The story of beginnings is beautifully vital for any people because it tells us a lot about who we are, which has implications for every aspect of the way we live and relate. Over the past couple of decades, discussions about the doctrine of creation have largely centered around how the world was created, primarily through the creation/evolution debates. When the doctrine of creation primarily becomes about the mechanics of creation, however, we may miss the astounding and important claim that rests at the center of this doctrine: there is one God, and that one God created all that is.
While that may seem exceedingly simple on the surface, it was unique and controversial in its beginnings, and it has the capacity, I think, to help us navigate some theological and ethical problems many Christians live in today. Namely, this doctrine teaches us that we were created by one God, rather than resulting from a conflict between multiple gods. That means, among other things, that our existence flows from the super-abundant love of God alone, rather than the clash of multiple gods in conflict with one another. In short, the doctrine of creation reminds us that the Christian story isn’t centrally a conflict narrative, and that makes all the difference for who we are and how we live.
Genesis 1 is one of the more controversial passages in the Bible, but it was controversial long before the creation vs. evolution debates broke out in the 20th century. Genesis 1 has been a controversial statement since it was written. Since those days, it has been making a claim that flew in the face of commonly accepted views of the world. In short, Genesis 1 is saying, “The way you’ve been thinking about the world is off because the way you thought it came to be is off.” It was making the radical claim that there is one God who created the world, and that tells us a lot about who we are.
The story of our beginning tells us a lot about who we are. Because most societies throughout human history depend on their origin story to tell them who they are, origin stories carry a lot of weight. Consider, for example, Rome’s origin story which traced its beginning to a fight between two brothers, Romulus and Remus. As a result, Rome came to understand themselves as a people who were forged in clash of titans, born of conflict and ready for any fight. In the case of Genesis, it was written against a cultural backdrop that gave us the Babylonian creation story called the Enuma Elish. In that story, two gods originally existed, and their co-mingling gave birth to more gods who begin to fight among themselves, eventually giving rise to Babylon.
If those examples don’t illuminate how controversial the claims of Genesis would have been in the ancient world, consider this example of origins that hits closer to where we live: Recently, the origin story of the United States has evoked contention. The origin story I received growing up was that virtuous men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sacrificed to forge a new nation as they pulled away from the tyrannical grasp of a faraway king. Americans, I learned in this story of beginnings, are the kind of people who virtuously stand up to tyranny and injustice. That’s who we are because that’s how we began!
“Wait a minute,” a contingent of Americans has said. “There’s more to the story. Washington and Jefferson also were slaveholders.” These historical facts are well documented, so why has this caused such an uproar? Because if our beginning wasn’t entirely virtuous, does that mean we are not a virtuous people? How the origin story gets told matters a lot for how a people understand who they are.
The Christian doctrine of creation functions as an origin story that does far more than attempt to answer questions about the mechanics of how the world has come to be. While questions of creation over the past several decades have been largely dominated by how God created the universe, that approach misses an opportunity to orient Christians to who they are in light of a delightfully unique origin story.
The unique nature is what makes Genesis radical, even if it doesn’t sound that way to us today. Unlike most other origin stories in the ancient Near East that set their beginning amid a conflict between two or more gods, Israel’s story of beginning starts with a shockingly radical claim: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). What’s missing here? Conflict and other gods. In other words, the first words we find in the biblical account of creation are making a startling claim in the ancient world: there is only one God, and that God created the world. In one powerful opening sentence, we find ourselves set in a story that isn’t a conflict narrative. This God isn’t fighting some other divine being, and the world this God creates isn’t a product of violence. Though we may hear the opening lines of Genesis as commonplace, they remain a resounding theological proclamation: There is one God who has created all things, which means this isn’t a conflict narrative, and we understand ourselves as those who have been created in love, rather than forged in the clash of violence. We could add another equally important sentiment: This is God’s story. From top to bottom, beginning to end, God is making and remaking this world, and that tells us who we are! We are beings who are in relationship to the one God who has made us in love and is remaking us in love.
A theological and moral problem arises for Christians when we read the Bible as a conflict narrative, but it happens a lot. In many streams of popular evangelicalism, the biblical origin story has morphed into a version of the kind of conflict origin story the writer of Genesis 1 was specifically moving away from. In the process, those who read the Bible like this come to understand themselves as caught in a conflict between two rivals, rather than as the very good creatures who the one God has lovingly and intimately breathed to life. Often, the story of Christian faith gets told as a conflict between good and evil, or God vs. Satan, and the hearers of that story find themselves in the middle of a conflict narrative. Genesis 1 tells us that there is one God, and we are the beings who are created by that God in love.
Of course, the biblical account does indeed involve conflict between God and evil – that slippery, ‘know it when you see it’ force that parasitically degrades the goodness of God’s creation through disease, injustice, and the like. But keep in mind that the writer of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 never uses the term ha satan, which is a Hebrew term for ‘accuser,’ and where we’ve derived the name Satan. Yes, there is a serpent in Genesis 3, but it’s only called a serpent in the text. In fact, the term satan doesn’t show up in the Bible until the Book of Job, and even then, it’s not a name but a title for a shadowy figure who doesn’t come anywhere close to a being alongside God. The point I’m making is that while there are certainly biblical references to Satan, the story of our creation isn’t a conflict between God and Satan: In the beginning, there was one God and this God created all that there is. That matters, of course, for who we are. We are not the result of divine conflict, but the creative work of one God. In short, the Bible is telling us of the one God who creates and insists that there isn’t some kind of evil counterpart alongside God who God must fight, making human beings pawns in the battle.
When God does confront evil, God’s action is decisive. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or cheap, but it certainly is not a question of whose story this is. The closing book of the Bible, John’s Revelation, narrates a conflict between those things, persons, and systems (including a great Satan!) that are working in active opposition to the goodness of God’s creation, and they all lose to a lamb that appears to have already been butchered. It’s not even close. Again, I am not trying to wipe away the truly problematic nature of evil, but rather trying to hold us to an enduring theme of Scripture: this is God’s story – there is no other god beside the Creator.
The great creeds of the Church take this seriously. In the opening lines of the Apostles’ Creed we confess, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…” Later, the Creed testifies to Christ’s descent to the dead/hades, but nowhere in confessions like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed do we find the makings of a doctrine of creation that functions like a battle between two equal but opposing gods. In historical fact, the early church began confessing creeds like these in part as a way of standing against persistent heresies like Marcionism, which espoused the reality of two gods, one good and one evil.
So why is it that so many Christians narrate themselves as beings who are defined by being caught in a conflict? Has the way we understand ourselves in the world taken its cues from a perceived conflict narrative that isn’t actually the story of creation? In lots of popular iterations of evangelical Christianity, we encounter a story that tends to function as a polar dialectic – a story of two nearly equal but opposing figures: God and Satan. Given that our ancestors in the faith took careful steps to move away from this kind of thinking, we should be aware when these moves are happening, because that version of the story will tell us a different story about who we are.
The way Genesis narrates the problems inflicted upon God’s beloved creation is not that there is a divine conflict that gives birth to the world, but that the creation God spoke into being has fallen away from the Creator’s intent. That has certainly harmed us and is hurting God’s beloved creation, but part of the Christian faith is entrusting ourselves to the reality that there is one God who has created and we are the beings who entrust themselves to the way this God is dealing with evil. That story puts us human beings into a very different kind of relationship to the Creator than the echoes of pagan conflict stories that tend to show up in contemporary Christianity. It’s the kind of relationship that helps us see the divine beauty that shows up in Genesis 3: the God who lovingly created in Genesis 1 and 2 now comes searching for the beloved humans who have fallen away and withdrawn themselves. “Where are you?” this God calls out to the hidden humans, the concealed creation. Here there is no cosmic battle in which these bashful beings are caught. There is only the pursuit of a Creator who has taken up residence near the earthen creatures. Here we glimpse the nature of the relationship between Creator and creation, reminding us of who we are: we are those beings who have fallen away and retreated, but the ones who the Creator seeks – eventually at God’s own expense.
Comments