Creation and Divine Relation: Christianity’s View of the World

What does it mean for a world to be created rather than simply to exist? This is not a trivial question. For Christianity, the answer shapes everything – how God is understood, how the material world is valued, and what role human beings play in the grand drama of existence. The Christian understanding of creation is not a single, simple idea. It involves a free act of divine will, a radical distinction between Creator and creation, a world that shares nothing of God’s own substance, and an ongoing relationship between God and the universe He brought into being. Each of these dimensions deserves careful attention.

Creation as a free act of God 🔗

In Christian theology, the act of creation was not a necessity – it was a choice. According to the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, creation did not arise from any self-interest on God’s part; God was not driven by personal need, nor did God gain anything by creating. Creation originates solely in God’s desire to share the gift of existence beyond the divine life itself. This framing is philosophically significant: God did not create because God had to, or because some pre-existing matter demanded ordering. The universe came about as an expression of divine freedom and generosity.

This idea stands in sharp contrast to many ancient cosmologies, which imagined creation as a byproduct of divine conflict, overflow, or necessity. Christianity insists instead on what theologians call divine aseity – God’s complete self-sufficiency. Because God depends on nothing external, creation is a pure gift. The interdisciplinary resource Inters.org captures this precisely: creation is the effect of God’s word, not an emanation of Himself. It expresses a free project that unfolds in time, orderly and gradually, allowing all things to participate in God’s goodness and divine perfections.

Creation ex nihilo: out of nothing 🔗

At the center of the Christian doctrine of creation stands one of theology’s most striking claims: that God created the world ex nihilo – out of nothing. As Wikipedia’s entry on creatio ex nihilo explains, this doctrine holds that matter is not eternal but had to be brought into being by a divine creative act, in direct contrast to the idea that God shaped a pre-existing, primordial substance. The universe did not emerge from some raw material that existed alongside God – it was called into being from absolute non-existence.

The doctrine received its first explicit articulation in the late second century by Theophilus of Antioch, who wrote that God creates things that are “out of things that are not.” This formulation echoes what Paul writes in Romans 4:17, where God is described as one who “calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Theologian John Webster, cited in Credo Magazine, calls creation ex nihilo a “hinge doctrine” – it functions as a link between what is true about the nature of God and what is true about the works of God in creation and redemption. It tells us that God’s power is completely unlimited, that all that exists belongs to one of only two categories: God Himself, and that which God creates. There is no third category.

This doctrine also draws a crucial philosophical boundary. BioLogos explains that creation ex nihilo is not just a claim about the absence of prior matter – it articulates how fundamentally different God is from everything found within the universe. The created world depends entirely on God for its existence, at every moment. Creation is not self-constituting; it possesses no independent ground of being.

The distinction between God and the world 🔗

One of the most philosophically important consequences of creation ex nihilo is the radical distinction it establishes between God and the created world. The St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology makes this precise: the phrase “from nothing” does not name a material out of which the world was made – it denies that God made use of any pre-existing materials at all. Unlike a carpenter who fashions a table from wood, God has no external resource to work with. The world is entirely, at every moment, dependent on the continuous creative activity of God.

This distinction is also what grounds God’s transcendence. Drawing on Nicene theology, scholars describe what Robert Sokolowski calls “the Christian distinction between God and everything else” – the idea that God is radically different from creation in such a way that God cannot be understood as simply the highest rung on a ladder of being that reaches from earth to heaven. God does not belong to the same ontological order as the world. This is not dualism – it does not mean God is absent from creation – but it does mean that God and creation are not of the same nature or substance.

The material world is not consubstantial with God 🔗

A key term in this discussion is consubstantiality – literally, sharing the same substance or essence. In Christian theology, consubstantiality is affirmed between the persons of the Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share one divine essence), but it is firmly denied between God and the material world. The universe, however magnificent, does not share in God’s divine essence. It reflects God’s glory, but it is not itself divine.

This has concrete theological consequences. The Inters.org article on creation notes that the material world is good – God called it “very good” at the moment of creation (Genesis 1:31) – but its goodness is a created, relative goodness, not an absolute or divine one. A universe that possessed absolute, necessary perfection would risk assuming the philosophical attributes of the Absolute itself, effectively blurring the line between God and the world. By affirming a relative perfection in creation, Christian theology actually strengthens the distinction between Creator and creature.

This also means Christianity avoids two opposing errors. Pantheism – the view that everything is God – collapses the distinction entirely. Gnosticism – the view that matter is evil – rejects the goodness of creation. Christian theology charts a middle path: the world is genuinely good, genuinely distinct from God, and genuinely dependent on God for its existence at every moment. As Christianity Today observes, there is both beauty and purpose in the world God created – but human beings are called to worship the Creator, not creation itself.

Creation as a continuous process: creatio continua 🔗

A common misunderstanding is that Christian creation theology is simply about an event in the distant past – a singular moment when God “started” the universe and then stepped back. The fuller Christian tradition rejects this picture. GotQuestions.org’s overview of the doctrine of continuous creation explains that God maintains an ongoing creative process that sustains everything from the beginning of time to the end. Without God’s unceasing will, there would be no creation – not because the universe would stop functioning, but because it would simply cease to exist.

This is the doctrine of creatio continua – continuous creation. It stands in direct opposition to deism, which imagines God as a clockmaker who wound up the universe and walked away. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that within traditional Christian theology, the view that created things cannot exist apart from ongoing divine involvement has been relatively uncontroversial, since it is implied by the sacred texts themselves. Colossians 1:17 states that “in him all things hold together,” and Hebrews 1:3 describes the Son as “sustaining all things by his powerful word.”

Theologically, this continuous creation is not a second, separate action from the original creation – it is the same divine creative will expressed through time. BioLogos’s article on recovering the doctrine of creation draws on Psalms 104 and 139 to show that God’s acts of creation did not cease with the seventh day of Genesis 2. Creation is ongoing, developing, and being drawn toward its calling – it is God’s project moving toward fulfillment, not a static work frozen in the past.

Human beings as co-creators and stewards 🔗

If creation is continuous and dynamic, then human beings are not passive inhabitants of a finished world. Christianity teaches that humans occupy a unique position within creation – made in the imago Dei, the image of God – and are called to participate actively in God’s ongoing creative work. This is the concept of the created co-creator, developed most fully by Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner. As outlined in an academic review of Hefner’s theology, the doctrine of creatio continua implies that human beings do not merely act as God’s passive partners but in a certain sense create on behalf of, and under the guidance of, God.

Thinking Faith, the journal of the Jesuits in Britain, articulates this beautifully: while God creates ex nihilo and then orders and arranges, human beings create in a creaturely way, dependent on God’s primary acts of creation. We imitate our Maker, though we can never replicate what God alone can do. The call to co-create is not an invitation to play God but to participate – consciously, responsibly – in the world’s ongoing becoming.

This participation carries ethical weight. Core Christianity notes that with God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply,” humans as well as all of creation are enlisted in the task of continuing creation. Every vocation – every form of meaningful work – is a participation in this ongoing process. Nothing we do in the world is theologically neutral.

Stewardship and accountability 🔗

Alongside the concept of co-creation sits the closely related idea of stewardship. The Lutheran World Federation emphasizes that mainstream biblical scholarship understands human “dominion” over the earth (Genesis 1:26) not as license for exploitation but as a mandate for responsible and compassionate care. God entrusted humanity with authority over the created world precisely because creation belongs to God – and those who care for what belongs to another are accountable to the owner.

World Vision’s biblical framework on creation makes this accountability explicit: God holds people responsible not only for moral failures between humans but also for how creation is used and misused. Sin affects relationships with all of creation, not just with other human beings. The call to stewardship is therefore a call to justice – toward the earth, toward its creatures, and toward future generations who will inherit what present generations leave behind.

What makes the Christian vision distinctive is that stewardship is not rooted in mere practicality or environmental ethics alone – it flows from theology. The Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University describes stewardship as the foundation and framework for a Christian ethical response to the earth’s environmental challenges. To care for creation is to honor the Creator. To destroy it is to dishonor the gift.

The world as gift: God’s relation to creation 🔗

Throughout all of these doctrines – creation ex nihilo, the Creator-creature distinction, continuous creation, and human stewardship – one theme remains constant: the world is a gift. It did not have to exist. It exists because God freely willed it into being, sustains it moment by moment, and draws it toward a purpose. This relationship between God and the world in Christianity is neither distant nor pantheistic – it is what theologians describe as a relationship of intimate transcendence. God is wholly other than the world, yet wholly present to it.

As Nicene theology observes, it is precisely because God is radically different from the world that God does not need a mediating principle to connect with it. God is capable of being radically present in creation. The incarnation itself – God becoming human in Christ – is the fullest expression of this paradox: the Creator entering the creation, not by being absorbed into it, but by relating to it on the deepest possible terms.

The material world, then, is neither divine nor meaningless. It is the arena of God’s ongoing purposes – a space where freedom, life, history, and redemption unfold under the sustaining hand of a Creator who has not finished with it yet.

What do you think? If creation is an ongoing process rather than a one-time event, how does that change the way you understand human responsibility toward the natural world? And what does it mean for a being that is not God to be genuinely invited into the act of creating – is co-creation an empowerment, a burden, or both?

References

1. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/Creation
2. https://inters.org/creation
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo
4. https://credomag.com/2023/05/the-doctrine-of-creation-ex-nihilo-why-does-it-matter/
5. https://biologos.org/articles/creation-ex-nihilo
6. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2026/04/13/the-nicene-imperative-the-enduring-relevance-of-the-homoousion/
7. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/02/judeo-christian-worldview-genesis-creation-story-imago-dei/
8. https://www.gotquestions.org/continuous-creation.html
9. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creation-conservation/
10. https://biologos.org/articles/recovering-the-doctrine-of-creation-a-theological-view-of-science
11. https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2305-08532014000100015
12. https://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/co-creation-spirituality
13. https://corechristianity.com/resources/articles/co-creators-with-god-how-continual-creation-changes-what-we-do-and-why-we-do-it
14. https://lutheranworld.org/blog/stewards-creation
15. https://www.wvi.org/sites/default/files/World%20Vision%E2%80%99s%20Biblical%20Understanding%20of%20How%20we%20Relate%20to%20Creation_Full.pdf
16. https://ifl.web.baylor.edu/sites/g/files/ecbvkj771/files/2023-02/creationarticlebutkus.pdf