June Newsletter Article: Creation and our Worldview
This article was written by David Kirk and featured in our June 2026 newsletter.
Somewhere near to the heart of a biblical Christian worldview lies the doctrine of creation. I don't mean talk of how the world was made (how long it took, or by what processes); I mean more important talk about questions such as: What is the creation? Why is the world structured as it is? What is a human being? What are places and why are they important? What is the meaning of work? What is the meaning of the arts?
You might not think all of those questions are particularly related to the doctrine of creation, but they are. Consider for a moment, what is music? By God's gift, music is embedded in creation itself: the soprano notes of birdsong, the baritone of the stag's call; the deep bass of an underground waterfall in a cavern, the rhythms and cadences of rainfall, or our breathing. This is the musicality of creation, which we form into poetry, oratory, and all kinds of music as art, whether the Gaelic puirt à beul, or jazz, or rap, through to the great symphonies of Western culture. Or, to ask a more straightforwardly theological question, how does God reveal himself? Yes, that too is inseparable from the doctrine of creation, because all revelation is earthly in character.1
In terms of dogmatics, the doctrine of creation is one of two so-called distributed doctrines, doctrines that intersect with others across the broad spectrum of theological categories (the other is the Trinity).2 Neglect these doctrines, and much else suffers. And the doctrine of creation certainly has suffered neglect. Why? Partly, it's a theological problem: we tend to value the spiritual over the physical. That's a problem that's dogged Christianity since Saint Paul wrote to Corinth. Partly, too, it's because of the culture of the modern West. We have increasingly forgotten that the world is God's creation. We live in it as if it were not. Recovering the doctrine of creation restores our memory and helps us to think biblically about who God is, and about life and salvation.
One of the things that surprises many Christians when they begin to remember that the world is God's creation is that they also begin to see Jesus Christ in a new light. Many Christians haven't really encountered Jesus as the truly-human, incarnate God. As the Lord of 'all things', to Him belong every facet of human life and all of the riches of God's good creation. The incarnation is God's powerful affirmation of His creation. And the atonement follows: Jesus Christ has died to reconcile 'all things' to God (Col 1:19-20). And so, God who gave his Son for us will also along with Him freely give us 'all things' (Rom 8:32). When God makes 'all things' new in Christ (Rev 21:5), then all things will be ours in Christ, our glorious inheritance in a redeemed creation, the eternal Kingdom of our God.
1 Hendrikus Berkhof, Christian Faith, Rev. Ed. (Eerdmans, 1986), pp.52-54.
2 John Webster, 'Non ex aequo: God's relation to creatures' in Allen, M., Ed., T&T Clark Reader in
John Webster (T&T Clark, 2020), p.109.