Edward Rhodes, my friend and teaching colleague on The Internship, has kindly provided a series of guest posts reflecting on the Apostle’s Creed. This coincides with our current series at Emmanuel entitled Creed: Why I Believe. Edward is the author of Rooted: Reconnecting with the History of the Church.
IN GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY, CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH
I believe in a God who is utterly transcendent, being self-existent, all-knowing and unbounded by either space or time.
I believe in a God who is sovereign, the creator and sustainer of heaven and earth, and who, as such, has created human beings in his image, with delegated sovereignty and genuine (albeit limited) free-will and decision making ability, which, alas, we have sadly misused to our ruin.
I believe in a God of holiness and love, who desires to relate to us and to rescue us from the ruin into which we have fallen. I believe that this is why the doctrine of the Trinity is so important, since it speaks of a God who eternally exists in loving, self-giving relationship.
I do not, however, believe in a “God of the gaps” – that ever-diminishing divinity, who exists in the things that we don’t yet understand. If human reason is, as I have argued, a reflection of the divine mind, then the fact that we can now scientifically understand how something came into being, and how it works, should surely be a reason to worship God rather than to doubt or diminish him.