Explain how God is shown in the Bible as a Creator

AS and A Level Religious Studies & Philosophy

EXPLAIN HOW GOD IS SHOWN IN THE BIBLE AS A CREATOR

To Christians, and many other members of the Abrahamic faiths, God is the sole creator of everything in existence, ex nihilo. They believe he created all that there ever was, is, and will be. To them, he was the only thing to exist before he “created the Heavens and the Earth” and everything therein, and is the only thing, or being, to transcend our realm of existence. This opinion stems from the stories of creation found in the Old Testament of the Bible. The most obvious and popular of these stories is the very first few chapters of Genesis, but even later on in the same Book, a different contradictory creation story is told, and even more later on in the Bible, such as in the Book of Job. How can a coherent view of creation, never mind view of God as the creator, be formed out of so many differing versions of the story which are all presented as fact? Perhaps the answer is not to take the stories literally, and try to extract morals or meanings from what may be metaphorical stories, as opposed to historical accounts. For example, God did not create all life, but neither did we, so we should still treat it as someone else’s property.

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The very first account of Creation is told in Genesis 1:1-3. In this 7-Day story, God creates all of the heavens and the earth, the land and the seas, the fish and the birds and man and woman. Everything is good in this world, it is all intentionally created and Adam and Eve live peacefully in the Garden, in dominance of the Animals and the land, with but one limitation, which is not to eat the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Even in this story though, there are slight words and phrases which seem to discredit the role of God as the sole creator and cause of all that there is. Although there is no argument about God creating the World, it is the wording which brings about such discrepancies. First of all “God created the heavens and the earth”. This one line is the basis for much of the view of God as creator, but recent Bible study, by Professor Ellen Van Wolde has studied the original Hebrew texts and noted that the verb “bara”, which was translated into English as “create”, does not in fact mean this. The verb “bara”, in the phrase “God [bara] the heavens and the earth” literally means “separated”. So God separated the heavens from the earth, but did not create either. This one mistranslation warped the entire Christian theology of God the creator, which was so widely accepted that it took until now for someone the study the original text and to see that this is not the case at all. Next, “The Earth is without Form and Void”. This suggests that the world as it existed was later shaped by God to have landmass and seas etc., and existed prior to this in a chaotic state, and in fact makes more sense taking the true interpretation of “bara” into account. The biggest question this poses is that it could well mean God is not omnipotent and therefore not God as we know [it].

The other creation story in Genesis is that God “formed” Man from the dust, and breathed life into his nostrils. God then made the Garden of Eden, etc. God saw Man was lonely and so created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. The main difference between these two accounts is how Man comes into it. In Genesis 1 he is the pinnacle of God’s creation, everything leads up to Man. In Genesis 2, Man comes before everything else and the world is built around him. The other animals God creates are in an attempt to satisfy Man. In Genesis 1, God creates Man and Woman all at once, as equals, but in Genesis 2, Woman comes as a servant to Man, much more in keeping with the Male dominance of society at the time. Another discrepancy between these two stories is the way in which God is referred to. In Genesis 1, God is referred to as [the Hebrew equivalent to the word “God”] but in Genesis 1, God is referred to as “The Lord” [in Hebrew as an individual by name]. It could well be that the two stories are not talking about the same God.

The final example from the Bible I will consider is in the Book of Job, where God tells Job how it feels to be the creator of all, and asks him if he has any such experience. He recounts to Job how powerful he is and how everything comes from him and will eventually return to him. This conversation between Job and God certainly supports the notion of God as an omnipotent creator, but it was written much later than the original creation stories, and so will have relied on those for a definition of God as the creator, it is a second hand account rather than the description of the actual act of creation.

The conclusion I can draw from this is that in the original creation story, God acts more as a “mover” than a “creator”, much like the Prime Mover in Greek philosophy. This would make sense, as there are other aspects of Greek theories of creation or “moving”, such as how the act of creation is one with a single verb, translated into English as “let there be...”. The Christian-Judeo God seems to be a personification of a being such as the Prime Mover, who is detached from our world, in an attempt to tie Ethics into this Philosophical debate, by making God perfect and humanoid, people would aspire to emulate this God, a notion which was previously unheard of considering the completely un-human nature of the Prime Mover etc.