Credo 6: … all that is, seen and unseen …
I here follow Luke Timothy Johnson’s insight that the creed is best understood as an extremely concise summary of God’s revelation of himself through the Incarnation of Jesus as understood by the church’s reflection on and development of the scriptures. This particular clause in the creed is concerned to spell out the implications of the preceding clause, of God as the maker of all. It is important to see that the activity of God in creation is not just some past event: God did not, as it were, light the fuse of the ‘big bang’ and stand well back; rather, that anything exists at all, and continues to exist, is due to God’s continuing creative activity. To assert this is to assent to a particular stance to the world: for the believer, the world is, ultimately, gift; no matter how many thorns in which that gift may be wrapped. Believer and unbeliever alike are assailed by the changes and chances of this passing world: the challenge of faith, ultimately, is to live out the particular Good Fridays in which we may find ourselves in the sure hope of resurrection. That is the theological truth asserted in Genesis 1 and elsewhere in Scripture: that God is the creator, and that creation is, fundamentally, good – cf Ps 104, especially vv 29-30: When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth.
seen
For many of our contemporaries the theological truth expressed in Genesis 1 – that God is the creator of all – is taken to be in conflict with our understanding of the world. Yet the vision of creation given in scripture, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, is entirely compatible with theories of evolution. It goes on: …let the earth…let the waters…bring forth living creatures of every kind. Such a view of God’s creation is consistent with the evolutionary sense of the world as constantly becoming, of the continuously creative power that drives the formation of this ever-changing universe. Creation is ongoing: God’s Word is still in the act of speaking God’s creation.
The theories of the natural sciences can only address the interconnecting causes of beings that have been or are now already in existence. They cannot account for existence itself. Nevertheless, these theories concerning the expansion of the universe and the evolving of species are full of important insights that Christians neglect or deny at the cost of intellectual integrity. It should be clear, Johnson insists, that the peculiar exercise called ‘creation science’ or ‘creationism’ is a failed enterprise lacking such intellectual integrity. Trying to read the account of origins in the Book of Genesis as a source of scientific knowledge is both bad science and a gross misunderstanding of Genesis as a literary and religious text. Whatever Genesis might be, it is not a scientific treatise. Genesis speaks the truth about the origins of the world through literary and religious myth. It tells us that everything that has so been brought into being is good, and that humans particularly represent the creator among all other creatures because they bear God’s likeness and image.
and unseen
The writers of scripture and of the creeds lived and worked in a cultural milieu that privileged the spiritual or mental over the material. From our side of the seventeenth-century watershed this position is reversed, yet this clause of the creed ‘all things visible and invisible’ (– which also has a scriptural basis cf Book of Wisdom, Romans) in effect extends and delineates the notion of creation first given in Genesis 1, by making it clear that ‘those words include absolutely everything that exists’ – initially defined against Marcion and the denigration of matter; therefore also against the endemic dualism within Christianity with respect to the human body, especially sexuality. Our challenge now is to both find some way of affirming the goodness of all created things, including sexuality (without being corrupted by the idolatrous and addictive hedonism of the current age cf Paul, 1 Timothy 6:17), and to extend our appreciation of creation beyond the material.
The word ‘invisible’ is more controversial to us now than when first formulated: almost all the ancients assumed the superiority of the spiritual to the physical, as evinced in scripture (cf Phil 2: 10-11 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth; Col 1:15-16 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him; 1 Cor 15:24 Then comes the end, when he [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power; Gal 4;3, 9: while we were minors we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world……now…that you have come to know God…how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits?; Mk 1: 34, 3:15 And he [Jesus] cured many…and cast out many demons…[and he appointed twelve apostles]…to have authority to cast out demons; James 2:19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe – and shudder.)
Now, however, the material world is taken to be all that is certainly real. Our technological success in controlling the world makes this assumption appear self-evident. Against this, the cult of the angels survives vestigially in the liturgy (in the Roman Canon – Eucharistic Prayer 1) and the committal at funerals (In paradisum deducant te angeli…). Yet no less a theologian than Karl Barth has said that in the beauty, work and witness of angels there lies the basis of the fact that the mystery of God can have a place in the earthly realm (Christian Dogmatics 3.3:484-486). Angels help us to experience holiness, to be transformed by an ethic of reception, to perceive that God’s creation is richer than the material world, for all its wonders.
Accordingly, Christians need to insist that faith itself is a way of knowing reality in a way different from, but no less real than, the limited (although impressive) ways of knowing that have yielded us technological mastery over the material. Christians need as well to cultivate practices that reveal and reinforce perceptions of the world that include things invisible – e.g. the countercultural force of prayer – in which, when we say ‘yes’ to God, we say ‘no’ to a world defined (and run) on the basis of matter and manipulation alone.
