"The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's"
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Rowan Williams slips a quiet grenade into a familiar argument: creation has a beginning, but “beginning” is a category that belongs to creatures, not the Creator. The line is doing theological boundary-work. It rescues “In the beginning” from being read like a timestamp on a cosmic calendar and reframes it as an account told from inside time, by beings who can only narrate origins as an event they stand downstream from.
The subtext is aimed at two temptations at once. One is the literalist urge to treat Genesis as a rival to cosmology, as if God were a very early actor within a very large timeline. The other is a more sophisticated but equally limiting move: imagining God as an invisible object “before” the universe, parked in some adjacent metaphysical waiting room. Williams refuses both. God isn’t the oldest thing in the universe; God is the reason there is a universe to have ages at all.
That’s why the line works rhetorically: it relocates the debate from chronology to dependence. “From the world’s point of view” concedes what science and common sense alike require (the universe has an origin, a history, a measurable arc) while denying that this origin exhausts what “creation” means. In Williams’s Anglican intellectual context, this is also a gentle defense of classical Christian claims about divine eternity: God isn’t earlier than everything else; God is other than “earlier.” The result is a neat reversal that protects both scientific seriousness and theological depth, and quietly undermines the culture-war premise that faith and physics are competing narrators of the same kind of fact.
The subtext is aimed at two temptations at once. One is the literalist urge to treat Genesis as a rival to cosmology, as if God were a very early actor within a very large timeline. The other is a more sophisticated but equally limiting move: imagining God as an invisible object “before” the universe, parked in some adjacent metaphysical waiting room. Williams refuses both. God isn’t the oldest thing in the universe; God is the reason there is a universe to have ages at all.
That’s why the line works rhetorically: it relocates the debate from chronology to dependence. “From the world’s point of view” concedes what science and common sense alike require (the universe has an origin, a history, a measurable arc) while denying that this origin exhausts what “creation” means. In Williams’s Anglican intellectual context, this is also a gentle defense of classical Christian claims about divine eternity: God isn’t earlier than everything else; God is other than “earlier.” The result is a neat reversal that protects both scientific seriousness and theological depth, and quietly undermines the culture-war premise that faith and physics are competing narrators of the same kind of fact.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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