KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 September
The Beauty and Wonder that Begins and Never Ends
At the first Chapel services each year the Head Girl and Head Boy read passages from Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. “In the beginning God”, as Genesis says, and “In the beginning was the Word”, as John says. In both readings there are the powerful and suggestive ideas of ‘word’, ‘light’, and ‘life’. God speaks creation into being and God is Word or logos. It highlights from the outset the idea of a Creator who is the author of creation, a theme which Jews and Christians and Muslims and others hold in common. As the Qur’an puts it, The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is”.
These readings are among the most powerful and the most commented upon theologically as belonging to the intersection of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic culture as shaped by Greek thought. They complement one another and belong to an intellectual and spiritual way of thinking about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. They contribute to a long tradition of philosophical reflection about reality. One cannot read the passage from John, for example, without being aware of how it is commenting on Genesis.
The beauty and wonder of the order of creation reflects the everlasting beauty and wonder of God. The Creator/creation distinction is paramount. It marks the idea of distinction within unity. The idea of creation, not as chaos but as an orderly affair in which one thing is distinct from another while yet connected to everything else in creation, is essential to intellectual inquiry. It emphasizes that the world as intelligible is also ethical. It is not evil. It is good. But it is not divine. It is the product of the goodness and love of God. Think of how radical that idea is in our disordered and confusing world of conflict and violence, a world of profound disconnect and unease.
Thomas Aquinas wonderfully observes that God is “the beginning and ending of all things, especially 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. 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 and of human consciousness, too. Hans Georg Gadamer, commenting on Hegel by way of Aristotle, notes that “the highest degree of self-consciousness must be ascribed to the highest divine being”, the God who thinks himself thinks all things. Our own limited thinking participates at best in that divine self-knowing through the intelligible and ethical order of creation. Think of how this contributes to the biblical insight of our humanity as made in the image of God.