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2eclipseso i figure that i should finally put my credo online.
if you can stomach a long-ass theology paper explaining what i think christianity is, you are welcome to it. this is the first half. the whole thing was so big, lj wouldn't let me post it.
Credo
To some extent what I believe changes every day. I am presented with new ideas and I rethink my old ones and change my mind. I pray that it will always be so. God has gifted us with transformation to prevent stagnation but also continuity to give life shape, texture and meaning. These beliefs are held both by individuals and by groups of believers. If we are fortunate, our understanding of them deepens with time and thought. These then, are some of the ideas that have shaped the Christian faith through centuries and my own understandings of their meaning for contemporary people.
We
The “we” in the opening of a creed is meant in a couple of difference senses. It is the people who are speaking professing their own faith, but “we” is not limited to that. “We” includes the entire community of saints . Generally when we speak the words of the creed, the community is speaking in unison as the community. Those who are part of the community but absent are included. I have an ecumenical understanding of the church, so in my personal view, this extends past denominations to include all Christians.
There is also a sense in which the “we” becomes even broader. Christ died even for those who did not believe in him, and for those who still do not believe today. The “we” of belief may be the community of believers, but the “we” effected by the events in a Christian creed contains the community of creation.
We Believe
For Christians, faith is a deep trust in and knowing of God. Using the word belief doesn’t quite cut it, but we speak the words faith and belief interchangeably despite their different connotations. Belief carries a connotation of opinion that faith does not, but we are constrained by our own grammar. It is incorrect to say “I faith in Christ.” instead of “I believe in Christ.” We must add the helping verb “have” to correct the sentence (Sanders pp.54-55). Faith becomes a noun instead of a verb and loses some of its potency. When we say, “we believe” at the start of a creed, Christians speak of faith, rather than of belief in a simple opinion about the world that can be changed through logic or argument. Faith is a gracious gift from God and cannot be changed with logic or reason. If faith is to grow, it must grow through the spirit. If it is diminished, that is also through the spirit .
In addition to semantic difficulties, our concepts of the universe and reality are shaped by what we believe, even if what we believe is that our opinions about ultimate reality do not matter and we give it no further thought. Even those of us who do not adhere to a faith have ideas that shape our understanding of reality, ideas like economics, science, and our own existence.
Humans are created with a capacity and a drive to make sense of the world around us. From a very young age, children annoy their parents, asking “why” of just about everything. This natural curiosity can be discouraged sometimes, or frightened out of us, but all of us have in our very nature a thirst for the truth. We go to great lengths in pursuit of it. We ask endless questions and create all kinds of stories to explain the natures of animals or the behavior of the solar system. Scientists perform all manner of experiments hoping to learn something about the truth.
The desire for truth is a deep need, which for Christians leads to and is expressed through fides quaerens intellectum or “faith seeking understanding.” Faith seeking understanding is the heart of theology. This drive to ask questions is a joy and a compulsion. A responsible theologian recognizes that there is nothing outside of God’s scope; there is nothing to which theology does not apply. This makes theology incredibly interesting and incredibly relevant. What greater object of study could there be than God? What could be more important than understanding the Creator of the universe and our relationship to Him? Theology is also massive, overwhelming and terrifying. It requires immense faithfulness and responsibility to the task (Barth p 86). We are responsible for our clarity, our accessibility, and our faithfulness. We must be careful with our assumptions and preconceptions. We must not misrepresent God or the Church.
We are also responsible for our attitude. Responsible theologians must practice humility. We must always allow room for inquiry and never present ourselves as knowing everything already. At all costs we must avoid fideism because it prevents faithful exploration of ideas. Fideism stops asking questions at a certain point and demands blind acceptance. It claims that there are certain questions we just shouldn’t ask. Affirmations stemming from fideism avoid the deep reflection that causes our understanding to grow. This is not faithful theology. Faith pushes (sometimes painfully) through and demands examination of even the ideas that we cling to the most (Migliore p 2).
At the other extreme, faithfulness demands that we avoid rationalism. Rationalism does not claim that we shouldn’t ask questions, but it dismisses some of them as unimportant. Rationalism attempts to engage with the truth of God in such a way that it bypasses faith altogether. It stays scientific and intellectual and will not allow the heart to participate in the inquiry. Because of this, rationalism is an inadequate way to search for the truth. Many of the things we cherish most about life are matters of the heart. The intellect alone cannot comprehend most of the things that motivate us. Theology is faith seeking understanding, not merely intellect seeking understanding (Soulen 9-2-04).
Mystery
Faithful theology endeavors to explore the revelation of God and illuminate it for others. For Christians, this exploration involves the understanding of God as a mystery. In this way we know God and relate to God, but our theology is informed by the knowledge that God can never be limited by our understanding of Him. God revealed as love is the central mystery of the Christian faith.
In Jesus Christ the living, inexhaustibly rich God has been revealed as sovereign love. To know God in this revelation is to acknowledge the infinite and incomprehensible depth of the mystery called God. Christians are confronted by mystery in all the central affirmations of their faith: the mystery of the holy love of God manifest in the creation of the world, the mystery of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, and the mystery of the renewal and promised transformation of broken human lives and of the entire world by the power of the Holy Spirit (Migliore p 2).
Although God’s nature is a mystery, we must not therefore throw up our hands and say that theology cannot know anything about it. God’s mysterious nature is not problematic for theology. Christianity gives the term mystery a different definition than it has in common use. We are accustomed to thinking of mystery as “something hidden from us that must be discovered or solved.” When Christians speak of mysteries we are talking about what is already revealed to us, but remains inexhaustible. We are not talking about the unknowable. We are talking about something to which we already have access. God wills to be known and has given us his Word. He has spoken to us in Jesus Christ and so we can know Him (Migliore p 3). Jesus Christ is the heart of God revealed to us and gives us access to God’s character. Since we cannot reach God on His own terms, He has lowered Himself to ours so that we might know Him.
At the same time, God will always remain incomprehensible to us. There will always be more of God than we can understand. God is a mystery to us not because He is not available to us, but because He overwhelms our capacity for understanding. We can never put God in a box or contain Him in a Church. God is always larger than our ideas of Him can encompass. This does not mean we cannot know Him. We know God in much the same way that we know each other. When two people love each other deeply they naturally say they know each other. They can predict each other’s actions and feelings and finish each other’s sentences. But there will always be things that come out as a surprise. We cannot domesticate one another and we cannot domesticate God (Soulen 9-16-04).
To even try to domesticate God is to miss the point. Many people attempt to circumscribe God and try to change him to fit their own views. The point of theology is to understand what God has revealed: not to change God, but to be changed by God. To take theology seriously we must take all of our ideas about life and about faith and hold them up to God’s standard.
Credo, indeed! But Credo, ut intelligam. No dogma or article of the creed can be simply taken over untested by theology from ecclesiastical antiquity; each must be measured, from the very beginning, by the Holy Scripture and the Word of God (Barth p 46).
Because of our tendencies to try to domesticate God, the Church has developed doctrines. Christian doctrines are guides that direct us into the heart of mystery. They are theology that is blessed and sanctioned by the church as truth about God. A doctrine is not an attempt by the church to explain-away a mystery. It is a way of pointing us not to one side or another, but straight into the depths of the mystery (Soulen 9-2-04).
Doctrine is theology that is part of what bonds us together as a community. It is the thought that inspires and directs the action of the Church. We are bound together by shared ideas about Christ and God, but we are bound together by more than that. Faith is not just theology. Christian faith calls us to action and fellowship. If we really believe in an idea it will be carried out in our actions. When we believe in God, our lives change in respect to that belief. We come together to profess our faith and to hold one another accountable to that faith. We are communal creatures. None of us is independent of the others or of God. Our decisions impact one another and we are accountable to one another. We need each other’s thoughts and insights in order to remain faithful Christians. We are most fully human when we come together in relationship to one another and relationship to Christ.
We Believe in One God
All people are indoctrinated into our faiths at a young age, whether that faith is in God, gods or science. The world is described to us in a certain way by our relatives and teachers until we are capable of describing it that way ourselves. If we remain conscious of how we describe the world, we can make choices about which presuppositions we will keep and which ones we will reject. Whether by indoctrination or by choice, Christians look at the world through a presupposition of faith that affects their concept of ultimate reality. We believe in God and even if we doubt, we cannot disbelieve. All of us have some ideas underlying our beliefs that merit attention in this treatment of Christianity. Non-Christians also have these underlying beliefs, but come to different conclusions about what those beliefs mean.
Ultimate Reality
There are different ways of looking at ultimate reality. These different ways help us to answer the question, “Who is God?” Particularism has been very important in Christian theology. Particularism or exclusivism insists that there is one salvific truth and one community that is most closely associated with that truth. All other claims for salvific truth are false. For
Christians, the salvific truth is the revelation of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ and Christians are the group that is most closely associated with that truth. There are two kinds of particularism, soft and hard. Scriptural basis can be found to back up both stances. Hard particularism rigidly takes the stance that outside Christianity there is no salvation. The salvific truth is only available through the one community that is close to it. “I am the way, the truth and the light: no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Soft particularism holds that although there is only one salvific truth, it is available outside the community that most closely represents it. People other than Christians are capable of righteousness and can know God. This view is expressed clearly in the story of Jonah. God sends Jonah out of Israel to preach. God’s word and God’s love are not just for Israel (Soulen 9-16-04).
Another important way of understanding the world is inclusivism. Inclusivism affirms that there is one saving revelation, and that fragments of that saving revelation can be found in various religions. Inclusivism takes a stance on the value of other religions while particularism remains agnostic about it. Christian inclusivism specifically affirms the use that God makes of other religions, but the fullest representation of revelation is still in the Church. This commitment to one faith combined with a desire to recognize the value of other faiths causes problems because the stance inclusivism takes is patronizing. “Christianity is viewed as the fulfillment of other religions” (D’Costa p 224). Other religions are viewed as inferior and provisional. Moreover, a while a non-Christian who lived their life well and never knew Christ could expect salvation, a non-Christian who lived righteously and then came into contact with Christianity without converting would be risking his or her salvation (Soulen 9-16-04).
A third way of looking at ultimate reality is pluralism. Pluralism gives the initial impression of being the most inclusive of these stances. It expresses the view that all widely accepted religions are equally valid. All religions have true revelations and equal access to truth (D’Costa p 224).
On the surface, this view seems like the most accepting one, and therefore the least offensive. However, there are problems with that idea. The first is that when you erase the significance of the differences between people’s religions they still get offended. We can’t say, “my religion is the same as yours” without saying, “your religion is the same as mine.” People are still going to be offended if we speak about their religions as though we know them better than those who practice the religion, i.e. well enough to negate the importance of the differences. The second problem is that pluralism actually excludes more people than particularism. It excludes all of the people who do not believe their religion can be reduced to one flavor of the truth (Soulen 9-16-04).
This is because all three of these positions are actually forms of particularism. Both inclusivism and pluralism affirm one basic, salvific revelation and believe that one community is most closely associated with that truth. Inclusivists still affirm whatever religion they hold as truth, and their own religious community as closest to the truth. Pluralists claim pluralism as their salvific truth and everyone who agrees with them is the community closest to the truth.
Pluralism operates within the same logical structure of exclusivism and in this respect pluralism can never really affirm the genuine autonomous value of religious pluralism for, like exclusivism, it can only do so by tradition specific criteria for the truth (D’Costa p 226).
But in western culture atheists, agnostics and a good number of liberal people from faith traditions primarily hold these pluralistic views. They are far outnumbered by believers from their own tradition or another tradition who believe in the exclusive revelation of their faith and therefore reject pluralism. Pluralism changes the question from “Who is God and what is ultimate reality?” to “What is the view that will be inclusive of the most people?” (Soulen 9-16-04). I find comparing these views to be incredibly useful, especially when explaining my faith to non-Christian friends who are disturbed by my faith (and who are usually harboring pluralist ideas). Faced with the hypocrisy of claiming that it is unreasonable for me to confess Christianity as a community in touch with truth when they are saying the same thing of their own community, my friends back down with a lot to think about. By their standards the differences between Christianity and pluralism is suddenly less significant.
How do we know God?
For Christians, belief is not just a matter of understanding the world around us. It is also a matter of faith and God’s claim on us. This faith is made possible by God’s gracious, self-revelation of his Word to us. Revelation is the unveiling or uncovering of something. In the Christian sense of revelation, God is doing the revealing. Revelation is a grace. We know God, not because we merited it in any way, but because God has reached out and revealed Himself to us through Jesus Christ.
Yet the meaning of revelation…refers to the self-disclosure of God in the creation, in the history of Israel, and above all in the person of Jesus. Revelation is not the transmission of a body of knowledge but the personal disclosure of one subject to other subjects. God has taken the initiative and has freely made known the divine identity and purpose. In brief, the knowledge given in revelation is not just knowledge that or knowledge about, but knowledge of (Migliore p 20).
Some Christians believe that there are two kinds of revelation. First, there is a general revelation that everyone has access to no matter what his or her faith. Many prominent early Christian theologians had theories on nature providing a general revelation. Calvin, Augustine and Aquinas all had nuanced theories on how we should see God in creation or how knowledge of God is implanted in us naturally.
There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty (Calvin, p 43).
Knowledge of God through nature was available to everyone but not sufficient for salvation. Special revelation was necessary for salvation. In contrast to general revelation, special revelations are given to a particular person or group. The Christian special revelation is God’s special relationship with Israel culminating in Jesus Christ (Soulen 9-9-04).
Karl Barth rejects the idea of nature as a general revelation to all humankind, and indeed, the existence of any general revelation separate from special revelation. The idea that God has given a special message to a special person that is other than the message he has given in the gospel leaves room for revelations that contradict the gospel. In Barth’s context, Germans could interpret a special revelation that gave them permission/instruction for conquest of other countries and abuse of their own people, despite conflicts with scripture and the pain caused to others. Separation of revelations means room for holding something above scripture. We are likely to interpret whatever suits our need as special revelation from God. We can get into pitting our own desires against God’s Word, and claiming that it is God’s will that we do so. For Barth, there is only is only one special revelation in Jesus Christ. This special revelation changes the world and everything in it. Everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike has been changed by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The revelation that is available to everyone is the same revelation that is available to Christians through Jesus Christ (Soulen 9-9-04, 9-16-04).
Trying to stretch our identity between two separate revelations is problematic because sooner or later our loyalty will be challenged. We have to choose which one is more important to us. However, in light of Barth’s claim that nature is not a general revelation available to everyone, I have the following claim. If God has given us one revelation in Jesus Christ, then I say “Yes, and nature is part of that revelation.” I disagree with the idea that God is not available to humankind in nature, though I agree that that revelation is the same one revealed in Christ. In Genesis, God spoke and creation sprang into being.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so (Gen 1:9).
God’s Word creates the universe. It makes sense for people to see and experience God in nature. I do not mean that we should worship creation along with God anymore than we should worship scripture, but neither should we be surprised if nature leads people to God. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork (Psalm 19:1).” Nature is created and as such is fallen with the sin of humanity, but a God who can work through sinful humans to bring the love of God to those who need it can certainly work through nature. Any action of God that we can sense is revelation.
Experience
One of the ways that we know God is through experience. Many Christians grow up in church communities and homes that teach them about the love of God. We can also have personal experiences with God through nature, through meditation, through personal interactions when we see the love of God acting through someone and more rarely, through personal contact with God.
Christians have different traditions over which of these ways is preferable for coming to faith. Some Christians believe that if you did not have a conversion experience then you are not really saved. Personal experience is what really allows you to connect with God. Others proudly title themselves “cradle Christians” and look askance at traditions that promote conversion experiences. They emphasize the education of their children in the Christian faith, growth in grace and the sacraments. There is a tendency for many of the conversion- emphasizing traditions to promote conversion so much that their congregants go through an endless cycle of repentance and falling off the wagon. I have been blessed to experience some of both of these traditions and find myself very much in the middle of this debate. I was baptized as an infant, grew up in a church and was a very devout thirteen-year-old when I was confirmed. Then as a high school student, I promptly rejected Christianity until I was more than halfway through college. A large part of my return to faith was the memory of being about three years old and hearing God calling my name, but I also value the education of my upbringing and wonder what I would have made of the personal experience without it. Despite the power of experience, it is important to keep in mind that revelation is not about us, but about God. The good news of Christ’s life, death and resurrection for us is the revelation of God’s faithfulness, love and graciousness to us, even in the midst of our iniquity. Our personal experiences are different from person to person, but God remains the same and extends His mercy to us. We can only know God through His self-revelation to us and we can only have relationship with God through knowing Him and seeking to understand Him better. Like everything else in our lives, personal experiences with God must be held to the standard of “scripture and the word of God” (Barth p 46).
Gospel
The Gospel is another important way of knowing God. Through the Gospel we know Jesus Christ and Jesus provides our knowledge of God’s nature. The Gospel is not just scripture but “the truth about reality in which nothing looks the same as it did (Soulen 9-2-04).” It is the good news of God’s love for us; that we are loved and redeemed in Jesus Christ despite our sin. The Gospel is the news of God’s victory over sin and death.
When Christians talk about the Gospel they are usually talking about the gospels and the scripture where they are found. Although scripture has the power to change our lives, we must be responsible in how we use it. Scripture is often referred to as the Word of God and treated as though the book itself were holy and not the message it contains. Reverence for the good news of God’s Word is well and good, but Christians must be careful not to make the mistake of worshipping scripture instead of God. Moreover, the Holy Spirit inspired scripture, but it was written with human hands by human beings who lived in specific cultures at specific times. Christians must not fall under the ruse of biblical inerrancy. Biblical inerrancy is the belief that
the Bible contains no theological contradictions, historical discrepancies, or other such “errors.” Implicit in this assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with one voice on every subject (Hill, p 12).
The Bible does not lose credibility for being written by real people with real agendas. God still inspired it and it still allows us understanding of Him. But we
must not make the mistake of pretending that we don’t interpret scripture or that it doesn’t need to be interpreted. Scripture was written in a context and whether we choose to ignore that context or to consider it in our understanding, we are still interpreting it (Hill, p 21).
One God, The Father
Christianity adheres to monotheism. We believe in one God, whose first commandment to us is “have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:2).” This does not just mean that we should not worship graven images instead of God. This commandment does not merely refer to believing that something is actually a god and worshipping it. Idolatry has to do with our priorities. When we treat something as though it were more important in our lives than God, we commit idolatry. We treat money, or security or our loved ones as though they were the most important things in our lives. Idolatry fails to acknowledge that all good things come from God. Prosperity, security and our loved ones are all things that God gives us. We do not give them to ourselves, nor do they give themselves to us. When we hold those things (or anything else) higher than God in our hearts, we fail to give God credit for providing those things; we worship the creation instead of the Creator. Faithful Christianity must worship one God. The Nicene Creed affirms that the identity of God matters. Christians worship the God revealed in the love of Jesus Christ, not the god of the Federal Reserve and not the god of the Constitution of the United States. In deed or in ideology, we must be clear that it is God that we worship, not money, power, drugs, fame, nationalism or each other.
The Trinity
One Christian doctrine that puzzles most non-Christians (and some Christians) is the doctrine of the Trinity. The common complaint is that Christianity claims to be monotheistic and yet worships three gods. But Christians do not worship three gods. The doctrine of the trinity claims one God in three persons. Christ and the Holy Spirit are of the same substance with God. We understand our God as a trinity because that is how He reveals himself to us through the Gospel. We cannot read the New Testament without encountering the three persons of God. Jesus prays to God and heals through the Holy Spirit, he is ascends to God and send the Holy Spirit to ordain the disciples.
Rightly understood, the doctrine of the Trinity is not an arcane, speculative doctrine; rather, it is that understanding of God which is appropriate to and congruent with the gospel message…It did not fall down from heaven, nor was it etched in tablets of stone. It is the product of the reflection of the church on the gospel message over many centuries (Migliore p 59).
The actions of the Trinity in respect to us are sometimes referred to as the economic Trinity. It is through the economic trinity that we experience God in our lives and in scripture. The persons of the Trinity in respect to each other are referred to as the immanent Trinity. This term is used to describe the persons of the Trinity in relationship and unity (Migliore p 61).
The doctrine of the Trinity stands against three heresies that misrepresent the nature of God: Unitarianism , Modalism and Subordinationism. Unitarianism seeks to set one person of the Trinity as sovereign over the others. Unitarianism is an inadequate understanding of God, resulting in theologies that neglect sin, social awareness and responsibility and emphasizing ideas of being saved, the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues or the creation (Migliore pp.64-65). Modalism holds that there is one God and that He has different modes of being. But if Christ is only a mode of God and does not reflect the true nature of God then we have no reason to trust him. Modalism also poses logical problems for the Gospel. Jesus would have had to bless himself and pray to himself and cry to himself when he died. None of this makes sense. Subordinationism sets up a hierarchy in the Trinity from God to Son to Spirit. The Son is not one with God, but the first creation of God. True divinity never comes into contact with humans and so yet again we have no true knowledge of God. If we cannot trust our knowledge of God, then we do not know His love for us, or His faithfulness to his covenant with us. If we do not know God, how can we worship Him? How can we know how to worship Him even if we wish to? There are further difficulties with a Christology that does not allow for full humanity and full divinity that I will address in the section on Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity steers Christians away from these false understandings and points them directly into the mystery of God (Soulen 9-30-04).
Apart from the persons of God, we have different ways of naming God. We have an informal generalized way of referring to God as God. “God” is a generic word that can refer to any god, not just the Christian God. The Hebrew “elohim” serves the same purpose. To speak of God more specifically we use the personal name of God. The personal name of God indicates who God is. It is Holy and not to be used lightly, so Jews write only four letters of the word, indicating for readers that God’s name should not be pronounced, but that we should instead say, “Adonai” or, “Lord.” To show this same reverence in English, we write YHWH, and do not include the vowels. These four letters representing God’s name in both Hebrew and English are called the Tetragramaton, literally, “four letter word” (Soulen 10-28-04).
Our name for God is also personal, but in the sense of an endearment. Jesus calls God, “Abba,” or, “Papa” when he teaches his disciples to pray. The name “Abba” is the baby name of a child for his father. It is a name full of love and trust. This name says a lot about both Jesus relationship to God and what our relationship to God should be given Jesus used this name to teach others to pray. It is this relationship that we refer to when we speak of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God the Creator is the Father of the Son, eternally begotten by the Holy Spirit. When we speak of God as “Father” we can mean one of two things. We can be referring to God as Jesus’ father, or we can be referring to God as our father. Jesus taught us to pray using this endearment name, so that we should have the kind of loving relationship with God that he does.
Almighty
God’s might is the only adjective we have in the Nicene Creed to describe the nature of God. Many the common conceptions of God follow from omnipotence. There are no limits to the power of an almighty God except those limits that are self-imposed. The description “almighty” refers to God’s power and establishes God’s sovereignty. There is no power above God and this is part of the good news of the Gospel. We know God’s nature through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We know that for our sake God sent his only-begotten Son to be a sacrifice. We know that despite our sin we are redeemed in Jesus Christ who died for us. And this is the power that is almighty. This is the God that created us and will judge us. Love is sovereign. Because God is Almighty we can truly know that
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:32).
Maker of Heaven and Earth, Of All That Is, Seen and Unseen
The doctrine of God as creator of heaven and earth refutes heresies based in separation of divinity from creation. Early Christian Gnosticism attempted to keep God from getting his hands dirty. It held to a dualism of rational/spiritual and material. The rational/spiritual was vastly superior to the material and came from God. Humans were believed to be sparks of divinity thrown off from God and trapped in a material world that was most certainly not made by God. The loving Christian God would never imprison us in flesh. Instead, Gnostics blamed the creation of matter on the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom they held to be different than the Christian God. The doctrine of creation stands in direct opposition to these ideas. God created both heaven and earth. God created everything, both seen and everything unseen.
God’s creation also tells us about the character of God. In creation we have evidence of God’s benevolence toward us and toward the universe. Everything exists because of Him. There is nothing that God did not create. Everything we cherish, every good thing comes from God as creator. We owe God not only our existence, but also the existence of every experience that brings us happiness. This creation was a free act. Before creation, God existed in community with God. God was not lonely and did not need us. God’s generosity and love were the only reasons for our creation.
For God is good – or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ (Athanasius p 28).
In a free act of love, God created the universe for the sake of our fellowship with God. God brought creation into existence and called it good (Soulen 11-4-04).
Creation is vulnerable and dependent on God for its existence. God is not only the creator of the universe; He is the re-creator of the universe. He is the source of life and creation is in continuous relationship to Him. Not only our creation, but also our continued existence depends on God. But the fragility of creation is part of what God called good. We were created for fellowship with God and our fragility demands that we continue in relationship with God, but because God created us for relationship, we are also not required to do without that fellowship. We do not have to be God. We do not have to be self-sustaining and independent. Our fragility and dependence are part of God’s blessing for us (Soulen 11-4-04).
if you can stomach a long-ass theology paper explaining what i think christianity is, you are welcome to it. this is the first half. the whole thing was so big, lj wouldn't let me post it.
Credo
To some extent what I believe changes every day. I am presented with new ideas and I rethink my old ones and change my mind. I pray that it will always be so. God has gifted us with transformation to prevent stagnation but also continuity to give life shape, texture and meaning. These beliefs are held both by individuals and by groups of believers. If we are fortunate, our understanding of them deepens with time and thought. These then, are some of the ideas that have shaped the Christian faith through centuries and my own understandings of their meaning for contemporary people.
We
The “we” in the opening of a creed is meant in a couple of difference senses. It is the people who are speaking professing their own faith, but “we” is not limited to that. “We” includes the entire community of saints . Generally when we speak the words of the creed, the community is speaking in unison as the community. Those who are part of the community but absent are included. I have an ecumenical understanding of the church, so in my personal view, this extends past denominations to include all Christians.
There is also a sense in which the “we” becomes even broader. Christ died even for those who did not believe in him, and for those who still do not believe today. The “we” of belief may be the community of believers, but the “we” effected by the events in a Christian creed contains the community of creation.
We Believe
For Christians, faith is a deep trust in and knowing of God. Using the word belief doesn’t quite cut it, but we speak the words faith and belief interchangeably despite their different connotations. Belief carries a connotation of opinion that faith does not, but we are constrained by our own grammar. It is incorrect to say “I faith in Christ.” instead of “I believe in Christ.” We must add the helping verb “have” to correct the sentence (Sanders pp.54-55). Faith becomes a noun instead of a verb and loses some of its potency. When we say, “we believe” at the start of a creed, Christians speak of faith, rather than of belief in a simple opinion about the world that can be changed through logic or argument. Faith is a gracious gift from God and cannot be changed with logic or reason. If faith is to grow, it must grow through the spirit. If it is diminished, that is also through the spirit .
In addition to semantic difficulties, our concepts of the universe and reality are shaped by what we believe, even if what we believe is that our opinions about ultimate reality do not matter and we give it no further thought. Even those of us who do not adhere to a faith have ideas that shape our understanding of reality, ideas like economics, science, and our own existence.
Humans are created with a capacity and a drive to make sense of the world around us. From a very young age, children annoy their parents, asking “why” of just about everything. This natural curiosity can be discouraged sometimes, or frightened out of us, but all of us have in our very nature a thirst for the truth. We go to great lengths in pursuit of it. We ask endless questions and create all kinds of stories to explain the natures of animals or the behavior of the solar system. Scientists perform all manner of experiments hoping to learn something about the truth.
The desire for truth is a deep need, which for Christians leads to and is expressed through fides quaerens intellectum or “faith seeking understanding.” Faith seeking understanding is the heart of theology. This drive to ask questions is a joy and a compulsion. A responsible theologian recognizes that there is nothing outside of God’s scope; there is nothing to which theology does not apply. This makes theology incredibly interesting and incredibly relevant. What greater object of study could there be than God? What could be more important than understanding the Creator of the universe and our relationship to Him? Theology is also massive, overwhelming and terrifying. It requires immense faithfulness and responsibility to the task (Barth p 86). We are responsible for our clarity, our accessibility, and our faithfulness. We must be careful with our assumptions and preconceptions. We must not misrepresent God or the Church.
We are also responsible for our attitude. Responsible theologians must practice humility. We must always allow room for inquiry and never present ourselves as knowing everything already. At all costs we must avoid fideism because it prevents faithful exploration of ideas. Fideism stops asking questions at a certain point and demands blind acceptance. It claims that there are certain questions we just shouldn’t ask. Affirmations stemming from fideism avoid the deep reflection that causes our understanding to grow. This is not faithful theology. Faith pushes (sometimes painfully) through and demands examination of even the ideas that we cling to the most (Migliore p 2).
At the other extreme, faithfulness demands that we avoid rationalism. Rationalism does not claim that we shouldn’t ask questions, but it dismisses some of them as unimportant. Rationalism attempts to engage with the truth of God in such a way that it bypasses faith altogether. It stays scientific and intellectual and will not allow the heart to participate in the inquiry. Because of this, rationalism is an inadequate way to search for the truth. Many of the things we cherish most about life are matters of the heart. The intellect alone cannot comprehend most of the things that motivate us. Theology is faith seeking understanding, not merely intellect seeking understanding (Soulen 9-2-04).
Mystery
Faithful theology endeavors to explore the revelation of God and illuminate it for others. For Christians, this exploration involves the understanding of God as a mystery. In this way we know God and relate to God, but our theology is informed by the knowledge that God can never be limited by our understanding of Him. God revealed as love is the central mystery of the Christian faith.
In Jesus Christ the living, inexhaustibly rich God has been revealed as sovereign love. To know God in this revelation is to acknowledge the infinite and incomprehensible depth of the mystery called God. Christians are confronted by mystery in all the central affirmations of their faith: the mystery of the holy love of God manifest in the creation of the world, the mystery of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, and the mystery of the renewal and promised transformation of broken human lives and of the entire world by the power of the Holy Spirit (Migliore p 2).
Although God’s nature is a mystery, we must not therefore throw up our hands and say that theology cannot know anything about it. God’s mysterious nature is not problematic for theology. Christianity gives the term mystery a different definition than it has in common use. We are accustomed to thinking of mystery as “something hidden from us that must be discovered or solved.” When Christians speak of mysteries we are talking about what is already revealed to us, but remains inexhaustible. We are not talking about the unknowable. We are talking about something to which we already have access. God wills to be known and has given us his Word. He has spoken to us in Jesus Christ and so we can know Him (Migliore p 3). Jesus Christ is the heart of God revealed to us and gives us access to God’s character. Since we cannot reach God on His own terms, He has lowered Himself to ours so that we might know Him.
At the same time, God will always remain incomprehensible to us. There will always be more of God than we can understand. God is a mystery to us not because He is not available to us, but because He overwhelms our capacity for understanding. We can never put God in a box or contain Him in a Church. God is always larger than our ideas of Him can encompass. This does not mean we cannot know Him. We know God in much the same way that we know each other. When two people love each other deeply they naturally say they know each other. They can predict each other’s actions and feelings and finish each other’s sentences. But there will always be things that come out as a surprise. We cannot domesticate one another and we cannot domesticate God (Soulen 9-16-04).
To even try to domesticate God is to miss the point. Many people attempt to circumscribe God and try to change him to fit their own views. The point of theology is to understand what God has revealed: not to change God, but to be changed by God. To take theology seriously we must take all of our ideas about life and about faith and hold them up to God’s standard.
Credo, indeed! But Credo, ut intelligam. No dogma or article of the creed can be simply taken over untested by theology from ecclesiastical antiquity; each must be measured, from the very beginning, by the Holy Scripture and the Word of God (Barth p 46).
Because of our tendencies to try to domesticate God, the Church has developed doctrines. Christian doctrines are guides that direct us into the heart of mystery. They are theology that is blessed and sanctioned by the church as truth about God. A doctrine is not an attempt by the church to explain-away a mystery. It is a way of pointing us not to one side or another, but straight into the depths of the mystery (Soulen 9-2-04).
Doctrine is theology that is part of what bonds us together as a community. It is the thought that inspires and directs the action of the Church. We are bound together by shared ideas about Christ and God, but we are bound together by more than that. Faith is not just theology. Christian faith calls us to action and fellowship. If we really believe in an idea it will be carried out in our actions. When we believe in God, our lives change in respect to that belief. We come together to profess our faith and to hold one another accountable to that faith. We are communal creatures. None of us is independent of the others or of God. Our decisions impact one another and we are accountable to one another. We need each other’s thoughts and insights in order to remain faithful Christians. We are most fully human when we come together in relationship to one another and relationship to Christ.
We Believe in One God
All people are indoctrinated into our faiths at a young age, whether that faith is in God, gods or science. The world is described to us in a certain way by our relatives and teachers until we are capable of describing it that way ourselves. If we remain conscious of how we describe the world, we can make choices about which presuppositions we will keep and which ones we will reject. Whether by indoctrination or by choice, Christians look at the world through a presupposition of faith that affects their concept of ultimate reality. We believe in God and even if we doubt, we cannot disbelieve. All of us have some ideas underlying our beliefs that merit attention in this treatment of Christianity. Non-Christians also have these underlying beliefs, but come to different conclusions about what those beliefs mean.
Ultimate Reality
There are different ways of looking at ultimate reality. These different ways help us to answer the question, “Who is God?” Particularism has been very important in Christian theology. Particularism or exclusivism insists that there is one salvific truth and one community that is most closely associated with that truth. All other claims for salvific truth are false. For
Christians, the salvific truth is the revelation of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ and Christians are the group that is most closely associated with that truth. There are two kinds of particularism, soft and hard. Scriptural basis can be found to back up both stances. Hard particularism rigidly takes the stance that outside Christianity there is no salvation. The salvific truth is only available through the one community that is close to it. “I am the way, the truth and the light: no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Soft particularism holds that although there is only one salvific truth, it is available outside the community that most closely represents it. People other than Christians are capable of righteousness and can know God. This view is expressed clearly in the story of Jonah. God sends Jonah out of Israel to preach. God’s word and God’s love are not just for Israel (Soulen 9-16-04).
Another important way of understanding the world is inclusivism. Inclusivism affirms that there is one saving revelation, and that fragments of that saving revelation can be found in various religions. Inclusivism takes a stance on the value of other religions while particularism remains agnostic about it. Christian inclusivism specifically affirms the use that God makes of other religions, but the fullest representation of revelation is still in the Church. This commitment to one faith combined with a desire to recognize the value of other faiths causes problems because the stance inclusivism takes is patronizing. “Christianity is viewed as the fulfillment of other religions” (D’Costa p 224). Other religions are viewed as inferior and provisional. Moreover, a while a non-Christian who lived their life well and never knew Christ could expect salvation, a non-Christian who lived righteously and then came into contact with Christianity without converting would be risking his or her salvation (Soulen 9-16-04).
A third way of looking at ultimate reality is pluralism. Pluralism gives the initial impression of being the most inclusive of these stances. It expresses the view that all widely accepted religions are equally valid. All religions have true revelations and equal access to truth (D’Costa p 224).
On the surface, this view seems like the most accepting one, and therefore the least offensive. However, there are problems with that idea. The first is that when you erase the significance of the differences between people’s religions they still get offended. We can’t say, “my religion is the same as yours” without saying, “your religion is the same as mine.” People are still going to be offended if we speak about their religions as though we know them better than those who practice the religion, i.e. well enough to negate the importance of the differences. The second problem is that pluralism actually excludes more people than particularism. It excludes all of the people who do not believe their religion can be reduced to one flavor of the truth (Soulen 9-16-04).
This is because all three of these positions are actually forms of particularism. Both inclusivism and pluralism affirm one basic, salvific revelation and believe that one community is most closely associated with that truth. Inclusivists still affirm whatever religion they hold as truth, and their own religious community as closest to the truth. Pluralists claim pluralism as their salvific truth and everyone who agrees with them is the community closest to the truth.
Pluralism operates within the same logical structure of exclusivism and in this respect pluralism can never really affirm the genuine autonomous value of religious pluralism for, like exclusivism, it can only do so by tradition specific criteria for the truth (D’Costa p 226).
But in western culture atheists, agnostics and a good number of liberal people from faith traditions primarily hold these pluralistic views. They are far outnumbered by believers from their own tradition or another tradition who believe in the exclusive revelation of their faith and therefore reject pluralism. Pluralism changes the question from “Who is God and what is ultimate reality?” to “What is the view that will be inclusive of the most people?” (Soulen 9-16-04). I find comparing these views to be incredibly useful, especially when explaining my faith to non-Christian friends who are disturbed by my faith (and who are usually harboring pluralist ideas). Faced with the hypocrisy of claiming that it is unreasonable for me to confess Christianity as a community in touch with truth when they are saying the same thing of their own community, my friends back down with a lot to think about. By their standards the differences between Christianity and pluralism is suddenly less significant.
How do we know God?
For Christians, belief is not just a matter of understanding the world around us. It is also a matter of faith and God’s claim on us. This faith is made possible by God’s gracious, self-revelation of his Word to us. Revelation is the unveiling or uncovering of something. In the Christian sense of revelation, God is doing the revealing. Revelation is a grace. We know God, not because we merited it in any way, but because God has reached out and revealed Himself to us through Jesus Christ.
Yet the meaning of revelation…refers to the self-disclosure of God in the creation, in the history of Israel, and above all in the person of Jesus. Revelation is not the transmission of a body of knowledge but the personal disclosure of one subject to other subjects. God has taken the initiative and has freely made known the divine identity and purpose. In brief, the knowledge given in revelation is not just knowledge that or knowledge about, but knowledge of (Migliore p 20).
Some Christians believe that there are two kinds of revelation. First, there is a general revelation that everyone has access to no matter what his or her faith. Many prominent early Christian theologians had theories on nature providing a general revelation. Calvin, Augustine and Aquinas all had nuanced theories on how we should see God in creation or how knowledge of God is implanted in us naturally.
There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty (Calvin, p 43).
Knowledge of God through nature was available to everyone but not sufficient for salvation. Special revelation was necessary for salvation. In contrast to general revelation, special revelations are given to a particular person or group. The Christian special revelation is God’s special relationship with Israel culminating in Jesus Christ (Soulen 9-9-04).
Karl Barth rejects the idea of nature as a general revelation to all humankind, and indeed, the existence of any general revelation separate from special revelation. The idea that God has given a special message to a special person that is other than the message he has given in the gospel leaves room for revelations that contradict the gospel. In Barth’s context, Germans could interpret a special revelation that gave them permission/instruction for conquest of other countries and abuse of their own people, despite conflicts with scripture and the pain caused to others. Separation of revelations means room for holding something above scripture. We are likely to interpret whatever suits our need as special revelation from God. We can get into pitting our own desires against God’s Word, and claiming that it is God’s will that we do so. For Barth, there is only is only one special revelation in Jesus Christ. This special revelation changes the world and everything in it. Everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike has been changed by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The revelation that is available to everyone is the same revelation that is available to Christians through Jesus Christ (Soulen 9-9-04, 9-16-04).
Trying to stretch our identity between two separate revelations is problematic because sooner or later our loyalty will be challenged. We have to choose which one is more important to us. However, in light of Barth’s claim that nature is not a general revelation available to everyone, I have the following claim. If God has given us one revelation in Jesus Christ, then I say “Yes, and nature is part of that revelation.” I disagree with the idea that God is not available to humankind in nature, though I agree that that revelation is the same one revealed in Christ. In Genesis, God spoke and creation sprang into being.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so (Gen 1:9).
God’s Word creates the universe. It makes sense for people to see and experience God in nature. I do not mean that we should worship creation along with God anymore than we should worship scripture, but neither should we be surprised if nature leads people to God. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork (Psalm 19:1).” Nature is created and as such is fallen with the sin of humanity, but a God who can work through sinful humans to bring the love of God to those who need it can certainly work through nature. Any action of God that we can sense is revelation.
Experience
One of the ways that we know God is through experience. Many Christians grow up in church communities and homes that teach them about the love of God. We can also have personal experiences with God through nature, through meditation, through personal interactions when we see the love of God acting through someone and more rarely, through personal contact with God.
Christians have different traditions over which of these ways is preferable for coming to faith. Some Christians believe that if you did not have a conversion experience then you are not really saved. Personal experience is what really allows you to connect with God. Others proudly title themselves “cradle Christians” and look askance at traditions that promote conversion experiences. They emphasize the education of their children in the Christian faith, growth in grace and the sacraments. There is a tendency for many of the conversion- emphasizing traditions to promote conversion so much that their congregants go through an endless cycle of repentance and falling off the wagon. I have been blessed to experience some of both of these traditions and find myself very much in the middle of this debate. I was baptized as an infant, grew up in a church and was a very devout thirteen-year-old when I was confirmed. Then as a high school student, I promptly rejected Christianity until I was more than halfway through college. A large part of my return to faith was the memory of being about three years old and hearing God calling my name, but I also value the education of my upbringing and wonder what I would have made of the personal experience without it. Despite the power of experience, it is important to keep in mind that revelation is not about us, but about God. The good news of Christ’s life, death and resurrection for us is the revelation of God’s faithfulness, love and graciousness to us, even in the midst of our iniquity. Our personal experiences are different from person to person, but God remains the same and extends His mercy to us. We can only know God through His self-revelation to us and we can only have relationship with God through knowing Him and seeking to understand Him better. Like everything else in our lives, personal experiences with God must be held to the standard of “scripture and the word of God” (Barth p 46).
Gospel
The Gospel is another important way of knowing God. Through the Gospel we know Jesus Christ and Jesus provides our knowledge of God’s nature. The Gospel is not just scripture but “the truth about reality in which nothing looks the same as it did (Soulen 9-2-04).” It is the good news of God’s love for us; that we are loved and redeemed in Jesus Christ despite our sin. The Gospel is the news of God’s victory over sin and death.
When Christians talk about the Gospel they are usually talking about the gospels and the scripture where they are found. Although scripture has the power to change our lives, we must be responsible in how we use it. Scripture is often referred to as the Word of God and treated as though the book itself were holy and not the message it contains. Reverence for the good news of God’s Word is well and good, but Christians must be careful not to make the mistake of worshipping scripture instead of God. Moreover, the Holy Spirit inspired scripture, but it was written with human hands by human beings who lived in specific cultures at specific times. Christians must not fall under the ruse of biblical inerrancy. Biblical inerrancy is the belief that
the Bible contains no theological contradictions, historical discrepancies, or other such “errors.” Implicit in this assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with one voice on every subject (Hill, p 12).
The Bible does not lose credibility for being written by real people with real agendas. God still inspired it and it still allows us understanding of Him. But we
must not make the mistake of pretending that we don’t interpret scripture or that it doesn’t need to be interpreted. Scripture was written in a context and whether we choose to ignore that context or to consider it in our understanding, we are still interpreting it (Hill, p 21).
One God, The Father
Christianity adheres to monotheism. We believe in one God, whose first commandment to us is “have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:2).” This does not just mean that we should not worship graven images instead of God. This commandment does not merely refer to believing that something is actually a god and worshipping it. Idolatry has to do with our priorities. When we treat something as though it were more important in our lives than God, we commit idolatry. We treat money, or security or our loved ones as though they were the most important things in our lives. Idolatry fails to acknowledge that all good things come from God. Prosperity, security and our loved ones are all things that God gives us. We do not give them to ourselves, nor do they give themselves to us. When we hold those things (or anything else) higher than God in our hearts, we fail to give God credit for providing those things; we worship the creation instead of the Creator. Faithful Christianity must worship one God. The Nicene Creed affirms that the identity of God matters. Christians worship the God revealed in the love of Jesus Christ, not the god of the Federal Reserve and not the god of the Constitution of the United States. In deed or in ideology, we must be clear that it is God that we worship, not money, power, drugs, fame, nationalism or each other.
The Trinity
One Christian doctrine that puzzles most non-Christians (and some Christians) is the doctrine of the Trinity. The common complaint is that Christianity claims to be monotheistic and yet worships three gods. But Christians do not worship three gods. The doctrine of the trinity claims one God in three persons. Christ and the Holy Spirit are of the same substance with God. We understand our God as a trinity because that is how He reveals himself to us through the Gospel. We cannot read the New Testament without encountering the three persons of God. Jesus prays to God and heals through the Holy Spirit, he is ascends to God and send the Holy Spirit to ordain the disciples.
Rightly understood, the doctrine of the Trinity is not an arcane, speculative doctrine; rather, it is that understanding of God which is appropriate to and congruent with the gospel message…It did not fall down from heaven, nor was it etched in tablets of stone. It is the product of the reflection of the church on the gospel message over many centuries (Migliore p 59).
The actions of the Trinity in respect to us are sometimes referred to as the economic Trinity. It is through the economic trinity that we experience God in our lives and in scripture. The persons of the Trinity in respect to each other are referred to as the immanent Trinity. This term is used to describe the persons of the Trinity in relationship and unity (Migliore p 61).
The doctrine of the Trinity stands against three heresies that misrepresent the nature of God: Unitarianism , Modalism and Subordinationism. Unitarianism seeks to set one person of the Trinity as sovereign over the others. Unitarianism is an inadequate understanding of God, resulting in theologies that neglect sin, social awareness and responsibility and emphasizing ideas of being saved, the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues or the creation (Migliore pp.64-65). Modalism holds that there is one God and that He has different modes of being. But if Christ is only a mode of God and does not reflect the true nature of God then we have no reason to trust him. Modalism also poses logical problems for the Gospel. Jesus would have had to bless himself and pray to himself and cry to himself when he died. None of this makes sense. Subordinationism sets up a hierarchy in the Trinity from God to Son to Spirit. The Son is not one with God, but the first creation of God. True divinity never comes into contact with humans and so yet again we have no true knowledge of God. If we cannot trust our knowledge of God, then we do not know His love for us, or His faithfulness to his covenant with us. If we do not know God, how can we worship Him? How can we know how to worship Him even if we wish to? There are further difficulties with a Christology that does not allow for full humanity and full divinity that I will address in the section on Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity steers Christians away from these false understandings and points them directly into the mystery of God (Soulen 9-30-04).
Apart from the persons of God, we have different ways of naming God. We have an informal generalized way of referring to God as God. “God” is a generic word that can refer to any god, not just the Christian God. The Hebrew “elohim” serves the same purpose. To speak of God more specifically we use the personal name of God. The personal name of God indicates who God is. It is Holy and not to be used lightly, so Jews write only four letters of the word, indicating for readers that God’s name should not be pronounced, but that we should instead say, “Adonai” or, “Lord.” To show this same reverence in English, we write YHWH, and do not include the vowels. These four letters representing God’s name in both Hebrew and English are called the Tetragramaton, literally, “four letter word” (Soulen 10-28-04).
Our name for God is also personal, but in the sense of an endearment. Jesus calls God, “Abba,” or, “Papa” when he teaches his disciples to pray. The name “Abba” is the baby name of a child for his father. It is a name full of love and trust. This name says a lot about both Jesus relationship to God and what our relationship to God should be given Jesus used this name to teach others to pray. It is this relationship that we refer to when we speak of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God the Creator is the Father of the Son, eternally begotten by the Holy Spirit. When we speak of God as “Father” we can mean one of two things. We can be referring to God as Jesus’ father, or we can be referring to God as our father. Jesus taught us to pray using this endearment name, so that we should have the kind of loving relationship with God that he does.
Almighty
God’s might is the only adjective we have in the Nicene Creed to describe the nature of God. Many the common conceptions of God follow from omnipotence. There are no limits to the power of an almighty God except those limits that are self-imposed. The description “almighty” refers to God’s power and establishes God’s sovereignty. There is no power above God and this is part of the good news of the Gospel. We know God’s nature through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We know that for our sake God sent his only-begotten Son to be a sacrifice. We know that despite our sin we are redeemed in Jesus Christ who died for us. And this is the power that is almighty. This is the God that created us and will judge us. Love is sovereign. Because God is Almighty we can truly know that
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:32).
Maker of Heaven and Earth, Of All That Is, Seen and Unseen
The doctrine of God as creator of heaven and earth refutes heresies based in separation of divinity from creation. Early Christian Gnosticism attempted to keep God from getting his hands dirty. It held to a dualism of rational/spiritual and material. The rational/spiritual was vastly superior to the material and came from God. Humans were believed to be sparks of divinity thrown off from God and trapped in a material world that was most certainly not made by God. The loving Christian God would never imprison us in flesh. Instead, Gnostics blamed the creation of matter on the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom they held to be different than the Christian God. The doctrine of creation stands in direct opposition to these ideas. God created both heaven and earth. God created everything, both seen and everything unseen.
God’s creation also tells us about the character of God. In creation we have evidence of God’s benevolence toward us and toward the universe. Everything exists because of Him. There is nothing that God did not create. Everything we cherish, every good thing comes from God as creator. We owe God not only our existence, but also the existence of every experience that brings us happiness. This creation was a free act. Before creation, God existed in community with God. God was not lonely and did not need us. God’s generosity and love were the only reasons for our creation.
For God is good – or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ (Athanasius p 28).
In a free act of love, God created the universe for the sake of our fellowship with God. God brought creation into existence and called it good (Soulen 11-4-04).
Creation is vulnerable and dependent on God for its existence. God is not only the creator of the universe; He is the re-creator of the universe. He is the source of life and creation is in continuous relationship to Him. Not only our creation, but also our continued existence depends on God. But the fragility of creation is part of what God called good. We were created for fellowship with God and our fragility demands that we continue in relationship with God, but because God created us for relationship, we are also not required to do without that fellowship. We do not have to be God. We do not have to be self-sustaining and independent. Our fragility and dependence are part of God’s blessing for us (Soulen 11-4-04).
