Creator of Heaven and Earth

The central problem was the loss of the Trinitarian theology of the early church that was formed at the council of Nicea in the 4th century and which carried forward both the Hebrew and New Testament understanding of God as triune. Although this is not explicit in the Old Testament, any notion of God as being transcendent in time must understand Him as being present in past, present and future, or as the New Testament has it as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is the one whose truth was in the past, is present in the Son and which comes to us from the future.

This is a radically different understanding of God to that of the Greek conception of the timeless and distant one, the self subsistent monad. While this god can easily be recruited into a theology of creation in which this all powerful, all knowing and eternal one has the power to bring into being, the God defined by Trinitarian theology does not fit. Which “person” of the Trinity did the creation? As soon as we answer “the Father” we have denied the initial Trinitarian formulation that insists that the work of God involves all three persons without distinction. Any giving of roles to the persons of the Trinity results in a form of modalism. The popular name of god as “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” invented to sooth the sensitivities of the feminists is a case in point.

Part of the problem is that when the old men of Israel wrote the creation stories, especially the first in seven days, even though their aim was to oppose mythology, they had to tell a story that could not occur at a time and place. This is not as true for the second story of Eden but I think the point still holds. By telling a story that did not occur at a time and place they told a story that looks like myth; that is the creator could be Aristotle’s demiurge. This is how a new name of God was born that was enshrined in the Apostle’s creed “Creator of heaven and earth” and which in popular imagination took over the other names of God that were anchored in history and which defined Him in terms of past, present and future.

This miscarriage of the theology of the early church has resulted in the fragmentation of knowledge in our time, particularly the schism that now exists between science and religion. Aristotle’s demiurge still lurks behind the theology of creation and no progress will occur until he is dismissed of his duties.

If the Christian God did not create the physical world, what does He create? In the first creation story God calls the world into being. John’s gospel picks this up and talks about the Word of God which he identifies with Jesus. Jesus in turn calls his disciples into a new way of being. As Bonhoeffer was fond of saying, “When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die”. This is a calling that puts to death the old man and calls the new out of his grave. While this is on the personal level we must remember that the history of Israel does not begin property with the creation but with the call of Abraham to leave his home. Thus the call of God creates a new history.

The creative work of God is not to do with setting the universal constants or igniting the big bang but in calling individuals and nations into a life freed from the “elemental powers of the universe”, those powers of enslavement, death and decay into a new future of freedom and love.