Sunday School: On Creation

Saturday January 31, 2009

For this week's installment of Sunday School, the younger students get a day off. Because the First Communion edition of the Baltimore Catechism has one half of the questions of the Confirmation Catechism, and only 33 lessons instead of 37, there will be occasional weeks in which we won't have a lesson from the First Communion Catechism. Also, while the titles of the lessons in both catechisms will largely be the same, the lesson numbering will obviously diverge from this point on.

Having considered the nature of God in the second installment of Sunday School, and the mystery of the Trinity in the third installment, we now move on to His Creation.

Today, when the Big Bang is the most widely accepted scientific explanation of how the universe came into being, the Christian idea of creatio ex nihilo—that God created the entire material world out of nothing—seems obvious. Thus, it is hard to imagine how earth-shaking this belief was in the ancient world, where the predominant view of the cosmos was that the created world had always existed. But if the material world coexisted from all eternity alongside God, then not only could God not be properly said to be its creator, but the material world could never be fully subordinate to God.

The Creation story in Genesis focuses on God's creation of those things which we see, but before man was created, God also created the angels. Together, man and angels represent the pinnacle of God's creation, and like man, some of the angels fell. Their fall was, in some ways, even greater than that of man, because they knew God directly yet chose to rebel. That is why, for the fallen angels, or demons, who were cast into Hell, there is no chance for salvation.

Adam and Eve, however, received the promise of a Redeemer after their fall from grace—but that's a topic for next week's lesson.

Lesson Fourth from the Confirmation Catechism has 7 questions. Note that the lesson begins with Question 32, continuing with the numbering from Lesson Third.

Check out this week's lesson, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or ask them in the Catholicism Forum!

Previous Lessons in Sunday School: