God, Creation, and Tomorrow

My good friend Thomas Jay Oord recently suggested that the idea of creation ex nihlo has outlived its usefulness as a construct by which to understand God and creation. Instead, Oord suggests God creates out of what he has created in love.

It has long been the position of many theologians that the essence of God’s nature is love. Out of this eternal love, suggests Oord, God continuously creates out of that which he has already created. As a philosopher and theologian, Oord builds his case in that gray zone where both proof and dispute are far from definitive. Oord rightly suggests that his theory does not defy the logic with which he proposes it. By the same token, however, a reading of his commentary in this regard, does not completely abolish the creation ex nihlo.

As one who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, I think of myself as one who enjoys thinking theologically. In thinking about the nature of God, the meaning of creation, and the everyday life of people like myself who have to be at work tomorrow morning, I have a few offhand comments.

When we affirm that God created all things, I do not believe this implies that nothing existed prior to Genesis 1. We simply do not know! We are so accustomed to thinking from materialistic categories, we are hard pressed to think about “something” out of nothing, and that there might have been a moment when nothing as we know it from our materialist perspective, existed.

The nature of the Triune God is fellowship-in-love. We do not fully understand the ultimate potential of this divine fellowship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Without sacrilege, I would speculate that as the Triune God has always existed, “something” has always existed. Just as Hebrews 11:1 states, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”, (KJV), who is to say that the holy community existing in a fellowship of love did not provide from its own self, all that is needed to create multiple universes.

The “nothing” that existed prior to creation was really what appeared to the Scripture writer as the “chaos” out from which God created. To say God created out of nothing is true for us, because chaos is “nothingness” to us. It is unintelligible, without form, lacking description. Remember this: it is formless, void, chaos to us because it is alien to us. To argue that the chaos that existed in the pre-creation era represents something malevolent is to suggest a dualism that is not true. It is to argue that evil and good are co-existent. There is simply no evidence that is true.

God creates, in my opinion, out of God’s self, not out of his creation as Dr. Oord suggests. Clearly, Oord right when he suggests the primary nature of God is love. (Although I wonder if Dr. Oord fully explores the spectrum of divine love.) Because God is love, God creates. Because God imparts his love to us, we too create, even from the “chaos” that we face everyday.

So, God created…from the “chaos” of possibility and potential because God is love without condition or coercion. We, the children of God, have been given his love and it has changed us. We are not “little gods” but we are being sanctified by which we believe we are being restored in the image of God by the sanctifying work of the Spirit. Tomorrow, we will engage the “chaos” and we have the possibility of “contributing to the well-being” of the world because “In this way, love is made complete among us…because in this world, we are like him.”(1 John 4:17) What appears to be chaos to us is often the raw material from which miracles are made.

From the deluge of Katrina and a broken Superdome, the New Orleans Saints found a new reality out of the chaos and in a few weeks they will play in Super Bowl 44. May we all be saints in the chaos of tomorrow.

Grace and peace,

Dave Felter