During my first year at the university where I currently work and teach, the building where the religion department would reside was under major renovation and the theology faculty was housed temporarily in a suite of offices in the science building. It was an interesting year, this year of exile, as we awaited our exodus. Housing a theology faculty in a science building may seem to be a cruel joke played by administration, but it was a beneficial experience and it is perhaps good to be reminded that, while theologians have oftentimes celebrated the demise of positivism, its aroma hangs quite heavy over some working scientists’ laboratories. Make no mistake – our hosts were quite hospitable. But I'm not certain that some of them always knew what to make of us.

To keep my bearings during that year I scrawled a single phrase upon the chalk board in my office: ‘Creation is the context of the covenant’.Footnote ¹ This shortened phrase of Karl Barth reminded me each day of the deep and abiding connection between my office and the office of the chemist down the hall. In some way we were engaged in related, though assuredly differentiated, tasks, both seeking understanding in God's world, a world of molecules and microscopes, of Moses and Mary. As Barth so carefully explains, creation and covenant are ever distinguished and not to be confused, but nor are they to be separated or divided. The creation does not stand as an autonomous entity, a brute fact, nor is it left to its own devices. Rather, while it has its own integrity and indeed purposes, it exists not only for itself, but as the context for a relation of God and humanity in Jesus Christ, established before the world's very foundation and therein for a relation between God and all creatures.Footnote ² The world that God created is the very same world where Jesus lived and walked and died. Ever since the shunning of Marcion and the shedding of the Gnostics, the church has firmly held to its core conviction that creation and redemption belong together, that there is but one good world created and redeemed by one good God. So, while fully acknowledging that the God Christians worship and seek to know stands apart from the world and cannot be confused with the world nor known through scientific instrumentation and measurement, it must also be said that the physical world in which both theologians and chemists work, as well as where both the believer and the unbeliever reside, is commonly shared, if quite differently perceived.Footnote ³

To speak of creation is therefore implicitly yet intentionally to speak not first of a cosmology but of a relation between God and the world. As often noted, this acknowledged relation is why Christians speak of creation rather than simply of nature. For the Christian theologian, it is not only an understanding of God that one must strive to achieve, or an understanding of the created order, but of the relation between them. Indeed, one cannot understand the doctrine of God or that of creation without understanding this relation, for these are understood in light of the relation itself, even as the relation is comprehended only in light of God's revelation as this itself is known through faith.Footnote ⁴ In brief, to speak of creation (rather than nature) is to speak of God, for creation implies a Creator with a logical and analytic assurance. It is the nature of this relation that I would like to examine in this paper.

The Question of God's Relation to Creation

Kathryn Tanner, in her penetrating book God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment, strives to present the logic of this relation in terms of its deep and underlying grammar.Footnote ⁵ Her stated purpose is to provide an investigation of theological language pertaining to God and the world, as she writes: ‘My direct concern is not for the object of theological discourse – e.g., God, the world, eternal life – but for theologians’ talk about it’. Her goal is to specify ‘rules for forming first order statements’.Footnote ⁶ Some might be a bit disconcerted by such a stark separation between language and reality and such a thorough-going linguistic turn in which material talk about God and world is traded for formal rules which regulate discourse, or unsettled by Tanner's statement that ‘[t]heologians seem to know that it is appropriate to say certain things about God without quite knowing what they mean by doing so’.Footnote ⁷ Yet she herself notes that her pragmatist method need not necessarily imply ‘non-referentiality’ or anti-realism and indeed insists upon the need for a referential aspect to theological language and the place in theology for first-order claims about God and the world.Footnote ⁸ For our present discussion, while recognising the complexity of issues surrounding reality and reference in regard to theological discourse and the importance of their investigation, I want to leave such deep linguistic waters and move on to Tanner's central argument.Footnote ⁹

At the heart of Tanner's work lies the explication of two convictions pertaining to and governing discourse regarding the relation between God and the world, convictions that she takes to be basic for Christian theology and practice. The first is that God is transcendent. God's transcendence is a central presupposition of various Christian practices:

The second conviction is that God is active as a creative agent in the world. This conviction is readily witnessed throughout the biblical canon, wherein God is described as both acting to create and sustain the world.Footnote ¹¹ Reconciling these two fundamental convictions of God's transcendence and God's creative agency, these rules that determine all that may and must be said of God's relation to the world, lies at the heart of Tanner's work and is her central task. She rightly argues that only a radical transcendence that portrays the relation between divine and creaturely causation as incommensurable allows one to avoid a competitive and contrastive view of God's transcendence and creative activity in which an increase in divine agency necessarily entails a decrease in human freedom.Footnote ¹²

Few theologians of a traditional bent would quarrel with these convictions, or with Tanner's claim that they are central to Christian theology and practice across various ecclesial traditions. Of course, it must be acknowledged that some have discarded such claims of transcendence, evident in types of process theology, for example, and illustrated in Whitehead's axiom: ‘It is as true to say that God creates the world as the world creates God’.Footnote ¹³ Such approaches are exceptions, however, rather than the norm. Nevertheless, in light of such approaches, one is warranted to ask the question whether theology can rest content with elucidating the interplay between these formal rules and defending their compatibility amidst seeming contradiction without specifying their ground. In other words, we might ask from where do these formal rules come and how are they themselves grounded for Christian belief and practice? What is distinctive about the Christian doctrine of creation so that these convictions themselves become central? And why do Christians have these specific conceptions of divine transcendence and activity rather than others?Footnote ¹⁴

The Distinctiveness of the Christian Answer

These are valid questions, for such convictions regarding divine transcendence and activity were, of course, not self-apparent in the matrix of Christian faith (nor are they so today). In pagan thought, divinity stood as the highest principle within the cosmos. One could of course differentiate between things within the world, but only in Christian thought (as prefigured in Judaism) does the world itself become but one term within a distinction, a relation between God and the world.Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast, pagan divinities exist in relation to other things within the world and they do so of necessity whereby their very identity and essence is dependent upon this relation.Footnote ¹⁶ They cannot exist without the world.

This judgement is, moreover, as true of later Greek philosophical notions of an abstract deity as of the gods of Homer and Hesiod's anthropomorphic myths. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover stands at the pinnacle of a cosmology; it does not stand above the cosmology itself as its transcendent creator.Footnote ¹⁷ Even Plato's seemingly transcendent One, or the Good, exists only as a part of all that is, as ‘one over, for and in many’, never as the One or the Good only in itself.Footnote ¹⁸ And when Greek notions of divinity do emphasise a type of transcendent other-worldliness, as in Plato's understanding of the eternal forms, they do so only by making the identity and integrity of divinity dependent upon its absolute removal and distance from the world's instability and becoming. The more stark the contrast between the divine world and the sensible one, the more the divine is isolated from the physical world and excluded from action within it. Greek thought is thus devoid of true transcendence and, insofar as it begins to approach such a conception, it excludes divine participation within the world.Footnote ¹⁹ Divine transcendence and divine activity are thus mutually exclusive. In fact, it is very questionable whether we should speak of either at all. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover exists within the universe and his exalted state within it is such that he may influence the other realities of the universe, but he neither acts within it nor exercises providence over it.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, the pagan universe is itself a divinised one; as Plato relates in the Timaeus, the universe is ‘a single living thing that contains within itself all living things, mortal or immortal’.Footnote ²¹ This position leads Richard Norris to conclude that Plato presents us with a picture in which the cosmos ‘in virtue of the supreme Intelligence which indwells it, is a god’.Footnote ²² The Greeks lived in a divinised universe, even after jettisoning the early anthropomorphisms of Homer and Hesiod's gods, and the divine was the highest principle within this universe.

The Christian conception of God's relation to creation diverges significantly from such understandings. Christians (drawing upon earlier Jewish traditions) think of both the world and God differently from their pagan contemporaries.Footnote ²³ First, whereas for the Greeks the world is understood basically as a natural order, an order that is eternal and constitutes a cosmology, the Jewish and Christian conception sees the world as the context of human life and human decisions occurring within temporal history and examined and evaluated in light of their correspondence to God's will and purposes.Footnote ²⁴ The Old Testament thus portrays God's relation with the world not in metaphysical but moral terms and the New Testament portrays this relation especially in terms of grace and mercy. As Norris notes, it is not that the world of nature is ignored, but it is not the most important thing: ‘It is like the stage setting for a drama: subordinate both to the actors and their movements and to the purposes of the author or producer. It finds its meaning in the developing story for which it provides a setting.’Footnote ²⁵

Furthermore, the Christian conception of God also differs greatly from pagan understandings. For the Greeks, the word ‘god’ denotes a kind of thing and can therefore be applied to various beings, whereas in Judaism and Christianity, God is a singular being who is known through a specific history of events.Footnote ²⁶ As Norris concludes: ‘The Greek deity is the final point of stability in a world of apparently senseless change. The Hebrew Lord is the initiator of significant change which transforms the character of historical experience.’Footnote ²⁷

The Christian conceptions of God, of the world and of their relation are thus very different to pagan conceptions. The notion of God's creation of the world ex nihilo is intimated in scripture,Footnote ²⁸ and firmly established by the time of Irenaeus, who takes it for granted. God stands apart from the world, but not against it. God is defined in relation to God's own being and free decisions, not in contrast and opposition to other realities.Footnote ²⁹ Contrastive notions of the divine and the human are pagan, not Christian, notions. Indeed, according to Tanner, it is precisely the radical transcendence of God that makes divine activity coherent, for God is not set over against the world in such a manner that his activity in it would lessen his divinity and thus make such activity problematic. Rather, God's independence from the world makes his activity possible without either lessening his deity or undermining the integrity of the created order, for divine and human causality are incommensurable and, in Tanner's words, related not in inverse but direct proportion. God's activity does not threaten human activity but establishes it.Footnote ³⁰

In sum, there is quite simply no equivalent in Greek or Roman pagan thought (or, for that matter, in ancient Near Eastern thought) to the Christian idea of a transcendent God who creates a contingent world out of free grace rather than necessity, who creates out of nothing (ex nihilo), a God who would exist with no loss of goodness or majesty even if the world was not.Footnote ³¹ And it is important to note, as Robert Sokowlowski does, that the movement from the first (pagan) conception to the second (Christian) one has nothing to do with intelligence, nor is it a move simply along the path of reason, but it is a very different move altogether. We might inquire how this move was made.

To begin, we might remember that the origin of Israel's conviction pertaining to God's transcendence over creation and distinct activity within it did not occur as the result of contemplating creation's order. Rather than following such an examination of nature, the conviction that God was the transcendent creator and ruler of heaven and earth who transcended ethnic and national boundaries was the result of God's salvific action expressed in superiority over all rival gods, be they Egyptian in the Exodus, or Canaanite or Babylonian. In the Old Testament, creation and redemption are often explicitly related, as in Isaiah 43:1: ‘But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’Footnote ³² The creation accounts in scripture, including the prototypical accounts in Genesis, are not primarily cosmological explanations of the natural order, but identity narratives of God and his relation to the world which were written in light of God's salvific action.Footnote ³³ The understanding of creation that Christianity inherits from Judaism is one in which God and the world are distinct and in which God is superior to the world in such a way that his lordship and sovereignty exercised in his mighty acts of redemption imply his independence from the world so that creation itself is a free, gracious and sovereign act.

It is this inheritance that Christianity receives from Judaism, an inheritance of a distinction drawn between God and the world in which God is both transcendent and active within the world. This distinction was not only related to liturgy but to life. The Christian distinction between God and the world is not only a theoretical distinction, but a lived distinction, first lived in anticipation in the life of Israel and fully lived and expressed in the life and teaching of Jesus.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, not only is it witnessed in the life and teaching of Jesus, but, and this is the crux of the matter, it is revealed and established in the existence of the divine incarnate Son. Christ reveals the true relation between God and the world precisely because he is God with us. So not only is this relation revealed in Jesus, it is indeed established in this mystery and miracle. In other words, Jesus Christ does not merely teach the distinction and relation of God and the world; he is its very revelation, basis and ground, the Word become flesh, the singular union of God and nature upon which all other relations between God and creatures are predicated and in which they exist as analogical reflections of this singular, unique and true relation. The distinction and relation between God and creation finds not only its noetic, but also its ontic, basis in him.

If this is true, then here one must begin to distinguish between chronological and logical priority. It is true that the distinction between the Creator and the creation is witnessed in Israel's history long before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and the church's reflection upon his life, death and resurrection. Yet the New Testament does not see Christ simply as an instance, no matter how unique, of a general relation between God and the world. Rather, Christ is portrayed as the basis for the world's very existence and the foundation upon which all of God's relations with particular creatures are established, not an object or product, but the subject and agent, of creation. What is remarkable of the vast majority of references to creation in the New Testament is that they are christologically determined and emphasise precisely this point. So, for instance, in the prologue to the Gospel of John, the Word who becomes flesh is the Word through whom all things came into being and without whom ‘not one thing came into being’.Footnote ³⁵ This prologue is echoed in that of Hebrews, where the Son is appointed by God as the ‘heir of all things, through whom he also created the world’.Footnote ³⁶ Paul can state, in the very context of a discussion of meat offered to idols where he stresses that there is only one true God regardless of claims for other gods in heaven and earth, that ‘for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’.Footnote ³⁷ The context, the parallelism and the claim itself are simply remarkable, for central to Judaism's understanding was that God alone participated in creation.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, perhaps the most exalted of all such texts occurs in Colossians where, after describing the redemption and forgiveness effected by the Father through the Son, the author describes this Son in glorious terms: ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or power – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together.’Footnote ³⁹ It is noteworthy that the very phrase that the Nicene Creed attributes to the Father, the Creator of all things ‘visible and invisible’, is in fact attributed to the Son in this passage that displays Christ as both the origin and the goal of creation.Footnote ⁴⁰

For the New Testament, then, as for the Old, creation and redemption are closely related. In conjoining divine creative and redemptive freedom, Paul can thus assert: ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’Footnote ⁴¹ Therefore we can conclude, as does Anne Clifford, that ‘just as the primary purpose of the Old Testament accounts of creation is not to report the physical beginnings of the world but is to express faith in God, so the New Testament creation theology is a reflection of the meaning of Christ’.Footnote ⁴²

After the close of the apostolic period, the patristic writers continued this trajectory of closely relating creation and redemption, creation and Christology, seen nowhere so clearly as in their appropriation and articulation of a Logos Christology in expounding upon created order. Drawing upon the implicit though unsystematic formulations of scripture, they came to confirm the transcendence of God as well as his activity within the world, both closely tied to an understanding of the incarnate Logos. As we have seen, these two mutual affirmations were not self-evident at the time, either individually or in tandem, and their intimate pairing is unique to Christian writers.Footnote ⁴³

Later, Irenaeus relates that God acts in the world through his two hands, the Son and the Spirit.Footnote ⁴⁴ Regardless of the real problems created by the merging of biblical and Platonic thought in Irenaeus, as well as other early thinkers, the centrality and uniqueness of the revelation in Christ is accepted and this is the key to their understanding of creation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, it is precisely the uniqueness and concreteness of the divine and creaturely union in Christ that allows Tertullian to overcome the Greek contrastive accounts of divine changelessness and worldly change. That the incarnation occurred, Tertullian argued, is precisely why one cannot claim that should God enter into a real direct relation with the world his divine nature would be compromised.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Tertullian, it is the actuality of the incarnation, not a preconceived notion of divinity which precludes intimacy with the world, that must dictate one's understanding of God, the world and their relation.

Such close bonds between Christ and creation were beginning to fray, however, by the late patristic period, in which Platonic forms translated into the mind of God, rather than Christ, began to be seen as the archetype for creation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus the christological emphasis that provided the shape for the doctrine of creation began to wane. So, for example, as Colin Gunton notes, christology is almost entirely absent in Augustine's doctrine of creation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such an absence became the rule rather than the exception and this would remain the case for a long stretch of church history. Creation and Christ were ever more treated as independent topics of theological discourse.

The Answer Re-articulated

Moving far ahead in time, it is in the modern period that one finds a thorough-going christological reshaping of the doctrine of creation (though this move is perhaps prefigured in the Reformation). Two attempts to read the doctrine of creation in light of the second article appear in the modern period with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. At the risk of doing justice to neither in such limitations of space, I will examine each in turn.

Even though Schleiermacher's doctrine of creation proper is relegated to a brief section of the Glaubenslehre, or Christian Faith, it is a very significant doctrine in that, as combined and subsumed under the doctrine of preservation, it exerts an influence upon the entire work.Footnote ⁴⁹ Schleiermacher's dogmatics is nothing if not systematic and every doctrine has a reciprocal influence upon every other one. For this reason, the doctrine of Christ in the second part of the Glaubenslehre exerts an influence upon the first part in which the doctrine of creation is addressed. This judgement is corroborated when it is noted that, for Schleiermacher, every Christian doctrine must be derived from Christ's own self-proclamation which comes to be the basis for Christian piety, for all Christian piety is grounded in the appearance of Christ the Redeemer.Footnote ⁵⁰

Schleiermacher sees Christ as the culmination of both God's creative and redemptive purposes for, as Schleiermacher states, ‘He alone is destined gradually to quicken the whole human race into higher life’ (CF §13.1). Yet the appearance of Christ in history is not an absolute miracle, a discrete divine action, but a natural fact, for regardless of how different Christ is from other persons generally, his perfect God-consciousness demonstrates an intrinsic capacity and possibility within humanity to take the divine into itself, expressed as the ‘highest development of its spiritual power’ (CF §13.1). That Christ is the highest instantiation of a human capacity for the God-consciousness does not mean for Schleiermacher that Christ's appearance and his God-consciousness are simply the actualisation of latent historical possibilities. Christ's appearance is divinely determined in an eternal decision; it is not simply the product of an evolutionary development of the God-consciousness within history. Nevertheless, Christ stands as the pinnacle of a human development, even though one that is grounded in an eternal election. Christ is not the incarnation of an eternal divine subject, but appears in history through an eternal divine decree.Footnote ⁵¹

It is important to understand why Schleiermacher takes this christological route rather than a more traditional one of a true incarnation of God in history. Two reasons for this approach can be discerned. The first is explicitly stated and dogmatic in nature. The second is implicit and due to a consideration external to dogmatics proper.

The first reason that christology is redefined as it is for Schleiermacher is apparent in light of his doctrine of preservation (which itself encapsulates the doctrine of creation). There, Schleiermacher maintains that the feeling of absolute dependence arises out of the awareness that all finite existence is determined by and contingent upon the interdependence of nature (the Naturzusammenhang) (see CF §46). The very ground for our relation to God, the feeling of absolute dependence, is thus itself dependent upon and arises from the uniformity of nature which admits of no exceptions.

Such a view of the world makes miracles especially problematic. Insofar as they are defined as disturbances of the constant causal nexus, their occurrence would undermine and indeed destroy the basis for the feeling of absolute dependence. Therefore a true miracle is an impossibility and such miracles need to be abandoned. In the end, this includes any true incarnation, if such is understood to mean a discrete and specific act of God in history. Schleiermacher does, in fact, speak of Christ's appearance as miraculous, yet this is always qualified to mean that Christ's appearance cannot be explained by his surrounding history and context but rather requires a grounding in an eternal divine law (Gesetz), itself established in an eternal decree (CF §89.2). It does not imply a discrete activity of God in history. Again, this does not mean that Christ is simply the product of historical forces, for his appearance is grounded in an eternal election. But Christ does not exist prior to his appearance, or as the creator of the stage of his own dramatic activity.Footnote ⁵² He may be the goal, but he is not the agent, of creation.

The second reason why Schleiermacher abandons traditional notions of incarnation and miracle needs to be pieced together. In a letter to Friedrich Lücke, Schleiermacher discusses the organisation of the Glaubenslehre into the First and Second Parts and states that he could have reversed the order of these major divisions. Yet one reason he provides for not doing so is his belief that only the present organisation can adequately address the issue of reconciling Christian faith and free scientific investigation.Footnote ⁵³ If this is so, then we might rightly point out that this external, non-dogmatic concern proves that not only internal dogmatic questions, but external ones, shaped the character of Schleiermacher's doctrine of creation as well as his christology.

In short, a concern to preserve a covenant of peace between dogmatics and natural science, joined to problematic metaphysical presuppositions regarding the relationship between God and the natural order, directly led to a problematic christology.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is one thing to abandon the notion of a literal six-day creation, as Schleiermacher feels must be done in light of modern scientific understandings of the universe. It is another thing altogether to abandon Nicene and Chalcedonian christology, a christology of a true incarnation. Yet Schleiermacher's understanding of the God–world relation required both.Footnote ⁵⁵

Modern scientific assumptions explicitly drive the first rejection; but they may well also implicitly drive the second. Indeed, in his letter to Dr Lücke, Schleiermacher relates that the very notion of creation itself may need to be abandoned in light of a new scientific understanding of the world, which was, of course, that of a closed deterministic universe.Footnote ⁵⁶ Schleiermacher held that scientific advancement would lead to a comprehensive view of the world, a prognostication that has not come to pass, while the conception of a closed universe that so influenced Schleiermacher has in fact passed away.

Turning to Barth, one is first struck by notable similarities to Schleiermacher. Like Schleiermacher, Barth has no desire to root a doctrine of creation in speculative principles (of either a metaphysical or scientific nature).Footnote ⁵⁷ Speculative convictions, for both Schleiermacher and Barth, are abstract, in that they are not derived from God's specific revelation, which Schleiermacher understands to be the Christian self-consciousness and which Barth understands to be the specific revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Both thereby claim to begin with dogmatic, rather than speculative, approaches to the question of creation (though, as we have just seen, Schleiermacher was not successful in this regard). But very important differences appear, for whereas Schleiermacher understands the causal order as uniform and unbroken so that Christ's own appearance is the product of a natural development grounded in an eternal election, Barth reappropriates and reformulates traditional Chalcedonian christology in a manner in which Christ is once again seen first and foremost as God's in-breaking into the world, a true miracle, rather than as the highest point of its natural development. So while there are important formal similarities in christology between the two that may even provide warrant for saying that both have a christological orientation in regards to their doctrines of election and creation (most notably that both see a very close relationship between election and christology), what also needs to be said is that the nature of this orientation is quite different for each.Footnote ⁵⁸

For Schleiermacher, Christ is the goal of the created order, but he is not itself its Creator and Lord. Christ may be understood as the hermeneutical key for understanding the purpose of creation, but in reality a preconceived notion of the God–world relation greatly influences and shapes the christology itself. For Schleiermacher, any true notion of incarnation is problematic, for any disturbance in the universal causal nexus, any true miracle, any discrete action of God, would in fact undermine the feeling of absolute dependence and thus undercut piety itself. Christ's appearance is grounded in an eternal decree, but Christ himself is the product of the natural order ordained to give rise to him. And in this, while we can speak of Christ as central to creation, he is so in a way quite different than for Barth, for whom a general God–world relation does not determine christology, but a specific Chalcedonian christology is the basis for understanding all other relations between God and the world.Footnote ⁵⁹

To fully explore this Chalcedonian christology and its effect upon Barth's dogmatics would take us far afield. Yet, it can be briefly summarised with special reference to the doctrine of creation. For Barth, Christ is not only the goal but the ground of creation as he is the ontic and noetic basis for all relations between God and the world. As Barth states: ‘Jesus Christ is the Word by which the knowledge of creation is mediated to us because He is the Word by which God has fulfilled creation and continually maintains and rules it’ (CD III/1, p. 28). Creation and christology are thus intricately tied together because Christ is the subject of both creation and incarnation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, the relation between God and creation is itself established and revealed in God's eternal election to be God for us in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, creation can only be understood in the light of Christ and redemption: ‘What is said in prospect of Him can be understood only in retrospect of Him. That is, the whole circumference of the content of Scripture including the truth and reality of the creation of the world by God, can be understood only from this centre’ (CD III/1, p. 24).Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, God the Creator is only fully known as God the Redeemer and it is the second that is the key to understanding the first, rather than the first being the key to the second, just as we know the Father through the revelation of the Son.

Without this christological grounding for understanding such notions as God's transcendence and activity, Barth contends, we can do little better than default to metaphysical and mythical speculation. In contrast to this, Christ is the hermeneutical key for both creation and scripture. Barth's understanding of the scriptural narrative and of doctrine is better conceived as a set of concentric circles with Christ at the centre, than as a set of pearls on a chronological string. So Barth maintains that the creation narratives themselves can only be rightfully understood when seen in the light of Christ: ‘Indeed, what is the value of the rest of the biblical witness to creation without the centre? . . . It is here that God Himself has revealed the relationship between Creator and creature – its basis, norm and meaning. At this point we are secured on all sides. And everything else that is to be learned from the Bible may be learned in nuce here’ (CD III/1, p. 25).

For Barth, the incarnation is a unique and unsubstitutable event, the singular instance of incarnate unity between God and humanity. As singular, it has no true analogy.Footnote ⁶² And yet it is also the basis for every other specific relation of God with his creatures and for the general relation of God and the world. In Christ, we learn the identity of God, but not only of God, but also of the creature. Christ is the revelation of both God and creation, the one who reveals that which he himself has created. Barth thus does not eliminate but reverses analogical predication.

In Christ, Creator and creature are bound together and their relation revealed. In Christ, God is shown to be superior to the world and distinct from it, yet in Christ is also revealed the truth that God will not be God without the world and acts within it. This relation with the world is not one of necessity, but of a free divine decision made in eternity. This decision entails that the creature has its own reality, its own causality, its own self-determination, as this itself has been determined by God. God has, outside of himself, in Barth's terms, a partner, who, though subject to the divine lordship, has his or her own integrity, existence and nature (CD III/1, p. 25). So God is not confused with the creation, but nor is God separated from this creation. God lives in fellowship with the creature as creation's Lord and Saviour. And we know this not by examining the fluctuations of the world life process, nor the regularity of the universe. The first may leave us shaken, the second may leave us cold and both are at best ambiguous. Rather, we know this God and his fellowship with us in Christ through the Holy Spirit, and through Christ we know the creation as good amidst its brutal realities and cold indifference.

Barth thus provides the most consistently christological doctrine of creation since the patristic era. In returning to such a reading of the doctrine of creation, Barth is in effect jumping over the deistic notions of the modern Enlightenment period, as well as earlier medieval ones, and in truth takes up themes not prevalent since the time of Irenaeus. Barth's dialectical relationship between creation and covenant is an attempt to reappropriate the New Testament themes of Christ as the divine agent of creation who, with the Father and the Spirit, brings the world into existence in order to save it. Regardless of the difficult theological topics this may raise (of which the old supralapsarian and infralapsarian debates are examples), for Barth the world is created to exist in a redeemed relationship with God. Such a claim neither denies the tragedy of sin nor the distinction of creation and redemption. Yet the latter provides the interpretative key to the former. For Barth, Christ is not only ordained to appear in history, but he is creation's very Creator and Lord, not only the goal, but the ground, of creation.

In sum, though both Schleiermacher and Barth present us with christologically focused doctrines of creation, the differences between them are significant. For while Christ is central as the goal of creation for Schleiermacher, the understanding of creation itself is derived from reflection upon the immediate feeling of absolute dependence and, while this itself derives from Christ, it is apparent that a preconceived notion of an unbroken causal order exerts a determining influence upon both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of Christ in ways that are problematic for each.Footnote ⁶³ In the end, for Schleiermacher, Christ is the product of the world process as divinely established, whereas for Barth, Christ is the Subject and Lord of the process itself.

Implications of the Answer

Any future doctrine of creation would do well to take this theme of the relation of Christ and creation, evidenced from the New Testament through Schleiermacher and Barth, into account. Of course, it must extend beyond these latter figures, though it is not feasible for more recent theologians and trends to be examined here. This historical survey is not meant to be exhaustive in any respect. Certainly the pneumatological themes of creation require further study. Nevertheless, this investigation does highlight its intended topic, i.e. the centrality of christology for the doctrine of creation. In light of this examination, I would like to provide three final suggestions for further reflection regarding the doctrine of creation.

The first is that any Christian doctrine of creation should begin and end with a recognition that this doctrine, like all others, is an article of faith. To confess the doctrine as an article of faith entails that we recognise that it is grounded in God's revelation in Christ and that our answering of the christological question of creation is prior to addressing any scientific ones. That question is precisely the nature of the relationship between Christ and creation and the explication of this relation. If this is so, then the most important decision one must make about the world is a christological one: is Jesus Christ the product of the cosmological process, grounded in immutable laws and an evolutionary development, or is he the Lord of both such law and development? This is the first question that must be answered in formulating a Christian doctrine of creation and how we answer this question at the centre shapes all that follows along the periphery. Moreover, I would contend that any pneumatological reflections upon the Spirit's work in creation cannot be divorced from these christological concerns. It is a matter of logical order, not historical accident, that the ancient church focused upon christological concerns prior to pneumatological ones. To divorce the Spirit from the Son in any doctrine of creation is to threaten not only the christological aspects of creation, but the very trinitarian nature of it. Of course the reverse is true as well, for to ignore the Spirit in creation is to ignore God's ever present work in the world and its teleological goal. But the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ and not another Spirit and it is the former christological emphasis that seems most often jeopardised today, rather than the latter pneumatological one.

Moreover, if Christ truly is the agent rather than the product of creation, even while standing in his humanity within the created order itself, then only when christology is misconstrued can such an approach be derided as anthropocentric, for while it may be a denigration of nature to view it as ultimately serving humanity, it is not a denigration but an exaltation of nature to see it as the stage on which the history of Christ is displayed, for the value of the stage is not lost but found in the preeminence of the play and its Author and preeminent Actor. While an anthropocentric view of nature may lessen creation's dignity, a christocentric view of nature grounds such dignity.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, one could argue that the only way to guard against an anthropocentric understanding of creation is to maintain a christocentric and really, richly trinitarian, understanding of creation.Footnote ⁶⁵ Only such an understanding preserves the superabundant richness of the world and superfluous beauty that delight and serve God and Christ and Spirit in ways that exceed human appreciation and utilisation. Rationalistic and pantheistic versions of the world can only fail on this score. Deism inevitably makes humanity lord of this world in God's absence and pantheism burdens the world with an impossible task of providing for its own salvation, for the loss of God's freedom from the world is ultimately the loss of God's power to save it. Such in the end leads humanity to act as such a saviour. What can be left for us, then, but self-worship.Footnote ⁶⁶

The first suggestion that I am making is therefore nothing less than that the doctrine of creation be taken up again in a new way by dogmatics, rather than conceded as the sole possession of the popular but amorphous religion and science dialogue within religious studies. It is a call to work from the centre outward, rather than the reverse. This suggestion is not meant to deny that scientific discoveries will impinge upon theological questions, nor is it meant to imply that the relation between dogmatics and natural science will be (or should be) an easy one of mutual harmony (or of mutual neglect). Barth himself noted in the preface to his discussion of creation that this relation between dogmatics and the natural sciences would exercise many a theological mind.Footnote ⁶⁷ This needs to be remembered by those who fault Barth for neglecting such questions himself (regardless of how we judge the validity of such criticisms). Nevertheless, the periphery of the doctrine of creation must not be addressed to the neglect of the centre, which is confessional and christological and which itself must shape the peripheral questions. To labour only at the edges is to ensure that our reflection on creation is not only determined by current scientific theory, but also bound to its fate. Part of Barth's ongoing relevance is no doubt tied to his refusal to stake his doctrine of creation upon a particular scientific view of the world, a view that now would be quite dated. As we saw, Schleiermacher did not escape this fate with his allegiance to a deterministic closed universe, an allegiance that caused him to make concessions and moves in christology that now appear not only unnecessary but unconvincing and contrived.

Second, the judgement that the doctrine of creation ought to begin with its centre entails that it begin with the acknowledgement that the God of creation is none other than the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who, with the Holy Spirit, creates the world. What is needed is a thoroughly trinitarian doctrine of creation that includes within it a christological centre and pneumatological focus. Whereas a significant amount of literature addressing the interface of theology and science begins by moving from an amorphously described general religious experience to an undefined God, the Christian doctrine of creation is truly trinitarian in shape. As Barth rightfully asserts: ‘And it is again as this Eternal Father, and not in any other way, that He reveals Himself as the Creator, i.e., in Jesus Christ His Son by the Holy Ghost, in exact correspondence to the way in which He has inwardly resolved and decided to be the Creator. As He cannot be the Creator except as the Father, He is not known at all unless He is known in this revelation of Himself’ (CD III/1, p. 12). Any revitalisation of the doctrine of creation must take place upon a solid trinitarian commitment and creation is thus to be seen in light of every article of the creed.Footnote ⁶⁸

In addition, the grammar of the God–world relation must be predicated in light of the unique relation between God and creation in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In short, it is the incarnation alone that assures us that God takes on a reality other than himself, that he visits a world from which he is distinct. The incarnation grounds both the Christian claim of God's transcendence (which is an ontological claim of freedom rather than a spatial category), as well as the claim that God is not threatened by the world but enters and acts within the world without loss of freedom, identity, or the distinction of the Creator and the creation. It is the incarnation that provides the ultimate basis for the Christian conviction that God is both transcendent and distinct from the world and present and active within it, and that provides the way that the Spirit's own transcendence can be understood, thus staving off all types of pantheism (whether Stoic, or evolutionary, or any other).Footnote ⁶⁹ With this in mind, any Christian doctrine of the creation must move from the identity of the triune God to the identity of the world, for whereas God's identity is necessary and assured, determined not in contrast to the world but in a freely chosen decision for it, it is the world's identity that is contingent and in need of justification. To remember this is to avoid two further errors.

First, while it must be admitted that all revelation is experienced, not all experience is revelatory and this is oft forgotten. To attempt to ascertain God's character from a general investigation of religious awareness or the world's order and process is deeply problematic and akin to speculation without constriction. Such can never serve as the basis for a truly Christian doctrine of creation, which can only be rooted in the heart of revelation itself. As Sokowlowski insightfully comments:

Second, and in a related vein, to fail to begin with Christ and the logic of Chalcedon as the paradigm for the relation of God and creation, which recognises both the unity yet differentiation between God and the world, oftentimes leads to a faulty use of transcendental arguments, in which we move back from general conceptions of the world to specific conceptions of God. Such problematic deductions are readily called to mind: the world is in process and therefore God is developing as well; or, the world evolves and therefore God does, too. Such mental manœuvres are remarkably old. For example, consider Canaanite and Hellenic logic, by no means unique: the world is a cycle of life and death and therefore God is involved in this cycle as well; the world is rife with fecundity and sexuality and therefore God is tied to and participates in such cycles. At its nadir and its worst, some modern religious literature reminds one of sophisticated Baal worship, evidenced in a return to pagan spirituality that exalts creation at the expense of redemption, failing to realise that to sacrifice God's transcendence is nothing less than to sacrifice God's freedom to save the world.Footnote ⁷¹ In some accounts, the particularity and uniqueness of Christ is sacrificed for a ‘cosmic Christ’, of whom Jesus is simply one manifestation.Footnote ⁷² The cosmic Christ is identified as the immanent divinity in all things, a life principle that fills the world in a return to a revived paganism. As C. S. Lewis once remarked, such advancements are not progress, but retrogression.Footnote ⁷³ Such problematic alternatives to historic Christian faith should remind us that a perhaps very necessary rethinking of the means by which God created the world does not necessarily mean that God's relation to the world must be rethought in such a way that divine transcendence and discrete activity are thrown overboard as obsolete cargo. Means and relation are two different, but frequently confused, things. Such confusion fosters problematic transcendental deductions, as well as a failure to distinguish natural processes from intentional agency and to recognise that divine and created causality are incommensurable.Footnote ⁷⁴

Finally, to sum up all that has been said, we should not treat the God of creation in abstraction from the God of redemption. Indeed, only as we know the latter do we truly know the former. As Barth states: ‘God the Creator is not the supreme being of our own choice and fancy. He is the Lord of the history of Israel’ (CD III/1, p. 13). Yet today God is at times redefined, the boundaries between God and the world broken down in forms of process and pantheism. Conceptions of the Creator are limited only, it seems, by the metaphorical imaginations of theological writers. Yet if we are to retain the convictions that constrict such imaginative reconstructions, if we are to continue to maintain the transcendent freedom and sovereign activity of God as such inalienable convictions of the doctrine of creation, we must understand the christological grounding for such convictions. The relation between God and the world is not a free imaginative construal; the relation itself is freely defined and determined in God's eternal election to be God for us in Jesus Christ. Such an approach to creation may sound scandalous and hopelessly narrow. But it is no more scandalous and narrow than the New Testament's pronouncement that salvation comes from Israel's son Jesus and only in him. The scandal raised by the confession that the creation exists solely by and for Jesus Christ is but an extension of the scandal of the Gospel of redemption and is itself but the logical outworking of the patristic conviction that only the God who created the world can save it and the Christ who saved it is he who created it. To reject one scandal is to reject the other and examples of this dual rejection are not hard to find.