Saturday, August 14, 2010

Who Did What at Creation?

I’m continuing my way through Henri Blocher’s In the Beginning.

In the back of my mind, I’ve wondered what Genesis 1:2 means when it says that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. I think it’s saying that God’s Spirit was involved in the process of creation: of bringing order to the tohu and vohu. Psalm 104:30 says that God sends forth his Spirit, and animals are created. In the Hebrew Bible, God’s Spirit gives power to judges, inspires prophets, and brings about the reconstruction of the temple. Why couldn’t it also create?

Most Christians would probably interpret the Spirit in Genesis 1:2 as the second person of the Trinity. Armstrongites and Jehovah’s Witnesses would view it as God’s power. The Jewish commentator Rashi saw the Spirit as God’s breath. Perhaps Rashi thought that God’s breath had creative power. After all, in Genesis 2, it gave life to the first human being!

But where do the word and wisdom (which Proverbs 8 says was with God at creation) come in? In Genesis 1, God creates through verbal command. The word appears to be applied to Jesus in John 1. From a Christian perspective, who did what at creation? Was Jesus (or, rather, God the Word) the wisdom that came up with the order of creation and spoke it into being, as the Spirit did the manual labor of actually causing the stuff to come into existence, or to be shaped into something orderly (depending on if you believe in ex nihilo)?

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