Creation is absolute act, out of nothing. This means almightiness. Almightiness does not mean a God who sits on His throne and can do anything he wants to do, like an arbitrary tyrant; rather, almightiness means God is the ground and the o n l y ground of everything created, and that there is no resisting matter against Him.
This is the meaning of the first article of the Apostles’ Creed, which you should read with great awe again and again, because here Christianity separated itself from the dualistic interpretation of reality which we find in all paganism – dualistic in the sense that there is a good principle and an evil principle, and that both of them are of equal originality, that matter is as eternal as form, that chaos.. . resists God. All these ideas disappeared in the moment the Christians created the first words of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the almighty creator of heaven and earth.” This is the great wall of Christianity against paganism. And Christology, without this wall, inescapably deteriorizes into Gnosticism, where Christ becomes one of the cosmic powers besides others, even if he is the highest. Therefore don’t underestimate the first article. Only in the light of this first article is the second article meaningful.
Don’t reduce God to the Second Person. of the Trinity. This was very well understood by these earliest post-biblical theologians, these Apostolic Fathers. They knew that they needed a God who is creator, almighty, and not in any way dependent on a resisting matter.
As ruler of everything, God has a plan of salvation. This idea of a plan of salvation is especially developed by Ignatius. In his letter to the Ephesians, he speaks of the “economy towards the new man.” This is a. wonderful summary of the Christian message: economy towards the new man. Economy means “building a house.” But this word is used in our culture for what we call economic production. It is used in the Greek period for the structure of God and world, in their relationships. There is an economy of the Trinitarian thinking: Father, Son, and Spirit. They only together are God. There is an economy of salvation, the building of the different periods which finally led to the new man. This idea of the new man, or new creature, or new being, as the aim of the history of salvation, is an important contribution of these theologians.
