Is God the cause of the world?

This does not, however, vacate the idea of creation; the emphasis shifts from the material world to the world that men inhabit, that world of husband and wife being paramount. This is further illustrated by how the second creation story continues to describe the fall of man into sin and death. Although there has been outrage at the negativity of this picture one has only to look into ones own heart or open a newspaper to know that it is true. But that surely is the point, the creation narratives are about what we are like and how we find ourselves in the world. In short, they are existential narratives that awaken us to our true nature.

The insistence that God is the cause of the world creates all sorts of logical problems. The most significant is the question of how spirit interacts with matter. This was a fundamental question that arose in the 17th and 18th centuries with the rise of causal explanations of the natural world and is the prime controversy between religion and science.

If God is an immaterial being then how does he interact with the physical? The problem is that this question has been posed using an understanding of God that is more Greek than Christian. It begins with the God of monotheism rather than that of the Christian God whose name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Irenaeus described the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of God. By this he meant that God acts in the world through the Son in his earthly life and that this action is continued in the Spirit. That is, the Spirit of Jesus, which is the Spirit of God persists in the world after the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

If the act of God is simple this means that the Father only acts via Word and Spirit, i.e. the Father does not act directly by himself in the world. The Trinitarian scheme avoids the problem of how spirit interacts with matter by restricting the action of God in the world to the action of the Son, a human being who can be an agent in the world and the persistence of the Son’s words, actions death etc in the Spirit. That means that the action of God is via the Word, it is noetic, it enters the world of men by their ears. There is no need for spirit/matter interaction, indeed no need for supernaturalism.

God creates by the Word spoken in Jesus Christ which is extended in time in the Spirit. As God spoke the world into being in the first creation story so again he speaks a creation into being by the Word made flesh. When we have to do with Christ something in us is put to death, as in the baptismal liturgy, and something is raised from the dead as Jesus was raised from the dead. Thus the creation that the Word brings about in its reception is a new being who lives a life free from sin and death. The Bible refers to this kind of life as “eternal” because it is a life not bowed down by death, even though we die.

The change we have to make when thinking about a theology of creation is to cease thinking about the cosmos and begin thinking about redemption, deathlessness even in the face of death. The healing of the earth can only come about at the hands of the risen man, the one who, being deathless is capable of the stewardship of the earth. For greed springs from the desire to secure the self against death, so those who are freed from death are also freed from greed.

What is created by Word and Spirit is nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth. This means that creation is an ongoing activity towards a goal that the Bible calls “the kingdom of heaven/God” when every heart will be transformed by the love of God.

The Word spoken in Jesus is the same Word by which God summoned the world into being in the first creation story. This is a Word that names the world as it is, natural, therefore not inhabited by Spirit and thus receptive to investigation by men. This Word also establishes the world as real, there can no longer be doubt about its existence, as though it is a dream or a construction of our minds. The Word of God gives the world ontological status.

This real world is the setting for human history which likewise is not a dream. Again we can ask when God creates, what does he create? The answer in this respect is a history that is more than “one damn thing after another” it is a history with a goal, the aforementioned kingdom otherwise known as the fulfilment of all things in Christ.

This reorientation of the theology of creation may be seen as yet another concession to the modern age bringing about a further weakening of the faith. Certainly, before the dominance of the scientific view it was common belief that God was the cause of the physical world. The scientific view has forced us to think more deeply about what we say about creation and there is plenty of biblical material that supports the view set out above that creation and redemption must be held as one. It is no longer possible to talk about two acts of God, the initial creation of the universe and the later creation of the new creature in Christ.

One would hope that the above would disarm the critics of Christianity who use natural science as their weapon of choice. One can only hope!