"In the beginning," Scripture says, "God created the heavens and the earth." That first biblical affirmation points to the priority of the doctrine of creation within the system of Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, even the doctrine of creation presupposes a biblical notion of God and the authority of his revelation in Scripture. The Christian believer does not acknowledge the creation and then infer a Creator. Indeed, it is not God who must be explained by the creation, but creation which must be explained by the Creator. Thus, the very first verse of the Bible affirms the cosmos as the free creation of the sovereign God of Scripture--the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The doctrine of creation is the attempt of the Christian believer to come to terms with the relationship between God and the world. As such, it gives proper place to the work of God in creation, points to the nature and purpose of the created world, and distinguishes the Christian theistic worldview from all others.

The starting point of the doctrine of creation is the presupposition of the sovereign God of Scripture. Those first words of Scripture indicate that the central character in the creation narratives is God, not the created order. God acts as the divine Subject, creating a dynamic universe as the object of his love and the theater of his glory. This biblical theism is the foundational affirmation of the doctrine of creation. Creation is inseparable from monotheism.

The most common creed in the Christian church begins with the confession, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." The God of the Bible is not needful of anything outside himself. This self-sufficiency or "aseity" of God precludes any need for creation on God's part. Positively, it affirms the fact that God created the world and all within it out of the freedom of his own sovereign will. With this in view, the divine initiative in creation takes on a powerful meaning. Though needing nothing, God willed not to be alone, but to create a world distinct and other than himself, as the result of his own divine pleasure.

This affirmation places the biblical worldview in opposition to all others. The Israelites were surrounded by pre-biblical religions which placed God over against creation, or suggested a number of gods conspiring to create a universe out of existing chaos and matter. The early Christian church found itself confronted by challenges including Gnosticism, Arianism, and Manichaeism, each positing a worldview in which God was variously placed within creation, over against creation as a dualism, or a scheme in which an evil god created the world in order that a beneficent god might redeem it.

The church quickly affirmed what had been assumed in the Old Testament, that God created the universe of out nothing, that is, out of no pre-existing matter. If the church had allowed an acknowledgement of divine creation as the mere fashioning of existing materials, it would have compromised the nature of God and the biblical testimony. No form of dualism is compatible with biblical theism.