KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 September
In the beginning God … In the beginning the Word
And so it begins. It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read the two lessons which have become a special feature of the first two Chapel services. The two readings are Genesis 1. 1-5 and John 1. 1-5; two of the most profound texts that belong to intellectual thought and reflection. The reading from John is most clearly and obviously a kind of complement and commentary on the passage from Genesis. These readings from the Jewish Scriptures, and the Christian New Testament are also complemented by a wonderful passage from the Islamic Scriptures, the Qur’an. The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is.”
We begin with the radical concept of God and in a way which challenges our contemporary culture. These readings show the intimate and necessary relationship between power and wisdom. Power without wisdom, I think we know, is deadly, destructive, and dangerous. God speaks reality into being. God as Word (Logos) is an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These passages are poetic and philosophical. They are not ‘science’ in its modern sense though they are precisely what science in all its forms presupposes, namely the world as being in principle intelligible. They also belong to an older sense of scientia as an inward habit or virtue, a way of thinking and living.
In principle. En arche, In principia – for ‘beginning’ means principle as well. The idea of Creation is set before us in a much more radical way than is commonly understood or rather misunderstood. God does not make the world like a clock-maker to use a famous early modern image. Creation is about the animating principle which creates and sustains what is created. Creation is always about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not any one of the things of creation. Thomas Aquinas makes the point beautifully that God is “the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures.” In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badi (Absolute Cause), al-Bari (Producer), al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Mubdi (Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al-Qadir (All-Powerful), and al-Qahhar (Dominator). Such expressions emphasize that God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things.