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the struggle of interests and temptations of power). The theological idea of an unrestricted covenant of grace is a critical principle that justifies human attempts at solidarity but denies the claim of any to be God’s order on the earth, pointing beyond all arrangements of the terrestrial city to the better justice and peace of the city of God (Augustine).

       THOMAS D. PARKER

      Bibliography

      Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1 (#41) and IV/1 (#57).

      Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial.

      N. K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh.

      E. W. Nicholson, God and His People: Covenant Theology in the Old Testament.

      E. P. Sanders, St. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism.

      Cross-Reference: Biblical Theology, Civil Religion, Ecclesiology, Election.

      CREATION

      The doctrine or symbol of creation—derived especially from Genesis 1–3, the Psalms, Second Isaiah, and John 1—is rich in religious and existential meaning. It has set the terms for most Christian (and Jewish) worldviews or metaphysics, and it has provided the essential presuppositions for every other important Christian doctrine or symbol: human dignity and freedom, sin, revelation, Incarnation, redemption, history, and eschatology. Without the assumption of creation, most of the other affirmations of Christian piety and loci of theology would make no sense. Second, creation has been the subject of great Christian controversies, especially in the early church and in the present era, when literal, biblical views of creation find themselves in opposition to most of modern science. Finally, this symbol, as much ignored as it was presupposed in most theology, has now come into sudden prominence because of the present crisis concerning the integrity, even the existence, of nature. In this short essay, each of these three aspects of creation is discussed in turn.

      The Religious Meaning of Creation. Every fundamental religious symbol implies, even requires, a certain mode of existing in the world; this is its “religious” meaning. The “religious” meaning of creation refers to the attitude toward reality, life, and its meaning that the symbol expresses—in this case an attitude toward God, the world, and human life in space and time. Religious symbols also manifest metaphysical implications as an attitude toward the larger reality or universe in which we exist; they are thus in the broadest sense cognitive even though they are not “scientific.” The Christian view of creation provided important parts of the groundwork for the rise of modern empirical science, for the belief in creation implied a real and an orderly, although contingent, material world and therefore one open for empirical investigation into its pervasive and invariable features. In what follows, emphasis is on the religious rather than the metaphysical implications of creation; the former have been surprisingly consistent throughout Christian history while the latter, however important, have received differing philosophical explication in different epochs; for example, Platonistic, Aristotelian, rationalistic, idealistic, neoclassical, and so on.

      To say, as the scriptures do, that God created all things meant to the tradition from the beginning that God is the sole source of all. Quite early, therefore, theology declared that God had not created “out of matter,” since then something—matter—would be co-eternal with God and not created by God. Nor was creation thought to be an emanation from God, a “fall” away from God, but the result of God’s deliberate and hence free action. Therefore, since God was known to be good, creation is good. To be finite, temporal, bodily, mortal, even dependent and vulnerable—as all creatures are—is therefore good and not evil. If God created all, then there is no essential, ineradicable evil; suffering is neither fated nor necessary, and redemption from it is possible. Similarly, the body, created by God as is mind or spirit, is good, not evil. Life, therefore, in its essential structure of finitude, spatiality, temporality, individuality, and sociality, is thus potentially creative and meaningful.

      Creation implies the absoluteness and unconditionedness of God as the source or ground of all, and the relatedness of God as that on which the world is continually dependent. God is therefore transcendent to the world as well as immanent within it. Creation implies the eternity of God as the source of time and yet the temporality and changeability of God as related to a world in process. It even implies the passivity and suffering of God as experiencing, knowing, and caring for a vulnerable, mortal world. These paradoxes about God implied by the religious meaning of creation have puzzled and challenged Christian philosophy since the beginning; they represent a “sign” of the mystery of the divine as creator.

      Creation thus both expressed and anchored firmly the monotheistic center of Christian (and Jewish) faith: As the source of all things there was God—alone, unconditioned, and eternal, and yet in continual and essential relation to a changing creation. Central to the implications of creation, therefore, was what it said about human existence, its possibilities, its dilemmas, and its destiny. One implication was that the Christian affirmation that men and women were created by God established the freedom and the dignity, the spiritual constitution, and the value of human life—all of which were represented by the crucial phrase in Genesis that humans had been created “in the image of God.” As a consequence of their creation, humans were free and responsible, that is, moral creatures, on the one hand subject to a moral law that obligated them to one another, and on the other hand capable of irresponsible and even evil action. The freedom, responsibility, and potential “fault” of human existence all appear with creation. A second implication of the symbol of creation was that God created all the essential conditions of human life: its bodily base, its material environment, its spatial and temporal parameters. In principle these parameters of finitude were also established as “good” if humans lived up to their image.

      Third, since God created time, ruled the sequences of historical events, and “acted” purposefully in history, history was given a potentiality of meaning unknown in religious and cultural life before. Creation, in other words, established the basis for the glory and the personal intimacy of God, for the value and spiritual dignity of women and men, for the positive assessment of nature and life generally, and for the decisive and hopeful character of temporal existence. As is evident, not only was the religious meaning of the symbol creation central to the religious attitudes of Christians toward God, their world, and themselves in that world, but even more it provided the bases for assumptions about reality that have been central to Western consciousness generally and have continued to define that consciousness long after the latter has become “secular.” To many for whom no religious meanings at all are valid, these implications of creation remain nevertheless accurate assessments of reality and of life’s possibilities within reality.

      Creation and Science. As the summary above shows, the religious meanings of creation are rich and important, even to a secular scientific and technological culture. Like all the other religious affirmations within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, these attitudes were expressed with and communicated by narratives and images, the “stories” about God and God’s actions. With regard to creation, these stories center in the first chapters of Genesis where witness is reverently and poetically given to the great events through which God brought the universe into being and established its main features. Not surprisingly, the story recorded there reflects the understanding of the natural order characteristic of the Hebrews in the seventh or the fifth centuries B.C.E. of the heavens, of the earth, of the flora and fauna of the earth, and of human history. It is therefore a relatively “archaic” view of the origins and early history of the world, laced with and expressive of these religious meanings. One important task for the modern theologian—in fact, for any modern Christian—is to separate that archaic science and archaic history into these religious meanings and to re-express the latter in terms of the cosmology and the historical consciousness of the modern world. Like the symbol of original sin, therefore, the symbol of creation has represented a fascinating, unavoidable, and yet very difficult challenge to theology to be at once “biblical” and modern.

      Most of the principal Christian traditions, Protestant and Catholic alike, have recognized the historical

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