50 Key Concepts in Theology

Creation
The view of the world as having been made by God.
The very existence of the world provokes an obvious question: ‘Where
did all this stuff come from?’ Or, put in its existentialist form: ‘Why is there
something rather than nothing?’ The Christian answer to this question is that
the world has a benevolent creator who created an orderly world for us to
inhabit. This view has been under threat for some time from an atheistic–
scientific view that the universe came into existence by itself, unaided by any
supernatural being.
The Church Fathers, who set out the framework of creation theology,
insisted on two key points: (1) Arguing against some classical assumptions
about the eternity of the universe, Irenaeus and others made the case that the
universe had a datable beginning in God’s act of creation and that God created
the world out of nothing (ex nihilo); (2) Arguing against the Gnostic view that
there are two types of creation (good and bad) and two types of creator
(benevolent and evil), Irenaeus and Augustine made the case that there is only
one benevolent creator and that everything he created is good.
When we think about it, there is something audacious about the idea that
everything has been created good. The world is manifestly imperfect – full of
suffering, violence and injustice. But the Church Fathers were insistent that
God can only create good things, and that there is only one God. This left the
problem of how to explain evil. The solution adopted by Augustine, and later
defended by Aquinas, was to offer another audacious argument: that evil does
not exist. What we call ‘evil’ is merely the absence of goodness.
Since the mid nineteenth century, the literal understanding of the Genesis
account of creation has been steadily discredited by scientific theories about
the origin of the cosmos and Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the origin of
species. By all except Christian fundamentalists, the biblical story of creation
is now treated as poetry and myth.
Since the late eighteenth century theologians have tried to reconcile the
growing body of scientific theory about the beginnings of the cosmos with a
Christian understanding of God’s role in creation. The Deists, for example,
argued that God was a craftsman who assembled the universe as a giant
mechanism that would operate according to scientific laws. This would mean
that science is merely uncovering the mind and purposes of God. Process
theologians (see separate entry) have argued that God is caught up in the
evolutionary processes of creation. Others, such as Arthur Peacock, argue that

---

science and religion offer different but complementary accounts of the same
reality. In this way modern science and a theology of creation can both be
right, even when they appear to be saying different things.
In the twentieth century, under the influence of phenomenology, some
theologians have talked about the world – and indeed, God himself – as
having the qualities of a ‘gift’. But the givenness of the world does not point
in some naïve way to a giver; rather, thinking of God and his creation as ‘gift’
helps us to think about what our response to this givenness should be.
Interesting as this is, the theology of ‘gift’ dodges the scientific question of
how exactly the world is given to us by God.
The doctrine of creation remains one of the most hotly contested in
Christian theology, not only because of the issue of science and religion, but
also because many other theological arguments and ethical views depend
upon how we think about God’s creative action. In the heated Anglican
discussions about sexuality, for example, those against homosexuality have
argued that God created a world in which sex should take place only within
the heterosexual pattern of Adam and Eve. Other theologians have argued that
since God made everything ‘good’, this must include lesbians and gay men.
The creation story is also at the centre of debates about the ethics of marriage
and divorce.
THINKERS
St Augustine (354–430) argued strongly, against Gnostics such as the
Manichaeans, that God was the sole creator and that he had made a good
creation.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) followed Augustine in arguing that God
created nothing evil, and that evil is the ‘privation of good’. (See entry on
‘The Problem of Evil’.)
Jean-Luc Marion (1946– ) puts the concept of ‘givenness’ at the centre of
his theology. When we analyse our existence down to its most basic
(primordial) foundation, all we can say is that we live in a state of ‘having
been given’. This ‘given’ state is, Marion argues, not simple but a complex
mixture of both presence and absence.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) argued that the Genesis story is a
metaphor for God’s creative action, rather than a literal account. He saw
creation as a process unfolding towards an ‘Omega Point’, when the universe
would have reached its final state.
IDEAS

---

Creation ordinances: the term used to refer to basic regulations which
(according to the book of Genesis) were set down by God at the time of
creation, such as keeping the Sabbath and the institution of marriage.