The Creating Word

In describing the mechanism of God’s creative energy, the writers of the biblical creation narratives may have employed any number of devices to communicate the unfathomable act of creation ex nihilo.  Unlike other narratives that imagine creation taken from the body of a deity, or even one in which the universe springs forth from pure, divine thought, the whole of creation in the biblical drama issues forth from the spoken word of the Creator.  This is profound, for speech is ultimately not an act of isolated engagement, but as Heidegger notes, is equally speaking and listening, a hearing and uncovering, an equal state of showing and beholding.

In this way, the speaking-Creator in the act of primal, universal becoming signifies something of the way in which the Creator is related to the creation.  Because the spoken word underpins the entire drama and energy of the universe’s becoming, that which is brought into being–the spoken-into–is made to participate in the one who speaks.  Through its emerging existence, the creation forms a conversation with the Creator, concomitantly the outcome of the word and the reason for it.

Moreover, the logic of this creating/becoming conversation unveils a suggestion of the meaningfulness of the creation to the Creator.  Because this act of creating-speech is necessarily participatory, divine intent and purposefulness are shown to be hard-coded into the very ontology of creation.  Far from an unintentional emanation of the divine, the creation which ushers forth from the divine word is something purposed by God to exist within the continual and perpetual engagement of the same divine word.  God has created for conversation, for relationship, for purpose, and the creation which arises from this divine, creating word is imbued with eternal meaningfulness at this fundamentally primal level.  While the participants in this conversation remain individual (even as two conversant friends retain their own ontology), they nonetheless–by virtue of the enduring conversation–participate one within the other.  In the creating-power of the divine word, God has been revealed to that which God has created, and that which God has created has been itself appropriated to the divine.

The Named Imagers of God

Yet if the creation has been appropriated to the divine through the spoken word of God, how much more has humanity been brought near to God?  In the creating speech, God has initiated the eternal conversation between Godself and creation.  But as the narrative continues, the word of God uniquely comes to rest on the object of God’s peculiar creation in humanity.  Here, the spoken word of God moves beyond the general conversation of creating acts to the specificity of the divine nature and being.  In the creation of the human, the essence and characteristics of God [the imago dei] are rehearsed as an act of “naming”; the Creator proclaims:

As we are in our eternity, so shall you be in your createdness.  Upon you shall rest the name of God, and you shall bear our likeness.

In this intensification of language is revealed the crucial nature of the imago dei which underpins the creation narrative en toto.  This imaging of God by the spoken-into and the named-of-God is no mere nod to abstract rationality or even casual inter-relationality.  Rather, in the revelatory nature of this language-as-participation, the “naming” of humanity signals the impartation of very God to this special creation of God.  The participation imagined here is no longer simply on the level of pure ontology, but has rather progressed to the deepest levels of the nature of the inter-penetrating oneness of the persons of the Trinity. In the mystery of the Godhead as unity and relationality, the male and female as the united, “named” imagers of this divine mystery encapsulate, in their createdness, the nature of their speaking Creator.  As they, in their imaging of the united Godhead, reflect the ineffable nature of the Creator, so too the nature of the Godhead expresses something of that which they have been created and named to be.

Named to Name

Finally, it is revealed that the imager of the divine is endowed to be a speaking-creator as well.  If they are, in their createdness, the imagers of God, so they are, as the named-of-God, also endowed by God with creating-speech.  For the creating speech does not end with God, but is perpetuated in the named-of-God who in turn exercise the creative word.  The naming of the animals envisaged in the narrative is no simple explanation for some curiosity of human knowledge.  Rather, even as the Creator has, through the naming of the imager, signified the relationship of the named-one to God, so the named-one’s naming of the animals demarcates the relationship which exists between the one who names and the one who is named.  In this divinely imparted role of creating/naming to the man and woman, the full measure of the imaging and name-bearing of the spoken-into is finally revealed.

This is why, then, the naming of “woman” does not indicate the ontological or spiritual subordination of the one to the other as some might suppose.  To the contrary, they [male and female] are first seen as equally and inextricably the named imagers of God through their unity of flesh.  As they are one in flesh, their relational and ontological unity images, in part, the unity of the Godhead.  So then, the naming of “woman” [out of man], far away from describing some domestic “ordering” or hierarchy, principally articulates the unique relationship which the naming named-one has to itself [male and female] and to the Creator; it is the self-aware acknowledgement of its divinely appointed and simultaneous imaging and naming roles.  It proclaims that the creation is not the end of the divine, creating conversation, but merely the beginning.  For even as the Creator has spoken creation into being and signified the divine relationship to it through its divinely-appointed name, so too are the named imagers of the speaking-Creator to perpetuate the work by participating in and taking ownership of the creating speech of their divine namer.