Theologian Elizabeth Johnson shows how our understanding of creation has evolved since Genesis:
Ancient biblical writers, imbued with faith in God’s creative power, described poetically how God stretched out the heavens, laid firm the foundations of the land, gave the sea instructions to stay within its bounds. Their model of the cosmos put an unchanging Earth at the center with the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies circling around it under the dome of the sky, which is actually the way things appear to the unaided human eye.
Many centuries later we have a different understanding. Scientific discoveries have led us to see the heavens and the earth as the still-unfinished result of natural processes…. Since life began on this planet more than 3.5 billion years ago, different species of plants and animals have evolved in sync with this changing environment, emerging and disappearing….
The Bible with its belief in a Creator who makes heaven and earth and all that is in them was written centuries before this modern knowledge developed and should not be expected to possess it. What remains constant for faith, whatever model one uses to envision Earth, is the religious intuition that the living God has an ongoing creative relationship with land, sea, air, and their inhabitants that enables their existence and actions.
Johnson invites us to think of God as Creator through a broad lens:
The ambling character of life’s evolutionary emergence over billions of years … is hard to reconcile with a simplistic idea of God the Creator at work…. Best to let go of the idea of God as a monarch acting upon other beings. Move your mind in the direction of the living God who is infinite holy mystery. Sit with the truth that our finite minds cannot comprehend the One who is infinite; our finite hearts cannot grasp love without limit. Look toward God not as an individual actor within the range of creatures but as the unimaginable personal Source of all beings, the very Ground of being, the Beyond in our midst, a generative ocean of love, Creator Spirit. Then begin to realize that the power of the Creator Spirit is not exercised as raw power-over but as love that empowers-with. God’s creative activity brings into being a universe endowed with the innate capacity to evolve by the operation of its own natural powers, making it a free partner in its own creation.
Expanding our view of the living God along the lines of the paradigm of the lover opens a way to respect the genuine autonomy of nature’s operation and the freedom of creatures’ behavior that the Creator God makes possible….
As God’s good creation, the world becomes a free partner in its own becoming while the Creator enables its existence at every moment. To put this succinctly, God creates the world by empowering the world to make itself. Far from compelling the world to develop according to a pre-designed plan, the Spirit continually calls it forth to a fresh and unexpected future.
Reference:
Elizabeth A. Johnson, Come, Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and the Earth (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2024), 17, 18–19, 19–20, 21.
Image credit and inspiration: Jennie Razumnaya, Blooming Peach Garden (detail), 2022, photo, Los Angeles, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We’re invited into the beauty of creation, receiving and offering, just like this artist painting the petals of a cherry blossom.
Story from Our Community:
Recently, I sat in my Sunday morning quiet space—a bench in the garage of our home. Looking over at the car parked next to me, I thanked it for being faithful to us in escorting us from place to place. I thought of the complicated process of building the car—a product of metal, glass, plastic, lubricants—all fashioned by the hands of its creators, both human and divine. In the past, the thought of literally “thanking a car” would have been crazy to me. But through that experience of offering gratitude to something I see every day, I felt deeply connected to God.
—Greg M.