The Creation Sets in Motion the Development of Human Creativity

God is the creator of potential.

When the Triune God created the cosmos and placed humanity at its center, the goal was development.

The ancient church father Irenaeus taught that Adam was not created as a fully mature end-product, but with a future goal in mind. The human race was never meant to be stagnant – we were created with great potential and placed in a cosmos of great potentiality.

Al Wolters writes,

"The mandate to develop creation is being fulfilled in history.

"The given reality of the created order is such that it is possible to have schools and industry, printing and rocketry, needlepoint and chess… What is involved here is the opening up of creation through the historical process. If we fail to see this, if we conceive of the historical differentiation that has led to such institutions as the school and the business enterprise, and such developments as urbanization and the mass media, as being basically outside the scope of creational reality and its responsible management by the human race, we will be tempted to look upon these and similar matters as fundamentally alien to God’s purposes in the world and will tend to brand them as being inherently ‘secular,’ either in a religiously neutral or an outright negative sense.

"However, if we see that human history and the unfolding of culture and society are integral to creation and its development, that they are not outside God’s plans for the cosmos, despite the sinful aberrations, but rather were built in from the beginning, were part of the blueprint that we never understood before, then we will be much more open to the positive possibilities for service to God in such areas as politics and the film arts, computer technology and business administration, developmental economics and skydiving." (Creation Regained, pp. 43-45)