Special Topic:Confucian and Christian Conceptions of Creativity

A Christian View of Creativity: Creativity as God

Gordon D. Kaufman

Published online: 9 June 2007# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) isexplored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concepttoday because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: neworders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity areexplored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativitymanifest in evolutionary processes; the human creation of culture. It is suggested that thiscreativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given areferent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human.God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modernunderstanding of the world and human life.

Keywords Creativity . Creativities 1, 2, and 3 . Evolution . God . Mystery

The English verb “create”—to bring something new into being—and the derivative nouns“creator,” “creation,” and “creature” go back to Chaucer and beyond; but the word“creativity” is relatively new, existing for only a century or so. (Whitehead’s use of the termin Religion in the Making [1926] apparently led to its wider circulation [Oxford EnglishDictionary, 2nd ed., 1989].) In western religious traditions, the idea of creating is very old,earlier even than the Hebrew Bible in which God is initially introduced as the one who had“created the heavens and the earth” in the very beginning of things (Gen. 1:1): it was Godwho brought into being everything that exists. From the first words of the biblical story,thus, God is distinguished in principle from everything else about which we can speak andthink—all of these latter being regarded as God’s creatures and thus absolutely dependenton God. This notion of God’s utter uniqueness is found not only throughout the Bible butalso in virtually all subsequent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, all the way down

Dao (2007) 6:105–113DOI 10.1007/s11712-007-9012-2

This article includes text and ideas taken from my book, In the beginning…Creativity (Kaufman 2004).

Gordon D. Kaufman (*)Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USAe-mail: Gordon_kaufman@harvard.edu

to the present. The complex interconnected ideas of creator, creating, creation, and creaturesarticulate this deep structure decisively distinguishing God from the world, a structurewhich underlies and has given the world–pictures of the three Abrahamic religions theirfundamental shape.

Our more recent word “creativity,” however, opens up possibilities for some fresh thinkingabout the concepts of God, the world, and humanity in the world. “Creativity” designatessimply the activity of creating, or the power to create—to bring something new into being. Itdoes this, moreover—and this is a very important point—without in any way implying thatcreating requires or presupposes a creator, a being who does the creating: creativity, thebringing into being of something novel, may be going on in this or that situation or context;whether there is some specifiable cause of this or not is a separate question.

I will return to this point in a moment; but first it is important that we look briefly at thephrase, creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—often used to elaborate further what ismeant by speaking of God’s creative activity. This formula is not found anywhere in theBible; and the opening chapters of Genesis even seem to deny it, suggesting that in thebeginning God worked with preexistent primeval waters and an earth that was “withoutform and void” (1:2 [RSV]).1 The phrase, creation out of nothing, is intended to set asideall such suggestions that God created the world and its contents out of something thatalready existed. Prior to and independent of God’s creative activity there was nothing-at-allout of which the created order could be made; the omnipotent God created all that existssimply by commanding that it come into being. As Genesis 1 puts it: “God said, ‘Let therebe light’; and there was light” (1:3). Everything that exists, thus, depends in all of itsfundamental characteristics on what God willed. In contrast, the major modes of creativitythat we today see in the world—the creativity of cosmic and biological evolutionaryprocesses, bringing new forms of reality into being; and the human creativity manifest inthe production of exceedingly complex cultures—both involve transformations of thingsalready present in the world.

1

I do not intend here to present an interpretation of this traditional conception of God as theCreator of all that exists, implying as it does an anthropomorphic conception of God as apersonal being that exists apart from and independent of the created world, bringing it intoexistence by divine fiat. For a good many years I have been speaking and writing of God ascreativity rather than as creator (more recently as serendipitous creativity). The word“creativity” (as just noted) does not presuppose or imply the existence of some kind ofquasi-personal “creator” that deliberately decides to bring new realities into being: it leavesopen the question of how or why the new comes into being. I suggest that instead of takingit for granted that the word “God” is the name of a creator–person who has createdeverything, we should think of the word “God” today as the religious name for this mysteryof creativity, a mystery for which we humans have no explanation, a mystery which is

1The earliest explicit statement of creation out of nothing is found in the apocryphal book of SecondMaccabees, where readers are called upon “to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is inthem, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed” (7:28). The earliest extantexpression of the formula itself is by Theophilus of Antioch (c. 170–190): “they [the prophets] taught us withone consent that God made all things out of nothing…. He being His own place, and wanting nothing, andexisting before the ages, willed to make man by whom He might be known; for him, therefore, he preparedthe world…. the world was in some manner created, being produced by God” (Quoted in Pelikan 1960: 250).

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beyond all human comprehension. As I shall explain, the metaphor of creativity—adescendant of the biblical concept of creation, and directly implied in the idea of evolution—hasresources for constructing a religiously pertinent and meaningful modern/postmodernconception of God, an understanding that can quite appropriately become the central focustoday for Christian faith (and perhaps for other theocentric faiths as well).

It is no longer possible, I contend, to connect in an intelligible way today’s scientificcosmological and evolutionary understandings of the origin of the universe and theemergence of life (including human life and history) with a conception of God constructedin the traditional anthropomorphic terms. What could we possibly be imagining when weattempt to think of God as an all-powerful personal reality existing somehow before andindependent of what we today call “the universe”? As far as we know, personal agentialbeings did not exist, and could not have existed, before billions of years of cosmicevolution of a very specific sort, and then further billions of years of biological evolutionalso of a very specific sort, had transpired. How, then, can those of us who think of theuniverse in our modern evolutionary way—according to which such complex actualities aslife and consciousness cannot be imagined apart from quite specific evolutionarydevelopments—continue to imagine God in such anthropomorphic terms? Is it possiblefor us today to really think of a person-like creator–God as existing before and apart fromany such evolutionary processes? In many current discussions of religion–and–scienceissues by theologians, who otherwise seek to take modern evolutionary biology andcosmology seriously, there is a failure to face this problem directly.

The idea of creativity, however (in contrast with the notion of a creator)—the ideaof the coming into being through time of the previously nonexistent, the new, thenovel—continues to have plausibility today; indeed, it is bound up with the very belief thatour cosmos is an evolutionary one in which new orders of reality come into being in thecourse of exceedingly long and complex temporal developments. Although “creativity” is nota word much used by scientists, it can be very useful philosophically and theologically, for itencourages us to focus on and hold together in a single concept a very significant feature oflife and the world as today understood, namely that novel realities continuously come intobeing in time. We contemporary philosophers and theologians can and should continue towork with the idea of creativity, but we should no longer think of this creativity as lodged in acreator–agent (a concept no longer intelligible).

There are, I suggest, at least three significantly different modalities of creativity; each ofthese manifests the profound mystery of creativity in its own distinctive way. The first ofthese—which I call creativity1—is the initial coming into being of the universe in which wefind ourselves, what is commonly called the Big Bang. A second is the creativity manifestin evolutionary processes, the ongoing coming into being of trajectories of increasinglycomplex novel realities. In this mode creation is not thought of as simply andstraightforwardly from nothing (as with creativity1); it is, rather, creation in the context ofother realities that already exist—creativity2, we shall call it, the kind of complex processesthat today are believed to have brought into being, in the course of some billions of years,countless different sorts of creatures, including humans. We also need to take note of a thirdmodality of creativity, quite different from either of these first two: human creation ofculture, human symbolic creativity, creativity3. There are, doubtless, other ways of thinkingabout the concept of creativity, but this three-fold classification will enable us to view itfrom three distinctly different angles. The understanding of God that I am proposing—asprecisely this creativity—enables us to connect this ancient symbol with central features ofmodern/postmodern thinking about the origins of the cosmos, the evolution of life, and theemergence and development of human life and culture on planet Earth.

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It might be assumed that creativity is to be thought of as a sort of force at work in thecosmos, bringing the new into being. To make that sort of claim, however, presupposes thatwe know more about the emergence of new and novel realities than we actually do.However, creativity is profoundly mysterious, as the ancient phrase, creatio ex nihilo,emphasized; the coming into being of the truly new and novel is not something that wehumans have any way of understanding. To regard creativity as a kind of “force” is tosuggest that we have a sort of (vague) knowledge of an existing something–or–other thatbrings new realities into being, when in fact we do not. We can see this most vividly,perhaps, when we consider the old unanswerable question: Why is there something, notnothing? All that we really see or understand is that new realities come into existence intime. There is a serendipitous feature in all creativity: more comes into being than onewould have expected, given previously prevailing circumstances; indeed, more than mighthave seemed possible. With evolving life we see that this occurs through chance variationand selective adaptation; but neither of these can properly be considered as “forces” or“causes” (in any ordinary sense of those words) that directly produce this or that newcreation. Creativity may happen in these contexts, but why precisely this or that item iscreated remains a mystery.

Precisely because “creativity” is an utter mystery, it is a good metaphor for thinkingabout God; indeed, it draws us into a deeper sensitivity to God–as–mystery than ourmore traditional religious conceptions do, with their reifying talk of God as the Creator.This older concept suggests that we know the ultimate mystery (God) is really a person-like, agent-like being, one who “decides” to do things, who sets purposes and then bringsabout the realization of those purposes. This anthropomorphic model of God is found, ofcourse, in the creation stories of the Bible—God is presented, for example, as like a potteror sculptor who creates artifacts (Gen. 2), or as like a poet or king who brings order andreality into being through uttering words (Gen.1). With Darwin, however, we have learnedthat significant creativity can be thought of in other ways than these. Indeed, according toevolutionary theory these human forms of creativity themselves were “created,” that is, theycame into being as cosmic processes in the course of long stretches of time broughthumanity into being. The most foundational kind of creativity for us today, therefore, is thatexemplified in the evolution of the cosmos and of life, not that displayed in humanpurposive activity. Though we can describe this evolutionary model with some precision, itin no way overcomes the most profound mystery at the root of all that is: Why is theresomething, not nothing? Why—and how—can the new actually come into being in thecourse of time?

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Let us look briefly now at each of the modalities of creativity that I have mentioned. Webegin with creativity1. The ideas of the Big Bang and the subsequent evolution of the worldand of life have become commonplace today: it is believed that the universe is very largeindeed, perhaps consisting of as many as 200 billion galaxies, each of which, on average,likely contains 100 billion stars. The universe is thought to have begun in what is called aBig Bang, now believed to have occurred 14 billion years ago. Scientist Stephen Hawkingtells us that “At the big bang itself, the universe is thought to have had zero size, and…tohave been infinitely hot” (Hawking 1988: 117). Though this may be plausiblemathematically, it is impossible to imagine—and very difficult to think—just what isbeing spoken of here: what could it mean to describe this whatever-it-is as of “zero size”?

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(Is this a modern way of referring to creatio ex nihilo?). What could it mean to say that thisnothing is “infinitely hot”? (Is this just hyperbolic rhetoric?). With the Big Bang, theuniverse (we are told) immediately started to expand at an enormous rate. What can it meanto say that something of zero size is “expanding”?

In these, and many other of Hawking’s expressions, words are used in very loose ways;we are dealing here with a mystery that seemingly cannot be articulated clearly in ourordinary speech. We are given a picture of a tiny, enormously hot speck of some sort (“ofzero size,” Hawking tells us) which—for no reason at all—suddenly blows up in a huge BigBang that produces, in the course of just a few hours of almost inconceivably rapidinflation, the beginnings of what we call our universe. We have no way of knowing whetherthere was anything before the Big Bang or, if there was, what it could have been. Nor canwe know anything beyond our universe itself. All of this remains utter mystery. Hawkingexplains why: our “universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form aboundary to space–time…at which the laws of science break down” (Hawking 1988: 139;emphasis mine).

It is implied in this statement that scientists have discovered the Big Bang and thesubsequent development of the universe through exceedingly ingenious imaginativeapplication of the laws of science, and we can, therefore, have considerable confidence inthis picture. However, the Big Bang is a boundary where these laws “break down,” andtherefore no knowledge of what has brought it about can be attained. We and our universeare, thus, ensconced in inscrutable mystery. Although we cannot know anything about whatmight have preceded the Big Bang, we can know quite a bit about its effects—what followsupon it. These are cumulative and long-lasting (but probably not unending) as newstructures and patterns gradually emerge in the universe that is coming into being, and laterpass away. These forms of order and ordering become the contexts within which furthercreative activity (which I call creativities2,3) occurs. And this further creative activity alsocumulates and develops and brings more new forms of order into being through long andincreasingly complex creative evolutionary processes. Our knowledge of the consequencesof the Big Bang is very impressive, but since we have no way of finding out how or whythe Big Bang itself occurred, it really gives us no answer to our question: Why is theresomething, not nothing? All that we can say is that the enormous creativity obviouslyoccurring in and with the Big Bang is a complete mystery; we are at the limits ofour knowledge.

3

The mystery here goes deeper than we have considered so far (though this is not often takenup in the scientific accounts). Where did this somewhat fantastic story about a Big Bangcome from? Everything I have sketched here (and there are many details that I haveomitted) has been worked out carefully and painfully by scientists on Earth. This wholestory has been built up in connection with careful observations of data, all found here onEarth or its immediate vicinity. These observations have been studied and refined forgenerations, during which more and more convincing interpretations and explanations havebeen developed, interpretations that involved increasingly elaborate and ambitious creativeextrapolations beyond planet Earth and beyond all human experience. These highlyimaginative extrapolations extend far backward in time—at least 14 billion years; and theymove far out in space—14 billion light-years in all directions, very far away indeed fromthe planet on which they were created, refined, and developed. Extrapolations of this sort

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are all, of course, human imaginative constructions. They have been created (creativity3)by the power of the human imagination to pull together into a coherent and intelligiblepicture observations and data from many disparate sources. Why and how did thisenormous human imaginative power come into being? How reliable are its extrapolationsand other constructions that are the basis of all our cosmological knowledge? We areconfronted once again with utter mystery. The imagination has created innumerable sets ofsymbols—images, noises, marks on paper—and symbol-systems; and all of these ideas havebeen worked out in symbolic form. These humanly created symbols (at least some of them)are generally regarded as standing for the so-called “realities” of life and the world aboutwhich we seek to learn. How and why did humans begin to create this whole new worldof symbols?

Let me present some speculative thoughts about this development. From very early onhumans have found it possible to picture to themselves—that is, to imagine—theenvironment in which they lived; to create, that is to say, images and ideas of the settingsin which they found themselves. Without such pictures, stories, and ideas humans wouldnot have been able to act, for they would have been incapable of thinking about the future,making plans for the future, and carrying through those plans. All of our world–picturesand myths—from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, whether deeply religious orthoroughly scientific or both—are creations of the human imagination; all are falliblehuman symbolic products that must frequently be subjected to ongoing criticalexamination. One of the most important features of modern science is that a kind ofcontinuous critical scrutiny and questioning of the ideas, proposals, and conclusions that arebeing developed has, with some success, been built into its methods. However, all suchcritical examination—since it is also always carried out by men and women here onEarth—is itself fallible, however “creative” it might be. I am not trying here to discreditin any way modern cosmological, evolutionary, and ecological theory; it is, in myopinion, by far the best thinking we have about our world and our human place withinthe world. Therefore, it is appropriate to live and think and act in the terms which itprovides. However, at the same time we should take up a thoroughly critical stance. Inthe future these symbolic constructions will doubtless change and develop in ways nowcompletely unforeseeable (as has frequently happened historically).

In sharp contrast, thus, with the creativity through which the massive universe, inwhich we now take ourselves to be living, came into being (through creativities1,2), manydiverse worlds of signs and meanings—languages and cultures in innumerable fantasticvariations—have come into being through our human creative symbolic activity (creativity3).The countless sorts of ideas and images; memories and hopes; fears and anxieties;achievements and failures; ways to live and act; societies and cultures of many differentkinds; imaginary worlds (in the literary arts); forms and patterns and designs of all sorts (inthe plastic arts); vast worlds of music and mathematics and dance; theories and hypotheses ofmany quite diverse philosophies, sciences, and religions; innumerable meanings of all sorts;and connected with all of this the terrifying experiences of meaninglessness—none of thiscould exist apart from this creativity3. Nothing like this enormously prolific symboliccreativity is to be found in the story of the Big Bang; indeed, that story itself, as articulated inmodern mathematics and the modern sciences, is a product (as we have just been noting) ofcreativity3. Symbolic creativity came rather late into the world, beginning perhaps somehundred thousand years ago in and through the gradual creation of language, as humanbeings slowly emerged. The mystery of this creativity3—though very different from themystery of the Big Bang—is surely as striking and as important to humans as those earliermysteries that it apparently presupposes (creativity1,2).

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4

It was creativity2—in the mysteriously serendipitous aspect that creativity sometimesmanifests—which gradually produced the conditions that enabled human self-conscious lifeto emerge; creativity3 appears to be a special complexifying of creativity2, to which we nowmust turn. We obviously cannot explore all the manifestations of this modality of creation(given the exceedingly complicated evolutionary picture that the sciences present today),but it will prove illuminating for us to look briefly at some current theoretical speculationon how the evolutionary developments in the cosmos at large, and later on in life, may havecome about. I want to turn now to the recent development of so-called complexity theory.

According to complexity theories, it was the gradual growth, over billions of years, ofincreasingly complex organizational patterns—first in galaxies and stars, and atoms andmolecules—that eventually made possible the emergence of life; the growing complexity oflife on planet Earth, then, gradually brought into being the countless living forms that haveevolved, including those forms that have become conscious, thoughtful, imaginative, andresponsible agents—us humans. Philosopher/theologian Mark C. Taylor, in his recent bookThe Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Taylor 2001), explores andcritically reflects on some of the remarkable ideas and theories about complexity and itscreativity in this way:

According to complexity theorists, all significant change takes place between toomuch and too little order. When there is too much order, systems are frozen, andcannot change; and when there is too little order, systems disintegrate and can nolonger function…. According to [Ilya] Prigogene disorder does not merely destroyorder, structure, and organization, but is also a condition of their formation andtransformation. New dynamic states…emerge in conditions far from equilibrium….Complex adaptive systems…always emerge at the edge of chaos…[and] are in a stateof continual evolution. (Taylor 2001: 14–15; emphasis mine)

It is this complex interactive intermix of order and disorder in all systems, structures, andorganisms, sometimes coming to the very “edge of chaos”—this intermix of “information”and “noise” (to use the more technical terms)—that is the womb within which new formsmay be created.

These are startling and puzzling words. Creativity is presented here as somehowemerging—mysteriously, without explanation—between the order and the disorder, theinformation and the noise, found in all systems and structures. This mysterious creativityhas made possible the evolution of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the complex universewe know today; it is particularly manifest in the unfolding of life on planet Earth, anevolutionary dynamic that develops from relatively simple into innumerable highlycomplex forms. All systems are in some respects out of balance, and sometimes—at the“tipping point” as it is called—the present order gives way to a new better-adapted order,and creativity has occurred. On other similar occasions the existing order simply breaksdown in chaos at the tipping point and is destroyed (Taylor 2001: 148).

There are four important points for us to note here: (1) All complex systems, structures,and organisms have an internal organization that holds them together and makes themprecisely this system or organism. This feature is not imposed from without but is a kind ofself-organization. (2) This internal self-organization is always in tension, in certain respectsout of balance. (3) Though it can never be predicted just when or why a tipping point willcome, when it does, an avalanche with quite unpredictable consequences follows. (4) Theseconsequences may be completely destructive, with the earlier order breaking down into

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chaos; or they may have self-organized into a new pattern, better adapted to the environmentthan the old one—thus creating a novel reality, a reality that had not existed before.

What we have here is a general description of creativity2. What we do not have is anexplanation of how or why this creativity occurs; nor do we have an explanation ofprecisely why this or that novel reality has come into being through this process. Creativity2of the new and novel is always unpredictable, unexpected, surprising—more mystery! Itcan be described in some detail, but not really explained. We do not (and may never be ableto) understand the mystery of how greater and more complex things can come out ofsimpler and lesser things—the version, appropriate to creativity2, of the old question: Whyis there something, not nothing?

5

We have before us now a brief summary of three frequently discussed modalities ofcreativity. Creativity2 and creativity3 are in some respects more readily intelligible thancreativity1, since we know something of the contexts within which they occur, and we areable, therefore, to specify some of the conditions without which they would not have beenpossible. But we do not know how or why they are creative. Current complexity theoryprovides a way to think about some features of these developments, but this understandingis just the tip of an iceberg, most of which still remains hidden from view. The mystery ofcreativity2, as we are able to think of it today, is obviously very wide and comprehensiveand deep. How creativity3—human symbolic and cultural creative activity, eventuallyleading into self-conscious and deliberate creation of countless cultural/symbolic forms,realities, and worlds—could ever emerge out of creativity2–activity is also a profoundmystery, a mystery connected with the emergence of humans as self-conscious andresponsible beings. How and why we humans have been so enormously prolific in ourcreativity is another astounding mystery. Without the emergence of beings like ourselves(i.e., with our powers of symbolic creativity), this whole picture of the amazingdevelopments from the Big Bang onward would never have been created.

Where does this leave us? I am suggesting that we today should think of this creativity—allof this creativity—as God, think of God as creativity: in our Western languages, the word“God” is, after all, the weightiest name, the most profound name, the most revered name forthe ultimate source of all that is—the ultimate mystery of things. What does our cursoryexploration of creativity tell us about God? Three points: First, creativity (God)—thebringing-into-being of the new, the novel—is to be found everywhere we turn: from the BigBang through the cosmic expansion into galaxies in which stars and planets emerge,through the appearance of life on planet Earth and its evolution into countless forms,ultimately including human beings in which creativity becomes to some extent self-conscious and deliberate. In this human context this creativity manifests itself throughvalues and meanings of many sorts, including ultimately through, for example, thecreativity of Jesus of Nazareth and others—the creation of such meanings as agape–love,for Christians the supreme value. God (creativity) apparently is always and everywhereactive to some degree and in some respect—a rather momentous point.

Second, as creativity continues to manifest itself in a world of growing complexity, ittransmogrifies itself in ways appropriate to that development. The three modalities ofcreativity that we have examined are both serially and dialectically interconnected witheach other. They are obviously in a serial order, and yet we cannot think clearly about anyof them without thinking of them all in their interconnectedness (a reminiscence of

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traditional trinitarian complexity though not quite the same). They are quite different fromeach other, as we have seen, though each brings into being new realities. The theologicalimplications of all this are vast: God (creativity) apparently changes and develops in thecourse of time.

Third, whenever we see—or come to believe—that creativity has occurred, we also alwaysfind profound mystery: we really cannot understand why creativity occurs or how it occurs.

Some may ask why I present this picture as a Christian understanding of creativity: Isnot what I am doing here simply taking over modern scientific ideas and declaring themChristian? I hold that characterizing God as creativity is quite fitting, given the long historyin the Abrahamic traditions that links creativity closely with God; besides that (as Imentioned earlier), the word and idea of creativity is not much used in the sciences.However, this word provides us with an excellent referent for our God-talk, one that isspecifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human (although it isalso deeply mysterious); and it does this without compromising the important traditionalinsistence that God must not be confused with any of the realities of the created order. Godis creativity, not one of the creatures—though deeply involved with the creatures: God hasgiven us humans our very humanness. God is ultimately mystery, beyond humancomprehension. This understanding of God undercuts completely the anthropocentrismand anthropomorphism of the traditional Abrahamic views, and it encourages our coming toterms in creative ways with today’s massive ecological and pluralistic issues—the centralreligious challenges of our time.

There will be those who say that in this theology God has really disappeared in the mistsof mystery, and that true faith in God is thus also gone. To that I reply, true faith in God isnot living with a conviction that everything is going to be okay in the end because we knowthat our heavenly father is taking care of us. It is, rather, acknowledging and accepting theultimate mystery of things and, precisely in face of that mystery, going out like Abraham(as described in Hebrews 11:8) not really knowing where we are going, but neverthelessmoving forward creatively and with confidence—confidence in the serendipitous creativity(God) that has brought our trajectory and us into being, has continued to sustain the humanproject within the web of life that surrounds and nurtures us, and has given us a measure ofhope for that project here on planet Earth.

We humans can live only within the ecological order of life on planet Earth; and it is clearthat we must learn to love and give ourselves and our lives—not only to our human neighborsand enemies—but to this ecological order as a whole. This perspective thus deepens andwidens the radicality of the Christian ethic, and also the radicality of Christian faith.

I conclude with a paraphrase of the opening verses of the Gospel of John: “In thebeginning was creativity, and the creativity was with God, and the creativity was God. Allthings came into being through the mystery of creativity; apart from creativity nothingwould have come into being.”

References

Hawking, Stephen W. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: BantamBooks.

Kaufman, Gordon. 2004. In the beginning...Creativity. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1960. “Creation and Causality in the History of Christian Thought.” Journal of Religion

40: 246–255.Taylor, Mark C. 2001. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

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