In the biblical story, it is helpful to portray God’s unfolding plan of redemption through four acts: creation, fall, redemption and glorification. The story begins with creation, and the story ends with glorification, creation recreated. Biblical theology provides the necessary link between exegesis and systematic theology. Creationism is the religious belief that the universe and life originated from specific acts of divine creation, as opposed to the scientific conclusion that they came about through natural processes such as evolution. Churches address the theological implications raised by creationism and evolution in different ways.

         The first thing the Bible tells us is that God is a creator. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God speaks and things come into being that were not there before, beginning with the universe itself. Creation is solely an act of God. It is not an accident, a mistake, or the product of an inferior deity, but the self-expression of God. God created all things with a telos, a purpose and end-goal in mind. Sin affected God’s original plan, but it did not derail or destroy it. He was not surprised, neither did it catch Him off-guard such that He now needed to enact a salvage plan that was second-best. Sin was allowed in order to magnify God’s greatness and to manifest His grace and mercy as He fulfilled His plan through His divine decree of sending His Son and saving His people and restoring all things to himself. Justification is a critical truth in the Bible, for the Christian and for the church.

Justification is the reality of the end-time verdict and reality brought into the present, a truth and experience which transforms believers from the inside out. This not only affects an individual, but also the corporate gathering of believers in the church, which is truly an outpost of heaven. Everything about us is transformed and being transformed in the likeness of the Son, and this affects how we view all of God’s creation.

We are stewards of God’s creation, under the Lord Jesus Christ’s rule and reign, and we are committed to work toward alleviating the groaning, knowing that is an implication of living between the now and the not-yet, with the assurance the groaning will be abolished in the new heavens and new earth. As we live in the in-between-times, with the groaning (in a double sense: the groaning as a result of living in a fallen world in the not-yet-fully realized kingdom, and the groaning as a result of longing for the now of the kingdom to be ushered in fully), we do not lose heart because this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

         It is of little use having a worldview or faith position which misses out on any of these questions by ignoring the hard bits of reality-such as the existence of suffering. Our map must have a good ‘fit’ with our experience of the world or, in the words of one Gestalt therapist, it must ‘gobble up experience’ that is,  cover reality and not leave out the rough edges of reality.

Although such questions can be distinguished, they are interrelated, the most obvious being that our understanding of human significance is inextricably linked to questions of origins and purpose, or, as we might say, cosmogony and teleology. Generally speaking we are faced with 5 world views in terms of Gods relation to the cosmos.

1. What You See Is What You Get or, to give it its more formal title,  Naturalistic Materialism which is well represented by the atheism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. This is an essentially reductionistic philosophy such that any spiritual dimension is not simply explained but explained away in terms of their alleged materialistic components. Accordingly, we have this description by Dawkins of what it means to be a human being: We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. Flowers are for the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading copy me programmes about, written in DNA language. That is EXACTLY what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is self-sustaining process. It is every living objects sole reason for living.  This is a classic case of ontological reductionism.

2. Deism/Gnosticism. The common characteristic these have in common is that there is an essential disjunction between the Creator and the creation. In Deism, God is viewed as a remote ‘First Cause’, and although while he may be considered a personal deity, there is no effective personal relationship with the creation. Gnosticism, in its variety of forms is fundamentally dualistic whereby God is construed as a Demiurge and the material creation evil which requires some intermediaries to bring the creation into being in order to preserve the ‘Otherness’ and Ineffability of the Creator.

 3. Pantheism. While there is a great range in Hinduism, with early stages being essentially polytheistic, the highest and most influential stage is monistic. This appears in the ninth philosophy of Shankara through to the 19th century version of Vivekananda. Here the relationship between God and the world is likened to that of a dream to the dreamer. What we experience as the phenomenal world is maya, illusion. This is not to say ‘creation’ has no reality, it is just the reality of a dream, a phenomenon of the dreamer, indeed, almost an epiphenomenon. In this way the world and ‘god’ can be seen as one- monism- and so everything (pan) is god (theism)

4. Panentheism. This is the view that God is in all things, but not necessarily identical with them. Martin Buber could be considered a panentheist, as indeed, Bishop J A T Robinson. The adherents of Process Theology also hold to a panentheistic conception of the relation between God and his creation, and so according to one of its major proponents, Charles Hartshorne, God literally contains the universe. A case could be made for placing the openness view of relational theism within this category driven by the perceived need to do justice to God’s love which, it is argued involves risk. Accordingly, God himself must suffer change by virtue of what his creatures will and do.

5. Theism. This is the belief that the ultimate ground of things is a single supreme reality which is the source of everything other than itself but which does not depend on them for its existence. This reality is complete and perfect and, as a consequence, deserves unqualified worship. Such a deity, while being transcendent from that which he has created, is also immanent within it

         In Genesis 1 God presents himself as the unique, personal, absolute, sovereign God who by his royal decreeing Word brings a world into being, ordering things ‘just so’ with the result that they are good, or ‘fit for purpose’ as we might say.[15] As such, God is transcendent, and ‘Wholly Other’ to his creation, but he also immanent and intimately involved with, in and through what he has made. This is indicated, for example, by the wonderful imagery of the ‘ruach adonai’ hovering over the formless void; and the evocative picture of intimacy of the Lord God breathing life into Adam (2:7) and forming the woman in the Garden. But other aspects of God’s relation to his world are brought out in other ways elsewhere- for example, the continuous involvement and provision of God as we see in Psalm 104; the universal revelation of his glory in Psalm 19, and his utter sovereignty and inscrutability in Job 38.[16] Thus already theism is significantly marked off from WYSYWIG, Deism, Pantheism and Panentheism. But what has been said so far goes little beyond theism in general. Similarly, Colin Gunton has argued that we need a theological interpretation of creation which integrates the whole Scriptural witness.[19] Thus, taking into account the sensus plenior, which includes the John 1, Colossians 1:15ff; Hebrews 1:1-3 and much of the Book of Revelation, it is possible to revisit Genesis 1:1-2 and 1:27ff to see what was implicit from the beginning, namely, the Trinitarian nature of God who is Creator, the God who is in relationship, the God who creates heaven and earth-v1, whose Spirit hovers over the chaos and whose Word issues the command ‘let there be’. The plurality within the oneness of God can then be seen to be expressed in the unique deliberation, ‘Let us make man in our own image. Herman Bavinck has argued that it is not possible to conceive of this creation occurring (as opposed to the speculative Multiuniverse theories)[21] apart from its Maker being relational and this coheres with the fuller revelation of his Trinitarian nature: ‘without generation (the Son by the Father) creation would not be possible. If in an absolute sense God could not communicate himself to the Son, he would be even less able in a relative sense to communicate himself to his creature. If God were not triune, creation would not be possible. 

         Creation has a personal origination and goal- and both are Christ, ‘all things were created by him and for him’. Here the creation is the theatre of God’s glory as embodied in the incarnated, crucified, resurrected and ascended Jesus. And so the big 4 questions of origin, identity, evil and purpose cannot be answered apart from their relation to Him.

Creation is not just a distant ‘past’ event, which deism would have us believe, and which Young Earthists could skew our thinking into focusing upon, it is ongoing, having a future destiny, with Christ ‘sustaining all thing by his powerful word’ (Heb 1:2). Thus God entering his ‘rest’ on Day 7 is not a movement into inactivity and certainly not signifying his absence (deus otiosus) , but indicating control since all the functionaries are now in place for God’s kingly rule to be exercised. This is the new state of stability with the whole cosmos being God’s temple- sacred space- from which and over which he exercises his loving rule (cf Psalm 132: 7-8 and Christ’s position in Hebrews 1:3- seated at the right hand of God). The rule of God is now to be conceived as part of the mediatorial kingship of Christ ( Hebrews 2:5-9, thus fulfilling Psalm 8) and which was being displayed in the earthly ministry of Christ as we see  in the ‘apprentice Son’ of John 5:16-23, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”

Redemption is not to be separated off from creation, there is an unbreakable unity, and the eschatological dimension is crucial to its fulfilment with a new heaven and earth and the resurrection of physical bodies (Revelation 21; 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Peter 3:13). This, together with the incarnation, underscores over and against Gnosticism both ancient and modern, that ‘matter matters’. Here again is Athanasius: ‘We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word, who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the Father has employed the same agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word who made it first.