Why the creation accounts in Scripture?
A brief catechesis on why creation matters.
I run a catechetical program for the parishes at which I serve as director of evangelization. This week, I offered a lesson on that first line of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” I opted to omit a section of the presentation on why there are creation accounts in Scripture in the first place. So, I will offer those thoughts here, instead.
All too often, people dismiss the creation accounts in Scripture as passé — myths from a time gone by, fairy tale-like stories we’re a bit embarrassed humanity believed for so long. Our contemporaries in the academy have convinced us that science has once and for all debunked the Genesis accounts as definitively unreal. In what follows, I do not intend to refute such claims. Others have done this quite well and this short post is not designed for dealing with such arguments.
Instead, I want to offer some early reflections in response to the question: Why are there creation accounts in Scripture? What value do they have now that the Word has become flesh? Are they not obsolete in our times marked by so much scientific discovery? Given that these originated within talk notes, they are rather abbreviated and do not claim to be exhaustive.
To offer perspective…
When most people think of the stories of creation, they think of Genesis 1 and 2. However, Scripture is laden with accounts of creation. Here’s a short list:
Gen 1
Gen 2
Ps 33
Ps 104
Prov 8
Job
John 1
Revelation (new creation)
Why so many accounts? Because the faith has to be worked out and communicated in every age, in every context. As Joseph Ratzinger says:
Scripture is not a meteorite from the sky...Certainly Scripture carries God’s thoughts within it; that makes it unique and constitutes its authority. Yet it is transmitted by a human history. It carries within it the life and thought of a historical society that we call the ‘People of God.’1
Notwithstanding the fact that Scripture is the divinely inspired word of God, it did not fall from the sky as an ahistorical reality. Rather, it contains a human element that develops within time, over time. Scripture is historical and it recounts history. Consequently:
The Bible itself constantly readapts the images it uses as ways of thinking continue to develop; we see how the Bible itself transforms them over and over so that it might testify more profoundly to the one thing that has truly come through in God’s Word — the message that he is Creator.2
Msgr. Frank Lane adds to this, saying, “The truths of the Faith remain but often the explanation of these truths, the vehicles of understanding and communication, change — and change radically.”3 Every age produces new questions, new ways of thinking, and new ways of speaking. The Faith needs to be re-articulated in every epoch, as new vistas of understanding unfold in front of it, each opening up new possibilities of understanding.
To address this question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Ultimately, the creation accounts in Scripture deal with a metaphysical problem, not a physical one. They address themselves not as answers to questions about what exists or how it came to be, so much as to why there’s something rather than nothing in the first place. This is the fundamental question the accounts attempt to answer. Stephen Barr, an American physicist who is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Delaware, articulates this with an analogy:
It is quite possible that the fundamental equations of physics correctly describe everything that happened at the beginning of the universe. Would that be the same as ‘explaining creation’? Would that mean that no Creator was necessary? No. That is confusing two ideas...The ‘beginning’ of the play Hamlet consists of its first words in Act I, Scene I. One may explain this beginning - i.e. why the play begins in a particular way, with particular words – by the laws of English grammar, by the principles that govern the proper writing of plays, by the way the opening scenes fit into the play’s overall plot, and by various other factors. But while all these things may explain why the play begins as it does, they do not explain why there is a play at all. The reason why there is a play at all is that William Shakespeare decided to write one and conceived it in his mind.4
Similarly, with creation and in response to the question about why there’s something rather than nothing, the scriptural accounts unanimously testify that God decided to create, he conceived of his creation in his mind, and he spoke it into being through his Word.
To remind us…
The creation accounts help us remember our origin so as to not lose sight of our destiny. Again, I turn to Msgr. Lane:
The greatest crisis for humanity is to forget that its beginning is always present. To forget is to not know who they are....A certain sense of amnesia about the beginnings of our existence sets us adrift in time and leaves us without self-knowledge and without a future....We become creatures adrift in the universe. We have no history and no destiny. All is illusory; all reality is confined to the limitations of human genius that is ultimately nothing for it dissolves and is swept away by time. Time becomes the enemy....The beginning must always be present or we do not know who we are or why we exist.5
This is one of the great dangers of the technological revolution, that we stand in front of the constant possibility of recreating ourselves and our world, thus forgetting our origins, forgetting the Creator. However, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes put in back in 1965, “When God is forgotten, however, the creature itself grows unintelligible.”6
This line from Gaudium et spes always reminds me of a striking conversation I had with my oldest child when she was about four. She was on the verge of reading, but not quite there yet. Her cousin had drawn a picture of her and her younger sister. It hung on the fridge. My daughter saw it and asked who was pictured.
“That’s you, and that’s your sister,” I said.
“Nope. Can’t be,” she replied.
“Well, it is, because I can read. Your name is under this girl, and your sister’s name is right here.”
“Can’t be me,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, growing impatient.
“Because you and mom aren’t in the picture,” she said, before walking away.
Her source and origin made her intelligible to herself. Devoid of that, devoid of her parents, she could not conceive of herself. The creation accounts draw God back into the picture we create — so often illusory — for ourselves. Without God in the picture, we become intelligible to ourselves and who knows what we will do as a result.
All of this gets at a need to recall a fact about humanity that is often overlooked: we are given and, as such, we depend. We are given life, we do not make it for ourselves, and as such, we depend on the Author of life for our existence. The word “depend” literally means to hang from, to be suspended by, to rely upon. To say “I depend,” means I rely completely upon another. There’s no such thing as being half-suspended. It’s completely suspended or it’s a free fall. To realize our dependence is, as Msgr. Luigi Giussani put it, a moment of maturation. Dependence means I acknowledge “I do not make myself . . . I do not give myself being . . . I am ‘given.’ This is the moment of maturity when I discover myself to be dependent on something else.”7 Fr. John Nepil, a priest in the Archdiocese of Denver, puts it succinctly, “To be a creature is to be dependent, and to be dependent is to be limited.”8 And, let’s bring in some words from Joseph Ratzinger for good measure: “Human beings are dependent. They cannot live except from others and by trust.”9
To bring the question of God to the fore
I believe most all the cultural challenges and the existential crises can be traced to how the human person deals with the question of God. Does God exist or not? How one answers this question impacts the whole of life — from the biggest decisions to the minutest details. I’m in good company on this one, as Benedict XVI also says:
Ultimately everything depends on the issue of God. Faith is belief in God or it does not exist. In the end it can be traced back to this simple profession of belief in God, the living God from whom everything else comes. For this reason the question of God must be central in catechesis. The mystery of God, creator and redeemer, has to appear in all its greatness. In addition we must put the myth of the modern worldview in its place.10
That last line is particularly striking. Every age has its own myths about the phenomenon of being. Ours is dominated by a scientific one. The creation accounts challenge this contemporary myth and introduce, yet again, an alternative perspective that throws open the horizon and allows human beings to catch a glimpse of both their origin and their destiny.
Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 33.
Benedict XVI, The Divine Project, 32.
Lane, Reflections, 51.
Barr, Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict, 66.
Lane, Reflections, 56.
Gaudium et spes, §36.
Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, 105.
John Nepil, “Relational Dependence in a Culture of Self-Creation,” 440.
Ratzinger, In the Beginning…, 99.
Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord, 42–43.