Why Did God Create?
21 June 2007 by Gil
Well I’ve finished Cornelius Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World and, aside from the fact that it contained the most references to John Calvin of any book I’ve ever read, it was well worth the effort. For those who are looking for a brief and readable account of a Christian worldview this is a good place to start.
Among many other things, I was really impressed with Plantinga’s take on creation. It seems that this particular element of Christian belief has been severely sidetracked by the whole creation/evolution issue so it was refreshing to read someone focus on what, to my mind, is the far more significant question, namely, Why did God create the world? Here Plantinga’s anwer is simply yet profoundly Christian. God created the world as an act of love. God was not, however, bored and lonely in eternity, trying to imagine some way of meeting some kind of inner need. Instead, God’s eternal love (this is where the idea of the Trinity takes on added significance) expressed itself in the creation of the world. This love is at the very heart of God’s nature (God is love) and it is at the very heart of the universe itself.
“Creation is neither a necessity nor an accident. Instead, given God’s interior life that overflows with regard for others, we might say that creation is an act that is fitting for God. It was so much like God to create, to imagine possible worlds and then to actualize one of them. Creation is an act of imaginative love.”
I don’t think this is a particularly radical idea but I think it is a very important one. It reminds us that somehow love really is at the heart of it all and that when we do express love - of God and neighbour, the sum total of our human responsibility before God - we are aligning ourselves with the most basic reality that there is.
Great insight! I quoted part of this post on MB Forum.
The only thing I would take issue with is that love of God and neighbour is “the sum total of our human responsibility before God”. Those two commands may sum up the Law, but they don’t seem to entirely include our pre-Law human responsibility as stewards of God’s creation. How we treat God’s creation reflects our love of its Creator and also affects our neighbours, but I think our action should not just stem from these two somewhat external factors, but also due to the goodness, value and reality of creation itself. We value other people both because they are made by God in his image with value to him and because they have intrinsic worth, and I think the same applies to the rest of creation.
Point well taken Marshall. There is something about our role as stewards that is missing in my somewhat exaggerated statement. Thanks for pointing that out.
I know that it’s dreadfully late to comment on this post, but I just read something very much along these lines in “The Beauty of the Infinite”. Hart writes that the idea that creation is “gratuity” rather than “necessity” guards against any inclination that God somehow limited himself in order to reveal (or discover?) his nature in the theater of history. For then, he needed to react to the world and creation would become necessary to God fulfilling his purpose. And if this is so, the fall, evil, would also become necessary. God’s love would be a “reaction” to evil rather than his very essence, and evil (or a reaction to evil) would become an indispensable part of God’s character. Such a god would not be worth serving.
Jessica,
I suspect that Hart would be a fascinating (and DIFFICULT) read on this topic. Thanks for summarizing in plain English. I’m not sure I would agree that seeing God as genuinely reacting to his creation would mean that God’s love would be limited to a ‘reaction’ to evil. I think that God’s love, as vast as it is, could be expressed eternally within himself, as well as within the ‘theater of history’ as a response to an evil that he did not cause or will to be . I like the contrast between gratuity and necessity that Hart makes.
I guess it depends on how you view God’s relationship to the world. In this portion of the book, Hart was critiquing the theology of Robert Jenson who writes (as I can best gather) that God “is who he is because he has a story in which he acts, determines his action, and accomplishes his nature”. Hart goes into great detail on Jenson’s theology of the Trinity, but what I found most interesting (and most understandable) is the idea that tying God’s “identity” to his actions in the story of human history would then make creation a necessity. This is hard to stomach for me because of the apparent difference between the God of the OT and NT; I feel the urge to explain the difference by thinking that perhaps God limited himself, thereby telling the story of redemption through his actions (and reactions) in human history culminating in the person of Jesus. What Hart suggests is that, by this logic, creation becomes necessity because the story of God (his actions and interactions with humanity) makes God who he is. And if creation is necessary, then the fall is also necessary and if this is the case then, as Hart puts it; “Jenson’s theology seems to fail Anselm’s test, morally it seems to fail the test of Ivan Karmazov: If the universal and final good of all creatures required, as its price, the torture of one little girl, would that be acceptable? And the moral enormity of this calculus is not mitigated if all creation must suffer the consequences of God’s self-determination.”