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The Persistence of Chaos in God’s Creation

Order and chaos belong together in God’s creation, but potential chaos of another kind was introduced when God created human beings endowed with freedom.

By Bernhard W. Anderson

It is difficult to make sense of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in a world filled with terrible violence, evident recently in the assassination of a peace-maker, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At times it seems that the powers of chaos have the upper hand. In the Genesis creation story, God does not eliminate chaos. Rather, God pushes back the waters of chaos and interposes a separating barrier so that the earth becomes green with vegetation and is habitable for animals and humans (Genesis 1:6–8). If God did not sustain this cosmic structure, the earth would be […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Bernard Batto, “When God Sleeps,” BR 03:04.

Endnotes

1.

Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).

2.

See the essay by Hermann Gunkel, “The Influence of Babylonian Mythology upon the Biblical Creation Story,” a translation and abridgment of his classic work, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, in Creation in the Old Testament, ed. by Bernhard W. Anderson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 25–52.

3.

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). “To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being,” Prologue, p. 5.

4.

In the next editorial column, I plan to deal with God’s sovereignty and human freedom.