Creator (Christ As)
Creator (Christ As) [1]
Creator (Christ As). —The Synoptic Gospels do not bring forward any specific teaching of Christ as Creator. Whatever Jesus may have taught on this subject, the controlling purpose of the writers of these Gospels did not require the inclusion of it. Hence it is that only by implication is any doctrine of Christ’s creatorship introduced into the Synoptic Gospels. The implication, however, is striking and worthy of notice.
1. The assertion of original power, c.g. the healing of the leper ( Mark 1:41, Matthew 8:3, Luke 5:13); the lordship of the Sabbath ( Mark 2:28, Luke 6:5, Matthew 12:8). The Sabbath is a Divine institution, and only the establisher of it could have power over it. The forgiveness of sins ( Mark 2:5, Matthew 9:2) is a prerogative of Godhead.
2. The note of authority .—The people felt this in Jesus’ teaching ( Mark 1:22, Luke 4:36). He claims authority for Himself ( Mark 2:11, Matthew 9:6, Luke 5:24). He gives authority to His disciples ( Matthew 10:1), and the unstated assumption is that it is by an original right inherent in Himself.
3. Miracles .—Jesus quiets the sea as one who has original power over it ( Mark 4:39, Luke 8:24). This is the right of the Creator of it. He restores life to the dead ( Mark 5:41, Luke 8:54; Luke 7:14). To give life is the prerogative of Creatorship. It is an original right of the Creator. Jesus exercises this right in His own name. He creates directly in the miracle of the loaves and fishes ( Mark 6:41-44, Matthew 14:19; Matthew 15:36).
4. Ownership .—Jesus calls the angels His own ( Matthew 24:31). His lordship of the Sabbath implies ownership ( Mark 2:28).
All these are clear, and the more significant because undesigned, narrations which imply the Creatorship of Jesus. If St. Paul held a supervisory relation to the Gospel of Luke, and St. Peter to the Gospel of Mark, as many of the best modern scholars believe, then we shall feel the corroborative evidence which is so outstanding in their Epistles for the Creatorship of Jesus.
This evidence in the Pauline Epistles lies in ( a ) the pre-existence of Christ ( Romans 8:3, 1 Corinthians 10:4, 2 Corinthians 8:9, Galatians 4:4. Ephesians 1:4, Philippians 2:6, Colossians 1:17, 2 Timothy 1:9). The self-impoverishment ( kenosis ) implies previous Divine fulness. If all things were created through (διά), in (ἐν), and for (εἰς) Him, He would necessarily be pre-existent. The Pauline Christ of the Epistles is not merely the historic Christ, but more especially the Creative Principle both in the world and in man. ( b ) Creation is through Christ ( Colossians 1:16). He is the causal agent, according to the eternal purpose. ( c ) Creation is in Him, i.e. in the sphere of Christ, ‘the creative centre of all things, the causal element of their existence’ (Ellicott). Hence all things are to be gathered up in Him ( Ephesians 1:10). ( d ) Creation is for Him. He is the goal as well as the explanation of all creation. 1 Corinthians 8:6 expands this idea, and makes Him both the source and the goal of all created things. ( e ) He is the bond which holds the whole fabric of men and things together. This is the doctrine of the Divine immanence ( Colossians 1:17), and sets forth Christ as the eternally existent Creative Principle in all things. All this teaching is an amplification of the teaching of the Synoptics, and sets forth the cosmic relations of Christ in Creation in order to show more clearly His cosmic relation in Atonement and Salvation.
There are two passages in the Petrine Epistles which teach the pre-existence of Christ (the Spirit of Christ in the prophets, 1 Peter 1:11; and Christ before the foundation of the world, 1 Peter 1:20), but there is no direct teaching of Creatorship.
The Gospel of John opens at once into a circle of new and profounder conceptions of Jesus. He is the Eternal Logos who was in the beginning ( John 1:1). He is the eternal and immanent Reason manifesting creative activities. He mediates the creation of the universe ( John 1:3). The Prologue sets forth Jesus Christ in His fourfold mediation, ( a ) As the Eternal Logos, who was ‘in the beginning with God, and was God’ ( John 1:1), He mediates the creation of all things ( John 1:3). The whole process and product of creation lie inwrapped in the Logos. Neither angels nor other beings assisted. ‘And without him was not anything made that hath been made’ ( John 1:3, cf. 1 Corinthians 8:6). ( b ) As the Creative Logos, He mediates life for men. He is immanent in the Creation. ‘In him was life’ ( 1 Corinthians 8:4), and ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not’ ( 1 Corinthians 8:10). He was the ground and source of life. St. Paul’s saying, ‘The world through its wisdom knew not God’ ( 1 Corinthians 1:21), shows the amazing inability of the world to recognize its Creator who was the ground of its own life. Sin had indeed become darkness which was incapable of apprehending the light ( John 1:5). ( c ) As the Logos made flesh or incarnate, He mediates a revelation of God to man ( John 1:14-18). The whole measure of revelation lies in the incarnate Logos. ‘God manifested’ to men was manifested wholly in Jesus Christ. ( d ) As ‘the only-begotten from the Father’ ( John 1:14), He mediates an atonement or reconciliation, through His death, between a holy God and alienated sinners. This is the climax of His wondrous mediatorship, and makes Him the perfected Mediator. The historic Christ is brought forward in this Gospel only enough to explicate or illustrate the eternal Christ, but it was in the historic Christ that the eternal and cosmic Christ was first recognized. The transactional phases of the historic incarnation lead, in St. John’s view, straight to the eternal Logos who mediated the whole creation. Christ, as Creator, is so wrought into the Cosmos which He made and sustains, that upon the entrance of sin into the world He becomes of necessity the mediator of new relations between the sinner and God. His mediatorship of redemption rests on the fact that He was ‘in the beginning’ the Logos who mediated the creation of all things. Christ, as Creator, is the fundamental idea of this Gospel. It is the starting-point of the whole history of the earth and the heavens, of man, his fall and his doom, of the redemption and the final glory. It is the interpretive key to the whole framework of the Fourth Gospel, whose author sees the designed correspondence between the Creator and the created, and that creation was primarily intended to be responsive to Him. ‘He came unto his own, and they … received him not’ ( John 1:11), expresses the failure of creation to fulfil the Divine purpose. St. John gathers up all that the Synoptists have taught, but adds new conceptions of Jesus in a profounder interpretation of Him. He teaches ( a ) the pre-existence of Christ ( John 1:30, John 3:13; John 3:31, John 6:62, John 8:56-58, John 14:11, John 17:5) more plainly and fully than the Synoptists; ( b ) His authority ( John 17:2); ( c ) His inherent power to work miracles ( John 2:8, John 6:11, John 11:43); ( d ) His ownership of all things ( John 1:11). But new conceptions are added, (α) He is the source of an abiding or eternal life. He has power to give this life to Whom He Will ( John 3:36, John 4:10; John 4:14, John 5:21-24; John 5:40, John 6:27; John 6:51, John 10:28, John 11:25, John 14:19, John 17:2). (β) His life is the light of men. But the fact that as Creator He is the source of both life; and light to men does not prevent their rejection of Him ( John 1:4, John 8:12, John 9:5, John 12:35-36; John 12:46). (γ) He shows His identity with the Father: ‘I and the Father are one’ ( John 10:30); ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ ( John 14:9, John 12:45). (δ) He shows familiarity with the life and conditions of Heaven ( John 14:2, John 17:24).
But these conceptions of Christ, as well as those which St. John and the Synoptists have in common, rest on the fact of His having mediated the creation of all things. His rights in the whole creation, as well as the obligations which He has toward it, grow out of the fact of His Creatorship. The eternal and universal characteristics of both incarnation and reconciliation are grounded in the creational character of Jesus Christ.
Literature.—B. Weiss, Religion of the Nt , 190–191, and Bibl. Theol. of Nt , ii. 99; G. B. Stevens, The Christian Doctrine of Salvation , 438; G. A. Gordon, The Christ of To-Day , 81–93; A. M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology , 341; D. F. Estcs, Outline of New Testament Theology ; A. B. Bruce, St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity , 335; H. R. Reynolds, ‘St. John’ ( Pulpit Commentary ), vol. i. 1–21. The literature on the subject is very scanty.
