Creation does not begin until it responds with an Amen

                                                    

Yes, it’s strange, but we have not yet been created. Nor has the Cosmos begun. First comes death - THEN life.

Let me explain, for Origen through St Maximus the Confessor, the term “creation” refers to what God creates from His being….what we call “creation” is really just a molding on already existing stuff.

What’s the difference ? One is grafted onto the life giving energies of God….the other decays, God is not “in” it.

When God is all in all, THEN creation will have begun.

One is born of the Word, the other is lifeless, irrational matter governed not by Logos but necessity.

One is persuaded by God’s beauty to “be”, it has said Amen, and Yes to its creator, wooed by His great love.

God's 'creation' requires a response, an 'Amen'.

                           

Oh, it’s Biblical, as John Behr writes,

“It is, moreover, as the reference to 'faithful and true martyr' indicates, something that comes about through death. As the verse from the Psalm puts it: 'You take away their breath, they die and return to the dust, you send forth your Spirit and they will be created (Ps. 103:29-30).

The movement of the work of God is always, in Scripture, from death to life: 'I kill and I make alive' (Deut. 32:39). The 'Amen' which completes the creative work of God, making it his creation, is that given by the martyr.”

                                          

Elsewhere Behr notes,

“…our primary or primordial existence: Gen 1:26 comes, literally, before Gen 2:7, when God takes dust from the earth and 'moulds' the human being. That which comes from the earth is neither simply 'created nor made: though, because resulting 'from a cause’”

In other words, it is an existence not directly gifted by the Zoe (spiritual life) of God.

Behr again,

“This is perhaps also connected to the fact that whereas everything else in Gen. 1 is simply spoken into existence by a divine 'fiat;'Let there be: the only thing said to be God's own work, that for which he takes counsel and is, as such, his own project, to make human beings in his image, is given in the subjunctive, 'Let us make' (Gen. 1:26-7).”

This 'project' is only completed on the cross, as described in the Gospel of John, with Christ's final word, 'it is finished' or 'it is perfected' (John 19:30), and before which Pilate says 'Behold the human being' (John 19:5), and then by the martyrs, such as Ignatius, who on his way to martyrdom asks that the Romans be silent about him so that he can follow Christ in martyrdom and so 'become human.’ 

                     

Finally Behr ends with this remarkable insight :

*Although the first account of Genesis comes first, literally, scripturally, and therefore theologically, yet for us, in our own experience of existence, the second account is first: we come into this world in Adam, until we too learn to give our 'amen' to God in Christ.

By starting with the end to speculate about the beginning, our 'election: which happens 'before the foundation of the world', is, in a very real sense, the call that brings us into being, prior to being 'fashioned' in 'the foundation of the world: and prior also to our being 'created', which only properly happens at the end.”