God, creation and the fall
Creation and the image of God
Why there is something rather than nothing, why it is good, and what it means that you bear His likeness.
You are reading the brief version. Switch the depth control to Complete for the full treatment.
God made everything out of nothing. Not out of pre-existing material, not out of Himself, and not by necessity. He was under no compulsion and lacked nothing. He created freely, out of love, and He called it good.
Two claims follow, and both are under pressure today.
Matter is good. The physical world is not a prison, a mistake, or an illusion. God made it, pronounced it good, and then entered it Himself in the incarnation. This is why Christianity has sacraments: God is willing to use water, bread, wine and oil, because He made them and they are not beneath Him.
Human beings bear God's image. Every one of them - unborn, disabled, demented, hostile, or asleep in a doorway. The image is not a capacity you might lose. It is a status conferred by God at creation. Reason, freedom, the ability to love and to be held responsible, and the calling to represent God in the world all flow from it, but none of them constitutes it. This is the foundation of every Christian claim about human dignity, and there is no secular substitute that does the same work.
Humanity is made male and female, body and soul together. A person is not a soul temporarily housed in flesh; you are your body as truly as you are your soul, which is why the Creed ends with the resurrection of the body and not the survival of the spirit.
Creation is not a finished act in the past. God holds everything in being at this moment. Withdraw His sustaining will and there would not be ruins; there would be nothing.
Out of nothing
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The first sentence of Scripture rules out nearly every alternative account, ancient and modern.
It rules out the world being eternal and uncreated, standing alongside God as a second ultimate fact. It rules out the world being made from God's own substance, an overflow or emanation of divinity, which would make trees and tumours equally divine. It rules out the world being shaped from pre-existing matter that God found lying about, as in Plato's Timaeus. And it rules out the world being an accident or a mistake by a lesser deity, which is what the Gnostics taught.
The Church's phrase is creatio ex nihilo - creation out of nothing. Nothing here does not mean a subtle invisible stuff. It means there was no out of. God did not work on anything. He spoke and it was.
Pause and thinkPause: what practical difference does it make whether God created from nothing or shaped pre-existing matter?
Two large ones.
First, God is not limited by His material. A sculptor is constrained by the grain of the wood; he can blame the marble for the flaw. If God made the material too, there is no independent factor to blame for evil and no ceiling on what He can do with what exists. Redemption is therefore possible in principle: the One who made it from nothing can remake it.
Second, nothing is outside His authority. If matter were pre-existing, part of reality would not be His. There would be a region where His writ did not run, and no guarantee that the world's deepest structure was on the side of the good.
And He called it good
Genesis 1 repeats a verdict seven times: and God saw that it was good, and at the end, very good. This is not sentimentality. It is a claim about the nature of things, and it was controversial from the start.
The great rival was Gnosticism, which taught that the material world is the botched work of an inferior god, that bodies are prisons, and that salvation means escape from matter into pure spirit. The Church fought this for two centuries and the fight shaped nearly everything else she said. Irenaeus, Tertullian and Athanasius all understood that if matter is bad, the incarnation is impossible, the sacraments are absurd, and the resurrection of the body is a disaster rather than a hope.
The same instinct returns constantly in new clothes: in the idea that the spiritual is real and the physical is a distraction, in a piety that treats the body as an enemy rather than a gift, in the modern notion that the true self is an inner consciousness that merely happens to be attached to a body.
Against all of it, Christianity is stubbornly material. God made stuff. He called it good. He became some of it. He feeds His people with it. And He intends to raise it.
The image of God
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Genesis 1:26). Everything Christianity says about human worth rests on this sentence.
What is the image? The tradition has given several answers, and they are complementary rather than competing:
- Reason and will. Human beings can know truth and choose freely. Augustine and Aquinas emphasise this.
- Relationship. We are made for communion - with God and with each other - as God Himself is eternally communion. That we are made male and female in the image's own sentence points this way.
- Representation. In the ancient Near East, a king set up his image in a territory he ruled. Humanity is God's image placed in creation to represent His rule - hence the immediate commission to tend and to keep.
- Destiny. Several Fathers distinguish image from likeness: the image is given and cannot be lost, the likeness is what we grow into.
Now the crucial move. Whichever description you favour, the image is not a capacity you must exhibit in order to qualify. If it were, then a person in a coma, an embryo, a man with advanced dementia, or a newborn would have less of it
- and the whole edifice of human dignity would rest on performance.
The Church has always refused that. The image is a status conferred at creation, which is why it survives sin, illness, unconsciousness and old age. The murderer bears it - which is exactly the reason Genesis 9:6 gives for murder being so grave. The victim bears it. You bear it now, while asleep.
Pause and thinkBefore reading on - a colleague says human rights do not need God; we can ground them in human capacities like rationality and the ability to suffer. What is the difficulty with that?
Capacities come in degrees, and they can be absent. If dignity rests on rationality, then those with less of it have less dignity, and those with none have none - which licenses exactly what the twentieth century did to the disabled. If it rests on the capacity to suffer, then dignity is shared with livestock and lost under anaesthetic.
The deeper problem is that a capacity-based account cannot generate an obligation. That I can reason is a fact about me; that you must not kill me is a claim on you. Facts about my abilities do not by themselves bind your behaviour. The Christian account grounds the obligation somewhere else entirely - in what God has said about every human being, irrespective of what any of them can currently do.
Be fair in how you put this. Your colleague is not wrong that atheists can be decent and can defend human rights passionately. The claim is not that unbelievers behave badly. It is that the belief is doing work its stated foundation cannot support - and that historically the conviction came from somewhere.
Body and soul, male and female
A human being is body and soul together. Not a soul that owns a body, and not a body that generates a soul as a by-product. The soul is the life and form of this particular body; the body is the soul's own expression in the world.
This is why the Creed says I believe in the resurrection of the body and not the immortality of the soul. The Greek hope was to be rid of the body. The Christian hope is to get it back, transfigured. A disembodied soul, in the Christian account, is a person in an unnatural and temporary condition, waiting.
Humanity is created male and female, and Genesis puts this inside the sentence about the image. The difference is not a defect to be overcome or a social arrangement laid on top of a neutral substrate. It is written into what a human being is, and it is oriented towards communion and fruitfulness.
Catholic
The Catechism treats creation under God's providence and holds that God upholds and governs everything He has made, permitting genuine secondary causes to act - which is why natural processes can be studied on their own terms without detracting from His action. The Church has been explicit that faith does not require a young earth or a literal six days: Augustine warned in the fifth century against Christians making fools of themselves on natural questions in the name of Scripture. Pius XII's Humani Generis (1950) permitted research into bodily evolution while insisting that each human soul is immediately created by God, and John Paul II in 1996 called evolution more than a hypothesis. On the image, Gaudium et Spes 22 makes the decisive Christological move: Christ fully reveals man to himself. Human dignity is therefore not merely a premise but is disclosed in the incarnate Son.
Orthodox
Orthodoxy distinguishes image and likeness: the image is given to every human being and cannot be destroyed, while the likeness is the growth into God which sin interrupts and grace restores. The purpose of human existence is theosis - deification, real participation in the divine life, which Peter calls becoming partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Through Palamas's distinction, this is participation in God's uncreated energies, never in His essence: we become by grace what God is by nature, without ever becoming God. Humanity is understood as the priest of creation, gathering the material world and offering it back to God in thanksgiving - the liturgical act that names the human vocation. Orthodoxy has generally declined to make the days of Genesis a doctrinal question, preferring the Fathers' allegorical and cosmological readings, though some quarters hold a stricter literalism.
Lutheran
Lutheran theology distinguishes the image narrowly and broadly. In the narrow and proper sense - original righteousness, true knowledge of God, and perfect trust - the image was lost in the fall and is restored only in Christ. In the broader sense, humanity retains reason, will and dominion, which remain real and valuable in earthly affairs. The Formula of Concord is emphatic that this loss is total with respect to spiritual things, precisely so that salvation cannot be credited to a surviving human capacity. On creation, Luther's Small Catechism gives the doctrine its most memorable form: I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them - all out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me. Creation is thus taught as a confession about me, not merely about the cosmos.
Anglican
Article 9 states that man is very far gone from original righteousness, following the Latin quam longissime - as far as possible - which the evangelical wing reads in a strongly Augustinian sense and the Anglo-Catholic wing reads as gravely wounded rather than obliterated. The Book of Common Prayer's General Thanksgiving anchors the doctrine in worship: we bless God for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life. Anglicanism has generally been comfortable with natural science and made its peace with evolution earlier and with less friction than most; Charles Gore and the Lux Mundi essayists had integrated it into a sacramental theology of creation by 1889. The Anglican tradition tends to emphasise creation's sacramental quality - the visible world as the ordinary means through which God's grace reaches us, which is also its argument for a liturgy that engages the body.
Work with it
Check yourself
What does the Church mean by saying God created ex nihilo?
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Correct. There was no raw material and no out of. God spoke and it was.
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Nothing is not a subtle invisible stuff. The phrase denies that there was any material at all.
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That is emanation, and it would make creation divine. The Church distinguishes the Creator from what He creates absolutely.
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The opposite. Ex nihilo asserts a free, deliberate act of God.
Check yourself
Why does the Church insist that the image of God is a status rather than a capacity?
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Exactly. If the image were rationality exercised, the unborn, the unconscious and the severely disabled would have less of it. As a conferred status it cannot be graded.
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We have many. The point is that the image does not consist in them.
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The image belongs to every human being by creation, including those hostile to God. Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition of murder in it without any reference to faith.
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The traditions describe the damage differently - Lutherans speak of the loss of the image in its narrow sense - but none holds that a fallen human being has ceased to be God's image-bearer and may therefore be treated as a thing.
Check yourself
Why has the Church always resisted the idea that matter is evil or inferior?
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Yes - and each of those four collapses if matter is bad. This is why the fight with Gnosticism shaped so much else.
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She has a great deal. The claim is not that matter is all there is, but that it is good.
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It does, frequently. But in Paul, flesh usually names fallen human nature turned in on itself, not physical matter as such.
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Most taught the reverse. The Christian position was a scandal to educated pagans.
Objection drill
Genesis is a Bronze Age origin myth, recognisably related to the Babylonian Enuma Elish. We now know the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that humans evolved. Continuing to teach it as revelation is simply refusing to update.
A model answer
Start by granting what is true. Genesis 1 is related to the Babylonian material - it shares the imagery of primeval waters and a created order. This is not an embarrassment; it is the key to reading it, because a text that borrows imagery from its neighbours in order to contradict them is doing something deliberate.
Look at what is changed. In Enuma Elish, the world is built from the corpse of a murdered goddess, and humanity is made from a slaughtered god's blood to do the manual work the gods are tired of. In Genesis, there is no conflict at all: one God speaks, and it is. The sun and moon are not deities but lamps, unnamed, appointed to give light. The sea monsters, terrors in every other ancient cosmology, are simply creatures God makes and pronounces good. And humanity - the slave class in the Babylonian story - is God's own image, blessed, and given the creation to steward.
Against that background, the chapter is not a primitive account of mechanism at all. It is a sustained polemic about who God is, what the world is, and what a human being is worth. Those claims are not the kind that an accurate age of the universe could confirm or refute.
Now the age and evolution. The four traditions covered here have never required a young earth. Augustine argued in the fifth century that the days of Genesis were not ordinary days, on purely textual grounds - there is light on day one and no sun until day four. Origen said something similar earlier. The Catholic Church has formally permitted evolutionary accounts of the body since 1950. No confessional Lutheran or Anglican formulary specifies a date.
What the doctrine actually requires is this: that the universe is not self-existent but depends on God; that it is good; that human beings are distinctively His image; and that something went wrong with us that we did not inflict on the animals. Cosmology and biology as such neither establish nor touch any of those four.
Finally, turn the charge around gently. "Refusing to update" assumes the text was ever making the claim science now makes better. If a physics paper and a marriage vow both mention water, we do not accuse the vow of being outdated chemistry. The question is what kind of speech act Genesis 1 is - and its own structure, its liturgical repetitions and its polemical edge answer that.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.