catholicism 101 -- part 13

Catholicism 101
(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)
Church of the Holy Cross
May 25, 2008
Part 13
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds: Concerning God

• “…maker of heaven and earth.”

• If we go back in time, to the beginning: “In the beginning God…”

• God is first. He precedes all.

• From all eternity, unto endless ages of ages, God is there.

• Remember, though, that the eternity of God means preeminently that he exists outside of time – not that he exists forever “in both directions” (though it means that too).

• Last time we talked a little bit about God as eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so it is.

• God cannot be eternally Father without eternally being Father of the Son. Likewise the Son cannot be eternally Son without being eternally Son of the Father. And the Holy Spirit is their mutual delight, their mutual love.

• This is the inner life of God – the “divine economy” – what we may licitly say about what God is like “inside”.

• The aseity of God means that he alone is self-sufficient, self-sourced.

• He is that greater than which nothing can be conceived.

• He is perfectly perfect (so to speak). He needs nothing to increase his perfection. He lacks nothing.

• Creation is therefore a mystery. It has baffled philosophers since the beginning of philosophy: why is there something rather than nothing?

• Our appeal to God’s eternity (i.e. his timelessness) take the contradiction out of the doctrine of creation, but not the mystery.

• There was never a time at which the created order was not. But “prior” to the beginning there was God alone.

• Why did God create? That’s the mystery.

• It seems we may say that God created, mysteriously, out of love – that before we existed, God loved us.

• It seems also that, because God is eternal, his act of creation is an eternal (timeless) act. There was never a time at which God did not create.

• It seems to be a part of his nature to create.

• So we might say he “owes it to himself” to create – i.e. in order to be who he is.

• In any event: God does create. And he creates “ex nihilo” – out of nothing.

• There was not some block of raw material from which God constructed the universe. There was nothing. And out of nothing God called something into being, by his word.

• “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” (Heb. 11.3)

• Cf. Genesis 1: “And God said… and it was so.”

• Cf. Psalm 33.8-9: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; * let all who dwell in the world stand in awe of him. / For he spoke, and it came to pass; * he commanded and it stood fast.”

• This is why God as Creator is differentiated from all finite acts of creation. When we create something, we create it out of something. When God creates, he creates out of nothing.

• God creates as Trinity:

• Genesis 1.1-2 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

• John 1.1ff: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

• Psalm 33.6: “By the word of the Lord [the Son] were the heavens made, * by the breath of his mouth [the Spirit] all the heavenly hosts.”

• The six days of creation need not be understood as six twenty-four hour periods (how could the day be measured before there was day and night?). Genesis is depicting the hierarchy of creation. Each stage of creation is succeeded by more perfect elements, until we reach the creation of men and women, the apex and pinnacle of God’s created work: finally, moral / spiritual creatures made in the image and likeness of God.

• You can believe in the Biblical account of creation and believe in Evolution.

• The Bible is not a science text. As a datum of communication, it has a different purpose: to disclose God. As such, Genesis is the story of God’s creation, of man’s relationship with God, and of the poisoning of that relationship by sin, and the beginning of God’s plan of redemption. It was not written by modern people obsessed with empiricism and scientific method and whatnot. It is as much (or more) poetry than history in the modern sense of that term.

• In creation we see God’s first language. God reveals himself in his act of creation, and in what he has created. The “analogiam creationis” – or the “analogiam entis”.