God the Father

One can make the case that the most distinctive tenet of Christianity is its teaching about creation.   From Genesis, where the first words are “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” to the Book of Revelation which says to God, “For you have created all things; by your will they came to be and were made,” we find reference to God who created everything out of nothing.

In the second Christian century a heresy developed which we now call “Gnosticism” (Nŏs-tǐ-cism).  The Gnostics believed that there were two Gods – an inferior one who created, and the Supreme Divine Being who was remote and unknowable.  According to the Gnostics, while we humans contained a spark of the divine because the lesser god had made us, the Supreme Deity never intended to create a universe of matter.  It was a mistake, the fault of the lesser god. 

Gnostics compared and contrasted the creator god they saw in the Old Testament, whom they saw as the eye-for-an-eye god of justice, and the loving Father proclaimed by Jesus in the New Testament.   According to most Gnostics, Christ came into the world as the agent of the Supreme God, revealing the true knowledge which was the way of escaping the flesh.  It goes without saying that they had no place in their system of belief for the resurrection of the body – Jesus’ or anyone else’s, because they believed that matter imprisons the soul and is bad.

The primary importance of God’s role as creator is reaffirmed in the first article of the Creed when we say of God that He is the MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, OF ALL THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.  This is the basic belief from which flows all else that we say about God, about the universe we live in, about our history, our destiny and our hope.

Because we understand that God, who is good, made heaven and earth, the Catholic-Christian tradition looks at the world and all that is in it in a positive manner.  The physical world, the human body, the thirst for life and human relationships are all good. 

The first article of the Creed can be summed up in this way:  there is no god but God.  Just like the Jews profess their belief when they say “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one.”  We profess the same belief… there are not a multitude of gods, there is only the One who made it all.