4.3 The Interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2

This continues an exploration of Genesis 1. Previous posts:

4.1 Differing Views of Genesis 1
4.2 The Genre of Genesis 1 

Now 4.3 The Interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2
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4.3.1 Taking Off Our Glasses
Now we get to the verses themselves. At first glance, they may seem simple enough:

In the beginning, God created the skies and the land. But the land was formless and useless, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And a wind from God was blowing over the face of the waters.

There are several opportunities in these verses for us to read modern assumptions into them, including modern Christian assumptions. But if we want to hear them as their first audiences did, we will have to take off our modern glasses and try to get into the ancient Israelite view of the world.

For example, most Bibles read, “God created the heavens and the earth.” It is natural that most readers probably picture a sphere like our contemporary view of the earth. When we hear the word heavens, we may not think of the skies but of the universe or even of the place where God and the angels are located.

We thus have to adjust our thinking to realize that Hebrew did not have a separate word for “sky” and “heaven” as a place where God is. I have translated with the word sky to remind us that the ancient Israelites had a far, far smaller sense of the world than we do today. The word shamayim for “skies” was simply that which is above us.

The word for “sky” in Hebrew is “dual,” which means that it refers to two things. In English, we have singular for one thing (e.g., a book) and plural for multiple things (e.g., books – we often add an s to the end to do this). Hebrew had another number it could use for its nouns, although rarely used. The “dual” in Hebrew referred to two things. For example, because Egypt was divided into Upper and Lower Egypt, the word for Egypt in Hebrew is always dual (mitzrayim).

The fact that Hebrew thinks of the sky as dual probably reflects the view of the sky we hear about later in Genesis 1. God divides the waters from the waters and puts a space, a dome, a “firmament” in between them (Gen. 1:6-8). There are thus two parts to the sky – the upper part and the lower part. Perhaps for the same reason, the word for “water” in Hebrew is also typically dual (mayim – notice how similarly the word for sky and water are in Hebrew).

Similarly, they did not yet think of the earth as a sphere in the times of ancient Israel. “Land” is a better translation if we want to picture what they would have pictured when they heard the Hebrew word ‘arets. We will see dry land appear in Genesis 1:9. This is not a globe but the relatively flat earth that emerges as you come ashore from an ocean or a lake.

A “wind from God” is another phrase where we as Christians might immediately think of the Holy Spirit if we read a translation that has “the spirit of God” here. It is probably not wrong theologically to hear overtones of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, we can apply the verse that way as Christians. But in terms of the original meaning of the verse, it is anachronistic. Ancient Jews did not yet have as developed a sense of God’s Spirit as the New Testament has – or frankly later Christian theology. The Old Testament does have a sense of God’s spirit (e.g., Psalm 139:7), but it is not yet used in a personal way.

The New Revised Standard Version is an example of a version that translates this part of 1:2 with “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” [27] They translate it this way because other Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) creation stories talk about a violent wind from one god blowing against a water goddess (e.g., the Enuma Elish). [28] It is a reminder that the word ru’ah in Hebrew could mean things like breath and wind. In other words, using the word spirit easily can lead us to read many concepts into the verse that were not there originally.

These are just some of the ways that our assumptions can easily lead us to see Genesis 1:1-2 as a mirror of what we already believe. To hear what these verses actually meant, we have to take off our cultural glasses and put on Ancient Near Eastern Israelite/Jewish glasses. [29] Only then will we begin to hear the words in terms of how their first audiences heard them.

4.3.2 The Function of Genesis 1:1
Should we see Genesis 1:1 as an overview of the whole chapter? Or is it the first moment in the sequence of creation – Day 0, if you would?

On the one hand, some see Genesis 1:1 as God getting his raw materials ready. He creates the materials he is going to use in creation in 1:1 -- the skies and the earth. Then in 1:3 he begins to cook with the ingredients and organize them. 

You might remember the gap theory. God creates an orderly universe in verse 1. But then Satan fell and everything became chaos in verse 2. In the gap theory, God then begins to re-create the world in verse 3. This would be one version of an interpretation that sees Genesis 1:1 as the creation before the creation, if you would. A whole sequence of creation and recreation has taken place before verse 3.

There is little contextual evidence for this gap theory. That is to say, if this is what Genesis 1:1-2 was saying, the verses do not leave us many clues. Isaiah 45:18 may very well allude to Genesis 1:2 when it says that God did not create (bara') the earth to be chaos (tohu). [30] However, the verse most likely refers to the direction and end result of creation rather than its initial state. It is saying that God never intended for the cosmos to end up as chaos. Rather, God created order out of chaos.

John Walton sees Genesis 1:1 as the heading of 1:1-2:3, an introduction to the rest of the chapter. In this way, it functions much like the statements "These are the generations of..." that start eleven later sections of Genesis (e.g., 2:4). [31] He proposes that it is far more likely that the author of Genesis had twelve of these sections -- with Genesis 1:1 starting the series off -- than that there were only eleven of them. Twelve is a special number in Genesis, the number of the sons of Jacob and thus the tribes of Israel.

Another argument for Genesis 1:1 as an overview of the whole chapter comes from the way 2:1 seems to close this introduction. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning, God created" at the beginning of the chapter. Then 2:1 says, "The skies and the land were finished" at the end. This kind of literary structure is called an "inclusio," where a block of text is put in a kind of parenthesis by similar words at its beginning and end. Here are the similar words: "At the beginning, God created the skies and the land... [read on and I'll tell you how]." Then we have "And the skies and the land were finished" at the end when the creating is done. 

On the whole, then, Genesis 1:1 does not seem to be the creation before the creation. It does not seem to be Day 0 or the creation of the matter that God will then mould in the rest of the chapter. Rather, it seems to be a general statement of the whole chapter. What is Genesis 1 about? Genesis 1 is about God creating the skies and the land. Keep reading and you will find out how he did it.

4.3.3 Creation Out of Nothing?
If Genesis 1:1 is an overview, then we face another question. Where did the waters of Genesis 1:2 come from? Genesis 1:1 already does not mention the waters. If it were the creation of material before the creation, one might suppose that the creation of the waters was implied in it. But if Genesis 1:1 is an overview of the chapter, then the chaotic waters of 1:2 are never created.

Given all the other ancient creation stories, it would not be surprising. All the creation stories of the Ancient Near East begin with water. In the Enuma Elish, the goddess that Marduk fights is Tiamat, a sea water goddess. The Egyptians had Nun, god of the primeval waters. In the Greek Theogony by Hesiod (500s BCE), the creation begins with -- you guessed it -- water. Aristotle distinguished the first Greek philosopher Thales (also 500s BCE) as different because he looked for a natural substance as the basis for the world rather than gods. But guess what substance he proposed as the most basic element of the world? You guessed it. Water.

So the cultural surroundings of Genesis would make it easy for us to think that it too saw water as an eternal given. God would have been meeting the Israelites where they were in their categories and speaking to them from there. [32] 

There are some grammatical features to Genesis 1:1 that are relevant to discuss. The very first word, bereshith, is curious in that it often has a sense of "first of" (e.g., Exod. 23:19). Building on this dynamic, the 1985 translation of the Jewish Publication Society rendered Genesis 1:1 to say, "When God began to create the heaven and earth... God said 'Let there be light.'" The sense it gave was that 1:1 was not a sentence but the setting for what follows. When God began (in the beginning of God creating) -- and the waters were unformed -- he started by saying "Let there be light."

This move seems a little strained (and unnecessary). The word can just mean "first." And the waters of 1:2 seem to be there waiting to be ordered one way or another. Further, as we have argued, 1:1 makes more sense as an overview of the whole chapter.

Another question is the meaning of bara', which means to create. It is not a frequently used word in the Old Testament, and it is always used with God as the subject -- "God created." Some have wanted to read a special meaning in here as in creation out of nothing. However, this meaning is not clear. It simply seems to be a word for making but that specifically refers to God making something.

What then is the meaning of 1:2. At the beginning of creation, there are two entities: God and the useless, non-functioning, chaotic, primordial waters. There is nothing but darkness. But a wind from God blew over the waters. This is the way things are when God decides to start to order the cosmos.

We have already discussed the origins of the doctrine of creation out of nothing in the previous chapter. We have framed it as a consensus of Christian (and Jewish) faith, and implied it is correct as a theological belief. However, we also made it clear that it likely reflects a "development of doctrine." That is to say, it is a belief that probably was not articulated in biblical times. It is not that the Bible opposes the belief -- not at all. It is simply not a thought that anyone had yet had.

Our exegesis of Genesis 1:1-2 supports this sense of development. At the time of the Old Testament, it was more or less assumed that everything had emerged from chaotic, primeval waters. That was not the point of revelation about creation. The point was that the God of Israel -- and he alone, almighty -- was the one who brought order to the cosmos.

[27] So also the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh translation.

[28] E.g., Claus Westermann translates it as “wind” in Genesis 1–11 (Fortress, 1990).

[29] The distinction between Israelite and Jewish largely has to do with the Babylonian captivity of 586-538BCE. Since the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722BCE, only the southern kingdom of Judah was left to go into captivity in 586BCE when Jerusalem was destroyed. Although “Israel” can still be used after this point, it is common to increasingly refer to those who returned as Judahites or Jews after the exile. Accordingly, if Genesis 1 was written after the exile, we might refer to its first audience as Judahites or Jews.

[30] Or it could be the other way around, Isaiah 45 may have helped inspire Genesis 1:2.

[31] Walton, Lost World, 43-45.

[32] It seems like any in depth understanding of Scripture will need to see somewhat of a "flow" of revelation as the understanding gets more precise the further we go in the river. 

God values the creation, and we should steward it.

1. At the end of Genesis 1, when God has set the world in order, he sees all that he has done and pronounces it "good" (Gen. 1:31). It is no longer "formless and empty" (1:2). Everything is working the way it is supposed to work. [1] 

Part of that goodness is the place of humanity in that order. Humanity is to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). Humans are to "subdue" it and "rule over" it. After Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden, they are to "serve" it and "keep" it (Gen. 2:15). [2] One gets the sense that humanity is the crown of God's creation, and with great power comes great responsibility. 

Humanity is created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). That both makes humanity valuable and perhaps suggests that humanity in some respects is God's representative on earth. After the Flood, God makes a covenant with his whole creation (Gen. 9:10). He has destroyed the earth, but he will not flood the earth again. 

"The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it... he has founded it on the seas and established it on the rivers" (Ps. 24:1-2). "Heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD your God" (Deut. 10:14). "The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork" (Ps. 19:1). Humanity may be the pinnacle of the creation, but God clearly glories in the rest of his handiwork as well.

The Law had provisions for the land. Every seventh year the land was to lay fallow to have a chance to recuperate from non-stop farming (Lev. 25:3-4). Just as humanity needs regular rest, so the land does as well. Jesus tells the crowds that God observes even the death of a sparrow (Matt. 10:29). It would appear that God not only loves humanity but the rest of his creation as well!

The holiness codes not only held that a person could become unclean and defiled. Humans could defile the land as well (Num. 35:33-34). A murderer defiled the land with the blood that was shed. The only way to purify the land was the death of the murderer.

The preceding verses give us a certain sense of God's attitude toward his creation. He likes it. He cares about it. Deuteronomy 25:4 looks out for the ox that is plowing the land. The farmer should not muzzle it but allow it to eat as payment for its labor.

A sense of respect for God's creation seems in order. We are thankful for the chickens that give us eggs. We are thankful for the cattle that give us meat.[3] Evangelicals are emphatic about the value of human life from conception. Yet the embryos of humans and those of other animals look quite similar at the earliest stages of development. If we are really pro-life, it would seem consistent to be good stewards of the other life God has created on the planet as well.

2. In the Parable of the Talents, one of the servants is chastised for not growing what the master had given him (25:14-30). The import of the parable is often taken to suggest that God expects us to use and grow the gifts he has given us. With regard to God's creation, we can bless the land and sky that God has given us. We can take care of it, and we can also curse it.

The placement of the parable in both Matthew 25:14-30 and Luke 19:12-27 suggests that these parables were deeply subversive. While they can easily be read in a hyper-capitalistic way, the proximity of Matthew's parable to the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats and the fact that Luke's parable is next to the story of Zacchaeus suggests a subversive meaning. In such a context, "making interest" on one's money becomes a metaphor for using it to help others in need. It is thus a fitting metaphor also for stewarding the creation that God has given us as we think about the lives of our "neighbors" at home and around the world.

God gave us streams from which to drink. God gave us plants to grow for food and animals to kill for meat. Ecology speaks of ecosystems, systems of life where each component of the system works together in harmony. The plants convert sunlight into energy that herbivores eat. They take carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to oxygen. We eat the herbivores and breathe in oxygen. We exhale carbon dioxide and the system repeats itself. It is healthy. It is natural. This is the way God has created the world.

Humanity has advanced industrially and technologically more in the last two hundred years than in all of history before. As of the writing of this article, the population of the world has surpassed 8 billion, far beyond any world population in the past. We are capable of consuming more forest than ever before if we let ourselves. There is plenty of demand to remove nature to build houses, businesses, and industry. There's nothing wrong with building or selling. However, as stewards of God's planet, we should also be mindful of the potential cost to God's creation and others. 

God endorses our growth and advancement. He made us to advance and excel. Otherwise, he would not have given humanity the charge to subdue the earth. On the other hand, God does not endorse selfishness or destructive hedonism. It is thus both biblical and Christ-like for us to open-mindedly consider the impact our advancement might have on others. This is part of loving our neighbor as ourselves. 

It is also a human tendency to sacrifice the benefit of our future for the needs and pleasures of the present. We eat recklessly because it tastes good even though we know we will likely pay for it in the future. We spend the money we have now rather than saving it for the future. The courses of action it takes to "look out" for the environment cut into corporate profit and personal convenience. It is no surprise that it is an uphill battle to get much done in these areas until a crisis emerges.

3. We should be wary of our own susceptibility to manipulation by those with power and resources. It took decades to pass legislation in relation to lead paint and lead gas. The book, Deceit and Denial is a meticulous presentation of how the lead industry managed to successfully oppose legislation against the use of lead, either throwing doubt on the certainty of certain harmful effects or blaming the incompetency of parents in slums for not watching their children closely enough. [4] I remember even as a boy in 1978 a tone of mocking in my family toward how the Carter administration was annoyingly ending leaded gas in lieu of the more expensive unleaded. 

The same narrative played itself out in relation to the tobacco industry. [5] The same narrative has arguably played out in relation to the gun lobby. The same narrative seems to be playing out in relation to climate change. With money or inconvenience at stake, with resistance to being told what to do, data is ignored or obfuscated. Lobbying forces manipulate the public into mocking those trying to work for the public good. "Going to try to regulate the farts coming from cows? Ha. Ha."

Small concessions are made as necessary. "Well, maybe the planet is warming, but there's no proof it is caused by human activity." Blame is diverted. "The problem is not the paint, it is the Negro and Puerto Rican parents who aren't watching what their children put in their mouths." "The problem is the lack of self-discipline on the part of the smokers." "The problem is not guns but the hearts of the people shooting them." Years, sometimes decades later, either crisis or the openness of a new generation breaks through. We wonder how it wasn't seen before because it seems so obvious now.

These sequences of events are repeated over and over again. It is amazing that we do not see the pattern... over and over again.

4. Poorer communities and countries see the impact of pollution sooner and more clearly than the comfortable. A 2016 study found that race is the biggest indicator in the US of whether you live near toxic waste. [6] Similarly, while most CO2 emissions come from the affluent global north, the regions most vulnerable to the effects of global warming are in the global south. Island states whose land is disappearing from rising water levels do not dispute the impact of climate change on the earth, nor do the African nations facing crisis levels of drought.

The love of our neighbor in the southern hemisphere puts an obligation on Christians to listen with an open mind and heart. The fact that this is God's creation calls us to listen with an open mind and heart as good stewards. It is the love of those in Flint, Michigan, whose water was allowed to become so polluted, that calls us to sacrifice a little today for the benefit to others later. We may find that we are also benefiting ourselves, like the rules that keep us from withdrawing from our retirement accounts before a certain age. We could sure use that money now, but it is even better for us to have it later.

Jesus almost scorned the "healthy" and focused instead on those on the margins--the poor, the sick, the demon-possessed. He focused on the lost sheep of Israel. Concern for God's creation translates to concern for those on the margins of the world today, for they are the ones that most suffer from the throwaway society of those of us who find everything convenient. 

5. We can debate the details. In this article, I have gone beyond principles to some specifics that seem relatively uncontested today. Except that they are contested. If we are interested in truth, we must allow for claims to be contested. Hopefully, there can be broad agreement on the principles. It is fully Christian to care for God's world. If we know our actions are harming others--or even potentially harming others--that is a concern for a Christian. 

As a Christian, people are important. The accrual of greater profit is not. Profit is not evil. The pursuit of profit to the detriment of others is. Paul indicts the Corinthians for putting the pursuit of their own freedom over concern for the faith of others (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:13). "Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak." (8:9). 

The technological advances of the world are a tribute to the intellectual gifts God has given the world. We can even blow up the world with nuclear bombs. With the great power God has given us comes great responsibility as stewards. God has not called us to selfishness, but to love our neighbor.

[1] John Walton has argued that, in context, the pronouncement of the creation as good likely had more to do with how it was functioning than its moral quality. In The Lost World of Genesis 1 (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 148-150.

[2] I am indebted in much of what follows to the benefit of sitting into several presentations by Brian Webb at Houghton University on Scripture and the Environment.

[3] It is interesting that the Genesis narrative gives the impression that humans did not even eat meat before the Flood (9:3).

[4] Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California, 2003).

[5] Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (Philadelphia: Basic, 2009).

[6] From 1996 to 2020, the CDC and NIH were stymied from using their funds to research gun violence.

[7] Paul Mohai et al. "Which came first, people or pollution? Assessing the disparate siting and post-siting demographic change hypotheses of environmental injustice," Environmental Research Letters (2015).

Novel on Creation now self-published

About a year and a half ago, I started writing a series of self-published novels called Gabriel's Diaries. The first one was about the incarnation. The second was about Jesus' earthly ministry to his resurrection. I'll do a second edition with notes by Advent for the first and by Lent for the second.

I've now finished the third. This one is geeky and extremely speculative. The idea was to see if it was possible to combine faith in the inspiration of the Bible, an affirmation of Christian orthodoxy, and modern science when it comes to cosmology, genetics, and evolution. I am not claiming that these latter ideas are true. I am exploring possibilities because some people's faith may be at stake.

Because these are sensitive topics, this one has a 7 page preface. Here's an excerpt:

"I am not staking any claims in this novella. It is an exploration of possibilities, not a statement of actualities. All the evidence of science could easily be accounted for by way of the 'apparent age theory.' This is the idea that God created the universe with apparent age. Indeed, as I told a class even last week, God could have created us six minutes ago with our memories intact. The question is whether such a theory is necessary or fits with the character of God. What purpose might God have had in creating the DNA sequences of all animals to look like they come from common origins? Would God really have set up fossil evidence just to test the faith of people in the last couple centuries, assuming that it reads the way most scientists say it does?

"For most of us, these issues are not central to our faith. I am a New Testament expert, not a scientist. I do not deal with scientific evidence in my daily life. I grew up taking Genesis 1 as literal 24 hour days and had no problem with the idea. I am still open to this possibility.

"I also fear that a lot of people have lost their faith over this issue. Others I fear are hindered from coming to faith because of these questions. Someone does graduate study in biology or genetics or some other scientific discipline, and they become convinced that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earth 4.5 billion years old. They become convinced that evolution is true. If they were taught that literal 24 hour days are a non-negotiable, they may lose their faith, not because they want to but because they just cannot fit the two together.

"Perhaps it will all blow over. What if the scientific evidence suddenly turned and older views of creation became obvious to all? In the meantime, it is worthwhile for Christian theologians, philosophers, and biblical experts to explore the possibilities. Scientists can be wrong for sure. But as an expert on the Bible, I can tell you that biblical interpreters are wrong just as often. They have to be—there are just too many conflicting interpretations out there!

"So my purpose here is to explore. May the Lord rescue any reader from any thought that might lead our trust in God astray. That is, after all, what it is all about, our faith. God is not primarily interested in our intellects, although God is truth. God is of course interested in our actions, because they have an impact on others. But it is the heart that is the center of the moral universe of humans. May the Lord protect our hearts as we try to navigate the troubled waters of our finite, fallen heads!"

So here is now Gabriel's Diary: The Creation, volume three of my Gabriel series.

Paperback

Kindle

3.1 The Creation Rule of Faith 1

Thus far in the outline:

Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
See the previous post.

Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation
3.1 The Creation Rule of Faith
1. With regard to creation, the Apostle's Creed simply states, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." The Nicene Creed only adds, "of all things visible and invisible." The Christians of the centuries have taken these words in the most literal of senses: there is nothing that exists that was not created by God.

As we will see, what is included in the "everything" and what it means to create has perhaps expanded over time. Creating may have merely meant something like "forming" to the Old Testament authors, perhaps even the New Testament authors.

Take 2 Maccabees 7:28, which says, "Look at the sky and the land and when you see all the things in them know that God did not make them out of things that are." Given our current understanding, it would be easy to assume that this verse speaks of creation out of nothing as we think of it. But many would suggest that 2 Maccabees is only arguing that God did not make the world out of already formed materials.

So when someone builds a house, they may buy bricks or planks and other materials in bulk from some business. They are making the house out of things that "are" and forming them into a house. In this interpretation, 2 Maccabees would be suggesting that God made the bricks and planks themselves. He would have made them from more fundamental materials that "do not appear" today (cf. Heb. 11:3).

2. It was in the late 100s AD that the Gnostic controversy seems to have pushed both Jews and Christians to a more radical and consistent understanding of creation out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo. The Gnostics of course believed that matter was evil. Already in the New Testament we find the early stages of this teaching. John 1:14, 6:54, 20:27; 1 John 4:2 all may very well address a rising sense that Jesus could not have been pure if he had flesh. If the underlying materials of the universe are evil, so the Gnostic line of thinking went, then only spirit can be pure, not anything material or made of flesh.

After the Gnostic controversy, creation is no longer just forming but the creation of the underlying raw materials themselves. Creation is now truly out of nothing. The Christians of the centuries pictured creation as God taking empty space and creating material that had not previously existed in any form whatsoever.

After developments in physics in the twentieth century, our sense of what creation out of nothing might mean becomes even greater. Again, the sense that God is the creator has remained constant from Genesis to today. But our sense of what it must mean for God to be creator has possibly changed as our sense of the creation has expanded.

So twentieth century physics introduces two new dimensions to the discussion that no individual in history had apparently thought prior to 1900. The first is Einstein's general theory of relativity, introduced in 1915. Space is no longer a fixed emptiness. Now, space itself can expand and contract. For example, around a massive object like the sun, space gets smaller.

The second is the idea of cosmic inflation. Around 1980, Alan Guth suggested that, in the first .00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, the universe went from being a point to something close to its current size. In other words, space did not exist before creation. If this theory is correct, then God exists outside and beyond anything we can imagine. He was not "in" space when he created "everything," but his essence is somewhere "outside" this universe and its space...

Creation and Eternity 1

I started an overview of the Bible a little over a week ago. Here was the first installment called "The Story of the Bible." The second installment is on Creation and Eternity.
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The very first verse of the Bible in the very first book of the Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1, NIV). Christians and Jews alike have long understood this verse to say that God created the world out of nothing. At one moment, nothing existed, not even space itself. Then God made the space, matter, and energy of the universe. [1]

If God created the world out of nothing, then there is nothing in the universe that he does not only know thoroughly but there is nothing over which he does not have power. After all, he not only cooked it; he created the ingredients. Indeed, he designed the ingredients. Christians do not believe that God is just another being. He is the Being. He existed without the universe, but the universe would not exist without his existence.

Christians believe that God is everywhere present in this universe he created. We often say that his Holy Spirit is here and everywhere. We believe that he loves what he has created. Nothing about it surprises him.

Genesis 1 is perhaps something like an introduction to the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. These books were first written for Israel, an ancient group of people with whom the Bible says God decided to have a special relationship. His relationship with them paved the way for the relationship Christians now believe God wants to have with everyone in the world.

As these ancient Israelites read Genesis 1, hundreds of years BC ("before Christ"), they would probably have thought of other creation stories they knew. Some features of Genesis 1 would no doubt have been striking to them. For one thing, there is only one God involved in the story. Apart from Israel, almost every other nation worshiped many gods, and their creation stories often involved a war between the gods. [2]

However, in the creation account in Genesis 1, God alone creates the world. He does not have to fight any other deity to get the job done. He is not reluctant to give good gifts to the people he has created. He effortlessly speaks, and it is done.

A second aspect that stands out in Genesis 1 is that God is a God of order. The Israelites might have seen in Genesis 1 a God who brings order out of chaos. [3] God brings light out of darkness (1:3). He provides safe ground out of destructive and chaotic waters (1:9). He takes emptiness and fills it with life everywhere--in the seas, in the air, and on the land.

After each act of creation, God pronounces that everything is good. At some points of history, various thinkers have suggested that the world or matter is evil, that it is the source of humanity's problems. But Christians believe that the world, no matter how twisted it may currently be, does not have to be that way. God did not make it that way.

In Genesis 1, humanity--men and women--are the climax of creation. God makes humanity as the peek of his creative activity, and then he rests. Christians and Jews alike have long understood his resting, his "sabbath" to be a model for us as humans. We need rest. Jews set aside Saturday as a day of rest, following the idea that God rested on the seventh day. Christians have often rested on Sunday, combining the day they celebrate Jesus rising from the dead (the "resurrection") with the sabbath of the Old Testament.

After God creates men and women, he tells them to multiply, to fill the earth (1:28). He also tells them to subdue the earth. He meant for them to do what they needed to do to survive and thrive, not least through farming and raising crops. Of course, God did not mean to destroy the earth.

Christians often see in this command a duty for humanity to take care of God's property. The world remains God's possession. "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Psalm 24:1). It would be irresponsible for us to trash God's world after he placed it under our care.

[textbox] "What are human beings that you are mindful of them... You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas" (Psalm 8:4, 6-8).

You may wonder about this wonderful picture of the world in Genesis 1. There is still much beauty in the world. Yet would God say that everything in the world today is good? In other words, what happened? For that story, we need to look at the next couple chapters of Genesis.

[1] As science has expanded our sense of how big the universe is, the Christian understanding of the scope of God's creation has expanded as well.

[2] I will follow the typical practice of using a lower case g when referring to the idea of many gods and a capital G when referring to the idea of the one God of Christianity and Judaism.

[3] There is debate over whether they would have heard Genesis 1:1-2 to say something like, "When God began to create heaven and the earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep..." (Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society). In this interpretation, God does not create the world out of nothing but he creates order to the world out of primordial chaos.

Wesleyan-Arminian Theology of Creation

I have now completed my posts on the Theology of Creation, part of my ongoing series called, "My Theology in Bullet Points." Below the links on creation are the links for the other completed section on the Doctrine of God.

The Doctrine of Creation
1. God created everything that exists out of nothing.
2. Everything God created was good.
3. God is in control of everything that happens.
4. There are good and evil spiritual beings at work in the world.
5. Human beings were created in the image of God.
6. God intended us to live forever.
7. All humanity is of equal value to God.

The Doctrine of God
1. God didn't need to create. (God's self-sufficiency)
2. God isn't literally a guy.
3. God has the power to do anything. (God's omnipotence)
4. God is present in all places and all times. (God's omnipresence)
5. God knows every possible thing to know.
6. God knows every actual thing to know. (God's omniscience)
7. God can do whatever he wants. (God's sovereignty)
8. God loves everything he has created. (God is love)
9. God's justice fits within the context of his love. (God is just)
10. To say God is holy is to say God is God. (God is holy)
11. There is only one God, but God is three persons. (God is a Trinity)

C3. God is in control of everything that happens.

The theology in bullet points series continues in the section on the creation. Last post here.
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God is in control of everything that happens in the world.

We have already discussed this topic from the standpoint of God's knowledge. We have also indicated that love is God's ultimate disposition toward the creation and that his justice fits within the context of his love. Now we want to visit it from the standpoint of the creation and God's "providence" or strategic direction of everything within it.

Since God created the universe out of nothing. God has power over everything that he has created. He is sovereign over the creation and is thus in charge. God has ultimate authority over the universe, and nothing happens in the universe without his direction or permission.

The question arises, though, as to how directive God is in relation to the creation. Some would argue that God is not in control if humans can disobey him, but this is an anemic sense of control. If God wants us to grow and mature, if God prefers for us to make the right choice on our own rather than be forced to make certain choices, then he will give us the possibility of disobeying him. God is not intimidated or infuriated when we disobey him. [1] Because God is indeed the supreme authority, he has the authority to let us rebel.

We thus should not think of everything that happens in the universe as a result of God's directive will. God's directive will is his will when it directly or indirectly causes something to happen in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe happens with his permission, to be sure. If you look at the story of Job, Satan is not allowed to touch Job without God signing off on it.

But God, in his sovereignty, allows for some decisions to originate from the creation itself. That is to say, many things happen in the creation as a result of his permissive will, as events that he allows rather than specifically commands. So some things happen in the creation as a result of God's directive will, and some things happen as a result of his permissive will. God's strategic leadership of the creation in both of these ways taken together, is his providence for the creation.

It is hard to know the precise formula of the combination of God's directive and permissive will. For the Calvinist tradition, everything that happens is a result of his directive will. I personally would suggest that, technically, only miracles are a matter of God's directive will, where a miracle is an instance where God interrupts the normal cause-effect chain of events by directive action.

We do not know how often God intervenes in this way. By this definition, any answer to prayer is a miracle because it involves God acting in a way that changes the normal cause-effect course of events. Miracles are when God interrupts the normal cause-effect flow of events. God has created natural laws that play out without his direct command. He does not have to instruct gravity to work. He did that on the day of creation. Yet even when God allows cause and effect to play out, his providence is involved because he decides in every case whether to intervene or not.

God obviously would not need our prayers if prayer was about informing God of what was happening (since he knows everything). And since God knows what is going on far better than us, it would be more logical for him simply to sort things out on his own. Surely, then, prayer is more for our benefit than it is for God. We need to pray. God does not need us to pray.

As a sign of God's immense favor toward us, God has actually allowed us to have an effect on what he does. Perhaps there are times when God has decided that he will do one thing if we pray and another if we do not. In that sense, God has sovereignly decided to let his action in the world at times be contingent on whether we pray or not.

Grace is the most important element of God's providence toward the creation. Grace is unearned favor that God shows toward us. [2] All the creation experiences what John Calvin called "common grace" in the goodness that is available us to us everyday in sunlight and rain, food to eat and water to drink. The goodness of the creation, even though marred by evil, still offers countless opportunities for our basic human needs to be met and for us to have moments of joy and happiness.

Yet John Wesley also argued that there is another kind of spiritual grace that God offers us all, "prevenient grace" [3] This is God's grace that reaches out to reconcile us even when we do not know him and are not seeking him. Indeed, Wesley would say that we would never seek him if his grace did not first reach out to us.

This model of grace is different from that of Calvin, who only believed that God reached out to those whom he had already chosen. And Calvin did not see that grace as reaching out, looking for a voluntary response, but Calvin believed that God's grace was irresistible and inevitably forced a person to choose him. You might say that, for Calvin, God's grace that leads to reconciliation with us is an "on-off" switch. God either turns it on and we are saved, or God leaves it off and we remain eternally damned.

For Wesley, the light was more like a dimmer switch. God empowered us enough to make the smallest of movements toward him. The more we receive the light, the more light we receive. In that sense, Wesley could believe that our default moral state is "totally depraved" or totally without the capacity for goodness and yet also believe that whether or not we came to God was a function of our human choice. [4]

God's providence involves a direction for the creation. That direction is ultimately to reconcile humanity to himself. He desires for all humanity to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), but he will not force anyone to be saved. He thus works all things together for good for those who love him (Rom. 8:28), which is ultimately their eternal redemption. But he will also eternally abandon those who do not choose him (Rom. 1:18, 28).

This is God's ultimate providence. The extent to which he intervenes in our everyday lives is much more of a mystery. We can assume that nothing that happens conflicts with his overall plan. We can assume that he has allowed everything that happens to us. But we probably should not assume that every event in itself that happens has some deep purpose associated with it, as much as we may find this thought comforting. [5]

God is in control of everything that happens. Some things he causes directly. Some things he allows to happen. He does everything from love and everything in the end will work out his plan for the universe.

Next week: C4. Angels and Demons

[1] These images are anthropomorphic.

[2] Often called "unmerited favor." The acronym, "God's Riches At Christ's Expense" is also used, but arguably there is more to God's grace toward the creation than the specific grace that is a result of Christ's sacrificial death.

[3] Wesley called it "preventing grace," but "prevenient grace" is the term now most often used.

[4] To put it in more technical terms, Calvin was a "monergist," believing that only God did the work that leads us to Christ. Wesley was a "synergist," who believed our wills had to work together with God's will in a way independent of God's coercion.

[5] No matter how popular Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here For (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002) may have been, it does not seem to be sound theology.

C2. Everything God created was good.

The theology in bullet points series continues in the section on the creation.
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C2. Everything God created was good.

Genesis 1:31 tells us as much: "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."

1. A Christian named Augustine (400s AD) had a brilliant solution to the question of why there is suffering and evil in the world. His answer was because God created Satan and the first human Adam with the freedom to choose evil. God created everything good, but he also created everything with the possibility of losing some of its goodness. Evil, he thought, was the absence of goodness, so God did not create evil, but God created the possibility for us to lose goodness.

Then when Satan and Adam sinned, evil came into the world. In Adam's case, Adam's sin brought a "sin nature" on humanity that gives us a drive to sin and causes us to die (cf. Rom. 5:12; 7:21). But Adam's sin also corrupted the creation. The corruption and decay of the world therefore comes also as a result of Adam's sin (cf. Rom. 8:20). In Augustine's view, there would be no suffering or death if Adam had not sinned, an event Augustine called, "the Fall."

Obviously this brilliant synthesis of themes in Paul and Genesis at least seems to stand in significant tension with the theory of evolution. Indeed, Genesis 1 is not the primary biblical difficulty with the theory of evolution, since it has a somewhat poetic character and was written in dialog with the creation stories of its day rather than to give us a literal account of creation by scientific standards. The primary difficulty with evolution is the way in which it seems to undermine both a key explanation for the problem of evil and suffering and thereby our sense of what the resolution to those problems might be.

And yet it would seem that Christians need to take the theory of evolution seriously, for "all truth is God's truth" (See F2). Evolution would not seem to be some passing theory or conspiracy among a small group of scientists. It is the position held by the overwhelming majority of experts across several scientific disciplines in an area where you make your name by discovering something new, and paradigm shifters are heroes. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of open-minded Christians who go into these fields find themselves accepting the theory the more they study and become experts in these fields.

Of course paradigms do shift, even overwhelmingly held ones. Yes, there are presuppositions involved in science that steer the way one interprets results. Yet from an objective point of view, it is very difficult not to conclude that the overwhelming weight of evidence at this time must surely point to a very old earth/universe and that the complex life we see today has developed from simpler life forms. Perhaps in the end it is not true, but it seems important for Christian theology at least to consider what the implications would be for Christian understanding if it were.

On the one hand, the age of the universe has not posed as much of a problem for Christian thinkers. [1] For example, since evolution first emerged as a theory, some have suggested that the days of Genesis 1 might have been ages lasting long periods of time rather than literal 24 hour days, the so called "day-age theory." [2] Still others from the very beginning have suggested that God directed the course of evolution toward the eventual arrival of humanity. This approach has traditionally been called "theistic evolution," although Christian scientists may prefer to call it "evolutionary creation."

In the theory of evolutionary creation, God stepped into the evolutionary process at various points to miraculously steer it toward humanity. Then perhaps at some point, God stepped in to create Adam and Eve as in Genesis 2-3. Others might say that God chose two humanoids to put a soul into, effectively creating Adam and Eve. This approach takes the Adam and Eve story of Genesis 2-3 somewhat figuratively as well. [3]

2. Our purpose here is not to render a verdict on a particular Christian approach to evolution but to brainstorm a little on what the implications would be for Christian theology if evolution would prove to be true in some form. There is of course the biblical question. Does the theory of evolution undermine biblical authority?

It does require us to take Genesis 1 and probably Genesis 2-3 as somewhat poetic presentations of creation. Yet it can be argued that they were intended to be taken in this way from the very beginning. The real difficulty, as I have suggested, comes rather with Paul in Romans and especially with Augustine's interpretation of Romans.

One observation that may help with Romans is an arguable difference between Paul himself and Augustine's interpretation of Paul. For Paul, sin was a power over the creation, not--as Augustine formulated it--a matter of the new nature of the creation. We have to be careful about building a doctrine out of a single verse anyway, but Paul probably understood Romans 8:20 in relation to the power of Sin over creation rather than a transformed nature within the creation.

The question though remains, if the power of Sin over humanity and the creation entered with Adam, how was there death and suffering before that time? Evolution requires lots of death.

Here Christians who have accepted evolution often note that, at least in Genesis, the default of Adam and Eve's nature was to die anyway if they did not eat from the Tree of Life (Gen. 3:22). That is to say, Genesis does not see Adam's disobedience as the cause of his death but as the reason why he was prevented from eternal life. In Genesis, death is the default status of his created physical nature and presumably the default status of the nature of the animals as well. [4]

We will examine Paul's theology of Sin in another place (See S5). For the moment, let us hypothesize that it was spiritual death that primarily entered the world as a result of Adam's sin. Let us further hypothesize that physical death "entered the world" with Adam's sin in the sense that Adam would not otherwise have died, not because his physical nature was originally immortal but because God had offered Adam and Eve the possibility of adding eternal life to their default nature.

Does this harmonization remove the problem of biblical authority? It depends on how rigidly passages like these must be read and to what extent we are allowed to take the ancient worldviews of the authors into account. If we are allowed to translate Paul's argument in relation to its basic point, rather than the specifics of how he makes that point, then we are probably okay. If we are allowed to look at the Bible's thinking as a chorus of voices rather than as individual voices all of which must be harmonized in detail, then we are probably okay.

3. What would be the implications of God creating physical death as part of the creation? If death is part of the creation as God created it, then we must consider death, "very good," at least as concerns the animal kingdom. Such a perspective is probably a significant adjustment to normal Christian thinking. We are prone to think of death as an evil, the separation of us from our loved ones. If evolution is correct, then we must rethink our view of suffering.

Resurrection and eternal life thus become special gifts God wants and wanted to give to humanity as the crown of his creation. Death for humanity becomes part of the Fall because it is not the glory God intended or created us to have (Psalm 8; Hebrews 2), not because death in itself is evil.

Before Augustine created his theological system, there were other Christians who had a perspective more along these lines. Irenaeus, writing in the late 100s, saw suffering as a tool God uses to help us mature morally. Anyone who has been bedridden for a time knows how quickly your muscles atrophy. Athletes are well acquainted with the motto, "No pain, no gain."

In the same way, Irenaeus suggested that the death and suffering of the world were tools that God used to help us strengthen our moral muscles. Without the challenge of suffering and difficulty, we would simply become morally flabby. We would not truly be moral beings because we would never have to make hard moral choices. This Irenaean explanation of suffering is not nearly as satisfying as Augustine's, but it reminds us that there were Christians who wrestled with this issue before the scheme that is now so familiar arrived on the scene.

This component of redemption and salvation then becomes the possibility for us to receive the glory we were intended to have from the beginning. We would no longer die, a gift that God originally intended to give especially to humanity. Christ's death would thus restore our originally intended eternity to us.

4. I will not pretend that the theory of evolution does not present challenges to ways of thinking about death and long held interpretations of the Bible for certain Christian traditions. At the same time, history tells us that interpretations of passages and methods of biblical interpretation have varied widely throughout the course of Christian history. Interpretations often seem obvious to us, not because they really are obvious, but because everyone in our group interprets them in a certain way in our lifetime. [6]

At the same time, scientific theories also change and have changed over the centuries. Christian theology is not a slave to scientific theory, especially when scientific theory is based upon naturalistic presuppositions that bracket out God as a possible element in the equation. Yet we also know that Christians have stood adamantly in the past against science on issues where we now have come to accept those scientific theories and wonder what the problem was. Those in the 1500s who argued against the sun as the center of the solar system took biblical imagery literally too.

It is best for us to give Christian scientists some leeway on this issue, those who do not have naturalistic presuppositions but still think the evidence for evolution is compelling. [5] And it is the task of Christian theologians at least to explore what the implications of evolution might be for Christian theology if it would prove to be true.

Whatever may come of these explorations, Christians affirm strongly that everything God created was good.

Next week: C3: God is in control of everything that happens.

[1] Even fundamentalist Christians like Wayne Grudem, John Piper, and R. C. Sproul do not have significant problems with the notion of a very old earth.

[2] Another theory that was once popular was the "gap theory," the idea that God created everything good in Genesis 1:1, but that Satan fell and everything became disorderly in Genesis 1:2.

[3] For different approaches to Adam and Eve, see Matthew Barnett and Ardel Canaday, eds., Four Views on the Historical Adam (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013).

[4] It is perhaps worth noting here that Judaism, rooted in what we call the Old Testament, has no doctrine of a Fall or of a fallen human nature. Adam plays no appreciable role in the thinking of the rest of the Old Testament.

[5] Two examples would be Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free, 2007) and Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (San Fransisco: Harper, 2007).

[6] Memory studies suggest that we are even likely to overlay our earlier views of things with the views we later came to hold. The implication is that even we ourselves often change in our interpretations of biblical passages overtime without realizing it.

C1. God created everything that exists out of nothing.

I've finished some (Wesleyan-Arminian) reflections on God as part of my "theology in bullet points." Today starts Creation, including the creation of humanity.
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C1. God created everything that exists out of nothing.

The words of the Bible were ripe for the earliest Christians to hear in them the truth that God created the world out of nothing, although the understanding of the biblical authors themselves arguably developed in relation to creation. In its context, the main point we learn from Genesis is that no other gods were involved in the creation of the world. God alone gave order to the shapeless earth and chaotic waters of Genesis 1:2. [1]

In Hebrews 11:3, we learn that God "mended" the creation by a voice command. What we see now did not come to existence from things that we see now. Christians throughout the centuries have generally taken this verse as an indication of God's creation of the world out of nothing. [2] At the very least, Hebrews is certainly saying that God can make things exist that are nowhere to be seen.

But it was arguably in the Gnostic controversies of the second century AD that the doctrine of creation out of nothing really crystallized within both Christianity and Judaism. The Gnostics argued that matter was not just weak and inferior but that in fact nothing could be good if it partook of a material existence. [3] The early Christian Marcion, in about the year AD150, actually argued that the creator god of the Old Testament was a different god than the Father of Jesus Christ.

In response, both Christians and Jews argued that God had created even the materials of creation. This seems to be a question that had not really been confrtonted before. Before this point, everyone seems to have assumed without thinking that some sort of formless matter was there to begin with (cf. the book of Wisdom 11:17). Now, taking cues from the wording of passages like 2 Maccabees 7:28 and Hebrews 11:3, not to mention the Greek translation of Genesis 1:1-2 that the early Christians used, they argued that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo in Latin).

This shift made possible a fuller understanding of God's power and knowledge. A god who engages materials that already exist does not necessarily know those materials from the inside out. That god's power over those materials is, as it were, exerted on them from the outside in. There is a sense in which a god who merely comes to existing materials is not quite as powerful and not as likely to have all knowledge as one who fashions them by their very nature out of nothing.

We can also see, however, how the problem of evil would intensify after this crystallization, as well as how discussions about the nature of predestination would intensify. Before creation out of nothing, evil was something that could, to some extent, be attributed to the inferior nature of flesh and the world. Before Gnosticism, these materials are not seen as evil, but they were thought to be more susceptible to the power of Sin. To some extent, God was more distanced from evil.

But if God created those materials, then he becomes ultimately responsible for their weakness. We can see how eventually, some would suggest that God predestines evil in a thoroughgoing way. The idea of creation out of nothing arguably took these issues to a new level.

You could argue that the theory of relativity as developed by Albert Einstein also takes the question of creation out of nothing to yet another level. If time and space can themselves expand and contract, then we can begin to think of what it would mean not only for God to create the materials in space out of nothing but for God to create the very emptiness in which God put those materials.

When we picture God creating even emptiness out of nothing, we see the question of what it might mean for God to exist "outside time" and "outside space" in a way Christians would not likely have conceived prior to the twentieth century. Prior to the twentieth century, those who pictured creation out of nothing more or less saw God putting things into an empty space that already existed. The question of the creation of space itself simply wasn't a question they thought to ask.

As we have seen in relation to our discussion of God's power and knowledge, there are significant implications for this development to our understanding of God's power and knowledge. It gives force, for example, to the long suggested idea that God's knowledge of the future does not imply that he determines the future. His essence is not in the flow of time. This robust sense of creation out of nothing also helps us unpack more fully the sense that all aspects of human experience are created and therefore known by God.

It may help us understand the dynamics of the Trinity more fully, although we need to be very careful here.  For example, the biblical understanding of the Spirit arguably served two functions. First, spirit-language served to show that God belonged to the realm of the heavens, not to the realm of the earth. Second, spirit-language serves to indicate that God is everywhere present here among us--he is not limited by a body.

When you place these functions within a universe created out of nothing, spirit is no longer the "stuff of heaven." In relation to the first function, "spirit" becomes a metaphor for the fact that God in his essence does not exist "within" this universe. With regard to the second, the Holy Spirit primarily plays the role of God's presence within this universe.

In the end, however, we should be very cautious about such speculations, although the rise of science has understandably caused us to ask questions that had never really been asked before in this form. The key point of creation out of nothing is that God is the creator of all that exists and thus that God has all power and knowledge in relation to the creation. It also indicates that all God created was, at least initially, "very good" (Gen. 1:31).

The Nicene Creed of AD381 made sure to specify that God created everything "seen and unseen." This added clarification made it clear not only that God created the materials of creation but also that he created all spirit-beings as well, including angels, Satan, and demons. Colossians 1:16 puts it this way about Christ: "all things were created by him: both in the heavens and on the earth, the things that are visible and the things that are invisible. Whether they are thrones or powers, or rulers or authorities" (CEB). [4]

There is thus no question that Christ is superior to everything else in the creation. For our purposes, there is no question that God created all spiritual beings. God created all angels. God created all the fallen angels or demons. And God even created Lucifer, the fallen angel who would become Satan.

God created everything that exists, both seen and unseen. He created it all from nothing, including space itself. He created it all "very good."

Next week: C2. Everything God created was good.

[1] Although Genesis 1 does not explicitly say that God created those chaotic waters. Genesis 1:1-3 can be read grammatically (and especially against its Ancient Near Eastern context) as God giving order to a chaos that already existed. Here is the CEB's translation of Genesis 1:1-3: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth—the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters—God said, 'Let there be light.' And so light appeared."

[2] Although it is easy to read Hebrews 11:3 as a statement of creation out of nothing, many scholars of biblical cosmology think that is an anachronistic reading. The argument is that the issue just did not exist yet at that time. Since we live after such debates, this verse sounds like creation out of nothing (and may in fact have helped give rise to the idea). But the argument is that the author of Hebrews wasn't even addressing that topic. Rather, the argument goes, Hebrews was saying something like 2 Maccabees 7:28.

2 Maccabees 7:28 comes from about 100BC: "I beg you, child, to look at heaven and earth. See everything that is in them and know that God made these things from nothing, and created humankind in the same way" (CEB). Although it is tempting to take this as the first known statement of creation out of nothing, many experts think this is an anachronistic reading. The point, it is argued, is that God could create this son who is about to be martyred and resurrect him, even if he no longer existed, just like God created the world when it did not exist.

The point is that the author isn't having a debate over creation out of nothing or the materials of creation. That just isn't what he's talking about or thinking. Rather, his point is about God's ability to create a living person where there is none. Nevertheless, you can see how easily these verses came to be read in relation to creation out of nothing and may in fact have helped generate the idea in the later context of debates over Gnosticism.

[3] It was arguably not so much the Gnostic view about creation that was of most concern to the early Christians but the fact that Jesus could not therefore have truly become human and remained without sin. Arguably, John 1:14 and 1 John 4:2 were beginning to deal with early forms of Gnosticism.

[4] Most experts on Colossians believe that this "hymn to Christ" literally pictures Christ as the agent of creation. In Colossians itself, it is not clear whether these words are meant literally or whether he is poetically saying that Christ is the wisdom and word of God. These words strongly echo such themes in Jewish literature (cf. Prov. 8:22-31). But in Proverbs and other Jewish literature, wisdom and God's words are not literally beings but personifications of God's wisdom and God's word. So the question in Colossians 1 is whether Christ is pictured literally as the agent of creation or whether the point is that Jesus is the wisdom of God for the creation and Jesus is God's will for the creation.

Grudem 16a: God's Providence 1 - Preservation

Nowhere perhaps is Wesleyan-Arminian theology more distinct from Calvinist than in the subject matter of this chapter.  I hope to review this chapter in three installments: 1) today's on Grudem's treatment of God's preservation of the universe, ) a second one on God's "cooperation" with the creation, including whether God causes evil, and 3) a third where Grudem argues against the Arminian position.

For previous summaries and evaluations of Grudem's theology, see here.

Chapter 16: God's Providence
Summary
Wayne Grudem defines God's providence in this way: "God is continually involved with all created things in such a way that he 1) keeps them existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them; 2) cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do; and 3) directs them to fulfill his purposes" (315). He treats each of these areas under a distinct heading: 1) preservation, 2) concurrence, and 3) government.

A. Preservation
Summary
God does not continuously create new atoms and molecules, but God preserves what has already been created. "God has made and continues to sustain a universe that acts in predictable ways" (317). Grudem references verses like Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:17, which speak of God upholding the universe by his word or holding things together. Nehemiah 9:6 says that God preserves the heaven, the earth, and the hosts within them.

Evaluation
One of the biggest weaknesses of Grudem's use of Scripture is his failure to read verses in their full contexts. He more or less takes verses as straightforward propositions. But God spoke to the audiences of Scriptures largely in their worldviews, including their paradigms of the cosmos. This means that language such as that found in the verses Grudem references cannot be assumed to be straightforwardly literal, much less the basis for a firm perspective on a doctrine. In this case, see how few verses he is even able to produce on this subject--a reflection of the fact that we are trying to address questions that were not the questions of the biblical authors themselves.

In Nehemiah's worldview, for example, the hosts that worship God may include stars. In Nehemiah's day, they sometimes thought of stars as heavenly beings, angelic beings of a sort, while we now think of them as burning suns. Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:7 may draw on Jewish traditions about the Logos, which Philo also says glues the world together (e.g., Heir 188). In such cases we are better to take biblical language as more poetic than literal. The imagery is drawn from ancient worldview.

In short, we have no way of knowing exactly how God sustains the universe. The universe would not exist apart from God and it only continues to exist by God's direct will. But does God actively go around making sure gravity always works according to Newton and Einstein's laws? Is God holding my rear end down right now so that I don't fly up and hit the ceiling? Does God specifically make sure the second law of thermodynamics is in play (or is it the result of sin?)? This is certainly the way Christians before the scientific age would have viewed it.

But there is surely nothing heretical to suggest that we may now be able to speculate more precisely than was relevant for Christians before the 1600s and the biblical writers themselves. What if God created the universe as a machine that more or less runs on its own? What if a miracle is God interrupting the normal working of the machine? The key doctrines are maintained. God is still in ultimate control. God is still active in the world according to his will.

However, contrary to Grudem's approach, it was not the sense that God is predictable in his sustaining of events in the universe that gave rise to modern science. Rather, science exploded because thinkers in the 1500s and 1600s believed God had created the universe to run on its own by certain natural laws that inhere in nature itself. Indeed, the view that everything that happens in the world is the action of God or some other spiritual being was an obstacle to the rise of science. It is no coincidence that the Arminian point of view, which argues for free will and which Grudem argues against, rose at the same time as the rise of modern science.

In the end, we have no way of knowing exactly how it works. Does God go around directly making sure electromagnetic forces follow the laws of physics? No one can disprove that he does, because natural laws would look exactly the same. Did God create the universe largely as a machine that runs according to the laws he created as part of it? The fact that the "scientific" paradigms of the biblical authors were a function of their ancient contexts does not argue against this position, since the Bible was revealed in categories its original audiences could understand.

But science has not advanced on the supposition that God flips every switch and yanks every chain. It advances on the assumption that there are regular laws to the way the universe operates and that we best understand those rules by experimentation and the collection of evidence. Grudem's approach thus more pulls against science and the discoveries whose benefits are undeniable and all around us.

Notes on God Creating...

Some thoughts I'm putting away for possible later use.

1. God didn't have to create. God is self-sufficient in his own being.

2. The nature of our universe is a matter of God's will, not his "nature." God in his essence is beyond understanding, deus abconditus. The idea of God's "nature" comes from God in relation to this universe. We understand God primarily if not entirely by analogy. The traditional sense of God's nature inevitably mistakes anthropomorphism for literal and reduces God to a big Zeus.

3. Even our understanding of the Trinity is significantly colored by creation. The Holy Spirit relates directly to God's presence everywhere in the creation, although, interestingly, the idea that God is Spirit has also been used in itself to reflect the fact that God is not physically located in the cosmos. Biblical language operates with a relatively small cosmos--land/water, underworld, layers of sky going up until you hit God in the highest layer. Pre-incarnational language of Christ uses imagery of the Logos, in Jewish literature the instrument of creation.

4. Creation ex nihilo implies a radical discontinuity between the universe and God's essence. God did not simply put matter in space, but God created space itself. Much Christian thinking throughout history has unreflectively assumed that God did not invent the rules for the creation ex nihilo as well.

5. If God created the universe out of nothing, then God must have as much power as what he creates. God must therefore be able to "bend" the universe anyway that he created the universe to "bend." God is omnipotent, all powerful.

6. A lot of Christian philosophy has inadvertently located God within rather than apart from the universe. For example, to define God as "the greatest possible Being" or "the most perfect Being" (and especially as God as a "being greater than which cannot be conceived") accidentally means, "in relation to this universe." God is thus inadvertently defined by the way God has made this world. He is contained and made a big Zeus.

Even the notion of divine simplicity is God's essence projected from the perspective of this universe, God reduced to a point because of the implication of him having parts in this universe. By contrast, the essence of God can only be understood by a via negativa.

7. Since God created the universe out of nothing, there is no truth to the universe that he did not create. There is no aspect to the creation that is by accident. God knows every possibility of the creation, because he created it. God created the possibility of evil. God created the possibility of sin. God created the possibility of temptation.

There is no difference between God's experiential and God's "head" knowledge. God created both. God knows what it is like to sin. God knows every feeling Satan has. God created the possibility for all these things. God the Father did not learn anything on the cross.

God cannot literally have emotions--this is an anthropomorphism. Emotions presuppose reaction, and God knows everything entirely at every moment of all time. Images of God's anger are pictures and analogies for our benefit. God cannot change his mind literally because he knew he would "change his mind" at least since the moment of creation and we presume since eternity past.

8. By faith we believe that God not only knows every possible eventuality of this creation but every actuality. We are not in a position to know if this is only one of an infinite number of universes, each one of which plays out the myriad possible eventualities. For the moment, let us assume that there are multiple possible outcomes to the story of the universe and that God knows all of them.

9. We choose to believe that while God knows the actual course of history, he does not overly determine it.  He is not limited by the time constraints of the universe. We use metaphors like: "God exists outside time" and "God is timeless." We choose to believe that God knows the future because he has already observed it, not because he determines it or that it is determined by mere cause and effect.

The notion that if God knows the future, the future must be determined results from an anemic distinction between God and the universe, an inadequate view of creation out of nothing. This line of reasoning unthinkingly assumes that God is only experiencing the passage of time within the creation. God's knowledge of the future comes from his existence "outside" of time.

This is, again, the failing of propositional, syllogistic, analytical approaches to God that are common among analytical Christian philosophers like Plantinga, Craig, etc... The premises used normally implicitly have the qualifier "in relation to this universe" (see #6 above). They therefore undermine the very truth-goals they aim to unfold logically from the very beginning.

10. We choose to believe that God has empowered some degree of autonomy to the creation, including humanity. With regard to creation, God has created the universe to follow what we call natural laws. There is, at least on a macro-level, a certain cause-effect determinacy to the universe. By contrast, there is the wiggle room of indeterminacy on the quantum level, which may allow for creational freedom as well. Humanity is also part of the creation and bears a similar mix of determinacy and indeterminacy by design.

9. God is everywhere present in the creation, especially in terms of the Holy Spirit.

10. God has revealed his disposition in relation to the universe as one of love. He has revealed that the fundamental standard for universal morality is acting for the benefit of others. This fundament of morality is not obvious at present as an inherent structure of the universe. It is a matter of revelation.

Justice or consequence to action seems a more obvious part of the order of things. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." "If you play with fire, you get burnt."

Love is God's right in the face of justice, God's freedom in the face of determinism.

11. No doubt there is immense stupidity to be associated with this post...

Grudem 15c: Scripture and Science

It's been almost two months since I've blogged any Grudem. Wright came out. Other books of more pressing relevance came out. But I do eventually want to make it all the way through Grudem. I am thankful that Michael Bird's Evangelical Theology is a potential replacement for Grudem in the circles that use him. Bird of course is still Calvinist, and he is a NT scholar rather than a professional theologian. We await a Wesleyan volume of Wiley's girth.
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E. Relationship between Scripture and Modern Science
Summary
Grudem begins this section by suggesting that faith in the Bible has led to the discovery of new facts about the universe. He mentions Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, and others. He also notes places where individuals have thought the Bible conflicted with science, such as in conflict over whether the earth was the center of the universe. Grudem counters that the Bible did not teach an earth-centered universe at all. He does not believe Scripture even addresses this question.

Science has helped us in some cases to get a clearer sense of what the Bible actually teaches. So "the Bible does not tell us the precise date of the creation of the earth or of the human race" (274). The actual creation of the universe, Grudem argues, is not a matter for science at all because it is not a repeatable experiment.

1. No Final Conflict
The first claim Grudem makes is that "when all the facts are rightly understood, there will be 'no final conflict' between Scripture and natural science" (274). The phrase, "no final conflict," alludes to a book by Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer suggested 7 different strategies for reconciling science and the Bible on the matter of evolution. Grudem will address many of these in the rest of the chapter.

The bottom line for Grudem is that when the Bible is properly understood and when science functions properly no conflict will remain between the two.

2. Ruled out
a. Grudem obviously rules out the "secular" theory, the idea that God was not involved in the creation of the world at all. He also rules out "theistic evolution." Theistic evolution argues that God directed the process of creation in some way. Grudem mentions three points of the process that are often mentioned: 1) creation of matter itself, 2) creation of the simplest life form, and 3) the creation of humanity. A theistic evolutionist might argue that "the Bible does not specify how it happened" (276).

b. Grudem rules it out biblically on the basis of six reasons. First, Grudem believes it is incompatible with the purposefulness of God in creation. Scripture teaches "intelligent design," evolution is about randomness. Once a Christian accepts some intelligent design, he argues, you may as well see intentionality in the whole thing.

Second, Grudem argues that God's creative word in Scripture brings immediate response. So for Grudem it doesn't fit that it would take millions of years for his command to play out. Third, God makes things in Genesis 1 that God created things "according to their kinds," which seems to indicate "some narrow limits to the kind of change that could come about through genetic mutations" (277).

Fourth, Grudem mentions instances where the language of Scripture speaks of very direct intentionality in God's engagement with people and living things (Ps. 139:13; Exod. 4:11; Matt. 6:30). We might also mention his sixth reason, "the increasing number of questions about the validity of the theory of evolution" (279).

The fifth reason Grudem mentions is the special creation of Adam and Eve. This is a point where theistic evolutionists usually see divine involvement. "Scripture pictures the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, as possessing highly developed linguistic, moral, and spiritual abilities from the moment they are created" (278). Grudem mentions that Paul seems to treat Adam as literal.

Evaluation
As he presents it, Grudem's argument is very weak. For example, nothing he says about Adam and Eve would eliminate a claim that God intervened in the special creation of Adam and Eve in the midst of an otherwise evolutionary process. Ironically, he seems to miss the most significant complication with evolution from a theological perspective--Paul speaks of death entering the world through Adam's sin, and evolution requires lots of death prior to Adam. You could counter that Paul refers to human death, because Adam and Eve were prohibited from eating from the tree of life.

None of the other arguments he makes against theistic evolution have any substance at all. Grudem is a Calvinist determinist of the highest order, so of course the idea of randomness or "free will" in the creation does not fit with his theological sensibilities. For an Arminian or a Wesleyan, this is no argument at all.

The idea that God's commands demand an immediate response is embarrassing. I guess the coming of Christ was a failure then, because it took so long to happen? Rather, this is simply a silly argument.

There is no question, from a normal Christian perspective, that God does engage the creation with high intentionality on some things, but this does not mean he does so on the type of jello you have for lunch. I can have a strong opinion on one thing but not on another. The one does not imply the other. We also have to reckon with the fact that 1) some biblical language is more precise than others and 2) there is a developing understanding of God in relationship to evil and suffering in the pages of Scripture (e.g., Exod. 4:11 requires the rest of Scripture to appropriate).

In the end, Genesis 1 was originally in dialog with the other creation stories of its day, not with the theory of evolution. It is incarnated revelation, as all revelation is--meant to communicate first with its original audiences and thus speaking first in the categories of its day.  Genesis 1 does embody an orderliness to the creation, not unlike the underlying dynamics of which foods are clean and unclean (the best explanation of the food laws is not hygienic but in relation to the "kinds" of animals in Levitical worldview).

And there is an orderliness to the creation. The divisions of Genesis 1 are not unlike many divisions of modern science: astronomy, geology, botany, biology, anthropology. We can debate, however, whether the poetic presentation of Genesis 1 demands that we eliminate theistic evolution as an option. This approach makes Genesis 1 serve a function it was never meant to serve.

A final note on Newton and other famous scientists who believed in God. It is true that these scientists had a sense of order in the creation.  Their sense of creation as God-designed probably did give them a goal to pursue, to discover the way God had designed the universe.

At the same time, there was a new worldview at work here as well. It was in the 1500s and 1600s that a sense of the universe as a machine developed, the creation as "natural" with God as "super-natural." This approach led them to see God as more distant from the day to day operations of the world rather than more directly involved, as Grudem would have him. God largely lets the world operate on its own, with miracles being special moments of divine interruption.

Newton was thus quite different in his view of God than even Luther was, who still saw thunderstorms as a kind of spiritual warfare of sorts. Modern science arguably would never have developed if a sense of the universe operating on its own, under laws God had implanted in it, had not come into play.

Greatest Common Denominator: Creation

I'm putting down some notes in case I ever want to write a book something like, "The Common Denominators of Scripture."  A few days ago I sketched out what a chapter on God might look like. Here are some thoughts on what a chapter on Creation might look like.

1. First, if we take creation out of nothing by faith, certain things follow. I will assume that it is appropriate for a Christian to read Scripture with the assumption of ex nihilo creation, even though Scripture does not seem to teach it explicitly, as far as I can tell. We might argue that it is the trajectory of Scripture (e.g., Heb. 11:3).

If God created the world out of nothing, then he presumably has all power in relation to it. He will also know every truth about it and its working. Simply as creator he will know every possible eventuality about it and, as we said in the previous chapter, we believe he knows every actuality about it as well.

2. Sovereignty and providence
The Bible teaches that God has ultimate authority over the creation. Nothing happens without his permission, good or evil. There is a strand of biblical language that sounds like God not only has authority over the creation but that he also determines everything that will happen. This is not, however, the only strand, and it fits better with the common denominator of Scripture to consider this language the unclear rather than the language of God's love and the freedom he gives the creation.

Nevertheless, God does work for good in the creation and he works good for us before we even know it. Indeed, he works good for us even while we are his enemies and even on those who are evil. He has been at work to reclaim us long before we existed.

3. Freedom of the creation
The greatest common denominator of Scripture will privilege those Scriptures in which God wants everyone to be saved and in which he gives substantial freedom to humans and the creation. This is more in keeping with his nature as love than to privilege the opposite. We can extend this basic principle to the way God has made the creation to follow the laws that he has planted within it. Some of the suffering and pain in the world could be simply the playing out of natural laws.

Christians disagree on whether this freedom might include the power to generate new life and indeed, a creative indeterminism on the quantum level, a kind of creational free will.

Grudem 15b: Creation not God

B. Creation is Distinct and Dependent
Summary
The creation is something entirely distinct from God, yet the creation is always dependent on God. God is "far above" the creation, greater than the creation (God is transcendent).  Yet God is always involved with the creation and is present in all the creation (God is immanent).

Grudem presents a number of theological mistakes that have an improper balance of these two truths. Materialism treats the creation as if it is all that exists (practical materialists are those whose lives are oriented around possessions and money).  On the other hand, pantheism equates God with the creation. The world becomes god.  Views that see the world as an "emanation" from God are similar to pantheism because the world is not distinct from God.

Dualism sees the creation as having existed side by side next to God as another ultimate reality.  In other words, it does not see God as creating the universe out of nothing. Is God stronger than the creation?  Will God win out over evil?

Deism then sees God as transcendent but not immanent.  That is to say, God created the universe but is not currently involved in it.  God is like a clock-maker who wound up the world and then left it running on its own.

Evaluation
Grudem's treatment of these unorthodox views is accurate and appropriate. The only place where perhaps it could be improved is in his distinction between transcendent and immanent. I have argued previously that Grudem does not have a fully developed sense of what it means to say that God's essence must be outside the creation since he created the universe out of nothing.

That is to say, creation was not when the Trinity, existing in emptiness, put matter into space. Creation was when God created both the emptiness and the matter in it. The transcendence of God, in relation to the creation, is thus much more than the fact that God is greater and "far above" the creation.  It is that his essence exists "outside" or "other" than this universe, including its space.  God's immanence is thus the presence of his Spirit everywhere within this universe and its space.

C. God Created the Universe to Show His Glory
Summary
"The entire creation is intended to show God's glory" (271). "One glance at the sun of the stars convinces us of God's infinite power."  God did not have to create the universe.  It was a "totally free act of God."  God does not need us in any way.

The creation shows us God's power and wisdom.  And God has made us in such a way that we enjoy creating things too.  We gain fulfillment when we imitate God.

Evaluation
Grudem is completely orthodox here, although he misses an important dimension.  Calvinists of Grudem's sort often talk about the creation as if its sole purpose is to give glory to God. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism says, the primary purpose of humanity is to glorify God and serve him forever. True though it is, it is not the whole equation.

The part that Grudem and those like him tend to miss is the fact that God created the universe to enjoy it as well.  Calvinists of this sort tend to see God as the greatest narcissist there ever was, as if he only created us so that we would tell him how great he is.  But God genuinely loves the creation.  He genuinely enjoys us.  He created the universe as a legitimate object of love and glory in itself.

D. The Creation was "Very Good"
Summary
Since God made the creation to glorify himself, we are not surprised that it does, that it is good. Genesis 1 of course says so. "The material creation is still good in God's sight and should be seen as 'good' by us as well" (272).

Grudem thus teaches it is wrong to have a "false asceticism" that believes we should not enjoy the creation (including the pleasures of marriage and food).  We should feel free to have a "positive, thankful, joyful use of it," 272). God has given us enjoyment of it, so the proper industrial and technological development of it is legitimate.

Evaluation
Certainly Grudem is orthodox to teach that the creation is not intrinsically evil. What is a little surprising is that he does not say anything about the fallenness of creation, which was a key teaching of Augustine and a common Christian belief throughout the centuries. That is to say, most Christians in history have believed that it was not only humanity that became subject to sin when Adam sinned but that creation itself became subject to corruption and decay at that time.

To be sure, not all Christians hold this belief, perhaps especially those who believe in some form of theistic evolution. Paul perhaps more exactly saw the creation as being under the power of evil at this present time, due to an intrinsic weakness (not sinfulness) that it had. Nevertheless, Grudem expresses a fully orthodox sentiment when he sees the creation as good in itself. We are free to enjoy the creation, to exercise, and to explore the greatness God has put into it.

Grudem also misses the fact that God created us to be good stewards of it.  He did not create us to abuse it or exploit it.  That would be treating his property carelessly.