Our Lent course on Creation Theology

This week we started our Lent course on Creation Theology. It promises to be an enlightening experience. We started with 'Biblical view of creation'; in coming weeks we will look at 'Humankind and creation' (including stewardship), 'Goodness of creation', 'Who owns creation?', 'The politics of creation', and a retrospective on a 'Biblical witness of creation'.

Our new(ish) minister, Revd Dr David Rankin, has an academic background so along with Bible study and extracts from church documents (this time, an extract from Hope in God's Future), we also got insights from his knowledge as a church historian.

We thought about different views of creation over the years: What do we mean by God the creator? Was the world created from nothing, or from something? What does scientific understanding add to this? We thought about the relationship between creation and redemption (re-creation), and what it means for God to be outside of time and space.

I enjoyed having to really think about these ideas, and the challenge of ideas I had not come across before. But the thing that I will remember most is this: of the two main Greek words used in the Bible for 'creator', the first also means 'poet'.