“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore — on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe.  It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.  We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.  To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand...  He was emphatically not a dull man in His human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.”
—Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”

The Creed

Chapter Two: “. . .in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.”
“in Deum Patrem omnipotentum; Creatorem coeli et terrae.”

Apart from revelation, God remains unknown.

That which goes by the name of God is often not God at all, but the truncated misconceptions of our fallen minds.  We have a heart-deep and life-wide bias, in Paul’s words, to suppress the truth about God and to make gods for ourselves of created things, rather than worshipping the Creator of things.  We tend to set our hearts on the transitory and the mortal rather than on the One Thing immortal (Rom. 1:18, 23). 

We do this in many ways, the most subtly misleading of which is the way of speculative philosophy.  As Blaise Pascal once noted, the greatest insight he ever achieved was to recognize that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not the god of the philosophers, which is to say that much of what some philosophers assert about God is inadequate and sometimes simply untrue.  God, Pascal realized, is no abstract principle of thought.  Though we think of Him by means of concepts, God is not a concept.  God is no mere prime mover, no impersonal or uncaused cause, and no abstract entity than which no greater can be conceived.  God is the One who called Abram out of Ur, who delivered the Jews from Egyptian thralldom, and who spoke to Moses on Sinai.  Most importantly, He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the One who raised Him from the dead. 

God is alive.  He is the Holy One behind and beyond our thoughts, indeed behind and beyond all creation itself.  The god of the philosophers, by contrast, is but an idea, and ideas do not act.  They do not create universes and restore the dead to life.  The God of the creed does, and it is about Him we speak when we confess our faith.  The God of the creed is the Lord of history, not an idea in a philosopher’s brain.  After all, our idea of a thing, no matter how good an idea it is, is not the thing itself.  It is about the living God Himself, not our fine-spun conceptions of God, that the creed speaks. 

Apart from revelation, the god in our minds often has little resemblance to the one true God outside it.  In many ways, the god in our minds is simply a mental idol, a reflection more of ourselves and our desires than of God.  There is only one God, and He is not man made; He is not humanly concocted.  He is the God revealed to us in Christ.  All too frequently — and more frequently than we realize — when we think of God apart from his revelation of Himself to us in Christ, we fall afoul of the first commandment, which prohibits having any other gods but God.  Not that we do so consciously or intentionally, but we do so nevertheless; and we do so even though we know, deep within us, that the gods of our own making are always unsatisfactory.

Neither this problem nor its solution are new.  Paul faced it centuries ago in Athens.  In their marketplace, the Athenians had erected a collection of statues to their gods.  But apparently the Athenian gods were inadequate.  Apparently worshipping them proved unsatisfactory and unsettling, perhaps even a little haunting, because, among those statues, Paul noticed one raised in honor of “the unknown god.”  This “unknown god” Paul came to recognize as the one true God, and, in order to make Him known to the Athenians, began to preach about Jesus of Nazareth and about the resurrection (Acts 17:16ff).

Paul did so because he understood that Christ is the hermeneutical, or interpretive, key to the universe and to the One who stands behind it.  Paul understood that if you want to know what God is like, you must look at Christ.  You do so because, as Jesus himself said in response to Philip’s request to see the Father, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).  “I and the Father are one,” Christ said (John 10:30).  By the same token, if you want to know what human beings are like, you also look to Christ, because He is the one true human.  He is the one person who really is what a human being ought to be.  He is not the flawed and fallen specimens of humanity that we ourselves have become.  He is, as it were, the one normal person among us.  He is what humans should have been, not what they now are.

Of the two things that Christ reveals, divinity and humanity, the one that concerns us here is the former.  Christ, not Aristotle’s abstractions, is the very definition of the word “God,” a word that, without Christ, remains oblique and mysterious.  Christ is, in the language of Paul, the “express image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).  God, in other words, is Christologically defined.  John’s way of saying this was to affirm that while no one has ever seen God, God has become known to us because his Son has exegeted Him, or made Him known (John 1:18).  Christ’s making God known is worthy of our belief, as William Beveridge understood centuries ago, when he declared that “though all creatures deceive me, Christ neither will nor can” (Beveridge, The Church Catechism Explained, 17).

To reach the same destination by a somewhat different route, Erasmus applied to God the ancient Socratic insight that as long as a man remained silent, he remained a mystery.  As soon as he opened his mouth, however, and began to speak, one could begin to obtain real knowledge of his character, his intentions, his skill, and his personality.  His words were a window to his soul.  The same is true of God, Erasmus believed.  As long as God remains silent, He remains unknown and unknowable.  But silent He has not remained.  He has spoken to us, and His message is Christ.  The Son of God is God’s eloquent and gracious utterance to a fallen world, which is precisely why Erasmus believed the Scriptures call Him the Logos, or Word (John 1:1).  In Jesus, God speaks directly to the deepest needs of the human heart, making known to us the righteousness and the merciful intentions of the Eternal, intentions we otherwise could never have known.  Without Christ, we are consigned to virtual agnosticism.

That is why, when a Christian utters the words “I believe in God,” that Christian is not merely affirming the opposite of atheism, that Christian is confessing belief in this God — the God revealed in Christ — as opposed to every other god, however conceived or identified.  The creed stands apart both from atheism and from paganism, even the well-intentioned paganism of some philosophers.  The creed affirms belief in the God revealed in Christ, God the Father. 

This is not to say that only Christians have recognized the things articulated by the creed about God, things like fatherhood, for example.   The ancient Greek poets and philosophers, the ancient Hebrew prophets, indeed nearly every major and minor religion, all call God “Father.”  But though the concept of divine paternity is not distinctively Christian, its precise content is, for Christ has given the fatherhood of God a definition for us in space and time.  After the incarnation, no longer is God the Greek or Roman mythological tyrant, a tyrant who rules the world with arbitrary whim in the face of the subversive intrigues of the pantheon.  No longer is He the abstract, impersonal, first cause or prime mover of the philosophers.  No longer is He even the exalted God of Israel, who thunders from the mountaintop and whose face we cannot see.  God became a man.  He walked our roads, ate our food, breathed our air, and spoke our language.  He came out from behind the curtain of creation that veiled Him from our eyes.  The Author and Director himself came on stage, and his name was Jesus.                  

The Apostles’ Creed makes the Object of our faith known to us under three names, or in three Persons:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Concerning these three the creed offers varying degrees of amplification and clarification.  Its comments upon the first are dignified and restrained, declaring merely that He is Father, that He is almighty, and that He is the Creator of the universe.  The creed, by contrast, is much more elaborate concerning the Son, though much less so concerning the Spirit.  The creed’s three pivotal notions regarding the first person of the Trinity are our concern in the remainder of this chapter.

As do both Testaments and Christ Himself, the creed identifies God as “Father.”  But “faith in God as Father has nothing to do with dreary contemporary debates about masculinity, femininity, and sexism.  God is the Father of Jesus Christ, which means that the universe is ultimately personal and therefore is an appropriate context for men and women together” (Harned, Creed and Personal Identity, 32).  To think otherwise is to misunderstand that the Father we meet revealed in Christ is no mere embellishment of human paternity.  God’s paternity is not human maleness writ large.  Human paternity is but the faint shadow of which God’s fatherhood is the enduring reality.  To think of it the other way around, as if we ourselves invented God’s fatherhood rather than He inventing ours, is not simply to get it wrong, but to get it backwards.  The paternity of God is not something foisted upon Him by human, chauvinistic ingenuity.  God’s paternity is something revealed to us by His Son, Jesus Christ.  God is not a father after our likeness; we are, if we are fathers at all, fathers somewhat after his.  God’s fatherhood is a fact of divine revelation, not human invention. 

From the revelation of God given us in Christ, we know that to be Father is something expressed in humility, obedience, service, purity, innocent suffering, honorable death, and victory over sin and the grave.  Divine fatherhood, in other words, is love and power exercised on behalf of others.  The bond between the Father and us is no longer merely what it was in the Old Testament era.  The God of Israel has become our “abba,” an ancient Aramaic word for "Daddy" (Gal. 5:6).

The notion that God is a father, of course, is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures (Ex. 4:22; Deut. 32:6; Isa. 43:6; 63:16; 64:8; Jer. 31:9, 20; Hos.11:1; Mal. 2:10).  What marks Christian doctrine off from Jewish doctrine in this regard is not the paternity of God, but the centrality and emphasis given it by Christ.  The fatherhood of God is constantly on the lips of Christ, from the time He was twelve and told Mary and Joseph He had to be about his Father’s business (Luke 2:49) until the very end of his earthly life, when, on the cross, He prayed for his executioners and commended his spirit into his Father’s hands (Luke 23:34, 46).  Between those two episodes stand many dozens of affirmations concerning the fatherhood of God.  Nor is Christ alone in these affirmations for, as a converted Jew, Paul also affirmed his belief in the fatherhood of God (Rom. 1:17; 1 Cor. 8:6; 2 Cor. 1:3, 11; 31; Col. 1:3), as did all the apostles.  For biblical and historic Christianity, the supreme name of God is "Father."

The fatherhood of God is not an outgrowth of, or a metaphor for, human paternity any more than the creed's accompanying assertions that God is "Almighty" and is "Maker of Heaven and Earth" are outgrowths of, or metaphors for, human power or human manufacturing.  His characteristics and activities are not metaphorical of our characteristics and activities, or derived from them.  Quite the opposite is true, which is why, regarding the fatherhood of God, the feminist theologians are so fully confused.  Only God's paternity is the genuine article.  Ours is derivative; ours is reflective; ours is the metaphor.  To say that God is Almighty, that God is Maker, and that God is Father, as does the Apostles' Creed, is to speak literal truth.  Let me explain.

The fatherhood of God is the principle notion of the creed, the notion according to which all other assertions about God are measured.  The fatherhood of God informs every facet of the Christian vision, enabling us to see the universe as our family home and ourselves as God’s children, both by creation and by redemption.  To shed the doctrine of divine paternity, as so many now are inclined to do, is simply to distance oneself from the fundamental fact of the historic Christian faith and of the Christ from whom it springs, for not only did Christ reveal God to us as Father, there was virtually no other name by which Christ spoke to Him or of Him.  When Jesus revealed God to us — and God is revealed nowhere so clearly and so fully as in Christ — the God revealed to us is revealed as Father, and nothing else so much as Father.  Christ speaks of Him in that way some 160 times.  The only time He spoke to Him in any other way was the cry of dereliction from the cross, itself a quotation from the Old Testament.  Furthermore, when Jesus taught us to pray, He taught us to begin all our prayers by acknowledging God as our Father.  Whether it suits us or not, to reject the fatherhood of God is to reject the religion of Christ, a religion in which God is not Father by mere human attribution, but innately and eternally.  True and proper fatherhood, not metaphorical fatherhood, resides in Him, not in us and then projected onto Him.  Magnification of human paternity onto God can, at best, produce only a superman, something the God of Christ and of both Testaments most assuredly is not.  Perhaps that fact stands behind Christ's command to "Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, who is in heaven" (Matt. 23:9).  Furthermore, the comparison in Matthew 7:9-11 between divine fatherhood, on the one hand, and human fatherhood, on the other, seems to indicate that even the finest human fathers are but faint and imperfect echoes of our Father in Heaven.  Divine fatherhood is no Feuerbachian foisting of human fatherhood onto God.  Quite the opposite.  As Paul himself wrote: “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14, 15).

Of course, I am not saying that nothing in us resembles God.  It does.  I am saying that the resemblance between God and us was put in us by God Himself, not put in God by us.  If that resemblance is at all metaphorical, it is metaphorical only on our side, not God’s.  The only real and true father in or out of the universe is God.  This fundamental fact the creed enshrines, and this fact the candidate for baptism in the early church confessed.  The creed identifies God as Father.  Thus, the candidate for baptism does not assert, when reciting the creed, merely that God is his spiritual father.  He asserts that God is Father per se.  Father is not what God is like; Father is what God is.  “To say that God is our Father does not say all that is true of Him, but it is true, and any proposition that is incompatible with this is not” (Bell, The Meaning of the Creed, 18).           

Put differently, Christianity could not remain a religion centered in Christ, in his apostles, and in Christian history if it renounced the truths that gather around the scriptural name “Father.”  To discount that name, to modify it, to reject it, is to disdain both revelation and tradition.  This others might do; not I.  As Wolfhart Pannenberg so aptly explains, “When we confess God the Father in the Apostles’ Creed we do not mean that we have chosen what seems to us the most adequate name of God, but we mean that we confess the God of Jesus” (Rein, A New Look at the Apostles’ Creed, 18).  We have Christ’s own word for it that he who has seen Christ has seen the Father, not the Mother.  I cannot say it any more plainly than has C. S. Lewis:

“Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in Heaven’ as to ‘Our Father’. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son... Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped; many religions have their priestesses.  But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity... Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him.  To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential... We know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life different from that of a Christian child” (Lewis, God in the Dock, 236-237).

The implications of God’s paternity are many and profound.  The first, and for the human condition most important, is the familial relationship this word presupposes.  On God’s side, this relationship encompasses (among other things) love, intimacy, care, and origin.  God is our Father; that means He is the One from whom our being and blessings descend and upon whom they continue to depend.  To Him we turn (or ought to turn) our minds and hearts in utmost love and gratitude.  God’s fatherhood is perhaps the most fundamental thing about Him.  That is why He is constantly working to make us — each of us — His children.  That is why He is constantly desiring to make a family of us.  He will not relent until He has succeeded.  His paternity makes it so.  When we recite the creed, meant as it is for those who are born again, we claim God as our Father and Christ as our Brother, a Brother with whom we are the joint heirs of the universe (Rom. 8:17; Heb. 1:2).  As the adopted children of God, we claim membership in a family much more extensive, important and enduring than the human family from which we sprang.  To confess belief in God the Father, therefore, is to affirm belief in an ultimately benevolent universe.  To confess belief in God the Father is to affirm that you are no mere cog in a mindless machine; you are a child in your Father’s home.  All other lesser notions of God the creed brushes aside in silence as unworthy and not truly indicative of the God who is.

Second, as hinted above, the concept of “Father” mentioned here in the creed finds its necessary complement in the article that follows it, which affirms belief in Christ as the Son of God.  To deny the one is inevitably to deny the other.  To deny that God is Father is to deny that Christ is Son.  To deny that Christ is Son is to deny the divine revelation in Christ and is to attack Christ’s authority and reliability as a teacher of doctrine.  As Rufinus argued centuries ago, when you hear that someone is a father, you conclude he must have children.  Just as no one is properly called “lord” unless he has possessions, servants and power, and just as no one is properly called “teacher” unless he has students, so no one is properly called “Father” unless he has, in this case, a Son.  Coupled with what we said earlier, we see that the fatherhood of God relates to the Son by generation, to us by adoption, and to all other finite things whatever by creation.  And, as children typically do, we Christians ought to grow to resemble our Father in Heaven and our Brother at His right hand (Rom. 8:29).

To proceed, the Father of whom the creed speaks is also almighty, and this is one of the most comforting facts in all Christian doctrine.  As Heinrich Bullinger explained in the sixteenth century, the fact that God is our Father means that He wishes us well; that He is almighty means that the good that He wills for us He can bring to pass (Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, 126).  By combining as it does its affirmation of the fatherhood of God with its affirmation of his almightiness, the Apostles' Creed combines what the pagan religions never did and never could.  The pagans seemed simply unable to grasp that the greatest power of all is attached to the greatest love of all, that benevolence is both the power behind power as well as its goal.  God wields all power, and He does so for the working out of his good will towards his children.  God the Father is almighty; He exercises his power according to the dictates of his loving, fatherly heart.  He has executive authority over the entire universe, and because He does there is not one square inch of ground upon which you can set the heel of your foot where He is not there with you and in complete control, working out your highest and best good, a good his power will not fail ultimately to produce.  Lest we forget, the place where the fatherhood of God and his omnipotence meet most decisively is in the resurrection of Christ, produced for our justification and proleptically indicative of our own destiny as God's adopted children.

The Greek word (pantokrator) that historically stands behind the Latin omnipotens is best translated not omnipotent, or even almighty, but all-ruling or all-governing.  As such, it has something of the connotation of “king” and relates more to the sovereignty and providence of God than to his unlimited power, which in part is why Bishop Westcott noted that “it has been a great loss to popular theology that an abstract conception of infinite power has commonly taken the place of the Biblical revelation of the actual dominance of God over all that He has made” (Westcott, The Historic Faith, 222).  This term is descriptive not so much of abstract power as of exercised dominion.  It means that our heavenly Father has an entire mastery over all things.

When we confess belief in God the Father almighty, therefore, we do not confess that God can do absolutely all things.  He cannot.  He cannot lie; He cannot sin; He cannot cease to be; He cannot deny Himself.  He cannot do any of the things it would be nonsense to ascribe to Him.  He can do only those things that lie within his nature to do.  In a very real way, the impossible things mentioned above are not things at all; they are nonsense, much like the square circle some people puzzle themselves over concerning what God can or cannot make.  We can say that God can do all things only if we remember that square circles are not things.  Like a lying, dying, sinning, extinct God, square circles are nonsense because they are contradictions in terms.  As C. S. Lewis somewhere observed, while God can do all things, nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.  Human nonsense is no limitation to the power of God; it is evidence that the products of our fallen minds often continue resolutely foolish.

To imply, as the creed does, that God is the ruler of all that He creates is not to imply that all that happens is God’s doing and is God’s explicit will.  Many things happen that God does not desire.  Every sin ever committed is a case in point.  But though we sin, that does not mean that God is not governing the world in righteousness or that He will not, in the end, get what He desires or produce what He intends.  He shall.  God can, and God shall, bring us to his will without violating the will with which He, as almighty Father, has endowed us.  In this respect, God’s almightiness means that nothing outside of God prevents Him from accomplishing his fatherly purposes.  He works under no externally imposed constraints or compulsion.  God can bring good out of evil, and in the exercise of our wills we shall be found to serve the will of God, even when we intended no such thing.  God’s almightiness guarantees it.

God's ultimate purpose, as Paul indicates, is our complete conformity to the moral and spiritual character of Christ (Rom. 8:28ff).  Our sanctification and glorification are marvellous instances of the Father’s gracious and all-governing power.  That power inaugurates our Christward transformation with our conversion, itself the product of the Father’s almighty love.  According to David Harned,

“...there is more of almightiness disclosed in bringing sinners to repent, fugitives to return, enemies to community, and prisoners to freedom, than even in the laying of the foundations of the earth, for persons have what the earth does not — their own inalienable powers of agency and choice...  [The] evidence that God is omnipotent and creative appears first of all in the words ‘I believe’ [which] is a confession by persons who know themselves to have been strangers and enemies.  They did not choose but were chosen; they did not seek but were found.  In this act of unfathomable grace, the almightiness and creativity of God are together disclosed” (Harned, Creed and Personality, 42).

The creed’s affirmation of God’s almightiness, furthermore, rules out any possible notion of dualism:  There is no other God but God.  There exists no independent, or equal, counterpart to Him.  He is the Sole Ruler, the Supreme Ruler, of the universe, and He is our Father.  The belief that his power, like his love, has no externally imposed limit is the basis for the Christian’s hope in the face of distress and the spring from which all petitionary prayer arises.

The earliest Western creeds ended their affirmation of belief in God with the notion that He is both Father and almighty.  But in time these affirmations were expanded to include the fact that He made Heaven and Earth, another way of saying He made all that is.  This addition was presumably in response to the ever-present threat of Gnosticism, which denied that the Supreme God would have direct contact with something so (allegedly) polluted as physical matter.  The Nicene Creed, in keeping with its penchant for completeness, further added the perhaps redundant statement that God made “all things visible and invisible" (visibilia et invisibilia), or, as Karl Barth preferred to call them, all things conceivable and inconceivable (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 61).

The creed’s affirmation that our almighty Father is “the Maker of Heaven and Earth” is an affirmation that must be understood in conjunction with those that precede it.  Whereas almightiness denotes the power of God to fulfill all his fatherly purposes toward us, creativeness denotes the divine ingenuity by which those purposes are carried out.  Put differently, to think of God as the Creator of the world, in general, and of souls, in particular, is to think of Him as the lover of the world and of souls, much the same way we naturally think of parents loving the children they have made and of great artists loving the paintings or the sculptures into which they have poured such effort, energy, and imagination.  Furthermore, this affirmation implies that all creation exists for good, that it has meaning and purpose, and that this meaning and purpose are the product of sovereign, fatherly rule.  Put more graphically, "the more we know of the universe the less it resembles a great machine and the more it resemble a great thought" (Abbey, Creed of Our Hope, 26).

This portion of the creed, then, deals with God's relationship to the universe and, by implication, our relationship to it as well.  It teaches that we belong completely and absolutely to God.  Nothing at all escapes the relation of creature to its Creator, for God is the maker of all that is, and all that is is his, and comes, as it were, from his hands.  Without God, neither we nor anything else could ever be.  Our very existence itself stands or falls with God.  Without Him making and sustaining the world, all stories come immediately to nothing.  Whatever exists does so by the will and power of God, which implies a family connection between ourselves and the world around us.  God fathered it, so to speak, just as He fathered us.  Consequently, we cannot and must not separate ourselves from the created order of which we are a part.  But this familial tie does not, as in the hands of some modern environmentalists it does, lower us to the level of the beasts or of mere matter; rather, it raises the dignity and worth of all non-human creation, and it offers us the hope — indeed the expectation — that just as all creation shares a common origin, it might also share a common destiny:  the redemption by God that seems to await a universe now groaning in travail because of sin and awaiting the revelation of the sons of God (Rom. 8:19).  All that God made, it appears, shall one day be reconciled to Him (2 Cor. 5:19; Col. 1:20).   

The divine making identified here in the creed includes the notion of sustaining:  "My Father is always at his work, even to this very day," Jesus said (John 5:17), which echoes the idea found in the command to rejoice because this is the day that God has made (Ps. 118:24).  In other words, God has not stopped making.  Every new leaf, every new day, every new season, every new baby, is a creation of God.  The universe is constantly renewed by the same hand that made it, a fact that holds as true for months and seasons in the passing of the years as it does for the human heart in regeneration:  “He that sits upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new’” (Rev. 21:5).

Understood Christologically, as it must be, the doctrine of creation entails at least four interrelated ideas: (1) Christ is Himself the Creator of whom the creed speaks (Heb. 1:2); (2) nothing was created that was not created by Him (John 1:3); (3) in Christ the Creator Himself enters creation as its maker, its redeemer and its goal (Col. 1:15-18); and (4) like his Father, Christ also continues to sustain and renew the world, for not only is the Father still at his work, but so is the Son (John 5:17).  Not surprisingly, then, the builder of the universe was, when a man, a carpenter.  As Erasmus was fond of noting, by a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.

By recognizing God as the maker of Heaven and Earth, and by attributing to Him the origin and maintenance of both material and spiritual existence alike, the creed once more rejects the persistent and misguided dualism that has plagued Christian (and not Christian only) thought from the beginning.  The creed also separates God from the world, a clear rejection of pantheism.  According to the creed, the Creator transcends the creation.  Neither the created world nor anything in it are properly divine.  The creation is something clearly distinct from God, and it is real.  It is no mere appearance.  But neither is it God.  Creation is everything that is not God and is not nothing.  The act of creation, in other words, is not something that occurs within God; it is opus ad extra, a work done outside Him.  The world is not God; neither are we.  To want to be like God is the oldest and most disastrous human error, one that relentlessly and regularly recurs throughout human history like the ticking of a clock.  Furthermore, the doctrine of creation implies that matter is neither eternal nor all that is.  Thus, the creed rejects the mistaken notion of philosophical materialism.

The purpose of creation, though the creed does not explicitly say so, is to raise up beings capable of participation in the divine life, beings of all sorts, from aardvarks to archangels, so that they might come at last to as free and full a sharing of God’s life as their being permits. Their destiny and their privilege as creatures is to share in the life of their Creator.  This is another way of saying what Calvin once said — the world is the theatrum gloriae Dei, the theater of God’s glory.  As witnesses to, and beneficiaries of, that gracious glory, we are more than mere spectators.  We are to express what we have seen, to applaud it and to articulate it.  To do so is the joyous business of the redeemed and is a chief part of our destiny and purpose.

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“...because he is intelligens the Christian, of all men, has to learn to discern with agonizing clarity what is conceivable by him about God himself.” —Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum

“We confess that the God who is the soul’s necessity has been revealed in Christ as the Father, is indicated by history as All-sovereign, is declared by nature as Maker of heaven and earth.” —B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith

"Everybody who is not a fool is thinking about the meaning of life.  We find ourselves in a beautiful but also a painful and perplexing world.  We long to understand it.  But the world can only be explained by something beyond the world.  What is that something?... On our answer to that depends our answer regarding everything else that is of value.  Our view of God determines everything.”  —Lumsden Barkway, The Creed and Its Credentials 

date modified:
6 July 2006