Introduction: the cosmological imperative

Summary

πάντα δι αὐτοꍱ ἐγένετο καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοꍱ

ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν

All things came into being through him, and without him

not one thing came into being.

John 1:3

The Christian doctrine that God is creator is as much a claim about the nature of the world in which we live as it is about the world's origins or the shape and destiny of the self. And yet theologies addressing the theme of the creation in the modern period tend to focus primarily upon the creatureliness of the self, developed in terms of a theological anthropology, on the one hand and upon the world as product of divine action on the other. What is missing is a concern with the nature of the world as created, and the relation of the world as created with God, by virtue of its nature as world. In the attempt to reconcile the traditional ways in which we speak about God with the ways in which science teaches us to talk about the world, contemporary discussions of science and theology have moved beyond the argument from design, seeking also to explore points of agreement between scientific and theological method and between a scientific and a theological understanding of the world. In some cases there are certainly traces of an investigation of the world as created but these are inevitably closely tied to the data and insights of science.