(Talk about a presumptuous title!)

In this post I touched briefly on the question of why God creates the universe in the first place. Keith Ward, following Hegel, suggests that in creating God is able to realize a kind of love and relationship, one with creatures capable of not responding to God, that would otherwise be impossible, and that this constitutes a great good.

It may be that there is no more impious or fruitlessly speculative question than asking why God created the world. Still, the Christian tradition has certainly grappled with it, and it’s intimately bound up with questions about the divine nature, the purpose of our existence, and our ultimate redemption, so maybe some reflection isn’t entirely out of order.

My impression is that the tradition has, in thinking about creation, tried to hold together two ideas that are, or at least appear to be, in some kind of tension. The first is the idea of creation ex nihilo and its corollary of creation as the free act of God. Unlike some of its pagan competitors, biblical religion has held from early on that God brings the world into being out of nothing, that is, there is no preexistent material or chaos that limits God’s creative will. And God is not constrained by any external force or reality to create; creation is an utterly free act of God.

The second idea that stands, I think, in some tension with creation ex nihilo and the freedom of God is the notion that God’s nature is love and that creation is in some sense an expression of the divine nature. Love, it can be said, longs to share itself and the creation of something other than God for God to share the divine self with seems “natural” or “fitting” if not necessary.

In this view it shouldn’t be said that God creates because God “lacks” something, but because it is of the divine nature to share itself. A popular image has been that of a fountain of being that almost can’t help but overflow, bringing other contingent beings into existence. The worry here, however, is that this looks like a kind of neoplatonic doctrine of “emanation” in which creation is a kind of divine effulgence rather than the result of a free purposive choice.

So, we have what looks like a paradox of sorts: we want to say both that creation is a free choice of God and that it is an expression of the divine nature which is love. Whether or not this is an irresolvable paradox will depend, among other things, on how we understand divine freedom. Do we think of freedom as the ability to choose A or B such that God could have just as easily chosen not to create? Or is freedom better thought of as the ability to express one’s nature without being in any way constrained by external forces or realities?

It should be noted here that we run into a similar paradox with the idea of grace. Grace is God’s unmerited favor and freely bestowed on us without our doing anything to earn or deserve it. And yet, graciousness isn’t, we think, just an accidental property of God as though God could’ve just as easily chosen not to be gracious. God’s freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to not be good, loving, and holy, or at least that’s what I think most Christians would want to say if they thought about it.

Interestingly, the contemporary Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer explicitly makes the connection between God’s graciousness in justifying sinners and God’s graciousness in creation.

He writes:

The world was not called into being because of any this-worldly necessity, but out of pure freedom and goodness. Creation out of nothing means that all that is exists out of pure goodness; it is unmerited: “All this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!” (Bayer, “Justification as the Basis and Boundary of Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly, Fall 2001, p. 277; the quote is from Luther’s commentary on the first article of the creed in his catechism)

So, God’s freedom in creation means at least that God isn’t constrained by anything outside of God, but at the same time creation is an expression of God’s grace and goodness. Creation and redemption aren’t two different stories, but part of the same story of God’s self-communication to that which is not God.

Another tradition that saw God’s purposes in creation and redemption closely aligned is the so-called Franciscan tradition (because of its association with Franciscan thinkers like Duns Scotus and Bonaventure). In this view, the Incarnation, the manifestation and communication of the divine nature, becomes itself the purpose of creation. In other words, the Incarnation isn’t simply God’s afterthought or Plan B for dealing with human sin; there would’ve been an Incarnation even in an unfallen world. And creation is a kind of theatre for God’s self-manifestation. You might say that Jesus doesn’t exist for us, but we, and everything else, exist for him!

This tradition draws on John’s logos Christology as well as the cosmic Christ imagery from Colossians in viewing the creation itself as a visible reflection of the divine Word, which is both the reflection of the Father and the archetype for the created world. Created being, in its multitude of forms, refracts the light of the logos in an unlimited variety of ways:

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 powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:15-17)

What this suggests, of course, is that the Incarnation isn’t some kind of deus ex machina inserted late in the story to salvage a plot gone badly awry, but the underlying theme of the entire story from the very beginning. Christ is the image of the Father, and creation is, in a manner of speaking, the image of Christ.

But if (part of) God’s purpose in creating is to share the divine self with creation, with what is not God, then it’s fitting that it be shared in the manner most fitting to the particular kind of creature. The medievals had the principle that there must be a certain affinity between the knower and the object of knowledge in order for true knowledge to take place. In light of that an Incarnation would seem to be the ideal way for personal beings like ourselves to know God, i.e. a fully personal mode of knowledge. A line of reasoning similar to this led thinkers in this tradition to suppose that God would’ve become Incarnate to share himself with his creatures even had sin never entered the world.

But as we know all too well there is sin in the world, so the Incarnation necessarily takes a redemptive form in our world. In a fallen world, the communication of divine love has a cruciform shape. But the divine nature that takes human form in the Incarnation is the same divine nature that is reflected (if imperfectly) in the rest of creation.

I think one of the helpful aspects of seeing creation as an expression or reflection of the divine nature is that it helps us to see non-human creation as something possessing value in its own right. Our perspective on creation has made it increasingly difficult for us to see the entire cosmos as existing for the sake of human beings alone, as a mere backdrop to the human drama of fall and redemption.* In his book Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding, Ward writes:

[A]nyone who believes in a creator God can affirm that the cosmos is created so that God can enjoy its beauty. After all, theists believe that the cosmos is a product of the divine mind, so its creation can be compared to the work of a supreme artist, enjoyable and worthwhile for its own sake, without any reference to possible finite persons at all. The universe could still have a point, and that point would be its expression of the power and wisdom of the creator, and God’s enjoyment both of the process of creating and of the created universe itself. This is part of the traditional view — the Hebrew Bible depicts the divine Wisdom as ‘rejoicing in his [God’s] inhabited world, and delighting in the human race’ (Proverbs 8:30). And if Wisdom delights in the human race, it surely also delights in the beauty of the stars. If there is a God, the universe has a point, as the creative expression of the master creator, and the object of divine delight. (pp. 15-16)

Needless to say, I would add that God delights in his other non-human living creatures and that these creatures don’t exist solely to fulfill human needs and wants. Seeing all created being as an expression of the divine Logos should move us toward a more theocentric perspective and a less anthropocentric one.

And yet it remains the case that we believe that God became human, and that the Incarnation represents something like the pinnacle of creation, that in Jesus the divine finds expression in way that is different in kind from the way it is expressed elsewhere. Or to put it another way, that the story finds its climax in this event even if the theme has been present all along.

But holding that all of creation is or can be an expression of the divine nature and glory doesn’t commit us to the view that all parts of creation are of equal value. Personal life does seem to have qualities and capabilities that make it more valuable in some respects. And our tradition has consistently taught that God is personal (or tri-personal), or at least that personal language is the least misleading language we can use about God. Which would seem to imply that, within creation, God could only find adequate expression as a person and could only adequately relate to his personal creatures in this way.

So where, if anywhere, have we gotten to? We started by asking if we could shed any light on why God creates. Does God need to create in some sense, in order to determine the divine identity, say, or to enrich the divine experience? Following the tradition I ruled out the possibility that God is constrained to create by anything external to the divine nature, but I suggested that maybe there is something “natural” or “fitting” in the fact that God, in the fecundity of the divine being, creates a world both as an expression of the divine being and as something to which God can communicate divine love. In this perspective, the Incarnation can be seen as the climax or focal point of the divine self-communication rather than a late add-on to the divine plan or a contingency measure (allowing, of course, that the form the Incarnation takes is partly determined by the exigency of human sin). God wills to share the divine being with creation and will go to whatever lengths necessary to do so, even, as we see in our own case, to the point of death on a cross.

Obviously this is all fairly speculative, open to revision, and to be taken with more than a grain of salt. 😉
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*It’s worth mentioning, however, that there are those who maintain that, given the constraints of very fundamental aspects of the laws governing the physical world, a universe roughly the size and age of our own would be necessary for the emergence of intelligent life on even one planet. Even if that’s right, though, it in no way rule out God choosing the rest of the cosmos for its own sake since God, presumably, can be quite parsimonious in choosing means to realize his ends.