5. God, Creation & the Fall

God did not create men and women only to abandon us. He has sought to heal the damage done by sin so that we might again live in a relationship of love with him. He reveals his face to us through Jesus Christ and calls us to membership in his holy people. We are invited to know and to love him, and in return he will give us eternal life.

The tremendous message of Jesus is that God is his Father. Despite our unworthiness, he offers him to us as our Father. Even though God might sometimes seem absent in our lives, he is present all the same. It may be that we make it difficult for God to make his presence known, by neglecting his Scriptures, prayer, and the worship of the Church. It is also possible that we are looking for the divine in all the wrong places. I suspect this is often the case in the busy and ambitious lives people live today. The Deist philosophers thought of God as a remote Creator, setting things on their course and then leaving them to their own devices. Many of our non-sectarian contemporaries with a scientific bent reduce God to a cosmic watchmaker. This is not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He called a people to himself and made covenants with them. He delivered them from political oppression and slavery. He gave them both the Prophets and his Law. Finally, he gave them his Son. Ours is a God who never forgets us. This abiding reality is most forcibly expressed in the saving mission of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He is sent into the world as one of us. He comes to rescue us from the sin and death which was of our own making. God the Creator offers us the opportunity of a re-creation and of a new life in Christ.

God is the Father of us all. He calls us into union with him. He is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, and the maker of all things, keeping them in existence. Created things reflect the glory of God, their Creator. As the source of all goodness, God willed certain things into existence so that they might enjoy his benefits and participate in his goodness. His infinite power brought all things out of nothingness into being and he keeps them in being. Otherwise, and it is against the divine economy, they would sink once more into nothingness. Above all creatures, he is self-existing; indeed, he is existence, itself. He is an infinitely perfect Spirit. All perfections find their eminent degree in him. All the goodness, beauty, truth, and power we appreciate in created things are but the merest shadows of the perfections found in their source, almighty God.

Signs of God's existence can be found in the created world around us. Nature is thoroughly intermeshed with order and design. Reason can help us discern these fingerprints of God upon our world. Sometimes the hypothetical case is told of an astronaut landing on the moon and finding a watch. He would logically conclude that an intelligent being had manufactured it and somehow it was placed there. It would be ridiculous for him to assert that the watch was simply the result of random and chaotic processes. Nothing comes from nothing. This principle holds for both mechanical and for biological constructs. Are not the simplest one-celled organisms, not to mention ourselves, far more complicated than such a time-telling gadget? Sure. We find the "laws of nature" all around us and inside of us. It is the proposition of Christians and certain theistic philosophers that only a living, sentient entity could have designed the cosmos. This is God. In comparison to God, we can make things but we cannot create them from nothing.

As people of faith, we also know God exists because he has told us. He speaks to the human race through revelation. Because of the limitations of human knowledge, many of the ways we know and speak about God are through analogies and stories. God identifies himself with Truth and with Love. He is all-good. He is mercy itself and ever forgiving. His is all-knowing. He is just. He is without limit. He is perfect and therefore, unchangeable. He id omnipotent (all-powerful) and present everywhere. He has no need of anything or anyone outside of himself. He creates freely, to give glory to himself, to share his life with his creatures, and to have them return thanks and praise to him. His identity is also Triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three Persons of the Trinity are not "persons" in the sense of contemporary usage dealing with psychology. Rather, it implies a sort of divine dynamism wherein there are three mysterious interlocked equal cores of God's identity. Caution must be applied to any description of it since the Trinity is ultimately beyond our full comprehension. Human language may crudely allow one to fall into the error of modalism wherein God in his employment is dissected into three gods. Properly understood, the classic definition is that he is one God in three divine Persons. The Scriptures never use the word "Trinity," but the doctrine resonates there clearly in the New Testament. Jesus calls upon God as Father. Jesus does the things that only God can do, like forgiving sins and making atonement. The Holy Spirit is experienced by the early Church as also God, giving life to the community just as he breathed life back into the crucified Christ. The Lord gives the command to go out to all nations and to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Baptism into the name of a creature would be meaningless, thus all three Persons constitute the one God of faith.

The story of creation is based on the oral and then the written traditions of the first people called by God. Not strictly a scientific account, it remains, nonetheless, inspired by God. Men and women are loved by God as the sole creatures on earth who can respond back to his overtures with their own conscious communication and self-offering. We are called to adore and praise God, to give him thanks, to petition him in need, to repent and join ourselves to his Son's sacrifice of propitiation, and to serve him faithfully. Men and women share the same human nature, complementing each other with two sexes. Although one might speculate upon the origin of the species by something such as evolution and natural selection, the Church insists that the human soul is created directly by God and is infused into the person.

The human being in philosophical terms might be described as a spiritual/corporeal composite. What that means in layman's terms is that we have both a body and a spiritual soul. Because of this spiritual soul, men and women have dominion over the other earthly creatures and are a more perfect image of God than anything else created on earth. Unlike the souls or substantial forms of animals, the human soul has a definite life of its own, although a body without a soul would be a lifeless corpse. But the soul, even parted from the body, will live forever. After all, it has no parts which could possibly break down or terminate operating. It would cease only if God destroyed it. Divine economy would preclude such an annihilation. Although human souls separate from their bodies at death, they are not angels. God has created us as men and women; he has revealed that at the world's end and Judgment Day, our soul's and bodies will be reunited. Human persons are much more than disembodied ghosts; in glory, God will make us whole again.

Our first parents were to pass on to their descendants the divine life given them. But first, they had to demonstrate their fidelity to God. However, they listened to the temptation of the evil one and deliberately turned their wills against their Creator. By so doing, they forfeited the divine life. There greatest gift had been sanctifying grace, bringing them God's friendship. This gift of grace was stripped away and would only be restored by Christ. What was the exact nature of the first sin? The Scriptures present it as the temptation to be like gods. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve succumb to their pride-- refusing to recognize their total dependence upon God. Thus, they committed what has come down to us as "original sin". The consequences of their rebellion were tragic. They forfeited their special harmony between body and soul. No longer were their powers oriented to God. Disharmony and chaos flooded into the picture. They became subject to sickness, suffering, and death.

We came into the world already suffering from original sin, and so often ratified it with actual or personal sin. But, God refused to abandon us to our folly. In response to our disobedience, God did not restore the lesser gifts; nevertheless, he did promise a Messiah. We know him to be our Savior, Jesus. He was God's Son, coming as one of us, and able to redeem and to restore us to divine favor and life.