start with.

This signifies that creation is creation all the best way down, and from that flows Christianity’s characteristically positive vision of matter, the body, and abnormal human life. Matter shouldn’t be a mistake. Embodiment shouldn’t be a trap. Finitude shouldn’t be a tragedy: creation’s limits are a part of its goodness, since to be a creature is to be this and never that.

That understanding of creation is a component of the gospel. So is the concept that God is as present to creation now he was as at its starting. The world is held in being at this moment as freshly because it was at the primary moment of its existence. The cosmos is less like a house — as Aquinas put it — that outlasts its builder, and more like a sunbeam, which might vanish the quick the sun withdrew. God shouldn’t be only maker, but sustainer. Another a part of the excellent news of the doctrine of creation is, due to this fact, the excellent news of God’s presence.

ALONGSIDE the joyful news that creation is God’s work, all through, comes the equally cheerful, salutary message that nothing about creation is divine (except, we must always say, for the created humanity of Jesus).

Those familiar words — “maker of heaven and earth” — highlight the worth of created things and, at the identical time, demote them from having ultimate value. Nothing in creation is to be worshipped (again, aside from the created humanity of Jesus) and nothing in all of creation has the ability over us which could belong to a god (never mind the one and only God). This, too, belongs to the gospel.

This is already present in the primary chapter of Genesis, where the sun and moon — gods to the encompassing nations — are put of their place, being simply a pair of lamps, one for the day and one for the night. There is a benign naturalisation here, which might eventually foster the expansion of natural science within the late Middle Ages and into modernity.

This, to underline the purpose, is sweet news. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, created things are “penultimate”. Family, work, leisure, nation, and so forth — these are all good, or will be, and value our attention, labour, and celebration. None the less, none of them is of the very best value, neither is any of them the rationale that we exist or what we exist for.

Here, we encounter the gospel as a message of freedom, as is so often seen within the ministry of Jesus and across Paul’s letters. The doctrine of creation offers a part of the inspiration for that freedom. Since nothing exists aside from as coming from God, it may well have dignity without holding us in tyranny.

There can also be excellent news in the opposite a part of the clause about creation — the one which we’re tempted simply to omit: creator of heaven and earth. This underlines that creation, and God’s intentions, will not be all about us. Other vast, unknown expanses were also made by God, which don’t concern us.

That message finds a robust biblical expression in Job 38-41 (especially chapters 40-41), where the wonders of creation — and various fabulous creatures — are presented as being aside from us: as beyond us, and beyond our understanding. In our day, we may also point to stars and galaxies, and all that lies there, beyond sight or imagination.

LODGED throughout the doctrine of creation is the doctrine of the human person (or “theological anthropology”), since we, too, are creatures that God has made. That also is filled with excellent news, especially with the concept that human beings bear the image of God. Pay proper attention to that, and it becomes excellent news in very practical ways.

When Spanish Dominicans (resembling Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Domingo de Soto) responded to the conquest of the Americas within the sixteenth century, they argued from the character of creation, theologically understood, that the indigenous peoples were the true owners of their lands and masters of their very own lives. There is a dignity to human nature as such — from the image of God in us —that doesn’t rest on faith, or any particular culture, and belongs to all. Neither unbelief nor sin can remove it, nor cannot being European.

Such claims may now seem obvious to us — although all of us too quickly forget them in practice — but, historically speaking, they’ve been removed from obvious. They have needed the excellent news of the doctrine of creation to turn into clear.

The doctrine of creation — that God is “maker of heaven and earth” — shines with the gospel in so some ways. Particularly, in conclusion, I feel of G. K. Chesterton’s comment that he all the time experienced his existence as a form of gift, and a present implies a giver. Saying that, he was near Luther’s injunction that we must always receive our creation as an act of “pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy”, which doesn’t rest on “any merit or worthiness in me”.

In other words, creation — like sin and forgiveness, which is where I began — is supremely excellent news since it is supremely a piece of grace, and that’s the hallmark of the gospel.

The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity within the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church. He discusses the doctrine of creation at length in his book Participation in God (CUP, 2019).

Quotations

“God doesn’t know all his creatures because they’re; quite, they’re because he knows them.”

— Augustine, On the Trinity, XV.13.22

“God brought things into being so that his goodness could be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and since his goodness couldn’t be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to at least one within the representation of the divine goodness could be supplied by one other.”

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 47, a. 1

“We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank nobody for the birthday present of birth?”

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 4

“We will not be nearer to believing in God the Creator than we’re to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.”

— Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, ch. 8

Biblical passages

1 Chronicles 29.14

“For all things come from you, and of your individual have we given you”

THESE words from David’s prayer on the dedication of the temple were familiar from my childhood from their place on the offertory within the eucharist within the Alternative Service Book. This is certainly one of the numerous texts that inspired theologians to emphasize that God made all things “out of nothing”, which is solely to say that there’s nothing “uncreated” about creation; nothing lurking there initially, alongside God, of which he made use. That undergirds our sense of creation’s goodness. It also gives creation a way of animation: that what comes from God is oriented back to God, not least in offering.

Colossians 1.16-17

“In him [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together”

OVER the past few years, theologians have written a very good deal about how central Christ is to the doctrine of creation. We find that initially of John, but in addition across the writings of Paul. That is a component and parcel of the best way during which the doctrine of creation is sweet news, since nothing that has anything to do with Christ will be at any distance from the gospel.