creator of heaven and earth

The Text

The clause completes the first article of the creed by tying the Father — already named, already confessed as almighty — to the whole of the visible and invisible. “Heaven and earth” is not a list of two regions; it is a merism, a Hebrew idiom (Gen. 1:1; Ps. 124:8; Neh. 9:6) where the two extremities stand for everything in between. To confess God as creator of heaven and earth is to confess God as creator of all that is, full stop.

Translation Notes

Creatorem / Factorem / poiētēn. The Latin tradition oscillates between Creatorem and Factorem in this position. Factorem is the older Western reading and is what the Nicene Creed uses in standard form. Creatorem is the more precise theological term — creare in Christian Latin came to mean specifically the bringing-into-being of what previously was not — but the alternation between the two is not a doctrinal disagreement. The Greek poiētēn (maker, fashioner — the same root as poiētēs, poet) is broader still. There is no Greek word for “to create from nothing”; the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is articulated by the patristic period using the construction ex ouk ontōn (from things which are not, Theophilus, Ad Autolycum II.4), not by any single verb.

The shift in English between Maker (Book of Common Prayer 1662, retained in the 1989 UMC Hymnal’s traditional version) and creator (ICET 1975, ELLC 1988, Roman Missal 2010) tracks the same alternation. The change is not theological revision but recovery of the more precise Latin.

Caelum et terra. The Hebrew idiom “the heavens and the earth” (haššāmayim wəhā’āreṣ, Gen. 1:1) is a merism — a figure of speech in which the two ends of a range stand for the whole. To bless God as “maker of heaven and earth” (Ps. 124:8) is to bless God for all that is. The Latin and Greek translations preserve the idiom. The English does, too, though modern English readers — for whom “heaven” has narrowed to mean specifically the abode of the blessed dead — sometimes read “heaven and earth” as a list of two places rather than as the merism it actually is.

The Nicene Creed expands the merism into a gloss: “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” The Apostles’ Creed leaves the idiom undeveloped, but the same range is meant.

Historical Context

This clause carries the clearest anti-Marcion polemic in the creed. Marcion (c. 144), as noted under “the Father almighty,” taught that the Creator God of the Old Testament was a different — and lesser — God than the Father of Jesus Christ. Gnostic systems multiplied intermediaries between an unknown, ineffable First God and the material world, treating creation as the work of a fallen or ignorant figure. To say “the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth” is to refuse both moves at once. The Father of Jesus is the maker of the universe. There is no higher God behind the Creator, and no lower demiurge between them.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — that God created not from pre-existing matter but from nothing — is the theological corollary. Greek philosophy generally assumed eternal matter; the Bible does not, but neither does it explicitly assert creation from nothing in Gen. 1:1–2, which can be read either as creation from chaos (the tōhû wābōhû of v. 2) or from nothing. Theophilus of Antioch (c. 180) is the first Christian writer to formulate ex ouk ontōn, and Irenaeus develops it against the Gnostics. By the Council of Nicaea (325), creatio ex nihilo is settled doctrine, and it is what the creed assumes when it confesses the Father as creator.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Athanasius

The patristic case for creatio ex nihilo rests on two pillars: that the Creator’s freedom is total (he is not constrained by pre-existing material) and that no creature shares the Creator’s mode of being (everything that is not God is contingent, derived, gift). Irenaeus’s argument in Against Heresies is that the doctrine of creation from nothing is what divides the Christian God from the gods of the philosophers. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation §3, makes creation the necessary context for redemption: if God created freely from nothing, he is free to recreate from death.

Strengths

• Refuses the dualisms (matter as evil; the Creator as a lesser god) that haunted late antiquity and recur today
• Maintains the radical contingency of all that is on the Creator
• Grounds redemption in creation: the God who made all things can remake them

Weaknesses

• Genesis 1:1–2 does not strictly require creatio ex nihilo; the doctrine is theological inference from the whole of scripture, not the plain sense of one verse
• The contingency emphasis can, in hands less careful than Irenaeus’s, slide toward a deistic distance the patristic authors did not intend

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 44–46

Aquinas distinguishes the fact of creation from the beginning of the world in time. The fact — that all that is depends on God for its being — is, he argues, philosophically demonstrable. The beginning in time is known only by faith. Creation is therefore not a one-time event in the past but a continuous relation: every existing thing depends on God for its existence in every moment. The world’s quod est (that it is) is the gift of the Creator continuously.

The Five Ways (q. 2) terminate in God as First Cause — the Creatorem of the creed.

Strengths

• The “continuous creation” reading is pastorally powerful: God did not wind the universe up and walk away; he holds it in being now
• Integrates Christian doctrine with the strongest available philosophical reflection

Weaknesses

• The Five Ways were never intended by Aquinas to be freestanding proofs of God’s existence; they are clarifications within faith, and have often been misused to do work they were not designed for
• The Aristotelian physics Aquinas inherits is no longer the live scientific framework, and parts of his cosmology have to be set aside

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.5, I.14; Belgic Confession, Art. 12

Calvin’s celebrated image is creation as the theatrum gloriae Dei — the theatre of God’s glory. Every creature, rightly seen, refracts the divine glory; the believer learns to read creation as a book parallel to scripture, the latter being the spectacles by which one reads the former clearly. The doctrine of providence (I.16) is continuous with this: the Creator does not retire after the act of creation but sustains and governs it.

Strengths

• Encourages serious, sustained attention to the natural world as theologically meaningful
• Avoids both pure-immanence and pure-transcendence errors

Weaknesses

• The “book of nature” rhetoric was sometimes used to authorize a confidence in natural theology that the Reformers themselves elsewhere chastened (Romans 1:18–23 was Calvin’s own caution)
• In some Reformed contexts, the theatre-of-glory rhetoric has been twisted to license utilitarian dominion over creation — a use Calvin himself would not have approved

Modern — Theology and Science

Tradition: John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science; Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology

The 20th- and 21st-century question is the relation between the Christian doctrine of creation and the scientific accounts (Big Bang cosmology, evolutionary biology, deep time). The mainstream theological consensus — across Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant scholarship — is that scientific cosmology and the doctrine of creation answer different questions and are not in competition. Genesis 1 is not a competing cosmogony to be falsified or vindicated by physics. The doctrine of creation asserts radical contingency, divine purpose, and the goodness of what is. It does not specify a sequence of events the scientific community can test.

Strengths

• Allows the church to receive scientific work without theological panic
• Frees both pulpit and lab from manufactured conflict

Weaknesses

• The line between “different questions” and “two truths” is harder to hold than the rhetoric suggests; theology and physics do, in places, make overlapping claims
• Strict young-earth creationist communities feel this account abandons biblical authority; the criticism is worth serious engagement, not dismissal

Ecological

Tradition: Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation; Larry Rasmussen, Earth Honoring Faith; Pope Francis, Laudato Si’

The ecological reading reads the creed in light of the climate crisis. Creation is not merely the stage on which the drama of salvation unfolds; it is itself bound up in the divine purpose. The Spirit broods over the waters (Gen. 1:2); the Son is “the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15); the Father wills “to reconcile to himself all things” through Christ (Col. 1:20). Care for creation is therefore not an optional add-on to Christian ethics; it is a confession of who the Father is and who the church is to be.

Strengths

• Reactivates biblical material — all things in Col. 1:20, all flesh in Joel 2 / Acts 2, the cosmic redemption of Rom. 8 — that pastoral practice has often neglected
• Connects the creed to one of the most urgent questions of the present

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms of green theology tend toward a panentheism that compromises the Creator/creature distinction the creed is meant to protect
• Risks letting cultural urgency drive doctrinal innovation rather than the reverse

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley was a remarkably engaged natural theologian. For an Oxford-trained preacher who would gallop on horseback to the next preaching post, he kept up surprisingly well with the science of his day. His A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation; Or, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy (1763, expanded to five volumes in 1777) is a compilation of contemporary natural science — astronomy, meteorology, geology, biology — read through the lens of the goodness and wisdom of the Creator. It was substantial enough to be reissued through the 19th century.

Two Wesley sermons sit at the doctrinal center:

Sermon 56, “God’s Approbation of His Works” (1782) is Wesley’s meditation on Gen. 1:31 — “and behold, it was very good.” He works through the orders of creation (stars, earth, plants, animals, humans) and insists that each, as originally created, was without flaw. The fall is real and pervasive, but Wesley refuses to let the fall obscure the original goodness of what God made.

Sermon 60, “The General Deliverance” (1781) is one of the most striking sermons in the Wesleyan corpus. It addresses the suffering of non-human creation: animals share in the consequences of the fall, and Wesley argues — from Rom. 8:19–22 — that the eschatological redemption includes them. The Father almighty who is Creator of heaven and earth is not the redeemer of human souls only. Wesley does not, in 1781, anticipate the ecological theology of the late 20th century, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Care for the whole creation, including non-human creation, is not a foreign import into Wesleyan theology; it is one of the most distinctive notes Wesley contributed to the English-speaking tradition.

Sermon 64, “The New Creation” (1785) — Wesley’s eschatological meditation on 2 Pet. 3:13 — completes the arc. The Creator who made the heavens and the earth will make them new. The first creation and the new creation are not two unrelated acts but one continuous purpose of the Father almighty.

The practical Wesleyan posture: praise the Creator for what is; mourn what the fall has marred; hope for the renewal of all things; treat creation in the meantime as the trust of the Father, not as raw material for human use.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnic treatment of creation is more redemption-shaped than pure creation-praise — characteristic of a tradition whose center is the ordo salutis — but with significant creation moments.

“Maker, in whom we live” (Charles, 1747), paraphrasing Acts 17:28, addresses the Father as Maker, the Son as Saviour, the Spirit as Sanctifier, with stanzas escalating from creation through redemption to sanctification. This is the closest the Wesleys come to a sustained creedal-style creation hymn.

“Author of every work divine” (Charles, 1747) opens with creation language: “Author of every work divine, / Who dost through both creations shine.” The “both creations” — natural and new — is a characteristically Wesleyan integration: the Father who made all things is the Father who is making all things new.

The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists opens with “Exhorting and Beseeching to Return to God” rather than a section on creation. This is structurally telling: the hymnal is shaped by the order of salvation, not by the order of the creed. Methodists sang of creation primarily as the stage on which the drama of salvation unfolds.

Where the Wesleys’ hymns are thin on pure creation-praise, Isaac Watts — whose hymns Methodists sang abundantly — is rich. “I sing the almighty power of God” (1715) gave English-speaking Christians their primary creation hymn for over two centuries; its entry into Methodist singing reflects the integration of Watts’s and the Wesleys’ traditions in actual worship. The contemporary Methodist congregation that wants a creation-Sunday hymn most often reaches for Watts.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

What does a congregation say when it confesses “creator of heaven and earth”?

It says, first, that the world is not necessary. The universe did not have to exist. That it does exist — that there is anything at all, that there is this anything — is gift, not given. The pastoral mode the clause asks for is therefore radical thanksgiving. We did not earn the world. We did not invent ourselves. We are creatures, and we have been received into a creation we did not make.

Hebrews 11 puts it crisply: what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. The visible universe rests on something other than itself. Modern cosmology can describe the unfolding of the visible from the Big Bang forward, but it cannot answer why anything is at all. The creed’s clause is not in competition with cosmology; it answers a question cosmology cannot ask. Whatever the universe is in its mechanism, the Father of Jesus Christ is its source and its purpose.

The pastoral force of this is uncomfortable. If the world is gift, the believer is not entitled to it. Not entitled to a comfortable life. Not entitled to a society like the one of one’s childhood. Not entitled to “Christian culture,” “biblical values,” “family values” — none of which the gospel actually promises and several of which have been used historically to license sins the gospel actually condemns. Jesus does not give us a culture to defend; he gives us life, redemption, transformation. The creed grounds this: we are creatures, not owners; recipients, not entitled parties. The proper response to gift is praise, and then the giving away of what we have been given.

For congregations wrestling with theology and science: the creed does not require young-earth chronology or six-day literalism, and never has. The patristic and medieval traditions read Gen. 1 figuratively as often as literally — Augustine’s On the Literal Meaning of Genesis is in fact a sustained argument against simple literalism. To pray “creator of heaven and earth” is not to commit oneself to any particular cosmology. It is to confess that the Father of Jesus Christ is the source of what is.

For congregations facing the climate crisis: the clause licenses care for creation as a confessional matter, not merely an ethical add-on. The Father almighty who made heaven and earth is not indifferent to what becomes of it; and a church that confesses him cannot be either. The Methodist movement’s commitment to social holiness has, in the last fifty years, naturally extended to creation care. The creed grounds that extension.

Further Reading

• Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum II.4 — earliest articulation of creatio ex nihilo
• Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies II — the anti-Gnostic argument for creation from nothing
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §3 — creation as the necessary context for redemption
• Augustine, Confessions XI–XIII — creation, time, and Genesis
• Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis — patristic non-literalism on Gen. 1
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 44–46
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.5, I.14
• Belgic Confession (1561), Art. 12
• John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1763; 5-vol. expanded ed. 1777)
• John Wesley, Sermon 56, “God’s Approbation of His Works” (1782)
• John Wesley, Sermon 60, “The General Deliverance” (1781)
• John Wesley, Sermon 64, “The New Creation” (1785)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament on Genesis 1–2
• Isaac Watts, “I sing the almighty power of God” (1715)
• Charles Wesley, “Maker, in whom we live” (1747); “Author of every work divine” (1747)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Harper & Row, 1985)
• Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (Vatican, 2015)
• John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale, 1998)
• Larry Rasmussen, Earth Honoring Faith (Oxford, 2013)