Once we acknowledge creation, God’s continued involvement with the world and humanity is not far behind. True, some deists denied that and acknowledged creation without providence or provision. But that was an untenable position and merely a pause on the way to atheism. “The creation of the world leads us by direct consequence to the providence of God,” to “the certainty of God’s providence in the continual order of nature” (John Calvin on Psalm 33:6).
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth. Psalm 33:6 RSV
This psalm begins “Rejoice in the Lord” and spends most of its time justifying that simple, though sometimes hard, course of action. Creation is good to think about because, among other reasons, it reminds us of the odd fact that there are (that we are) living things in the universe and that their (our) life is the breath of God.
“The breath of his mouth” in the psalm is “the Word of the Lord” by which the heavens and all this other stuff were made. It was all made by God speaking: “Let there be . . .” (Genesis 1:3, 6, etc.), and a tradition of referring to creation by the Word of God, nearly personified, developed out of that. It was as if God’s speaking was there alongside God in the work of creation.
Among Christians it did not take long before that Word of God / co-creator was identified with Jesus. For instance, see John 1:1-5, 10, 14; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:16; and Hebrews 1:2. Through it all there is an apparently careful use of prepositions to keep the distinction between God and his Word — for instance, “through” in 1 Corinthians 8:6 (twice) distinguished from “from” earlier in the verse.
Nonetheless, there’s no reason to second-guess the conclusion the church came to later, that the man Jesus is “true God of true God . . . consubstantial with the Father, he by whom all things were made” (Nicene Creed). The amazing step, for people who knew the Jewish Scriptures, of saying that about a particular human (indeed, along with defending his complete humanity) was the natural and logical outcome of an unstrained and public process. The man whom we speak of being disciples of was present at creation and is now both the one in whom all things are maintained in existence and the God whom we know.
- Deism came later than Calvin, but in the same context he says: “Not that all men reason so justly, or are endued with so sound a judgment, as to conclude that the world is at this day maintained by the same divine power which was once put forth in creating it: on the contrary, the great majority imagine that he is an idle spectator in heaven of whatever is transacted on earth” — as good a definition of deism as any. He goes on, “But no man truly believes that the world was created by God unless he is also firmly persuaded that it is maintained and preserved by him”; in other words, deism is either temporary or unthinking. Once we say “creation,” we are faced with a much bigger and more intrusive God.
- You might have noticed me having an understanding of providence different from Calvin’s. [;)]
The One Story 