The Overton Salon

By Austin

Last week I started this series by asking how we can make sense of this high regard the God of the Bible has for the outsider. Part of the answer to this starts in thinking about the belief that God is the sole creator of all things. This is the foundation for all thinking about how God relates to the world, which will help explain why he in particular seems to favor the lowest of the earth.

The opening problem with our discussion is that most people misunderstand what “creation” means. The famous debates between evolution and creationists has distorted this doctrine, not only for atheists who think it’s silly and infantile, but for Evangelicals too. But what is this doctrine?

Well, what the doctrine isn’t might be a better place to start. It isn’t a doctrine about how things are made. It’s not like explaining to a 10-year-old about the fuel injector of a car. In that case you would say that because the car runs on gasoline, it needs some mechanism to get it there so it can run. You don’t say, “the engineer thought it would be a good idea, so she put it in.” The question for how something is made does not need a reference to the maker at all. Just look at the thing, and figure out why it works the way it does.

But the larger point is that God is not a maker. He’s not a really big and ingenious engineer, crafting a world out of some stuff he found. He’s not the answer to the questions like “why are humans smarter than lizards,” or “why do humans have protruding chins?” He’s the answer to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”

This is a much more radical question. This is the most ultimate “why” question, the question that science refuses to even ask, because it cannot be empirically verified. And when we ask this question, our answer always has to be “God” (and there is no good reason not to ask the question). Creation means that this world we are in is absolutely dependent on this God who brings everything into existence – this is the doctrine of God as sole creator of all things.

What does this say about who God is? The primary implication is that God is not a “thing” like other things. As Herbert McCabe says, God and the universe don’t make two. Biblical language states that God is incomparable, and what this means is that God is no big boss man in the sky; you cannot compare God in any way with creatures. He is absolutely other, completely different, not one thing amongst others, a creator, not a maker. He doesn’t make a bunch of products like a watchmaker, and then set those watches out to the world to work their magic keeping bankers on time for appointments. He is the reason there is a watchmaker at all…

Since this is the case, there is no contradiction between the human and the divine, because there is no comparison. Contradiction depends on some quality that is similar – e.g., I cannot say I am a man and I am a woman. However, there is no contradiction in saying I am a man and I have a great idea (although some might dispute that!). “Man” and “idea” are not comparable things, so there is no paradox here.

The same goes for “human” and “Divine.” There is no contradiction, no competition, between humans as creatures and God as creator, no contradiction between our freedom and our dependence on the Creator God. God is not something outside of us, something different like a stone is different from a chair. God is not a thing, so that if he is in us, we are reduced (a favorite canard of most humanism is just this opposition – that if we get our morals from God we are lessening our humanity). It is only when we are fully acknowledging and living our dependence on God do we finally become fully free. Our freedom, in other words, is not a thing to be grasped, but a gift we receive.

The conclusion of this powerful doctrine is that humans are fundamentally dependent creatures. Saying that we are made in the image of God is saying that we are fully dependent on the Source of all things, and this is the basis of all the freedom and well-being of our lives. Our fundamental relation to the world is one of dependence and cooperation, because from the first we are creatures of a Creator, not products of a clock-maker.

In the next post, we’ll see the social significance of what it means to be dependent creatures. This is most fully explained in the doctrine that Jesus is Lord.