Hey folks! Our current unit in the kids curriculum is about the Apostle's Creed. We'll be in this unit until the beginning of Advent!
The Apostles Creed forms one of the three main catechetical tools of the Church from its earliest days. For hundreds of years, persons were taught the faith through the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. This Fall we’ll be walking through the articles of the Creed to get our kids oriented to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints”!
Traditionally, the Church has used the Apostle’s Creed as the bedrock of what ought to be believed about God, the story the Bible tells and our future hope.
Our first confession about who God is mentions his identity as creator of all things (heaven and earth meaning everything). There is no thing that is that was not made by God. The classic formulation of this doctrine is that God created all things “ex nihilo,” or “out of nothing.” The cosmos was not simply fashioned from pre-existing material. Without God's causal act it was not. Through God's causal act, it is.
Very often this notion is invoked in intra-christian debates about the means of creation, especially as it relates to evolution. But creation ex nihilo is really not about that, regardless of what you think about evolution or the age of the earth or whatever.
It has to do with the assertion that God as God is not a constituent part of creation, but is its source. This means that God and creation do not “stand side by side” as it were, “existing” in the same way, as if the only difference between them is God’s power. There is instead a basic difference between the two--the difference between God and creation is radical (literally meaning, “having to do with the root”) and infinite, and everything that exists that is not God “inheres” in God.
So just repeat all that ^ to the kids and you’ll be all set. Jk.
The point with all of this is that the notion of God as creator of heaven and earth is a fundamental conviction of the Christian Faith that has enormous implications for pretty much all Christian theology, the scope of which we can’t come close to describing in a 20 min kids lesson.
However, one thing to notice about the creation narrative is how it profoundly subverts the authority of other contemporary Ancient Near East (ANE) creation stories. In those stories (which every nation Israel encountered had) their god or collection of gods (for rain, fertility, harvest, etc.) would all have a story that involved making order out of pre-existing chaos, culminating with the construction of their “image” in whatever temple the people had built.
For the people of God, however, God doesn’t make order out of chaos but makes everything to begin with. And he isn’t god over one aspect of human life but of all of it. And he doesn’t put an image in a temple built with hands, but places his image—male and female—in the Garden of Eden: the original “Holy of Holies.”
Scripture to consider:
John 3:1-16
Mark 9:14-27
Genesis 1:1-31
Questions for your kids
What does God say over and over about what he’s made?
What do you think it means that men and women are “very good” as opposed to just “good”?
Does the world as God made it sound like a nice place to be? If so, in what way?
Holy Imagination
Learning the faith isn't just about memorizing facts. It's about seeing the world as it really is: "charged with the grandeur of God."
The old theologians like to say that God "wrote" two books: The Book of Nature, and The Book of Scripture.
Take some time to walk outside, maybe in a park, with your kids this week. Ask them what they see. If it all comes from God, what does it tell us about him?
Peace,
Danny+