Can there be a CHRISTIAN doctrine of creation?

The following is an essay I wrote late last year; long, yes, but food for thought perhaps.

There can indeed be a specifically Christian doctrine of creation; and such a doctrine must have its emphasis in Christ. Christ as Creator, Christ as Redeemer, the Christ of John 1 and of Paul. Christ as creation.
I will argue for an emphasis on a two-fold, christocentric, continuous, contingent and, I believe crucially, New Testament based creation ‘account’[1] augmented by Old Testament scripture.

What are we to understand by ‘creation’? To speak of a Christian doctrine, one must surely first have an idea of what it is we are attempting to formulate (perhaps a better word is ‘discover’).
Well, no, for it seems that the instant we begin to think about this ‘creation’ and what it might involve we begin to get into difficulties of definition. Should we in fact speak of ‘Creation’?
Not only this, the instant we speak of creation we begin to speak of doctrines of creation.
Thus we must understand that all come to the discussion with preconceptions impossible to shake off; with a term loaded with significance and connotations.
So can the Oxford English Dictionary help us?

Creation
• noun 1 the action or process of creating. 2 a thing which has been made or invented, especially something showing artistic talent.
3 (the Creation) the creating of the universe regarded as an act of God. 4 (Creation) literary the universe.[2]

Well, this sends us in something of a circle. We need more than ‘creation’. We need to know what it is to create.

Create
• verb 1 bring into existence[3]

Now we are getting somewhere. To create is to ‘bring into existence’. This is what we are trying to understand, to make intelligible. Ludwig Wittgenstein framed the question well when he said "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”[4]

So how should a Christian understand such a challenge? What would a Christian doctrine of creation be like?
Firstly, “The doctrine of creation is not the story of an event which took place ‘once upon a time.’ It is the basic description of the relation between God and the world.”[5] (Tillich) Christian creation is not about narrative. The ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’ (Gen. 1 v1)[6] of Genesis is not the place to begin theologically, it is simply where the Bible narrative begins. Rather, because “Creation…describes the miracle of existence in general…”[7] and our place in it, it must begin with Jesus Christ. It must begin and find its ultimate emphases, therefore, with the New Testament; and it should find its practise in the daily lives of all Christians.
Any Christian doctrine of Creation must have a two-fold emphasis within the New Testament revelation: That of Christ the Creator and Christ the Redeemer.
“What Jesus did and said points to the underlying meaning and purpose of the creation.”[8]
It is important to understand that this is not “the unhappy tradition of distinguishing between creation and redemption as between two distinct modes or steps of divine activity” described by Gregory Baum[9]. For, in line with Karl Barth, the almost absolute emphasis on Jesus Christ as the goal and consummation of creation allows for a non-confliction of the ontological and the soteriological.

Christ as Creator
Christ is creator in his Trinitarian oneness with the Father, in his presence at ‘the beginning’ regardless of whether, by this beginning, we are speaking temporally or of an ontological ‘source’.
This shown by Christ as Logos:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was With God, and
the Word was God, He was with God in the beginning. (John 1 v1-2)
Now follows the crux of the first part of our two-fold emphasis:
Through him all things were made; without him nothing
was made that has been made. (John 1 v3)
Further, Christ is not only “first born over all creation” (1 Col v15), “the beginning of creation, he is also the beginning of the new creation, as demonstrated for the writer of Colossians by his resurrection.”[10]
Colossians 1: v15-20 and Hebrews 1 v3 give us the idea of a continuous creation (or creatio continua) in the phrases “in him all things hold together…” (Col. 1 v17) and “sustaining all things by his powerful word.” Thus “God creates and sustains the entire universe rather than just the beginning.” (Don Page)[11] He “out of eternity creates things and time together…He is creative in every moment of temporal existence” (Paul Tillich)[12] This action is unique (sui generis) and ultimately unintelligible except by allusion through human analogy and metaphor.
It is important to understand that our emphasis on Christ in not to the detriment of the ‘Father’ for it is through the revelation of Christ that we come to a fuller understanding of the Father’s creation. Christ is that manifestation of God by which we know the aspect of the Father; by which we understand the ‘miracle of existence’. This is similar to Karl Barth’s view found in his Church Dogmatics although crucially different in once respect.
Whereas Barth argues that “God is unknown as our Father, as the creator, to the degree that he is not made known by Jesus…”[13] surely one must take the Old Testament texts as accounts of the Father prior to the historical revelation of the Person of Christ. This is not to say that primacy should still not be given to New Testament creation scripture but to argue Christ to the exclusion of the possibility of all other epistemology seems extreme.
So can a Christian doctrine of creation include natural theology as one of its emphases?
Karl Barth’s answer is, as we have seen, an emphatic ‘no’. For Barth God is so radically other (Young) from his creation in ‘material’ terms that knowledge aside from Christ’s revelation is impossible. Yet others such as the neo-Barthians Eberhard Jü­ngel and Christian Link “see a need to overcome a certain narrowness in the original Barthian approach…”[14] Link rejected metaphysics in the philosophical sense: “inference from certain given ‘orders’ ”[15] and focuses instead on Jesus’ parables as examples of “faith actively shaping reality…”[16] Jüngel is similar in that he argued that you can learn nothing of God from nature but “that the word of God has a good deal to say about nature…as a new vision of the universe constituted through the event of redemption in Christ.”[17]
I would argue that the emphasis for the doctrine of creation as regards natural theology is that nature can glorify god, informing us of him by revealing his works to us. This is not to say that the creation is God (this is not process theology) rather that we can come to know someone or something by their actions. We do this in God’s case by observing His cosmos in Faith. Science is, then, arguably natural theology in many ways.

Christ as Redeemer
Christ Creator is he “In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col. 1 v14)
Redemption is the consummation and telos (‘end’) of creation. “The ordaining of salvation for man and of man is the original and basic will of God, the ground and purpose of His will as Creator…”[18] as Karl Barth put it.
This is where our two-fold emphasis can be seen for the unity that it truly is. Christ the Creator and Redeemer is the one Christ of the Cross. “…the cross is not only the parabolic suggestion of the divine reconciliation, it is this reconciliation, its completion, its reality.”[19] Creation is one overarching soteriological act consummated in Christ’s sacrifice: “the redemptive covenant.” (Baum)[20]
The New Testament is riddled with references to redemption and salvation, for this is Gospel itself: 1 Peter 1 v18, Ephesians 1 v7, Galatians 3 v14, Colossians 1 v14, Titus 2 v14, Romans 3 v24 to name but a few. The kerygma (proclamation) is in many senses the creation; and Christ’s death and resurrection are the consummation and confirmation of the covenant and the coming of the Kingdom of God. By this I mean that in Christ’s taking on of the world’s sins, His dying to sin, and His rising to new life we may find the ethic of creation itself, the ground of being of the cosmos: That is to say, God as Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit upon whom the universe is contingent. (Col. 1v17).
The universe is thus contingent, but in the sense that God affects our actions indirectly. He doesn’t strictly affect, he effects through his sustaining action. I am here referring to the concept of ‘two co-existing actions’.[21]
· The genuinely independent causal activity of the world, or ‘secondary causation’; and
· God’s primary causation, which is the ‘uniform enabling of the secondary causes’ power to act’ (Wiles, 1986, p34).[22]
We have this freedom of action from God, that is, we have free-will, because of this dual causality. God is ‘epistemically-distant’. In other words, we do not ‘know’ the transcendent God as close to us in the conventional sense for if we did, how could our actions be said to be truly free? God is immanent in the presence of the Holy Spirit sent down on Pentecost (Acts 2) yet this is not a coercive force “but a guiding within the inherent openness of the flux of becoming.”[23]

A Christian doctrine of Creation, as well as being metaphysical, must be ethical. If the cosmos is “the actualisation of the Christ-life in the material structures of being…”[24] then how are we to receive this gift of existence; this divine gift of love found in the cross?
This question has been framed in reference to the ‘ecological crisis’: “a crisis in the human relationship to nature, in human beings’ understanding of themselves in relationship to nature.”[25] How we treat the natural world is an ethical question in the doctrine of creation. Our ‘rule’ over the world* as found in Genesis 1 v28 should be one of stewardship rather than exploitation, to “act as the visible representatives of God’s benevolent care for creation.”[26] Hence, we should “care for and…preserve the creation”[27] in and for Christ.

Thus, I argue that Christ is the core of a Christian doctrine of Creation. Christ as Creator (Jhn 1v1-3) and Christ as Redeemer (Col 1v14) whom we find as one in the Cross (Gal. 6v14). This is to be based on the New Testament, with reference to the Old for understanding of the Father. But consummation of creation is the Gospel, and the Gospel is Christ in 1st Century Palestine, dying for new life. Thus is our doctrine that of the Gospels, the New Testament.
Furthermore, a doctrine of creation must seemingly be a universal one, without exclusion for those not of faith; for the whole of creation was created for salvation, and salvation for the whole of creation. This is not universalism+; rather it is universal opportunity for salvation through the cross.

[1] Brunner, p6-7
[2] http://www.askoxford.com/ Search results for ‘creation’. It must be noted that this is the Compact OED.
[3] Ibid. Search results for ‘create’.
[4] Wittgenstein, p73
[5] Quoted in Young, p107
[6] Bible references will be from the New International Version, unless otherwise stated.
[7] Quoted in Astley et al, p97
[8] P.J. Hefner quoted in Astley, p112
[9] Quoted in Astley et al p92
[10] Quoted in Southgate et al, chapter 2, p10
[11] Ibid, p2
[12] Quoted in Young, p109
[13]Ibid, p88
[14] Per Lonning, quoted in Astley et al, p95
[15] Quoted in Astley et al p95
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid, p91
[19] Brunner, p337
[20] Quoted in Astley et al, p92
[21] Astley, p17
[22] Adapted from Astley, p17
[23] The Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England, We Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1991, quoted in Astley et al, p34
[24] Ibid., p112
[25] Bauckham, p183
[26] Southgate et al, Chapter 2, p7
[27] Ibid, p8
+ The belief that all mankind will eventually be saved. Espoused by Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 175-185 CE) and, in modern times, the theologian John Hick.

© Alan Bowden, 2006