Today we celebrate Creation Sunday, the beginning of a month when our focus will be on thanking God for the gift of this world, and also reflecting on our responsibility for it. Next Sunday, Dominic Roser will give a talk after church on our responses to the environmental crisis, so I will largely leave that theme to him. This morning I'm going to take one step back from that immediately pressing topic to ask the background question that frames our thinking about this world and how we relate to it. What do we mean when we talk about 'creation'? What does it mean to say that we believe in God the Creator of all things?
Some years ago I read an unusual book called Sophie's World, which is both a novel and an introduction to philosophy. It begins with a schoolgirl, Sophie, receiving a sequence of mysterious letters. One of these contains just the words: 'Where did the world come from?' 'I don't know, Sophie thought. Surely nobody really knows. And yet Sophie thought it was a fair question. For the first time in her life she felt it wasn't right to live in the world without at least inquiring where it came from.'
The question of where the world comes from is one of the most basic issues that philosophers have addressed. Other related questions, much discussed down the ages, include: Is the universe eternal? In other words, did the universe have a beginning? Was there once nothing, and then the universe was brought into being by a Creator? Or has the universe always been there? And questions have been raised about matter, the essential physical stuff out of which everything is made. Is matter good or evil? Is matter real or an illusion? Some philosophies have seen physical matter, the world around us, as unreal, an illusion to be seen through, and an evil to escape from into the realm of pure spirit.
These questions may not keep us awake and worrying in the middle of the night, but they are worth thinking about. They are not just questions for philosophers. The ways they have been answered have shaped the very different outlooks with which societies and individuals have lived, have made sense of things, and have related to the world around them and other people. Even if we don't explicitly think about such matters – most of us aren't professional philosophers, after all – we still hold some implicit view, maybe absorbed from childhood, of where everything came from and the nature of the world around us. These questions touch on how we think about ourselves, our place in the world, and how we live our lives.
So let me outline some affirmations of the Christian faith on these fundamental questions, with some reference to today's readings and also to the history of Christian thinking.
First, the universe is here because God created it. The first verse of the Bible tells us: 'In the beginning...God created the heavens and the earth.' (Genesis 1:1) But to say this does not prejudge the question of how God created, or when the Creation began. It's mistaken to expect the Bible to answer such questions. How the universe came into being, and how it reached its current state are open questions, on which more and more light has gradually been shed by the work of scientists. What our faith affirms is that the universe is not an accident, that it did not somehow generate itself; rather, the universe is the purposeful, meaningful creation of a wise and loving God.
This bears immediately on some of those questions I mentioned earlier. It means that the universe has not always been there; that matter is not eternal. Only God is eternal; only God – to put it crudely – has always been there. In other words, God created the universe out of nothing. (Interestingly, the doctrine of creation out of nothing is not stated explicitly in the Bible – other than once in the apocryphal book of Maccabees; but as with other Christian doctrines which are not explicitly stated in the Bible, such as the Trinity, Christian thinkers have come to the view that this doctrine accurately conveys the teaching of the Bible.) So God is not, as some have thought, just a craftsman shaping material that is as eternal as he is. It's a vital distinction: God is the Creator, not just a craftsman. God freely chose to bring into being that which was not and need never have been. Why? Because at the heart of God is generous, self-giving love. Just think: there need never have been anything but God; God is the only necessary Being, existing before all things in the eternal loving communion of Father, Son and Spirit. We should look out on the world in grateful wonder that it is there at all. Creation is in itself an act of love, not just a display of divine power.
A second important Christian affirmation is that because the universe is God's creation, it is fundamentally good. In Genesis 1 there is a refrain after several of the days of creation saying: 'And God saw that it was good'. God is like an artist looking round, pleased with what he has made, saying 'Isn't it good?' Again, at the end, 'God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.' (Genesis 1:31) That may seem obvious to us, but it certainly has not been obvious to all people at all times. Various religions and philosophies have seen the physical reality of the world in very suspicious and negative terms, so emphasizing the spiritual that our physical life is regarded as something sinful and ugly, something to be ashamed of, to escape from. The soul is pictured as a bird trapped in the cage of the body; the body and physicality in general, especially sexuality, are all seen as things to despise and to transcend. That way of thinking about the body has also been present in some Christian traditions, though in hindsight they were reflecting the outlook not of the Bible but of other philosophies.
As well as questioning the goodness of the physical creation, some outlooks have also questioned its very reality: is anything really there at all? Some Eastern traditions tend to see the world around us as an illusion; some of this thinking has attracted people in the modern West who had perhaps grown tired of singing about all things bright and beautiful and were drawn to this very different perspective. Think of the Beatles singing: 'Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about'. Is there any reality at all beyond ourselves, or is our apparent experience of the world around us really just a big illusion?
Over against all this, Christians, agreeing here with Jews and Muslims, insist that the world is real, and that it is good. Here we tread a narrow path. To one side are those who despise the physical world or doubt its reality: in contrast, Christians affirm that it is good and real. To the other side there have been those of every age who see the world itself and everything in it as divine and therefore to be worshipped: in other words, paganism, which existed in many ancient forms of fertility religion and nature worship and also continues in the modern world, including in the West, with some people consciously turning back to pre-Christian traditions. But for Christians, however wonderful the creation might be, it remains the creation, not the Creator. Nature is good and points to God, but it is not divine – it is not to be worshipped; only God the Creator is to be worshipped. As the gift of God, the created world is to be received thankfully, to be loved, revelled in, and cherished.
But as I keep talking of the goodness of God's creation, perhaps there arises in your mind one of the hardest questions that Christians have to struggle with. If the world is the good creation of a wise, loving God, why is there so much evil and suffering in it? We could spend a lot of time on that question, but for now I'll just make a couple of brief references to our New Testament readings. In Romans 8, Paul movingly describes the groaning not just of human beings but of the whole creation. He knows that the world as we now experience it is full of suffering and frustration. But Paul is confident that the God who has raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also restore his whole creation to the glory for which it was made. And Paul's hope for the renewal of the creation is connected to the opening of John's Gospel. Note how John 1 echoes Genesis 1. Genesis starts: 'In the beginning...God created the heavens and the earth' and John opens his account of Jesus: 'In the beginning was the Word...and all things were made through him' (John 1:1, 3). Genesis speaks of the creation of all things by God, but John is now telling us about a new creation, the recreation of all that God has made through Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God made flesh. And for both Paul and John the call of God to us through Jesus Christ is to embrace the new creation, the new life, that comes into the world in him.
We come now to a third and final point about the Christian understanding of God as our Creator. This concerns the question of our relationship to the world around us, our place as human beings in God's creation. Let me quote Sophie's World again. Earlier I in fact mentioned the second question which Sophie has to reckon with: 'Where did the world come from?' But the first question was simply 'Who are you?' That question has a very contemporary ring to it. 'Who am I? How can I find the real me?' If I bring that question to our reading from Genesis, I may not find that it has something specific to say to me as an individual about who exactly I am, but it does give to us all the key to understanding our place as human beings in God's world. It tells us that we are created, male and female, in the image of God. (Genesis 1:26-27)
This is the foundation of the Christian understanding of what it means to be a human being: to know that we are created in the image of God. That teaches us to be humble; just as the animals and the plants, we are created by God: as the Psalm puts it, 'It is he who has made us, and not we ourselves' (Psalm 100:3). But if this teaches us humility, it also gives us our true dignity, and also awesome responsibility: we are created not just anyhow, but in the image of God. Stars and mountains, rivers and flowers, eagles and dolphins may all reflect God's glory in their own ways, but none of them are created in the image of God. That privilege is given to human beings alone. It implies kinship to God and a capacity for a special relationship to God, enjoyed by no other part of the creation.
So the doctrine of God as our Creator has a great bearing on our knowledge of ourselves and our search for our true human identity. This applies powerfully to each one of us, and not just to great cosmic questions about the universe and its origin. It means that each of us can see our life as a sheer gift from God our Creator, who not only gave us life but also loves us and wills for us that we should reach our true potential as bearers of God's image. It isn't always easy to be positive about the value of our lives. In one of his poems John Donne, presumably at a time when he is tempted to despair, asks God: 'Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?' The answer is of course 'No'. God has made us in his image and God treasures us. And as I mentioned earlier, the God who has made us in his image has also come into this world in Jesus Christ to make all things new and to call us to be part of the new creation. The basis of our true worth and the key to our true identity is nothing that we can achieve ourselves but rather the attitude to us of the God who created us in his image and in Christ calls us to new life. And this is not just a matter for personal consolation; it also has powerful social and political implications, because it forbids us to write off any other members of the human race, all made in God's image, all embraced by Christ's love, as being of less value than ourselves or the wider group to which we belong.
This privilege also brings great responsibility. As bearers of God's image, human beings are called to care for the world and order it with wisdom and love on God's behalf. In the current ecological crisis there has been a new awareness among Christians of our responsibility not to exploit the world selfishly, getting out of it as much as we can for our own pleasure, with no thought for the consequences, but rather to be stewards of God's creation, looking after it with humility, respect and wisdom, helping it to fulfil the purpose for which it was made. We look forward to reflecting more about this with Dominic next Sunday.
David Marshall