“Creation” evokes different things: the initial divine action of creating, the created world as a fait accompli, the “otherness” and “createdness” of the cosmos in relation to its uncreated Creator, the divine work of preserving and renewing the created world, and more. All are important and mutually inextricable in Christian understanding. The “doctrine of creation” in the early church is in turn a multiplex, indeed kaleidoscopic construction. (1)
It includes not just the origins of the world (cosmogony) and the nature and structure of the universe (cosmology) but also properly theological considerations about the precise relation of the triune Creator to the time-bound creation and the ontological chasm (diastema) that separates them while also constituting the frontier, as it were, of their enduring interaction and communion. (1)
Additionally, there are integral issues of theological anthropology, since the origin, vocation, and destiny of humanity constitute for many patristic thinkers a microcosm of the drama of the universe. (2)
Christology and soteriology, Blowers points out, are not topics to be put aside and taken up later; instead, they are the “focusing lens… in the early Christian vision of creation.” (2) In short, for early Christian writers, “creation was confessed not in isolation but in a normative relation to God’s overall salvific action in the world.” (2)
Again: “Writers throughout the patristic age rarely, if ever, undertook straightforward expositions of cosmogony, metaphysics, physics, astronomy, etc. in isolation from ulterior theological and didactic concerns.” (3) The sermonic and salvific element is there on purpose. In modern idiom we might say patristic creation theology was existential, or at least that the story of salvation is hermeneutically present in the situation of the reader, and these authors more or less knew it. In Blowers’ telling, as early as Origen we get “what is best termed “moral cosmology” and, more broadly, “theological cosmology.” (3)