A Theology of Creation in 12 Points
D.A. Carson
All right. Let’s say something about creation.
Today when Christians talk about the doctrine of creation, a lot of the discussion immediately turns to when creation took place, how it relates to claims of evolutionists, old earth, young earth, and things of that order. And certainly such questions are important, but it is not the place where the Bible itself lays the primary emphasis. Let me explain what I mean by that.
About 50 years ago Francis Schaeffer wrote a book called Genesis in Space and Time. And in it he asked a question that I have increasingly come to see as fundamental: What is the least, he asks, that we must make of Genesis 1–11 in order for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true? Now he is not asking what is the most that you can draw from Genesis 1–11 and Genesis 1–3 in particular, but: What is the least that we must be certain about, clear about, for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true? That is a very shrewd question, because it is a way of saying: Those are the things that we must most emphasize and that are least negotiable.
So let me outline some of those kinds of things. This is a mere survey. Each of the points I am about to mention could easily be expanded into an hour’s address. And instead, I am going to go through a handful of them rather quickly.
1) God comes first. It is such an elementary point, but it needs to be articulated. Before anything else was, before there was a universe in the beginning: God. He comes first. And that is teased out in other Scriptures to show that God in eternity past was not dependent upon us. It is not that God needed the universe so he wouldn’t be lonely. Eventually, the Bible fleshes out the notion of God in all kinds of ways to show that in the past the Father loved the Son and the Son loved the Father. So there was a perfection of love in the past.
That’s very different from, for example, the vision of Islam where Islam is slow to speak of God being a God of love, because that assumes the importance of another. And in their insistence on God’s uniqueness and sovereignty and separateness, then they can stress God’s big and greatness. It is hard for them to stress God’s love. The Qur’an rarely speaks in those terms. But the Bible as a whole insists that God is love, because in the one God, miraculously, strangely, God is also other. In the oneness of God there is a complexity such that God loves the Son, the Sons loves God, even in eternity past, and he doesn’t need the universe.