maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen

The Text

The third phrase of the first article, and the Nicene Creed’s careful expansion of the older baptismal formula. The Apostles’ Creed had named the Father as creator of heaven and earth. The Nicene adds and of all things visible and invisible — and the addition is not redundant. The fourth-century church faced spiritual cosmologies in which the angelic and demonic realm was understood as a separate eternal order distinct from the material creation, sometimes co-eternal with God, sometimes generated by a lower demiurge. The Nicene addition closes the door on every such cosmology. Whatever is not God is creature. The angels are creatures. The principalities and powers (whatever those biblical names denote) are creatures. The seraphim and cherubim and thrones and dominions of the patristic angelology are creatures. There is one God, and there is one creation, and the creation includes everything that is not God — visible and invisible together.

The clause is also the foundation of every Christian sacramental and pastoral imagination. The visible creation is good, given by God, destined for the new creation. The invisible creation is also good, given by God, ordered to the same end. The body matters. The soul matters. The angels matter. The dust matters. All of it is the work of the one God whose Son will redeem and whose Spirit even now is at work in the whole of it. If God is not the creator, God cannot be the savior.

Translation Notes

Poiētēn / factorem — maker. The Greek and Latin both use the most ordinary words for one who makes — poiētēs (from which English derives poet), factor (the agent noun from facio, to make). The creed’s choice of these everyday terms over the more technical dēmiourgos (in Greek) or conditor (in Latin) is theologically pointed in two ways. First, the dēmiourgos — Plato’s world-maker in the Timaeus — was the term Gnostic and Marcionite groups had used for a lower creator-deity distinct from the high God. The creedal poiētēs refuses this two-stage cosmology: the one God of clause 1 is himself the maker. Second, the patristic distinction (in both Greek and Latin) between making-from-existing-matter (plassein, fabricare) and creating-from-nothing (ktizein, creare) developed alongside the creedal formulation. The creed’s poiētēn / factorem should be heard with the patristic sense: making from nothing, the doctrine the church will later formalize as creatio ex nihilo.

Ouranou kai gēs / caeli et terrae — heaven and earth. The standard scriptural pairing (Hebrew shamayim wa’aretz) is the comprehensive name for the whole of created reality. Heaven in scriptural usage covers the visible sky, the upper firmament, and the dwelling-place of God; earth covers the dry land, the seas, and the depths beneath. The pairing is a hendiadys: heaven and earth names the whole created order, the way the merism young and old names everyone. The phrase does not, in its creedal use, imply that heaven is the eternal dwelling of God that pre-exists creation; the heaven of maker of heaven and earth is itself part of what God has made. The patristic and medieval theologians sometimes distinguished between the empyrean heaven (the eternal dwelling of God) and the firmament heaven (the created sky); the creedal clause refers to the latter, with the former assumed in the doctrine of God as such.

Horatōn te pantōn kai aoratōn / visibilium omnium et invisibilium — of all things visible and invisible. The Nicene addition. Horatōn (from horaō, to see) and aoratōn (from the same verb with the alpha-privative) together name the seeable and the unseeable. The contemporary ELLC translation of all that is, seen and unseen is more inclusive in tone than the more literal of all things visible and invisible; both are legitimate. The doctrinal substance is the same: the whole of created reality — material and spiritual, sensible and intelligible, embodied and angelic — is God’s creature. Colossians 1:16 stands behind the clause: in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers — all things have been created through him and for him.

Historical Context

Three historical horizons shape the Nicene confession of God as maker.

The Old Testament protology. The deepest substrate is Genesis 1–2 (the creation accounts), Psalm 33:6, 9 (by the word of the Lord the heavens were made… for he spoke and it came to be), Proverbs 8:22–31 (Wisdom present with God at creation), and Isaiah 40–55 (the prophetic articulation of the creator as the redeemer of Israel, against the gods of the nations). The Old Testament does not present a developed doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the philosophical sense, but its rhetorical and theological substance points unmistakably in that direction: the God of Israel is the source of all that is, and the cosmos is wholly his work, not his colleague.

The New Testament Christological expansion. The apostolic writings consistently confess that the work of creation is the work of the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. John 1:1–3: in the beginning was the Word… all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. Colossians 1:15–17: in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Hebrews 1:1–3: the Son is the heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. 2 Corinthians 4:6: the God who said let light shine out of darkness is the same God who has shone in the believer’s heart. The early baptismal creeds confess this single-source doctrine of creation against every dualist alternative.

The second- and fourth-century controversies. The proximate historical horizon is the controversy with Gnostic and Marcionite cosmologies in the second century, and the Arian controversy in the fourth. The Gnostic groups (Valentinian, Sethian, and others) typically posited a hierarchy of spiritual beings (aeons, archons, the pleroma) generated from a high God, with the material world made by a lower and inferior demiurge. Marcion (c. 144) distinguished between the creator God of the Old Testament — whom he characterized as just but cruel — and the redeemer God of the New Testament — whom he characterized as gracious and merciful. Both alternatives split the unity of God and the unity of God’s work; both made the material world either evil or second-rate; both produced spiritual cosmologies in which salvation is escape from rather than transformation of the created order.

The anti-Gnostic, anti-Marcionite work of Irenaeus of Lyons (Against Heresies, c. 180) is the classical patristic refutation. Irenaeus’s central conviction is unmistakable: one God, who is creator and redeemer; one creation, which is good and is being redeemed; one history, which runs from creation to consummation under the providence of the one God. The Nicene confession of God as maker of all things visible and invisible is the conciliar codification of Irenaeus’s settlement. The invisible spiritual order — the angelic ranks the Gnostic groups had populated with aeons and archons — is created. There is one creator and one creation; the spiritual is not exempt from creaturehood.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) developed in dialogue with both the biblical witness and Greco-Roman philosophical alternatives. The Greek philosophical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics) typically assumed eternal matter that the divine maker shaped but did not call into being. The Christian distinctive — articulated by Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus II.4, c. 180), Tatian (Address to the Greeks 5), and definitively by Augustine (Confessions XI–XII; On Genesis Against the Manichees; City of God XI–XII) — is that God made not only the form but the matter of the world: there is no eternal substrate beside God. Creatio ex nihilo is the doctrinal articulation of the creedal maker of all things visible and invisible.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Irenaeus, Against Heresies II and IV; Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus II; Athanasius, Against the Gentiles; Basil the Great, Hexaemeron; Augustine, Confessions XI–XII, City of God XI–XII, On Genesis Literally Interpreted

The patristic settlement on the doctrine of creation has three foundational convictions. First, creation is from nothing (ex nihilo): there is no eternal matter beside God. Second, creation is good: the goodness of God is communicated to what God makes, and the creation is fundamentally good even after the disordering effects of sin. Third, creation is whole: the same God is the maker of the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual, the human and the angelic. There is no two-tier ontology in which the spiritual is divine and the material is alien; everything that is not God is creature, and all creatures are good.

Augustine’s treatment in Confessions XI–XII and City of God XI–XII is the great Latin patristic synthesis. Augustine’s reflection on time (Confessions XI) — in which time itself is created with the world rather than pre-existing it — is among the most sustained patristic meditations on the doctrine of creation. Basil’s Hexaemeron (a series of nine homilies on the six days of Genesis 1, preached during Lent c. 378) gives the great Greek pastoral exposition of the creation: each day is preached with attention to the natural-philosophical knowledge of Basil’s era and with constant reference to the doxological response the creation invites.

The patristic angelology — articulated by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (The Celestial Hierarchy, c. 500) into nine ranks of angels — is the developed exposition of the invisible creation. The angelic orders are creatures; their goodness, their fall (in the case of the demonic), their service of God’s purposes are all part of the doctrine of creation. The early church did not regard angelology as speculative ornament; it was part of the confession of God as maker of all things visible and invisible.

Strengths

• The patristic settlement decisively excluded every dualist or two-deity cosmology
• Creatio ex nihilo gives the doctrine its proper distinctiveness against all Greco-Roman philosophical alternatives
• Basil’s Hexaemeron is permanently usable as a model of theological natural-philosophy preaching

Weaknesses

• Some patristic articulations of the creation (esp. in the Alexandrian school) imported allegorical readings of Genesis 1 that the later tradition has had to re-examine
• The patristic angelology developed in directions the Bible does not warrant — though the substantive claim that there is an invisible creation remains creedal

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, Monologion; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.44–49 (on creation) and I.50–64 (on the angels); Bonaventure, In II Sententiarum (on creation and angelology)

The scholastic tradition systematized the patristic doctrine and gave it the philosophical rigor that defined medieval theology. Aquinas’s treatment in Summa Theologiae I.44–49 is the great Western synthesis. The argument: God is the first cause of all that is, not as the first member of a chain of causes (which would make God the first creature) but as the wholly other source of being who calls everything into being from nothing. The doctrine integrates the philosophical question (how can what is contingent come to be at all?) with the biblical confession (the world is the work of the one God whose love is the source of its being).

Aquinas’s treatment of the angels in Summa Theologiae I.50–64 is the great medieval angelology. Aquinas (sometimes called the Doctor Angelicus for this work) treats the angels as pure intellects, each individuating in its own species (a metaphysical doctrine with implications for individuation more generally), created with both the visible and the invisible orders at the beginning. The angelology preserves the creedal confession of all things visible and invisible without lapsing into the speculative excesses some patristic sources had reached.

Strengths

• The scholastic doctrine of creation provides the philosophical-theological rigor the doctrine needs
• Aquinas’s integration of Aristotelian causality with the Christian doctrine of creation is one of the great syntheses of Western thought
• The medieval angelology, however speculative in its details, preserves the creedal confession of the invisible creation

Weaknesses

• The scholastic vocabulary (efficient cause, exemplary cause, etc.) requires translation for contemporary use
• Some scholastic discussions of the angels reached speculative excess the contemporary church does well not to reproduce

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Lectures on Genesis (1535–1545); Small Catechism on the first article; Large Catechism on the first article

The Lutheran tradition has held the doctrine of creation with the strongest pastoral-personal accent of any in the Western tradition. Luther’s Small Catechism on the first article gives the substance: I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them. The doctrine of creation is not, on Luther’s reading, a cosmological theory; it is the believer’s first confession about her own life. God has made me. Everything that follows in the creed is the unfolding of what it means for God to have made me and to be sustaining me even now.

Luther’s Lectures on Genesis — the longest of his works, occupying ten volumes of the Weimar edition — is the great Reformation commentary on the creation account. Luther reads Genesis 1–2 with constant attention to the Christological and pastoral substance: the God who made the world is the God who has made me, and the doctrine of creation is the foundation of the gospel.

Strengths

• The pastoral-personal register makes the doctrine concretely usable
• Luther’s Small Catechism articulation is one of the great pastoral statements in the tradition
• The doctrine of creation is held firmly with the doctrine of justification

Weaknesses

• The strong pastoral-personal accent has occasionally left less attention to the cosmological-philosophical dimensions of the doctrine that the patristic tradition had developed
• The Lutheran tradition’s polemical context (against Roman Catholic and Anabaptist alternatives) produced occasionally narrower articulations than the catholic substance required

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.14–16 (on the creation of the world, the providence of God); Belgic Confession Articles 12–13; Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 26–28; Westminster Confession Ch. 4–5

The Reformed tradition has integrated the doctrine of creation with the doctrine of providence with particular care. Calvin’s Institutes I.14–16 treats the creation of the world (I.14), the angels and demons (also I.14), and providence (I.16) as a single doctrinal complex. The conviction is that the maker of the creed is also the sustainer — the same God who called the world into being is the God who governs every moment of its life. The Reformed tradition has been more willing than most to follow the implications of this conviction into a strong doctrine of providence in which nothing happens outside God’s ordering, including human sin (which God permits and over-rules without himself being the cause).

The Heidelberg Catechism’s pastoral form is again notable: Q. 28: What does it profit us to know that God has created and by his providence still upholds all things? That we may be patient in adversity; thankful in prosperity; and for what is future, have good confidence in our faithful God and Father, that no creature shall separate us from his love… The doctrine of creation is, in the Reformed pastoral register, the foundation of the believer’s daily trust.

Strengths

• The integration of creation and providence is one of the strongest articulations of the doctrine
• The Heidelberg Catechism’s pastoral application of the doctrine is permanently usable
• The Reformed tradition has consistently insisted on the goodness of creation against every dualist temptation

Weaknesses

• The strong doctrine of providence has occasionally been heard, in popular Reformed piety, as if God’s sovereignty made him the direct cause of every event including evil
• The Reformed tradition’s polemical context occasionally produced articulations sharper than the catholic substance required

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Basil the Great, Hexaemeron; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man; Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua and Mystagogy; Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Divine Names

The Eastern tradition has held the doctrine of creation with a distinctive emphasis on the logos-Christology and the doctrine of theosis. The created order is shot through with the divine logoi (the rational principles, the divine intentions for each thing) — the principles through which the Logos (the Son) has made everything for participation in the divine life. Maximus the Confessor’s elaboration of this doctrine (in the Ambigua and elsewhere) gives one of the great syntheses of cosmology and Christology: the universe is the work of the Word and is ordered to participation in the divine life.

The Eastern liturgical tradition has integrated the doctrine of creation into the Paschal and Theophany liturgies with particular depth. The blessing of water at Theophany — in which the priest plunges the cross into the water in remembrance of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan — names the sanctification of the whole created order by Christ’s incarnation: Today the nature of the waters is sanctified… Today are illumined the creatures of all the cosmos. The Eastern angelology (developed by Pseudo-Dionysius into the nine choirs and received with great influence in both East and West) preserves the creedal confession of all things visible and invisible in living liturgical form.

Strengths

• The logos-Christology framework integrates cosmology and salvation in a single doctrinal vision
• The liturgical embedding of the doctrine has kept it pastorally present in Orthodox worship
• The Eastern tradition has consistently held the goodness of creation against every dualist temptation

Weaknesses

• The strong sacramental-mystical register can be hard to translate for cultures unfamiliar with the patristic-monastic tradition
• The detailed angelology of Pseudo-Dionysius has occasionally produced popular Orthodox piety more focused on the angelic ranks than the substance the doctrine names

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1–III/4 (on creation); Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (1985); Sallie McFague, The Body of God (1993); Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015); David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (2013)

The 20th- and 21st-century theological discussion of creation has been particularly rich. Barth’s treatment in Church Dogmatics III/1–4 is the foundational modern Protestant articulation: the doctrine of creation is grounded in the covenant of grace, not the other way around. The God who creates the world is the God whose covenant with humanity in Christ is the eternal purpose of the creative work. Moltmann’s God in Creation (1985) develops the doctrine with particular attention to the Spirit’s presence in the created order and to the ecological implications of the doctrine. Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015) is the most significant ecclesial document of the 21st century on the creation: a sustained pastoral and theological articulation of the integral ecology that the doctrine of creation requires the church to embody.

The dialogue with the natural sciences has been a major focus of recent theological work. The traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not in conflict with the cosmological data of the past century (the expanding universe, the Big Bang, the deep evolutionary history of life): the doctrine names that the creation comes from God, not how God brought it about over time. The Christian doctrine of creation should welcome the scientific accounts as descriptions of the mechanisms by which God’s creative work unfolds, without conceding any of the doctrinal substance.

Strengths

• The 20th-century recovery has produced one of the great periods of theological reflection on creation
• Barth’s covenant-Christological framing of the doctrine is foundational for modern Protestant theology
• Laudato Si’ is among the most significant pastoral documents of the contemporary church
• The dialogue with the sciences has matured significantly and is now broadly productive

Weaknesses

• Some 20th-century theologies have so reduced the doctrine to ecological-ethical implications that the metaphysical substance is lost
• The popular reception of the science-theology dialogue has occasionally produced concordism (forcing scripture to match scientific accounts) or fideism (refusing the scientific accounts altogether) — both equally bad

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of God as maker is unambiguous, biblically grounded, and integrated with his characteristic interest in natural philosophy and the works of mercy. Article I of the Articles of Religion (1784) names God as the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible — a near-verbatim reception of the Nicene confession. Wesley’s pastoral exposition of the doctrine is concentrated in Sermon 56, “God’s Approbation of His Works” (preached on Gen. 1:31, and behold, it was very good), Sermon 64, “The New Creation” (on Rev. 21:5), and Sermon 60, “The General Deliverance” (on Rom. 8:19–22, the groaning of creation and the redemption of the whole created order, including the animal creation).

What is distinctive in the Wesleyan articulation is the integral register the doctrine acquires. The same God who made the world is the God who is even now redeeming it; the redemption is not the abandonment of creation but its renewal. Sermon 60 is one of Wesley’s most theologically daring sermons: he argues that the animals, too, will be brought into the redeemed creation, on the grounds that the same God who made them in the beginning loves them and will not abandon them at the end. The argument is not naive (Wesley knows the philosophical questions it raises) but pastoral and biblically grounded.

Wesley was unusually attentive, for a major theologian, to the natural-philosophical knowledge of his time. His A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation; or, A Compendium of Natural Philosophy (5 vols., 1763, revised through subsequent editions) is a sustained attempt to present the natural-philosophical knowledge of the period — astronomy, anatomy, botany, geology — as the unfolding of the divine wisdom in creation. The work is dated in its specific science (much of the 18th-century natural philosophy has been superseded), but the theological move is permanently valuable: the doctrine of creation invites and requires the believer’s attention to the natural world, and the deepening of natural knowledge is, on Wesley’s reading, a deepening of doxology.

The Wesleyan pastoral substance of this clause is therefore three-fold. First, the doctrine of creation is the foundation of the body-affirming, world-affirming Methodist tradition that has been at work in the means of grace, the works of mercy, the medical and educational missions, and the social-holiness movements that have characterized Methodism at its best. Second, the doctrine grounds a Methodist environmental ethic that the tradition has not always fully realized in practice but that is theologically native to it. Third, the doctrine integrates the natural and the supernatural — the visible and the invisible — into a single doxological vision, against every spiritualizing reduction of the Christian hope.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the creator of all things visible and invisible as the same God who is the Father of Jesus Christ; treat the created order — bodies, lands, animals, ecosystems — as the work of the God who will redeem them; receive the natural knowledge of the sciences as a deepening of doxology, not a competitor to faith; live the Christian life as participation in the new creation that the Maker of heaven and earth is even now bringing.

Hymnody

The Methodist hymnody on creation is rich and ranges across the tradition. The hymns operate in three registers: the doxological (creation as the occasion of praise), the kerygmatic (the creator who is the savior), and the eschatological (the new creation that the maker is bringing).

“All creatures of our God and King” (Francis of Assisi, 1225; trans. William H. Draper, 1919) is the great Franciscan canticle of creation, brought into the Methodist canon in the 20th century. The hymn calls the whole creation to praise: thou rushing wind that art so strong, / ye clouds that sail in heaven along, / O praise him, alleluia!

“This is my Father’s world” (Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901) names the creator as Father in the pastoral register the Methodist tradition has prized: this is my Father’s world, / and to my listening ears / all nature sings, and round me rings / the music of the spheres.

“For the beauty of the earth” (Folliott S. Pierpoint, 1864) gives the doxological response to the creation in the seasonal-pastoral key Methodism has loved: Lord of all, to thee we raise / this our hymn of grateful praise.

“Maker, in whom we live” (Charles Wesley, 1747) is the explicitly trinitarian-creator Wesleyan hymn: Maker, in whom we live, / in whom we are and move, / the glory, power, and praise receive / for thy creating love.

“God of grace and God of glory” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1930) — though not strictly a creation hymn — invokes the creator in the prophetic-political register: grant us wisdom, grant us courage, / for the facing of this hour.

“God of wonders” (Marc Byrd and Steve Hindalong, 2000) is the late-20th-century evangelical contribution to the Methodist hymnody on creation: God of wonders beyond our galaxy, / you are holy, holy.

“All things bright and beautiful” (Cecil F. Alexander, 1848) is the children’s catechetical hymn on the doctrine of creation: all things bright and beautiful, / all creatures great and small, / all things wise and wonderful, / the Lord God made them all.

For the angels and the invisible creation: “Ye watchers and ye holy ones” (Athelstan Riley, 1906) — ye watchers and ye holy ones, / bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones, / raise the glad strain, alleluia! — gives the rare modern English-language hymn on the invisible creation.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The pastoral task at this clause is to recover, for the modern congregation, the cosmic scope of the Christian confession. The cultural pressure is constant to reduce the Christian message to a private spiritual transaction concerning the soul, with the world — the actual cosmos of stars and oceans and ecosystems — relegated to the merely scientific or the merely political. The creed refuses the reduction. Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. The God of the gospel is the God of the cosmos. The God who saves is the God who makes. The redemption is the redemption of the world God has actually made, not a private rescue of some immaterial part of the human person.

This has at least three pastoral implications.

The first is the goodness of the body and the material world. The same God who is the creator of invisible things is the creator of visible things. There is no two-tier ontology in which the spiritual is more real or more important than the material. The Christian tradition has periodically been tempted by this dualism — sometimes in monastic-ascetic forms that valorized the spiritual at the expense of the bodily, sometimes in popular-pietistic forms that treated the soul’s salvation as the only important thing. The creed refuses both. The visible and the invisible are equally God’s good creation. The body is not the soul’s prison; the body is the believer’s life, and is destined for the resurrection. The earth is not a holding cell; the earth is the place where God has put humanity, and is destined for renewal in the new creation.

The second is the goodness of the invisible. In a culture for which the invisible has often meant either the merely subjective (the invisible feelings of the individual) or the merely fictional (the invisible characters of stories), the creedal invisible is a different category altogether. The angels are invisible in this creedal sense — real created beings, not perceived by the bodily senses but no less actual for that. The seraphim of Isaiah 6, the angels of Bethlehem, the angel at the empty tomb, the principalities and powers of the Pauline correspondence — these are invisible creatures of the one God. The Methodist parish need not become preoccupied with the angelology of any particular tradition; but the pastor should refuse the contemporary tendency to flatten the cosmos to the visible-empirical and to lose the invisible part of the creedal confession altogether. The world God has made is more than the world the eyes can see. The eucharist itself trains the believer in this conviction: the invisible communion of saints, of angels, of the whole company of heaven, joins the visible congregation at every celebration of the table. Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name. The creedal invisible is what makes this language possible.

The third is the Christian ecological imagination. If the maker of heaven and earth is the same God who in Christ is reconciling all things to himself (Col. 1:20: through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven), then the way the church treats the created order is not a private ethical preference but a substantive participation in the work of the maker. The Methodist tradition has not always realized this implication in practice — the 19th- and 20th-century industrial economies have been damaging in ways the church has often blessed or ignored. But the theological foundation for an integral ecology is the creedal confession itself, and the contemporary recovery (in Laudato Si’, in much of the United Methodist Church’s social principles, in the work of Moltmann and others) is the church’s reawakening to what the creed has always said.

There is also a pastoral word for the believer whose body is failing, whose land is being degraded, whose ecosystem is being damaged. The doctrine of creation is the church’s most fundamental word of hope. The body God made is the body God will raise. The land God made is the land God will renew. The invisible hosts of God’s creation — the angels who attend the believer’s dying, the company of saints with whom the believer is even now joined in worship, the powers that the principalities have not finally overcome — are at work for the believer’s good. The doctrine of creation is not a remote cosmological claim. It is the foundation of the church’s daily confidence.

For the preacher: do not allow the doctrine of creation to drift into a topic for Earth Day or a debate-piece against the secular. Preach the doctrine as the spine of the gospel. The God who makes is the God who saves. The redemption is of the visible and the invisible together. The body and the angels alike are the work of the one God who in Christ is bringing all things to their proper end.

Further Reading

• Genesis 1–2; Genesis 8:22 — the creation accounts and the post-flood ordering
• Psalm 8; Psalm 19; Psalm 33:6–9; Psalm 104; Psalm 148 — doxological response to the creation
• Proverbs 8:22–31 — Wisdom present with God at creation
• Job 38–41 — the divine speeches on the creation
• Isaiah 40–55 — the creator as the redeemer
• John 1:1–18 — the Logos through whom all things were made
• Romans 1:18–25; 8:18–25 — the creation’s groaning and renewal
• 1 Corinthians 8:6; 10:26 — one God, the Father, from whom are all things
• Colossians 1:15–20 — the cosmic Christology
• Hebrews 1:1–3; 11:3 — the worlds were framed by the word of God
• Revelation 4:11; 5:13; 21:1–22:5 — the consummation of the creation
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies Books II and IV
• Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus II
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§1–7
• Basil the Great, Hexaemeron (the nine homilies on the six days)
• Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man
• Augustine, Confessions XI–XII; City of God XI–XII; On Genesis Literally Interpreted
• Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy; The Divine Names
• Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; Mystagogy
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith II
• Anselm, Monologion
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.44–49 (on creation); I.50–64 (on the angels)
• Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum; In II Sententiarum
• Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis (Weimar edition, vols. 42–44); Small Catechism on the first article
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.14–16
• Belgic Confession, Articles 12–13
• Heidelberg Catechism, QQ. 26–28
• Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapters 4–5
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article I
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 56 (“God’s Approbation of His Works”); Sermon 60 (“The General Deliverance”); Sermon 64 (“The New Creation”)
• John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (5 vols., 1763 ff.)
• Charles Wesley, “Maker, in whom we live” (1747)
• Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Creatures (1225)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1–4 (on creation)
• Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (Fortress, 1993; original German 1985)
• Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015)
• Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000), esp. essays on creation
• David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013)
• Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (Catholic University of America, 1995)