We Believe: Of All That Is, Visible and Invisible
The first article of the Nicene Creed—“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”—can easily slip by without our stopping to wonder at it. This is particularly true of the brief addendum, not found in the Apostles’ Creed, “of all that is, visible and invisible.” But this little phrase contains a world of meaning. Let’s see how.
“Of All That Is”
The phrase “all that is” brings together philosophers’ wisdom and the revelation to the Hebrews. From Plato onward, Greek thinkers sought to find a unified understanding of reality (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology). Even today, scientists continue the quest for a “unified field theory” of the universe. The Hebrew Bible presents another way: the confession of YHWH, the one true and living God, creator of heaven and earth (Isaiah 40:28).
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The New Testament Gospel fulfils the Old Testament revelation, identifying Jesus with the Creator God. According to St. John, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3, emphasis mine). St. Paul also speaks of Christ as
the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Colossians 1:15,19-20
The scandal of the Gospel is that we do not grasp all things by the wisdom of the Greeks or the law of the Hebrews but by faith in a man crucified “under Pontius Pilate.”
Unseen or Invisible?
Traditional Anglican Prayer Books render the Greek wording of the Creed “all that is, visible and invisible,” which in turn reflects St. Paul’s usage, when he says:
[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
Colossians 1:15-16
In the 1970s, an international commission of translators rendered the phrase “all things seen and unseen,” and this rendering appears in many contemporary liturgies, including the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. No doubt this translation reflects the rising secularism of the day, as when the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin reported from space that “I looked and looked, but I didn’t see God,” and when Episcopal Bishop John Spong claimed that “God can no longer be understood with credibility as a being, supernatural in power, living above the sky.”
Gagarin and Spong are guilty of a category error. They assume that invisible things are either not yet seen by the latest telescope or are fantasies fit only for the gullible. In truth, they are, in effect, the intellectual flat-earthers. Prince Hamlet’s rebuke to his fellow scholar Horatio fits their case: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The perspective of the Bible and the Creed is far deeper than these caricatures, and the ACNA Prayer Book rightly returns to the traditional and accurate translation of the Greek text.
The Invisible within the Visible: Day One
The first article of the Creed takes its cue from the opening chapter of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Genesis 1 sets the stage for the biblical worldview, what we may call our natural knowledge of God and the world. Day by day God fashions the chaotic “stuff” of matter into an ordered cosmos.
On Day One, he says: “Let there be light,” and light comes into being (verse 3). Many people find the Bible inconsistent here because God creates the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day (verses 14-18), but this criticism puts the proverbial cart before the horse. John’s Gospel identifies the Word with a primordial light, saying: “in him was light, and the light was the life of men” (John 1:4). Quantum physicists have puzzled over the mysterious property of light: it is both something visible and also the cause of vision. Similarly, Psalm 36:9 reads: “In your light we see light,” a favorite verse of the Nicene fathers, who spoke of God’s Son as “light of light.”
Charged with God’s Grandeur
In a recent book titled Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Spencer Klavan argues that
…the human way of seeing the world and speaking about it, the form and structure that human beings discern through the medium of their senses, has never been an incident of triviality. For the logos—the “firstborn of creation,” that word that is before any written letter or spoken sound, the reason and meaning that cannot be gainsaid—was infused into matter from the moment it was created.
Spencer Klavan, Light of the Mind, Light of the world, p. 203
In other words, the interpenetration of the invisible and visible is built into the very fabric of the cosmos.
This knowledge, St. Paul observes, is available to believers and unbelievers alike:
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.
Romans 1:19-20a
John Calvin famously opens his teaching on the knowledge of God the Creator this way: “As experience shows, God has sown a seed of religion [a ‘sense of divinity’] in man.” Further, Calvin notes, God
…daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe…. You cannot in one glance survey this vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness.
John Calvin, Institutes I.4.1; I.5.1
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
The Invisible beyond the Visible: Day Two
Alongside the mysterious commingling of the invisible and the visible elements of the world, there is also a separation between the world above and the world below. On Day Two, God forms a “firmament” to divide what is above and what is below… “and God called the firmament heaven [or heavens].” When seen from Earth—even through the Hubble telescope—there is just one heaven up there. But when seen from the divine perspective, there are many heavens. As the Bible puts it elsewhere:
You are the LORD, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.
Nehemiah 9:6
This is the world of the invisible beyond the visible, the world of the holy angels, the cherubim and seraphim, praising God day and night; it is the world of the fallen angels, of Satan and demonic forces, bound in outer darkness. Above all stands the throne of God, where Christ sits at the right hand of the Father.
The Heavenly Impinges on the Earthly
Yet even though the Creator has placed a spiritual barrier between heaven and earth, the heavenly impinges on the earthly: through dreams, through prayer and prophecy, through the gifts of the Spirit, and preeminently through the coming of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, who came down from heaven and assumed the form of a Servant. In the Eucharistic liturgy, we lift up our hearts and join with the angels, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” even as we partake of the Bread that has come down from heaven and the Blood shed for us.
These observations are a piece of my personal testimony. As an agnostic teenager, I began my journey to Christ through attending my girlfriend’s (now my wife’s) Episcopal parish church, where I observed men dressed in their Sunday best kneeling in the pews. What, I thought, would cause such odd behavior? This was, I suppose, my encounter with the “sense of the divine.” Later, I found myself living in an isolated valley in the high desert of eastern California. Taking nightly walks under the cloudless canopy of the Milky Way, I could not avoid the sense of awe and hearing the voice of the desert whispering, “Who made these?”
Looking back now from sixty years of following Christ, I rest my case on these words: “God is love.” Is love not an invisible reality? Yet does the Cross of Calvary not make this reality visible? Trusting this to be true, I am standing on the promise
…that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Rom 8:38-39
Image: James Tissot, The Creation (1902). Courtesy of WikiArt. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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