Creation As An Ongoing Change
A common belief among many Christians is to imagine the creation of the world as an historical point at an end of a linear timeline; when God separated light from darkness and heaven from earth. The risk of describing creation as an historical point is to reduce it, to make it mechanical (cause and effect), as if everything was completed and perfect once upon a time and has to be restored. Things happened in Paradise. It added something to creation. There was a separation between God and human and a separation between humans in the world. Sin became a part of creation and started a movement. Actually, one can interpret the Fall as a second creation, one that initiated an ongoing change of a plurality of ideas, knowledge, art and relations. Maybe the Fall was a precondition for the creation, in order to bring change and development into the world. A paradoxical way of opening the totality and fulfillment for uncertainty and plurality?
Wendy Farley has an argument about the consequences of the illusion of totality and the One, which relates to these ideas mentioned: “It is a Whole in which everything is already caught.”1 She argues that the illusion of totality, the idea that the world is completed, opens for destruction of plurality and concreteness of the world as material. Further, in “failing to recognize or encounter reality [as plural and vulnerable], it becomes impossible to behave ethically towards it.”2 It becomes impossible because the totality excludes movement, and movement is the precondition for creation.
God’s involvement
Does the movement mean that God changes in an ongoing creation? That humans’ experiences of evil, pain and destruction even is a precondition of the vulnerable dimension of creation? Maybe, but this does not seem to fit humans’ spontaneous images of creation, which often is described as something exclusively positive from a human point of view. Destruction is blamed on the evil forces. One reason for this dualistic perspective on creation could be that creation is mistaken for progression. It is a valuation of the creation as good or bad in relation to the human perspective and not an acceptance of change as an unconditional term of existence. Does this mean that God accepts evil? It is the wrong way of asking the question, since humans are participating in the ongoing creation and share the responsibility as Imago Dei, the image of God. In our contemporary time it can be considered as radical to speak about creation as an ongoing event without any ethical valuation of good or bad. One reason for this is that during modernity, many people in the “West” are programmed to judge every act in relation to its consequences for people. It is radical to claim that I am dependent on the creation and not vice versa. It is radical because in the secular modern narrative the message to humanity is that humans construct the world in the name of progression. We design and multiply Selves through technology, social media, economy and the mirror of globalization that swirls around an imagined autonomy. I create myself here, there and everywhere. And yet, I am nothing without someone and something.
The Creed that says: I want you
In the first article of the Nicene Creed Christians confess: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty maker of heaven and earth, and of all that is, seen and unseen.” It is both the “formless stuff and the forming principle from a more ultimate divine source, which it defines as both logos and as creative will, as both the principle of form and the principle of vitality.”3 The creed also means that we are created, as a part of the creation and at the same time unique. The creed is an answer of creation, with my body and mind, towards the Creator. This relation means creation is a mutual confession out of love and faith. Further, the creational confession requires someone who says: I want you. It is a unique relationship of love. Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, describes love’s expression: “Love is an action in the world. The one who is in it [love], sees with its eyes, for him the humans are released from their entanglement in the mechanized life…”4 Something starts in the relation, a movement from you to me that creates something new when you see me and I see you. This is why creation is not primarily something that happened at a certain point in history, but a continuation of the world as it is and will become. And this is why responsibility and justice are two of the most precious virtues in the creation, because they are mutual and caring. But, at the same time, one asks, is it not blasphemy to speak of this world as created, when there is so much suffering and destruction going on? One answer is that the experiences of pain are not outside the creation, they are part of it, and this is in itself an act of resistance. It is a resistance which means that life continues even though, from an ethical point of view, it should stop immediately. The Swedish poet Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793–1823) did express the holistic view about creation and destructions like this: “Night is the mother of day, Chaos the neighbor of God.”5
“To be is to be perceived”
In the end of 17th century, George Berkeley developed a theory about subjective idealism.6 He wanted to find rational evidence based on experience for the existence of God and objects in the world. “To be is to be perceived,” is one of his famous arguments. It is a radical response to René Descartes, who claimed that the only thing I know is: “I think, therefor I am.” Berkeley’s perspective invites every perceiving subject into a mutual relation: “From my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God.”7 This radical approach from Berkeley about perception, invites further reflections about the radicalism of creation: I exist because I am perceived. I was born without a power or will of my own. Nobody asked me if I wanted life. Yet, the Psalmist says: “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”8 This can be interpreted as an eternal creation from God’s perception, time as Chronos and Cairos. We live in the creation and receive life, air, light, senses and vulnerability. We also have the power to give love, forgiveness, and pain. I am created and I am also a creator. I am created “a little lower than the angels, and crowned…with glory and honor.”9 Everything in the world appears as the mask of God, as larva Dei, which means we can experience the world as the appearance of God. We cannot see God, but we can experience God through God’s creation. God shows in the flowers, in the rivers, in our neighbor. And through faith we can “see” God in the creation, as larva Dei – the mask of God.10
“In the beginning there is relation,” Buber proclaims.11 Creation is the ongoing movement between everything that exists. It is the dynamic of waves that roles through the same water that enveloped Jonah – who tried to escape the Creator – which today carries the dead and living refugees over the Mediterranean. It is the same wind that brings me a caress from someone’s hand that crushes houses and trees in the storm. The same sun that shines on me has also shone on the victims of horrible sufferings and unspeakable acts towards the creation. Everything that is, is a part of creation. The same light that once met Aron, who blessed God’s creation, is shining upon us: “May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you.”
Notes
1. Wendy Farley, 1996. Eros for the Other. Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World. The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, p 20.
2. Farley, p 22.
3. Reinhold Niebuhr, 1947. The Nature and the Destiny of Man. A Christian Interpretation. Charles Schribner’s Sons, New York, p 134f.
4. Martin Buber, 1962. Jag och du. Bonniers, Stockholm, (Translation from Swedish: Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson), p 21.
5. Erik Johan Stagnelius. ”Vän i förödelsens stund” in Stagnelius. Dikter i urval. Wahlström och Widstrand, Stockholm, 1988. Translation: Bill Coyle. (http://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/05/friend-in-the-desolate-time (2015-11-27)
6. George Berkeley develops this in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710.
7. Berkeley, p 21.
8. Psalms 139:16 (NIV)
9. Psalms 8:5 (NIV)
10. Martin Luther speaks about Larva Dei as an aspect of vocation for the whole creation in different comments. One example is Martin Luther ([1535] 1843): Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas, Caput II, v 13–14, 23–25.
11. Buber, p 23.
