Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning, beloved in the Lord, I have in mind to talk to you about the fact and the dogma of creation: the first article of the Creed, the one spoken about in this morning’s reading from 1 Corinthians, where Paul says, “But to us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we in him.” It is so easy to turn this into a general truth and to pretend that everybody shares it and never closely to examine it. But the idea that God was the Creator—God the Father—was the Creator of all things, that all things came from him, was an idea that fell on the Greco-Roman intellectual world with the force of a bomb. It still does. It still does.

Point one: Patriarchy and creation. Now, prior to coming here, 20 years ago this month, I taught as many classes as I could on as many campuses as I could, because I was just an adjunct teacher, and we needed a lot of money, at least it seemed like a lot of money at the time, to keep the family afloat, so I took as many jobs teaching as many subjects as I could. I taught so many subjects I had never had classes in when I went to school, but one of the classes I taught was history of religions. History of religions: it was offered in the philosophy departments of a number of campuses in Pittsburgh, and among other places I taught this course in an all-women’s college. Can you imagine me teaching in an all-women’s college? I would tell you about that sometime, but it would distract me right now.

I would start with India. We’d take the Upanishads, take the Vedas first and then eventually the Upanishads. Then we moved up to Nepal and took the Buddha. We sort of worked our way around. My philosophy in the history of religions I could never actually share with them. My philosophy in the history of religions is very simple: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and everybody else is a jerk. I didn’t come right out and say that, but that is what I believe, that all the others are thieves and robbers!

Anyway, when I came to the Christian faith, I insisted that the Christian faith is necessarily and at root a patriarchal religion. That it was in the essence to the very definition of the Christian Gospel, patriarchy. Now, try saying that in an all-women’s college. The classes were roughly divided by half. There were some of the ladies who said, “Yeah, and that’s exactly why I’ve always rejected it.” They thought I was right. The other half said, “He can’t possibly be right. That’s not the religion I know.” But of course, it wasn’t the religion they knew.

Patriarchy and creation: Now, to introduce this, I’m going to do a little exercise with you by reading you the first verse of the Bible, and I’m going to ask you to compare two different translations. I’m glad the children are quite quiet right now; I wasn’t sure when the service began this morning that I’d be able to get through this sermon. [Child shouts; Laughter] Not funny, Magee! [Laughter] I’m going to give you two translations, both of them grammatically correct. Both grammatically correct: two translations of the first verse of the Bible.

There’s one translation, roughly everybody, almost everybody agrees with it. It’s certainly in the Greek version, the Septuagint, and it’s in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, translated directly from the Hebrew, and most translations read something like this:

In the beginning (Bereshit) God created (bara Elohim) the heavens and the earth (et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz). In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Now I’m going to give you another translation. This is from a Bible called the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), much favored in a large archdiocese, Orthodox archdiocese in this country, much favored—not ours, by the way. Here’s the way it begins.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was tohu wabohu, was empty and void.

Did anybody spot the difference? Let me try it one more time. Here’s the old one:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was tohu wabohu.

The second one:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was tohu wabohu.

Did you spot it?

Congregation: When.

Fr. Pat: When! When. The difficulty here will not be detected without a very close reading of the text. Somebody wrote to me the other day—well, I get this question all the time—“What translation of the Bible should I read?” I say, “The Septuagint.” “Well, I don’t know Greek.” “Then the Vulgate.” “Well, I don’t know Latin.” “Then the King James, or the Douay-Rheims.” “What about the such-and-such?” “That translation was made in the 20th century. Don’t fool with it! Don’t fool with it.” But that’s another question.

The one version or the multiple versions begin, “God created” is the principal clause of the sentence. In the NRSV, “God created” is in a subordinate clause: “when God created.” Now, what is the difference? Why am I making such a mountain out of a mountain? There’s an enormous difference. These two readings of Genesis 1:1 point to two different and incompatible meanings of the word bara, to create. Two different and incompatible meanings. The one is the word of God; the other is the word of Satan. But, you see, grammatically, both readings are possible, but only one can be correct. That’s the principle of contradiction, isn’t it? Review your course you had many, many years ago in logic. That’s the principle of contradiction.

What is the significance of this difference? If the NRSV is correct, then the text is describing the universe as it was before God created it, to wit, “In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void, tohu wabohu.” That is to say, God created by imposing order on a pre-existing chaos. Now this reading of Genesis is exactly the theory that we find in Plato. I quote you from the Timaeus. Plato wrote, “When the Demiurge took over the visible stuff (hyle, stuff), and felt that it was not stable, but was in unharmonious and disorderly motion, he brought it to order from disorder.” You have God looking at stuff and bringing it into order. That is so standard in the mythologies of Egypt, the Middle East, and Greece, classical Greece. It involves God’s imposition of order on disorder; he imposes structure on chaos.

Now, beloved, it happens that this theory of creation is exactly, precisely what the Jews and Christians had in mind to reject! And this is not what we mean in the first article in the Creed. If Plato and the NRSV are correct, chaos and disorder were present before God’s creative act. That is essentially what you have in Manichaeism: two eternal principles, order and disorder, good and bad, right and wrong. Two eternal principles, in eternal conflict with one another. According to this theory, God and the primeval chaos existed before creation. But we Christians insist, with the Nicene Creed, that this is not the meaning of Genesis. We declare that prior to God’s creative act there was nothing, no-thing, not even chaos. All that existed was God, and only God, and we identify him as the Father.

If you want to pursue this further, I urgently invite you—Jim, what are the dates?

Jim: October 11-13.

Fr. Pat: October 11 to the 13, to gather with us up in Deerfield and examine this theme: paternity, patriarchy. When I say “patriarchy,” that is… Why am I say that’s essential, essential, to the divine truth, revealed truth? Because it identifies the Pater, the Father, with the Arche, the beginning, the principal. You see, God the Father is the principal even of the Holy Trinity. He’s what the Fathers of the Church called the riza theotitas; he is the root of divinity. Any religion that identifies the Arche with the Father is patriarchal; we can’t get away from that.

Now, we’re saying that God was eternally the Father. I’m not going to explore this this morning, but simply to point out that if he’s eternally the Father, then he must eternally have a Son. That question was settled in 325. He can’t be eternally the Father without eternally having a Son. […]

At the root of all existence is the fatherhood of God. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Nothing, no-thing, is antecedent to the fatherhood of God. This apostolic message derived from the Hebrew Bible, came on the Greco-Roman intellectual world like a bolt of lightning. Along with the doctrine of the resurrection, this was the most challenging part of the Gospel. It gave a firm back of the hand to the best philosophical theories of the day, and remains a source of bewilderment to the present hour. I don’t believe—honestly I don’t believe that very many Americans believe this. I mean, they may say it; they may say it, but it’s always very dangerous to read the Bible without a Creed, by the way, if you get to that. Very dangerous to read the Bible without a Creed.

Point two: Faith and creation. Christians are aware that the doctrine of creation is under attack, and so they devise various apologetic arguments to meet that attack, and one of them is called creation science. Many years ago, when I was pastor of the Church of the Resurrection down in Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma council of churches asked me to debate with an atheist. I think they didn’t completely trust me, because they had another pastor debate with me against the atheist. I ended up disagreeing with both of them. [Laughter] I disagreed with the atheist; I certainly do not believe in evolution, because I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution. On the face of it, it’s so improbable a theory that I think if one examines the evidence at all, it’s impossible really to take it seriously.

At the same time, there is absolutely no evidence in this world of what we mean by creation, none at all. There’s no scientific evidence that God brought forth all things from nothing. There’s no evidence for that! Indeed, nothingness is not and cannot be a scientific concept. In fact, nothingness was not even a mathematical concept until the Indians invented it and passed it on to the Arabs, and they gave us the one numeral that does not have corners; all the other numerals have corners: you count the corners, you find out the value of the number. And there’s certainly no way to inspect a transition from nothing to something.

You might look under a microscope and see nothing there, and then all of a sudden you see something there, but you’re not going to watch the kinesis by which it comes: it’s there and it’s not. Strictly speaking, there can be no motion, no kinesis, from nothing to something. This points to the danger of spoiling theology with apologetics. I really do believe that most heresies in the history of the Church come from the intrusion of apologetics into theology.

Point three: Creation and invitation. I want to speak to you this morning at this point about what George Steiner calls the summons of conscience. The summons of conscience: I read this expression in George Steiner in the past week when I was down in southern Indiana, God’s country, because it’s so close to Kentucky. The summons of conscience: so let’s examine that, because I think I’m like most people; I tend to regard conscience not as a summons but as a warning. The rooster crowing: Hey! Watch out! Caution!

But the notion that conscience, the syneideses, the conscientia, in man represents summons, it’s an intriguing idea. We tend to think of conscience mainly in terms of a voice of mourning and a call to moral vigilance, but there is another aspect to conscience. It is the voice of invitation. It’s the inner testimony of conscience that prompts us to look at created existence with the eyes of poetry. Let me say that one more time. It’s the inner testimony of conscience that prompts us to look at created existence with the eyes of poetry. Let me try to see if I can describe what I mean here.

Often when I go back to Kentucky I go to have a look at the house that we moved into about 1940, when I was a very small child. I like to do that. The people who have the house and have had it since the late ‘40s—they’ve had it a long time, this old couple—they’ve taken very good care of it. And the yard is immaculate and there’s flowers and there’s an American flag hanging out front, which—that’s the right flag, by the way. But I always look at a tree. This tree was very large at the time. It was in the yard of the house immediately to the west of ours. It went up, and I had—when I was about four years old, I had a mystical experience that involved that tree. At least it was a Platonic experience. I won’t describe that to you, but it was profoundly, profoundly moving in my soul. It got me thinking.

So I went back to look at that tree. But as I started to walk back to the car, which I had parked a little bit to the east, I looked up, and there’s another tree obviously the same age, that I had not noticed before! [Laughter] And I looked up at the tree. It was the high point of the trip! The high point of the trip. It was just… It was overwhelming. Reflecting on it, I’ve been thinking going through Joyce Kilmer’s poem. Everybody—at least all my age or our age—know Joyce Kilmer’s poem. “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” Not a great poem; although it’s got some memorable images in it, it’s not a great poem. And Kilmer would be embarrassed to ever compare that poem to a tree. He says that at the end, doesn’t he? “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”

To what inside me was that tree crying out? My conscience. The epistle to the Hebrews says that “through faith we know”—although King James Version says, I think, “we understand”—“that the world’s tous aionas worlds were created by the speech, by the rema, the speech of God through faith.” Remember point two was creation and faith. We only know creation through faith. We do not know it by science; we do not know it by philosophy. We can know it only through faith. The things of God’s creative act bring something when there was nothing.

You see, beloved, all created existence embodies the word of God. The gift of conscience enables us to seek this in faith. The word of God which lies at the root of reality and maintains the being of all things declares its truth to the conscience and the perception of the human soul. And how does holy Scripture speak of the word of God? Listen. I am the Alpha and the big-O: Omega, big-O, as distinct from the little-o, omicron. I am the Alpha and the big-O. I am the beginning and the end of language.

I’m much impressed that that is said in Greek. If it had been said in Hebrew, it would have been: I am the Alef and the Tav. If it had been said in Latin, it would have been: I am the A and the Z. Why Greek? Why Greek!? I’ve pondered this and pondered this and pondered this as I was driving around down in Kentucky and Indiana this past week. I’ll talk about that later. The Greek word for truth is aletheia, which literally means—it’s an a-primitive, aletheia—means the disclosure, revelation. You see, the fundamental question of the human mind, in looking at reality, is very similar—well, it’s identical—to the question that the myrrh-bearers posed. Every philosopher worth his salt is asking this question: Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb? That’s the fundamental question of philosophy.

Aletheia means that the stone has been rolled away. The full perception of truth, the full perception of aletheia gives rise in the soul to an Alpha and an Omega. Now, how do you pronounce alpha in Greek? Joanne, you know how to pronounce alpha in Greek. Ahh. Ahh! The full perception of the truth involves ahh! The ahh expresses assent and wonderment, but the ahh is incomplete. There also has to be an ohh! You see the difference, don’t you? Ahh! and ohh! The ohh consequent to the ahh means that the reflecting soul takes stock of the mystery, and, taking stock of the mystery, the soul turns its attention to the moral burden of reality.

The moral burden of reality: I’ve tried to discuss that with our cats; they can’t quite grasp it, but in that respect they’re not that different from a lot of other people. With the ahh—what does the soul learn with the ahh? “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage.” But that’s followed immediately by the ohh! “Thou shalt have no other gods my stead.” The ahh declares, “This is the truth,” and the ohh responds, “Walk in it.” The ahh announces, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” and the ohh enjoins, “Go therefore; make disciples of all nations.”

Every perception of the truth contains a summons to the moral order. The human soul in this world, beloved, is utterly surrounded by truth. Creation is an invitation inscribed in massive letters. Write down the vision, the Lord instructed Habakkuk, and make it plain on tablets, that even the runner may read it. In other words, put it up there like a billboard! You see, beloved, not everybody walks through life. Some of you out there walk through life. God’s word to Habakkuk is concerned with those who run through life. And there are two different kinds of people there: some walk through life and some run through life. And God’s truth must be evident to both, so the inscription in reality must be large.

It says the just man shall live by faith. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. And what does faith hear at the heart of reality? It hears a line from Ignatius of Antioch: “Come to the Father.” That’s what the tree was saying to me. “Come to the Father.” That is the message contained in the wind and the waves that Jesus calms in this morning’s gospel. “Come to the Father.” In all music that stirs the soul and lifts the mind, that’s the imperative. “Come to the Father.” In today’s reading, Paul says of the Father, “from whom are all things, and we in him.” Amen.