The Good Creator of Everything Good
What it means to confess God as creator of heaven and earth
This is part 6 of a series on the Apostles’ Creed through the lens of Ben Myers’ book The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism as well as Brother David Steindl-Rast’s book Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles’ Creed.
So far in this series I’ve talked about the sacramental (not just educational) nature of the creeds, who the “I” is that believes the Apostles’ Creed, what it means to say that we “believe” in God, why we name God as “Father”, and what it means that God is “almighty.” Now we turn to the next phrase of the Apostles’ Creed, in which we declare God the Father almighty to be the “creator of heaven and earth.”
Overlapping, interlocking “spaces”
We confess that God created both heaven and earth. In the American religious imagination, “heaven” is a wispy “spiritual” place we go when we die—a remote, immaterial location, inaccessible, not as “real” as earthly things. But that’s not how ancient peoples thought about heaven, including the earliest Christians.
“Heaven” for them isn’t a far away location for later, but rather simply names God’s “space,” in contrast to the human “space” called earth. Stendl-Rast calls heaven “the fountainhead of God’s creative action.” I find it helpful to think of heaven and earth as two “dimensions” of reality that intersect and overlap in mysterious ways.1 (It’s kind of like quantum entanglement). More on this below.
So God is the creator of heaven, but the more counter-cultural claim of the creed (from the early church’s perspective) is that this God—the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—is also the creator of the earth.
Against despair
Myers points out that the Apostles’ Creed developed, in part, in response to the “world-denying doctrines” of various forms of Gnosticism, and “the wider culture of despair that had engendered them.” Gnostic teachings were very diverse, but “what they had in common was a dualism that divided the (bad) creator from the (good) redeemer and the (bad) world of flesh from the (good) human spirit.”
In declaring the God and Father of Jesus Christ to be the Creator of heaven and earth, then, “Christians were marked by their positive stance toward creation” from the very beginning. It was significantly counter-cultural to be baptized into such a “world-affirming faith” that refused to see any created thing as inherently evil.
One of the reasons Gnosticism was appealing was because it presented a seemingly elegant solution to the problem of evil: The reason there is so much suffering and evil in the world is that it was created by an evil god. Thus our very existence in the world is reprehensible—something to escape from, something for us to wish to see destroyed. “Gnosticism solves the problem of evil only by transforming everything into evil,” Myers writes.
(I find it ruefully ironic that a similar kind of world-denying attitude can now be found quite commonly among Christians. If your faith is all about escaping a doomed earth that’s going to burn, and going away to “heaven” when you die, you might be closer to Gnosticism than the Christianity of the early church.)
Everything is good, actually
Against the predominant view, the early Christians taught that everything in creation is good, because it was created by a good God. Summarizing early Christian teaching, Myers writes that “evil, properly speaking, does not exist at all.”
There are no evil entities, only good ones created by a good God. When a creature fails to be properly itself, when it turns away from its own nature and purpose, then it becomes a deficient version of itself. It is evil to the extent that it now lacks something essential to its own nature.
Darkness doesn’t “exist”—it is merely an absence of light. Likewise evil doesn’t “exist”—it is rather a deprivation of inherent goodness, a twisting of the good creation toward ends that are dichordant with its essential goodness.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that evil is insignificant. We’re not seeking to gaslight ourselves by saying that evil is no big deal, or that it’s actually good. (That would be just as harmful as saying everything is evil.) But it changes how we respond to evil. Instead of collapsing in despair over an inherently and irredeemably evil world, we pray and struggle toward the eradication of suffering and evil, knowing that we are living in God’s good creation.
And everything needs to be healed
To confess God as the creator of heaven and earth is to confess that we live in “a sick world that needs healing, not an evil world that needs destruction.” And here’s where heaven comes back into the picture. Because of the ascension of the resurrected human body of Jesus into heaven, Christ now “fills everything in every way” (Eph 1:23) and is thus with us always (Matt 28:20), occupying, as it were, both heaven and earth.
In other words, Jesus “goes away” into heaven in order to be more fully present to us here on earth. Jesus has taken humanity into the presence of God, and now is present on earth in his divinity through his body, the church. So Jesus is in heaven and on earth, and because we have been “raised with Christ” (Col 3:1), we too are on earth and in heaven. In Christ, God has begun the healing of the world God created, the world God loves.
Next in this series: God’s Only Son and Our (Only) Lord
N.T. Wright describes it this way in his book Surprised By Hope.