Chaotic Order
The Creator God Who is With Us
In the beginning…
Those three words carry a heaviness for many people of faith. They spark remembrance and hold the meaning of creation. The three words bring the story of creation to mind in all of its complexity. They also connect the Hebrew story of who God is with a similar but philosophically poetic telling within the Gospel of John. But, what is creation about and why do contemporary Christians often add baggage to a story of beauty?
The creation stories found in Genesis chapters 1–3 are often mistaken for stories of what and how rather than who and why. Ultimately, the creation stories are about who God is. This is why John’s Gospel looks backward in order to show the connection of Jesus to the cosmic unfolding of creation. Creation was not the first concern for the ancient Hebrews. Eric Vail explains this in his book Creation. The earliest stories of the Hebrews were the stories of God working through relationships and people. From the narrative of Abraham being called out of Ur to the rescue from Egyptian slavery, the first stories were of the faithfulness of a God who is present.
So when did creation become important? Most scholars believe it was during the exile of Israel in Babylon. In a time of crisis and doubt, Israel began to tell the story of a faithful God who is involved and present in creation and with them in the crises.
Even though it stands at the beginning of the Bible, the probable age of Genesis 1 places it among several capstone statements in the Old Testament about the Creator and creation. These various passages represent Israel’s faith in God during their exile. Thus, these texts served as assurances about God in Israel’s present crisis, upon which their hopes for the future were justified. (Vail)
It is in this context that the creation stories began to take form from the oral tradition. They are sories about who God is and why the world is the way it is.
In keeping with the biblical background, the doctrine of creation is first a reflection on God, answering not only, “Who is this God to whom we pray?” but also, “Who is the God who will come to our aid in [our] time of need?”The Scriptures again and again link God as Creator with God as Redeemer. (ibid)
This is why I believe that groups like Answers in Genesis are misguided at best. When we attempt to turn stories that are meant to point to the character of God into modern history, we lose sight of their real purpose; revealing the heart of God. Maybe I should state a few ideas before we continue - assumptions so to speak.
Genesis 1–3 tell the story of who and why, not how. The ancient Hebrews had no concept of geology, genetics, or evolution. Thus we need to read these within that context. But, and this is huge, we can read the creation accounts while holding to modern scientific understandings about how life became diverse through evolution. Genesis and science both deal with similar ideas, but in the case of evolutionary science, the answers of diversity are answered, but not the ultimate origin of life. Genesis also doesn’t deal as much with origin as we assume. It is more about the why and the who, but we’ll get to that.
One common assumption is that God created out of nothing. Theologians use the Latin creatio ex nihilo to talk about this. But does the text really say that there was nothing? It’s comlicated, but not really. Read Genesis 1:
“When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” (Gen 1:1–3 NRSVue)
The idea is chaos rather than nothingness. A formless void of chaos and then order is spoken into it. My friend, Dr. Thomas Jay Oord, is working on a Systematic Theology of Love. Within his first volume, the idea of creation is dealt with by looking at what it means for God to create. Tom, like many of us rejects the idea of creatio ex nihilo from a theological and scriptural viewpoint. What is the text revealing about God? Here is one of Tom’s ideas:
Before the beginning of our universe, the Spirit was loving and creating. God loved creatures before the big bang and has loved moment by moment throughout evolutionary history. The Spirit creates and loves every entity, organism, creature, ecosystem, and civilization on every planet, universe, and multiverse that might exist. God will everlastingly create and love in the future too. (Creation)
This is a much more expansive cosmology than attempts to layer modernism onto theological truth in Genesis. Tom has put together some Latin to describe this as opposed to creation out of nothing.
…creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore as a more adequate theory of creation. This is the Latin phrase for “God everlastingly creates out of creation in love.” (ibid)
This is the connection between Genesis and the Gospel - acts of love.
Why is this important? Because so much of our current cultural moment is shaped by assumptions not in evidence. Assumptions which lead to attitudes about fellow human beings. If we start from an idea of brokenness rather than love, we slide toward the desire for authoritarianism. But, if we assume goodness and love, the nurturing of all creation becomes more important. In the creation accounts, God calls everything good, that os our true originality. For us to regain our core of love we need to go back to
In the beginning…
If we take a look at the story we call the Fall, we get some clues about what is going on. First the main characters.
God, the creator and gardener The man The woman The serpent
Because Genesis is often read as dualism in which God’s arch nemesis appears, I want to focus in the serpent first. In the creation story, the concept of Satan does not exist. Humans have placed Satan in the Garden, but the story does not do that originally. No, the serpent is a created being and not a grand spiritual foil to God. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made.” (Gen 3:1 NRSVue) The serpent also never lies outright. Instead the serpent uses the truth to seduce the humans into the original sin of self sufficiency through the desire to be gods.
When the serpent asks, “Did God say,” it is more of a challenge than a beginning of a lie. When the serpent says they will not die, this is not a lie because the death that comes is the death of relationship rather than body. Conflating the two leads to an illogical claim that death does not exist prior to the events of Genesis 3. The serpent understands this and uses the truth bent toward a manipulative point.
The humans succumb to their desire to be like God and then they realize that death has come. In this moment we may be tempted to assume that humanity is doomed to continually make the worng choices. Bur, as my friend Terry likes to ask, “Is Adam’s act greater than the act of Jesus?” No, it is not. I’ll lean on the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace to say that goodness is extended through that powerful work of grace.
God does not abandon the humans. God calls to the man when he does not show for their usual walk in the Garden. God teaches the humans to make clothes and while God speaks the repercussions of the humans’ sin, can we not see that as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Or, can we embrace the truth that Jesus changes everything? The broken relationship is healed in the act of Jesus’ self sacrifice as the perfect human and God-man.
The greater truth is that even when the humans chose death of relationship, God never wavered in being with them. The Israelites in Babylon worked out that truth in their own crisis and dealt with it in the beginning…
I can’t help wondering if we go back to the beginning with fresh eyes, we might be less inclined to force this beautiful story of goodness coming out of chaos into a modernist assumption of how. Scripture does not tell us how other than the idea of God-breathing. Ultimately, God breathes goodness and our recognition of that is one way our trust switches in repentance toward God rather than ourselves. But we really need to go back and remember.
Why is this important? Because understanding who God is undergirds the ways we live out faith. The creation story of the Hebrews is a contrast to the creation story of Babylon. The Babylonian story of Marduk and the many gods of Mesopotamia contain the idea that humans exist to serve the whims of deities. The contrast with Yahweh is of a God of creation who creates in love for relationship. The Babylonians had deities who existed outside of their existence rather than with them. A creator God is not a warrior god. That part matters greatly.
One reason I find creation out of nothing to be wanting is that it places God outside of creation rather than an integral part of creation. When God is outside of our experience that is a distant and ineffable god rather than the God of creation present within creation. The God described in the early part of Genesis is a God who walks with us and invites us into intimate relationship. Eventually, our experience of the creator God is perfectly revealed in the person of Jesus the Christ. Jesus reflects the very nature of the creator God described in Genesis 1-3. This is a picture of a peaceable and relational God.
God is not Marduk or Ares/Mars. God is the God of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and revealed in Jesus. How much different would our ethics and faith be lived out if we treated God as creator rather than warrior? God as integral to creation changes our assumptions and actions. I was thinking about this when in a discussion about creation based on a poll that asked “are evolution and creation both true?” The answer for me is yes, because truth is not required to be factual. Truth is greater than facts. But the idea was put forward that wither God or matter had to exist first and thus, we must go with God. My response is why? Why must it be either? What if God and matter exist in an eternal creating?
Would we be less likely to tear down if we understand the truth of creation? As Loki says in the series Loki, “Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what is broken is hard. Hope is hard.” Creation is harder than destruction. Creation entails relational action and concerns. War is not an action of creation and our thrist for violence is contrary to ceation. Later in Genesis, it is humanity’s penchant for vilence that is the catalyst for the flood story. Yet humanity continues to reach for violence as the solution. We cheer violence and ask how else can we bring peace? Creative relationship as we are invited by God is how.
In the beginning…
Creation. 1st ed, The Foundry Publishing, https://open.substack.com/pub/thomasjayoord759927/p/a-creation-theory-to-replace-ex-nihilo?r=2m2un&utm_medium=ios