Doctrine of Creation (Part 8): Continuing Creation

III.  Continuing Creation

God is conceived in traditional Christian theology to be the cause of the world not only in his initial act of bringing the world into existence but also in his ongoing conservation of the world in being. So today we want to turn to the subject of conservation, as it's sometimes called. Let's begin by looking at some biblical data concerning conservation.

         A.  Biblical Data

While divine conservation is not as well attested biblically as creation (as obvious from the consistent use of past tense verbs to indicate an action at the beginning of the universe when God brought the world into being), nevertheless there are some important New Testament passages that speak of God's conservation of the creation in being. For example, Colossians 1:16-17. Here Paul says of Christ,

Notice the contrasting verbs in that sentence – between verbs of creation (all things were created through Christ and for Christ), but then in addition to that all things hold together in him. The one verb speaks of the creation of the universe initially; the other speaks of God's ongoing preservation of the world in being. The word literally means to con-sist – the world consists in God.

Similarly in the book of Hebrews 1:3, again speaking of Christ, “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” The word there translated “upholding” literally means to carry. God carries or sustains, as it were, the universe in existence.

Finally, in Acts 17:28 we have the words of the apostle Paul as he speaks to the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill. Paul says, “In him we live and move and have our being.” It's that third verb there that I draw your attention to – we have our being in God. The word literally means we exist in God.

So there is New Testament data that God not only created the universe initially but that the universe consists through God, that God bears or sustains the universe, and that we exist in God.

B. Systematic Summary

1. Definition of Conservation

Let's go on then to a systematic summary of what is meant by conservation. Creation and conservation have traditionally been classed as two subdivisions of creatio ex nihilo because in neither case does God create or conserve the world out of some material thing. The initial creation is very often called creatio originans, or originating creation. This would be God's creation at the beginning of the world. Conservation is called creatio continuans or continuing creation. That would be God's ongoing conservation of the world in existence.

While this is a very nice and handy rubric, nevertheless I think that when it's pressed for technical precision it is actually quite misleading. As we've seen, when we say that something is created we are talking about the first time at which a thing comes into existence. So the doctrine of creation implies that things begin to exist at the time that they are created. But then if you think of conservation as a kind of continuing creation, what that would imply is that at every successive moment God creates a new individual at that moment – the first time at which it exists in the place of the thing that existed at the previous time. Thereby you are landed in the crazy doctrine called occasionalism. Occasionalism is the view that God is the only cause in reality. Things that we think are causally connected are merely the occasions upon which God acts to bring about some new effect. So, for example, when you see a wad of cotton exposed to a flame and it turns black and smoldering, on this view the flame does not actually cause the cotton to turn black and smouldering. Rather, the proximity of the flame to the cotton is merely the occasion upon which God makes the cotton black and smouldering. So there really are no secondary causes in the world. God is the only cause there is, and he simply acts on certain occasions to bring about different effects. What occasionalism implies is that nobody persists through time. You never persist from one moment to another. There is a new creation at every successive moment, and therefore this destroys personal identity and hence personal agency and responsibility. The costs of construing conservation as a type of creation I think are unacceptably high.

If we try to elude this problem by saying creation doesn't necessarily involve a first time at which something begins to exist, then I think we've really lost something important and essential to the doctrine of creation. As I explained in our lectures on creation, creation involves God's bringing something into being where something comes into being at a time t if that time is the first time at which that thing exists. So I think it's preferable not to classify conservation as a type of creation. It's really quite a distinct operation of God in addition to creatio ex nihilo.

We can distinguish conservation from creation, not in terms of a difference in God's action or power (which seem to be the same in both cases), but rather in terms of the object of his action. For conservation presupposes an object which God acts upon to cause it to persist from one moment to another. Creation does not presuppose any such object. Rather, in creation the object is constituted by God's action – it begins to exist. It is an absolute beginning of existence for that thing. But in conservation there is an object on which God acts to cause it to persist to the next moment. So conservation should be understood, I think, in terms of God's preserving some entity E from one moment of existence to another. We can provide this analysis of divine conservation:

So the divine action itself (that is to say, the bestowal of being – the causing of existence) may be the same in both creation and conservation, but in creation it does not presuppose a prior object, and it may be instantaneous simply at a time t , whereas in conservation it does presuppose a prior object and it occurs over an interval of time. So that would be the difference between creation and conservation. Creation doesn't presuppose the existence of an object, but rather it constitutes that object in being. And it can occur in an instant t. But in conservation God acts upon an object to cause it to exist through an interval of time – from one time to the next.