Ben Stevens - Why God Created the World: A Jonathan Edwards Adaptation

For most of my life, I never thought to ask why God created the world. I had asked myself, Why did God create me specifically? which seemed like a more practical thing to wonder. But the answers I found to that question always struck me as shallow. I think thats because its impossible to understand what part we play in a story if we have never grasped what the story is about in the first place.

When I did eventually get interested in the more fundamental question of why God created the world, I ran into problems. At first, I concluded that He created the world out of love for us. But that answer is not very intellectually satisfying. We havent always been here to love. At some point, we had to be thought up too. So what led Him to think anything up in the first place? There is nothing material in creation which He didnt already have beforehand, and the fellowship He had in the Trinity was better than anything we have to offer.

As I wrestled through these issues, I did so as someone who became a Christian early in life. I had enjoyed decades of Christian community and then studied theology at the graduate level. In some ways, I assumed I was the only kind of person who could find this kind of theological dilemma intriguing. So you might imagine my surprise at the way the question sparked intense discussions with non-Christian friends here in Berlin, where I live; a place which sociologist Peter Berger has called the world capital of atheism.

For a while I found this phenomenon as difficult to explain as the question itself. But then it dawned on me that my non-Christian friends here like debating the question for the same reason I do: Its the prequel to the gospel story. You see, if the only possible explanation for Gods motives in creating the world is egomania or loneliness, as some might assume, then that shows how incoherent the rest of the story must be. On the other hand, if the story does have a logical and beautiful purpose, that makes sense of the tension Christians see in our rejection of Gods plan. Either way, its the place where the coherence of the story rises or falls.

Look at it this way: The gospel is a solution to a problem. What exactly is that problem? The problem is a kind of deviation from Gods design, a deviation from the reason why God created the world. So how are we to understand for ourselves, let alone explain to others, the tragedy of the Fall, or even the joy of redemption, if we fail to understand the genius of creation itself? How are we to make sense of the story, and the God behind it, if we dont know