6. Creation: Things Visible And Invisible
6 CREATION: THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis 1:1). This was the absolute beginning. Before that, there was neither space nor time, nothing at all. It was the complete and total origin of all things: ‘In the beginning, God.’
In Colossians 1:16 St Paul makes this more explicit: ‘… all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible’. That is an important clarification of what is intended by the words ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ – both the visible and invisible. If we had kept that firmly and consistently in mind I think perhaps some of the futile arguments that have gone on in the past among theologians might have been avoided.
For example, there have been prolonged arguments and disputes about whether something was right because God commanded it, or whether God commanded it because it was right. To advance that idea implies that there is something called ‘right’ which existed, as it were, before God or exists apart from God. The thinking that is intrinsic to the phrase ‘all things invisible’ protects us from this notion. We think of concepts such as right and wrong, beauty or coherence, as though they possess a kind of timeless existence, but this is not so. All things visible and invisible in heaven and on earth have their sole origin in God’s mighty word.
If we could only adopt the attitude enshrined in that famous little notice that Harry S. Truman placed on his desk in 1945 when he was President of the United States: ‘The buck stops here.’ He assumed responsibility for things he would not pass on to someone else. In a sense, in all our intellectual inquiries, we need to have that little motto in front of us. Here is where the final questioning stops and we have to humbly accept the answer.
I want to discuss five points that flow from those first chapters of Genesis about God’s creation. The first is that there is an emphasis on distinguishing and separating things one from another: light from darkness, sea from land, the different species of animals and plants, the distinctness and specificity of everything that has been created.
The second point is the fact that the created world has been given a sort of autonomy. It has a life of its own. Plants, animals and humans are able to reproduce their own species. The created world has a being, a life and a movement of its own. This creation is not just a kind of extension of God or an emanation from him, but distinct from him. It was so clear-cut and well-defined that on the seventh day God could rest. The creation went on. God did not have to keep pushing it along all the time. He could rest and contemplate his creation and, as we shall see, that is a very important point for practical discipleship.
The third aspect is that the whole world was brought into existence as a home for the human family. The purpose and meaning of it all was that it should be such a home. I think perhaps this emerges most strikingly in what is said about the creation on the fourth day: the creation of the sun, moon and stars. These words were almost certainly written during the time when the people of Israel were enslaved under the mighty Babylonian Empire, working in powerless bondage under the shadows of those enormous temples and palaces that we know existed in Babylon.
For the Babylonians – like so many other cultures in the world – the sun, moon and stars were gods. They were supernatural heavenly bodies, divine entities to be worshipped and prayed to. But here our text says this was not so. They were lamps placed in the sky for the home that God had made for his family. The whole meaning of the creation was that it was to be a home for God’s family.
The fourth thing to be grasped is that the human family has been given a particular responsibility, and that is to cherish the creation. It has been given a delegated responsibility from the Creator to bring the creation into the perfection which the Creator desires. And this in itself is an important message in relation to all our ecological fears of the present time. It was not God’s intention that the world should become a wilderness. It was to be a garden for the human family to nourish and cultivate.
Humankind was granted responsibility for the naming and classifying of animals so that there was from the onset a relationship with them. The Christian scholar C. S. Lewis suggested in one of his books that it was part of our responsibility as human beings to do all we could to bring animals to the fullness of their potential. Take, for example, a faithful dog. One thinks of those marvellous animals used by shepherds on the Cheviot Hills in northern England. Such dogs are incredibly intelligent and responsive, and if you contrast them with a wild creature like a fox or a wolf, you then begin to realise what God intended human beings to do in relation to the potential of animal existence. We are given a delegated responsibility to bring the whole created world into that perfection for which God made it.
My fifth point is that God looked each day at everything he had made and saw that it was good. This is a wonderful phrase, and it is repeated after each day of creation until it culminates, on the sixth day, with God’s affirmation that all he has made is ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). This phrase contrasts sharply with so much of human religion which has often regarded the world as a bad and dangerous place, a place of darkness. The Christian reformer John Calvin, in a wonderful description, considered the world to be ‘a theatre for God’s glory’ – a place where his glory was reflected in the created world.
If we compare this with pagan views of the created world, we see how great the difference is. I am, of course, using language rather loosely here because ‘pagan’ is a word of broad meaning. It includes an immense variety of different beliefs, but there are certain common things, which are fairly widespread in the world, which pagan views share. For example, there is the idea that nature itself is in some way divine and that it is the ultimate reality. This is expressed in primitive animistic forms where trees and rivers and mountain tops are seen as places where divine energies rest. It can also be seen very clearly in many forms of Hinduism where the powers of nature are identified with God.
If, for example, you go to a Sivaite temple you will see in the central shrine a phallus, a symbol of the potency of human sexuality, and guarding the door a bull, the supreme symbol of pure animal power. Those sheer powers of nature are seen as divine and as the ultimate reality.
Alternatively, and these two things can go together, nature is seen to be transient. All natural things die and pass away – except things like mountains – but even these eventually erode. Most of nature is marked by transience. The plants blossom, grow, and then fade and die, as do human beings and animals. So throughout human history there has been a strong tendency to feel that ultimate reality is beyond nature, that it must be something transhistorical, eternal. It is something to be grasped by the mind, rather than these fleeting things that we know by our rather inadequate senses of sight, feeling and hearing.
This was clear in the classical world into which the Christian church was first launched. According to Plato, the ultimate realities were ideas and non-material things. All the different things in this world were shadowy or imperfect representations of a perfect reality that existed in an invisible world of ideas. Or, according to Aristotle, a sharp distinction existed between ‘substance’ and what he referred to as ‘accidents’. What we see, hear, touch and feel are the accidents of things. But the real substance, what lies behind those accidents, is something we can never know.
There was a sharp distinction between what the Greeks called the sensible world and the intelligible world. The sensible world was grasped by the five senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. On the other hand, the intelligible world is that which we apprehend or perceive with the mind, or perhaps contemplate with the spirit. So the way to ultimate reality was to bypass the material things of the visible world, and to bypass those accidental happenings in history which cannot give us ultimate truth, and to press on beyond them. To pass through this visible world to an eternal invisible world beyond would be achieved by the powers of human reason or mystical contemplation, self-transcendence and all the various techniques of yoga.
By implication history could not have any real significance. History might appear to be linear and moving onwards, but this was an illusion. It was really just going round in circles and everything that had happened would happen again. Our understanding of history would therefore be modelled on our perception of nature as a perpetual cycle of growth, development, maturity, decay and death, followed by new growth – and so on. So the actual happenings of history could have no ultimate significance.
Those were the dominant ideas of the pagan world into which the Christian gospel was projected. During the period when Christianity was a persecuted minority religion struggling for its life and winning its way by the testimony of its martyrs, there could be no mature discussion between those who stood for the Christian gospel and those who held these pagan views. But once Christianity was acknowledged as a permitted religion, and eventually as the religion of the Empire, the way was opened for vigorous discussion. This occurred especially in the great intellectual centre of Alexandria, the greatest in the world at that time, with its tremendous library. And in the fourth and fifth centuries many vigorous intellectual discussions took place between Christian thinkers and the practitioners of science and philosophy.
Those early Christian theologians learned from these discussions that nothing could be built on classical philosophy. The gospel provided a completely new starting point. If the Logos, the divine reason for the existence of all things – by which they were made and for which they existed – had actually appeared in human history in the person of Jesus Christ, then that had to be the starting point of all our thinking. From that standpoint it was then possible to step back from the dominant classical worldview and pose some specific questions from which certain principles emerged which ever since have defined and determined the development of European thought.
The first principle is that since the world is the creation of a rational God, and since God has created us in his image, then a rationality prevails which is within the grasp of reason. We can therefore take it as a matter of faith that in principle the universe is ultimately comprehensible, though there may be many things that we do not yet understand. And that is the indispensable foundation upon which modern science has been built.
If the universe was a place where all kinds of demons and spirits could perform their arbitrary deeds according to whim and fancy, then there could be no certainty of the existence of a rational universe. Why do European scientists take it for granted – unlike the thinking in many other parts of the world – that if two similar experiments are conducted in two different places with dissimilar results, then there must be a mistake? The passionate conviction that these things cannot be totally irreconcilable, that one must be able to find some pattern of thought which will enable us, coherently, to hold these things together, is what has made possible the enormous advance of science.
This has one particular illustration with regard to the so-called ‘heavenly bodies’. In pagan thought, most certainly in the thought of Aristotle which dominated the science of the first centuries, the sun, moon and stars were heavenly bodies. They were not made of the same four elements of earth, air, fire and water of which this world was made, but were of a different kind of being. The Christian theologians declared, ‘No. Since God created them all, they are all of the same kind.’ One of the ironies of the history of thought is that when the controversial physicist and astronomer Galilei Galileo (1564–1642) got to work with his telescope and concluded that the moon was made of the same stuff as earth, he was roundly condemned by the church because the church, earlier in the twelfth century, had taken Aristotle on board again. That is one of the many ironies in the history of the relation between science and religion.
Since creation is not an emanation, this created world has a relative autonomy but it is not an absolute autonomy. The world has a measure of independence which does not depend for its continuing existence on God constantly causing all things to happen. In the thought of Aristotle – and here he is followed by Islam to this day – everything that moved was governed by God. The stars move because God is moving them. The concept of momentum was wholly foreign to classical thought.
If I throw a ball into the air, we now take it for granted that in the absence of gravity it will go on moving with its own momentum gained from that initial thrust. But that was a concept unknown to the classical world. If the ball went on moving, it was because God was pushing it along. It was the rediscovery of the concept of momentum in the Middle Ages that made possible the revolutionary physics and mathematics of Sir Isaac Newton. This is one example of the way those early theologians challenged the prevailing worldview and insisted that this world, since it was a creation, had a relative independence. Everything that happened was not the direct action of God.
But the great and difficult question to which we must return is this: ‘How much autonomy does the world have?’ It is possible to go to one extreme and suggest that it has almost complete autonomy. This is the image of the world as a clock which functions perfectly without the clock-maker’s interference. If the clock-maker was highly skilled, having made the clock and wound it up, there would be no need for further interference.
That way of looking at the world, which is called deism, the belief in a creator who did not intervene in the universe, was a dominant view in the seventeenth century when Newton was working. Although Newton’s theology was deist, he nevertheless believed that the ‘clock’ needed occasional adjustment and that God would do this if and when it became necessary.
But it was not long before the clock-maker was made redundant. With the approach of the nineteenth century the view emerged where the dominant picture of the world was seen as a pure mechanism which worked without reference to any divine purpose and from which anything that we might call the supernatural, had been banished.
There is a well-known story of the famous physicist and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) who produced a great work on astronomy that contradicted Newton’s worry that perturbations in planetary orbits would lead to long-term instability of the solar system. He presented it to Napoleon, who after reading it, said, ‘But, Monsieur Laplace, I do not see any reference to God in this work.’ To which Laplace replied, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis.’ (Newton thought that divine intervention was necessary to ensure stability.) The reply of Laplace could be a motto for nineteenth century science which still has such a large influence in our own time. It depicts a world so totally independent that the very idea of God becomes unnecessary.
The other extreme, pantheism, perceives the world as being completely dependent on God at all times. God is in everything and doing everything, permanently pervading the universe so that you cannot, as it were, distinguish God from the world. God is immanent and cannot be distinguished from the world.
The post-Renaissance Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) coined the widely used phrase Deus sive Natura – ‘God, though equally it is Nature.’ God was identified with nature because he impregnated and saturated the whole world. That way of thinking had reasserted itself around the time of the Renaissance because of the growing influence of Platonism.
So the Christian theologian has always had to find a way between those two extremes: deism, which makes the world so independent of God that there is no need for God, and pantheism, where God disappears into the world. Contemporary examples of this pantheistic way of thinking are the New Age movement and the so-called ‘creation spirituality’ espoused by Dr Matthew Fox and the University of Creation Spirituality in California, USA.
Because of the incarnation, it is permissible to speak in terms of material means for our salvation. Let me explain what I mean. The Greeks developed the science and practice of medicine to a considerable degree, but the Hebrews rejected it. In the Old Testament there was no place for doctors. Healing was the direct work of God, the answer to prayer; it was part of forgiveness and because of this there was no place for medicine.
But the early Christian theologians argued that because God had used in the incarnation the actual material life of Jesus Christ to bring about the salvation of the world, consequently the use of material things for God’s purposes of healing and salvation could not be rejected. So in contrast to the Hebrews the Christians accepted and took advantage of Greek techniques and achievements in medicine. From this they developed the whole ethos of the healing ministry which since then has always been such an integral part of the church’s work.
On that basis, of course, much greater and wider developments occurred. What we now call technology emerged, as well as all the different ways that material things have been developed to further human welfare. The great apostle of this movement was Francis Bacon, the Renaissance philosopher, who passionately believed that it was essential to develop science in order to improve and elevate the human race. In that respect we know how much has been accomplished, but we also know, sadly, how technology can become a terrible instrument in the cause of evil.
How is this question of autonomy to be answered? We have seen the two extremes. On the one hand deism teaches that the world carries on by itself without interference. On the other hand pantheism sees the world pervaded by God and that everything that happens in it is his work. How do we navigate the correct course between them? How is the created world related to God? That is perhaps one of the most difficult and inescapable problems in all Christian thinking about the world. At one end of the scale, and it comes in different forms, you could say there is no relationship. Or to put it the other way, the world has no independence at all. As I have said, Islam, following the Aristotelian tradition, is a religion whose adherents believe that everything that happens in the world is the direct action of God. The movement of a star or even a single stone is the direct action of God. And in that Islam follows the Aristotelian doctrine of the ‘prime mover’. Perhaps one of the most disturbing things to have happened in the course of Christian history was St Thomas Aquinas’ attempt to synthesise biblical faith and this Aristotelian–Islamic rationalism. In this he came dangerously close to equating the God of the Bible with Allah – the prime mover of Aristotle and Islam – and I think even today we are still troubled by this confusion.
The reason why Islam rejects the central Christian doctrine of the crucifixion – that the Son of God died on the cross for our salvation – as simply impossible is because the Muslim world believes that Jesus was an apostle of God, and that God could not, and would not, have killed his own apostle. And since everything that happens in the world is the direct action of God, it would be incredible, impossible, indeed blasphemous, to hold the belief that Jesus died on the cross.
But the other extreme is to claim total autonomy for the world, to see it as a closed system controlled entirely by cause and effect. In the often repeated assertion of nineteenth-century positivism, all causes were adequate to the effects they produced and all effects could be explained by the causes which produced them. Here there is no place for the supernatural. The way the world functions and is to be understood is entirely in terms of its own internal rules of action, or laws.
We can neither ask God to interfere in a world which is independent of him, nor on the other hand if the world is completely dependent on him can we ask God to change his mind to suit our wishes. In both cases prayer, intercession, miracles or divine providence – the belief that God rules over all things for the good of those who love him – become impossible.
I do not think that there is what could be called a metaphysical solution to this problem. I think it has to be, as in everything else, a solution that depends on faith in God’s grace as revealed to us in the Bible.
There is first an orderliness, a pattern, a regularity which God has built into the created world. Genesis speaks of the regularity of the seasons, of day and night, summer and winter, spring time and harvest. God does not act arbitrarily and unpredictably. This orderliness has been made clear in the unravelling by science of the laws and regularities of nature, without which human freedom would be impossible.
We can only act responsibly if we know that the world is not an arbitrary place. If we do not know whether water will boil or freeze under heat then we could not make a cup of tea. All human freedom of thought and action depends upon the regularity God has given to the natural world. It relies upon the fact that God is consistent and not arbitrary or whimsical, that the world is not under the control of capricious little demons and imps who can play havoc with things. This given regularity of the world is the condition upon which our freedom is based.
Next there is human responsibility, and therefore the freedom to obey God. The Old Testament makes it absolutely clear that people are responsible before God. They can sin and repent. God makes them responsible for their actions, so that everything that happens is without doubt not the direct will of God. He has created a world where people possess the freedom to disobey him and act against his will.
Then – and this is a different kind of argument altogether – in our understanding of the regularities of the world, we have to recognise a hierarchy of logical levels. As we saw in , the simplest example would be to take a machine. You can understand a machine on one level in terms of its physical components and mechanical structure. You could understand completely the relationship between cause and effect which makes that machine work, but that does not begin to tell you its purpose – what the machine is for. Either the designer of the machine, or someone who has learned from its designer, must tell you. The question of the purpose of the machine is on a different logical level.
There is a whole hierarchy of levels: atomic, molecular, mechanical, biological and so forth. Biology cannot be replaced by physics or mechanics. Chemistry cannot be replaced by physics and so on. And in particular, when we think about human behaviour, we know that from one point of view, at one logical level, it can be fully explained by the mechanical structure of the skeleton and the nerve impulses that move muscles and by the electrical activity in the brain which can be studied by a neurologist.
But none of this explains human motivation or purpose. This again is on a different logical level. We can therefore accept that while in one sense the world can be explained as a self-operating mechanism, it is not the total explanation. To attempt to understand the world, divorced from the purpose of the one who created it, is a logical mistake. It is to misunderstand the difference between logical levels. But it still remains a mystery why God has given us this freedom of choice to disobey him and has given to the world this regularity we cannot ignore or reject, and yet God, in the words of St Paul, ‘works for the good of those who love him …’ (Romans 8:28).
It is only by grace through faith that we can understand that. This awareness and insight begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The cross of Jesus is, from one point of view, the most complete contradiction of God’s purpose and yet has become, through his workings, the most complete expression in action of his purpose. The cross and resurrection of Jesus are the place where, by faith and in response to grace, we can believe. We can believe even if we cannot completely explain that despite the relative independence God has given the world, he nevertheless overrules all things for the good of those who love him.
Remember Plato’s famous conundrum: ‘What does it mean to seek the truth? If we know what truth is, why do we seek it? If we do not know what it is, how will we recognise it when we find it?’ Plato’s answer was in terms of the doctrine of reincarnation, that when we recognise truth it is because we have remembered something from a previous birth. Few people today accept that.
How do we understand? How can we answer Plato’s conundrum? The answer surely involves heuristic passion to which I referred in . This passion to know leaves us unwilling to accept mere confusion. It drives us to seek pattern, order, beauty and coherence in the multitude of things that face us. This could be a jumble of patterns on a page or the total perplexity of our very lives. It is not something which simply arises from below but is the response to the grace of God who, as St Paul says, ‘has made us so that we might feel after him and find him’.
If all this is true then it brings all our knowing and being together, because we would then have to understand that it is the same grace of God calling all creation to its full potential, to completeness and perfection. It also explains the specific ways of nature where an acorn grows by these natural and consistent laws into an oak tree and not into a cabbage. It explains the evolution of living creatures in the world as the response of creation to the calling of its Creator and not, as Darwin theorised, by blind forces from below. As human beings we possess an innate ability to make that response conscious. So with all our thoughts and feelings we are able to struggle to try to grasp the meaning of this wonderful and often perplexing world in which God has placed us. If that is the correct way of comprehending then we can understand the Fall because we know that the human story is not simply that of our faithful search for the truth and of our growth towards God’s purpose.
If this picture is true then we can understand the Fall exactly as it is portrayed in Genesis 3: as the struggle to know perverted into a desire for personal power. The temptation of the serpent was not to trust God’s word but to find out for oneself, so that we would be like God and we would know, not by faith but by knowledge. We would know as God knows. We would no longer innocently believe or trust but would actually know good and evil. The turning inwards of the longing for truth, into the self, is the essence of the Fall, and that is why our marvellous achievements in technology in using the powers of nature to serve humanity, have become for us a double-edged sword, for technology may also be used as a terrible instrument of evil.
Finally, as well as the visible world, we must remember that God made all things visible and invisible. Consider again Paul’s words in Colossians 1:15–20. Look particularly at the words: ‘For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible …’ which we repeat in the creed. Paul then spells it out by talking of dominions or principalities. He is talking of power and authority, invisible things, which are nevertheless real and powerful. What does he mean?
We know from the rest of his letters what Paul was talking about because he makes use of this language in many places. Sometimes this language refers to the imperial power, the ultimate political power represented by Caesar in Romans 13. Sometimes it is the Jewish Law in Galatians. Elsewhere it is Greek philosophy in Colossians 2. Sometimes it is the whole establishment that put Jesus on the cross. In 1 Corinthians 2:8 he declares that if the principalities and powers had recognised Jesus they would never have crucified him. And those principalities and powers were represented by the Jewish priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate and the mob-like crowd bellowing and shouting for his death.
In every case those powers were represented by something visible. Caesar was a visible human being, but he was not just that; he was the present embodiment of a power that was there long before he was born and would be there long after he was dead.
There exist powers, ideologies, spiritual realities which are represented temporarily in human beings and their institutions but which also have a strange or curious existence of their own. This separate existence is enormously strong. I have become keenly aware of this from talking to such people as industrialists and bankers. From a human point of view these people seem to hold tremendous power but when you talk to them on a personal level they confess that they feel powerless. They feel trapped and helpless in the grip of a vast system which has a life of its own, operating and organising things from which they cannot free themselves. Nationalism, especially when represented in extreme forms, such as Nazism, is a particular example of these intangible forces.
Paul said that such powers were also created by God in Christ for a good and valid purpose because positive intentions and aspirations were found in such things as political authority and economic order. But unfortunately they have become fallen powers, part of this fallen creation. They have sought to absolutise themselves, to confer upon themselves powers which belong only to God. They thus become agents of evil against which we must fight.
But as the New Testament constantly reminds us, in his dying on the cross, Jesus disarmed and dethroned those powers. ‘Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out’ (John 12:31). They were not destroyed; they were disarmed. Paul stated in 1 Corinthians (15:24–25) that Jesus must reign until all the powers of the enemy were brought under his feet, and then he would hand the kingdom to the Father.
We live in times when these powers, which still exist and threaten us, have nevertheless been robbed of their final authority. We can therefore do as Paul says: ‘Put on the full armour of God … For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces…’ (Ephesians 6:11–12). Our fight is not against other human beings, but against these principalities and powers, these invisible realities which are nevertheless part of the created world, God’s creation, a fallen creation, but ultimately redeemed and under the power of Christ.
And so we live by grace through faith in the confidence that God, who in the beginning created all things visible and invisible, will in the end reign in glory over all things and that the earth will indeed be ‘the theatre of his glory’.