Out of nothing God created everything

Introduction
Out of nothing God created everything; God who is completely separate from creation, space and time, transcendent, became immanent in creation, creating and entering into space and time.


From the beginning God is transcendent and in creating he becomes immanent. God speaks, the Spirit hovers over the void at the beginning and He walks in the garden on its completion, revealing to us, in the light of the Gospel, God as Trinity; three Persons, One God. This is an essential mystery of God and a foundation of our understanding of God as he has revealed himself in the scriptures and through nature.


God is immanent and God is transcendent, One God in being, majesty and power. To our minds there appears a discontinuity in how we need to understand God, to make sense of our experience of God, who God is to us and how he responds to us, and God’s transcendent being. And yet there is One God undivided, continuous in all his attributes.


The concept of continuity and discontinuity is one I want to explore, how it helps us understand the involvement of a transcendent God in creation, how it works its way out in creation and in our lives and how it helps us understand scripture and engage with science.


The initial spur for writing is, having read Robert John Russell’s paper, Reflections on Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: from Conflict to Interaction. I found myself excited by the opening out of the idea, from a physicists point of view, that the fact of Jesus’ return might have an observable impact on creation and how it works.
(http://www.ctinquiry.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_John_Russell ).


At the end of his reflections Russell says, “…nature might have a “multiple temporality” with the eschatological “future” woven into and between the ordinary “future””. Eschatology is the study of end times and temporality refers to the passage of time. He describes the return of Christ as being “proleptically present”, meaning anticipated as if already present.


So he is saying that not only is the physical process involved in the end times anticipated in the physical facts of Jesus resurrection but also in the whole of the history of life. He is seeking to explore if the physical nature of the new creation is anticipated in its existing structure and what laws will continue to operate in the new creation.


What struck me was the repeating of an idea I first heard from my son that: wouldn’t every involvement of a transcendent God in creation resound throughout every moment in time and be woven into its fabric, so that just as the salvation offered by the cross is effective throughout time, would this not also be true of the judgement of Adam and as Russell also suggests, the return of Jesus.


Russell spends some time discussing the idea of the continuity and discontinuity of Christ in his Kenosis, his self limiting and emptying of himself in the incarnation, so that he is fully man and fully God and the same person in heaven as he was on Earth yet different in form. The Word becomes flesh without division in substance.


He argues that the continuity and discontinuity in the physical body of Christ at his resurrection gives us a basis for considering the continuities and discontinuities at the renewal of creation when Christ returns. The old is rolled up in the new in the same way as the incarnate Christ is the eternal Word and the risen Christ; one in the same person, but different within an immutable Godhead. Philippians 2:5-7 .


He is also suggesting that just as Christ took upon himself the sins of the world, the new creation will redeem nature from the evil in this present creation. This can be supported in scripture which describes creation as groaning in anticipation of Christ’s return. Romans 8:18-25 (ESV)
Russell states of the end times
...the bodily resurrection of Jesus directs us towards a much more fundamental view: the radical transformation of the background conditions of space, time, matter and causality, and with this, a permanent change in at least most of the present laws of nature.


For Russell, the resurrection is not a myth but the Fall from grace of man and the creation is. He does not look for a radical transformation at the Fall.


For Russell his position is that nature is evil and predisposed to sin as is evidenced in the wasteful and destructive processes of evolution and cosmology and so he rejects the Fall as an event. He sees it as a property of creation.


I think he is wrong, and would extend his concept of an eschatological discontinuity to include a discontinuity at the Fall which I believe is as radical an event within creation as the return of Christ.


Continuity and discontinuity
The idea of discontinuity and continuity in created life can be traced to Aristotle who in De Anima II 3 states “… that plants possess a vegetative soul, responsible for reproduction and growth, animals a vegetative and a sensitive soul, responsible for mobility and sensation, and humans a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle#cite_note-30)



The idea is that although there is continuity in the created order, in creation there are discontinuities. These ideas lead to the scientific discipline of Taxonomy, challenged by modern genetics which emphasises continuity more than discontinuity as part of the dogma of evolution.
Aristotle voices a deep held human conviction that discontinuities are absolute so that a stone cannot be alive and that all states of life are bound. We might be made of inert chemicals but we possess life and this life force is common to all life, nevertheless plant life is not animal life. All animals are complex but there is a scale of sensitivity and sentience ultimately is expressed in the otherness of humanity. Aristotle’s ideas are rejected in modern science, believing that in time all is resolved into evolutionary paths from subatomic particles, to life, to man.


Russell brings the language of continuity and discontinuity into an engagement with future cosmology and theories about thermodynamics but not looking at living entities other than as properties of the fabric of space and time and the processes that happened within creation. He also believes in evolution which I hope to show is legitimate, but not necessarily right. I do this without accepting Russell’s omission of the Fall as an event.


My primary source of evidence is scripture. I am not well read in Aristotle or Philosophy and am not very schooled in Theology, Evolution or Cosmology. I hope I have a voice though.
I believe the moment of creation anticipates all that is to come but it is to be expected that the facts of creation can be legitimately interpreted otherwise.


Hebrews 11:1-3 (ESV) 1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 For by it the people of old received their commendation. 3 By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.


The bible makes it clear that it is faith that reads the evidence and it has to be true that looking at the same facts, it is consistent but not necessarily acceptable to conclude that what we see is not the work of a creator.


I think that each word spoken by God at creation represented a speaking of a discontinuity in the continuity of creation as do the events of the Fall, incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection, and that in creation each anticipates what is to come until the final judgement and coming of the new creation.


Man’s current best effort at explaining the cosmos is that what we see is the result of blind chance. It has to be acknowledged that this is a legitimate conclusion something that Russell points out.


As a digression, Russell intimates that amongst scientists deep questions are being asked about the nature of time. An example of this is that some of the eminent scientists engaged in work on the Hadron Collider seriously suggest that the bosons formed in the future by the collider are hindering their discovery by sabotaging the science.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html


And so even in science we can see how time is a matter for discussion.


Time
The bible does not give us the mandate to try to prove God through science or scripture. However having the faith that what God says in the bible is indeed true then we have the opportunity to have our eyes opened more as what God says informs what we see. We can view the Bible as God’s revelation over time and in our reading we read each passage in the knowledge of what has happened in Christ and what it says is to come. But those who wrote the Bible were not so apprised.


Beginning with Genesis, we read that God speaks out creation, first forming it then filling it. It is a picture seen from God’s perspective and tells us that God prepared a place that he might rest in communion with mankind. There is no reason given in the Genesis narrative why a transcendent God creates, communing with man and sustaining and providing for what he has made.


In God’s days we see that God speaks out distinctiveness within the creation and we can see how the origins of the discontinuities in creation, commented on by Aristotle, could have their origin in the days of creation. We also see the continuities as it is the soil that brings forth life and Adam is formed from dust.


It has to be true that God continues to sustain and provide for his creation with the words he spoke at the beginning but Genesis gives us no hint of processes nor a necessity for over interpretation and pseudo science; arguments about days seem fruitless and inappropriate when what we are discussing is clearly not a scientific document.


There is no reason not to see here a form of divinely ordained evolution. There is also no reason not to accept a plain six days of creation, nor for that matter to see the bible as a load of nonsense and that there is no Creator.


The bible requires us to have faith that God created and that he spoke out creation and his words form, sustain and provide for what is spoken.


Indeed in the quote from Romans 8 we can see how in our own salvation we are justified by the word of God’s grace, redeemed and regenerated and through our lives, sanctified. Our salvation I believe is secured on the day we believe and through the Holy Spirit we are sanctified, perfect yet perfected by the lives we live.


I see the forming of creation by the power of God’s word as a foundation for my hope of salvation spoken by the same God on the day I believed. What he has begun he will surely complete and it is complete from eternity, spoken by a transcendent God who speaks all things into being.


This God is love. To make sense of why a transcendent loving God created and became involved in creation, we need to leap forward in time to the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. It is in the cross that creation finds meaning because in the cross we have the revelation of the transcended glory of God, a God who died to reconcile sinful men to him because he loves them and will renew not destroy creation. So creation anticipates Christ and salvation in scripture.


Ephesians 1:3-7 (ESV) 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,


I believe that it is for this reason that after the creation of man


Genesis 1:31 (ESV) …God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.


It was very good because God transcends time and in creation, in its fabric, is the hope of Christ which makes it very good;


1 Corinthians 15:21-23 (ESV) 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
God rested on the seventh day. The seventh day has no end marked in the narrative of Genesis and I believe this is because God dwells now with man, entering into a relationship with humanity. I believe we live in that day in the experience and anticipation of rest as we have faith and dwell in God and that day will never end until time ends. The idea of rest here is one of completeness; now the transcendent God can dwell in his creation, echoing the language of the completion of the temple (ESV study Bible).Genesis 2:1-3


Casting man out of the Garden of Eden broke this intimate communion but it was ever God’s intention and purpose for God to dwell with man; that the Word would become flesh. God manifested this rest in his people Israel, through the work of Abraham and Moses and the temple worship.


God is present now with man in Christ who sends the Spirit to his church where Father and Son dwell. The Church becomes the body whose purpose is fulfilled in the last days,


Revelation 21:1-3 (ESV) 1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.


That day is appointed for those God has chosen; those who are obedient to him. Hebrews 4:4-6
From this we get an inkling of how from the beginning the “rest” of the seventh day for man is through obedience to God in Christ and how in Christ, grace is glorified. God always acts to bring glory to himself.


We also see that in creation there are those chosen in Christ for eternity. This sovereign choosing is part of the mystery of God transcendent. Our experience of God is that he responds to our obedience and gives us the awful freedom of will that allows us to do the things he forbids. Our freedom is limited by this choice but God’s is totally free and perfect since he alone is good.


The Fall
To sin is the choice Adam made. This was an event in history, the Fall, and I believe God’s response to it, judgement, marks a discontinuity in the created order; “the radical transformation of the background conditions of space, time, matter and causality” .


Russell seems to consign Adam to mythology and sin as an inevitable consequence of the natural order. He refers to natural evil as a property of creation which in his reasoning becomes good in that it is finally wrapped up through the cross in the new creation.


I do not see that the biblical evidence supports this theodicy: it is not a convincing defence of God’s goodness in the face of evil for me, as it discards the revelation of scripture that it was through Adam that sin came into the creation and in my opinion to believe otherwise makes nonsense of scripture.


For example the reading of Romans 8 becomes quite meaningless. We are told


Romans 8:20-22 (ESV) 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
I think evil is something that opposes the will of God and is a result of an event in time. When God spoke creation into being, the sin of Adam, Christ the new Adam and the new creation, resounded and it was very good as creation’s fullness brings glory to God through grace and love fills all in all in the fullness of time.


I think the Fall, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ and his return making all things new, fill time and are events in time, since it is the transcendent God who acts in historical time. So what God said was good, was good.


This conclusion may be the same as Russell’s but I believe the difference in reasoning is important. The God who subjected the creation did this in hope and yet because he was God this was a certainty in Christ; even in these verses we see the interaction between God involved in time and God transcendent. The use of the word “hope” here is interesting as it indicates a degree of freedom in the response the creation will bring, displaying the self limiting nature of God even in the certainty of the cross.


When Adam sinned, all creation fell subject to death and decay, as a judgement from God and it was at this juncture that natural evil; suffering and purposelessness, entered creation. God pronounced a curse on creation for the praise of his glorious grace in the hope that it would turn back to him.


For this reason, by whatever process God brought creation into being, up to the time of Adam, it was not evil, as its working and character were within the perfect will of God. It was the eating of the fruit that brought the knowledge of good and evil and ended the freedom Adam and the woman knew. We see this when we read of creation from man’s perspective. The pains of childbirth, which could refer to the anguish of bringing up children not necessarily their birthing, were a result of this curse and Paul likens these to the pains creation suffers, which could refer to the suffering created as a result of sickness, greed and disease, and we suffer together with the Cosmos in anticipation of the end of the age. Man is now a slave to sin and spiritually dead choosing to disobey God and not trust him. Genesis 2:16-17


As the whole of creation fell because of the disobedience of Adam, I believe there was a discontinuity as evil perverted the course of creation in time. In the Genesis narrative, God no longer speaks of creation as being good. His first ten words of creation I believe reveal God’s view of the whole of creation, transcendent, but as he sees sin it is not good. Now, jealousy and murder reign, and angels rebel. Pride and lust rule the peoples and things go from bad to worse as men worship the created rather than the creator and learn to fear gods who are not gods.


Disease, decay and futility characterise the altered creation; what was once good and pure becomes perverted because of the disobedience of Adam as his dominion becomes as lawless as him, subject to sin and death because he is subject to sin and death. His dominion of creation, a good gift God gave him, becomes a curse for creation. Therefore there will be continuity in creation between the pre and post Fall universe but a discontinuity marked with violence, greed, disease, futility and suffering as we see now.


As the transcendent God spoke into being the whole of creation, his ordering and filling of it I believe anticipated the evil of the sin of Adam from the beginning. I think the process of creation equipped creation to survive disease and avoid danger for example. I feel that this event in space and time resounds through all space and time and it is woven into the fabric of creation for the praise of God’s glorious grace, just as, in the fullness of time, the incarnation and crucifixion does and the second coming will. Creation before the Fall will be similar to that after but different in one way; evil and the powers and the principalities of the air will be active in perverting the course of history on a microscopic and cosmic scale.


I think there is no reason to believe that violence and decay were not always part of creation, since God is seen to act through violence and decay in first cursing and judging the world and when God acts it is not evil. The curse is a good work of God! Decay is a vital process as are the predator-prey, symbiosis and carrion processes; our distaste for it does not make it evil; the evil is not in the unclean process but in its character, its heart as Jesus declares.


Mark 7:21-23 (ESV) 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”


We look at creation with post Fall eyes and minds. Basically I believe the processes of creation will look the same throughout time but spiritual powers allowed to work within creation, through the sin of man, changed the nature or character of the processes within it to being futile so that sin, fear and death now reign because of what Jesus speaks of and because of suffering.


Surely on the day of creation God spoke the natural cycles and created life anticipating the Fall and Christ and since the Fall creation has groaned in anticipation of its restoration and deliverance from the futility that now besets it.


Conclusions
I suggest that each moment of God’s involvement in the world as told by the scriptures and experienced in our lives is proleptically present or immanent in all time; creation anticipated each, weaving them into the fabric of the garment of creation.


God transcendent speaks into being creation. In fact, as Russell suggests, the eschaton, the end of the ages, is initiated in God speaking, “Let there be light” and out of nothing everything is made; the act of creation holds its end in its beginning, as I believe does every moment of God’s involvement.


Romans 8:28 (ESV) And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.


I feel this position not only offers Christians hope in a world full of futility but a point of interaction with scientific truth, providing a confident position from which to present a credible scriptural theodicy that includes the truth of judgement and the glories of God’s grace.


I do not share Russell’s hope that it will provide avenues of scientific investigation. It is key that this way of seeing is a matter of faith in God and trusting in his goodness and grace and is not contingent on any scientific investigation. Without God there are no discontinuities, which is what scientists report. Our response still is to believe in Jesus and receive salvation by faith and by faith alone, safe in the knowledge that “all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”


Could it be that we see things otherwise because we are acting out the fulfilment of the curse of the tree of Eden and underestimating the need for the freedom offered by the tree of the crucifixion? Blinded by our pride in judging good and evil, we miss the revelation of faith. Freedom from the tyranny of evil brought by the death of the One, Christ, who died cursed on a tree, and rose from the dead so that all might have eternal life through him passes us by.


Convinced of our basic goodness and ability to judge everything by scientific observation and our moral sense, we fail to appreciate the depths of our sin, its offence to God, the wrath of a Holy God and the glories of his grace found in the gospel of salvation.


Centred on the cross and rightly discerning God, we are constantly brought to a fullness of the knowledge of God and we cry “Holy, Holy, Holy are you God!” In our whole being we can trust God and put our faith in him as Creator


Romans 5:17-18 (ESV) 17 For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. 18 Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.


Praise the glories of his grace! This will not be a scientifically observable fact.


How does this help us today? In theology we need to be focused on the nature of God and a credible understanding of Him for people today; free will and Gods sovereignty need to be explained again for this present time. Suffering and the problems of evil, need to be addressed in modern contexts. In science; the Big Bang Cosmology, Quantum mechanics and Evolution are giant theories that seek to explain our present. Life. The Mind and Time are mysteries fought over by materialists and mystics; physics and metaphysics; and need to be talked about for everyman by those who have faith in God.


Contemplation of God, transcendent and immanent and engagement with the sciences I believe will be fruitful avenues of human thought in the coming years.


I don’t think believing in the God of the bible is intellectual suicide but the most likely foundation for the advancement of science and human understanding, as it has ever been. And just maybe, by recognising that there is continuity and discontinuity in life and cosmology, we will have dialog with mainstream science without recourse to wacky science.


This brings us back to an earlier point; we should not be put off by failing to see eye-to-eye. The bible says belief in creation is by faith and therefore there must be more than one credible explanation to the facts.


Because God is true, the truth is, God created everything seen and unseen for the praise of his glorious grace and all truth is subject to this truth. However, I can only know this by faith because the bible tells me so. This is not the place for arrogance because arrogance will not convince anyone especially if our only authority, the bible is made to look foolish by half baked ideas in fields we do not understand.


Daniel 1:20 (ESV) And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.


It is important that Christians engage with science as if it is credible and give due honour to those whose craft it is. We are free to explore the wonders of creation as people of faith within science and must give those with talents liberty to become experts in their field and, like Daniel in Babylon, become enriched masters of science, as is Russell, true to the Creator and his revealed word.