Welcome to After the Fact, a knowing fake mini episode where we look to take a big question and address it in just a few minutes. Typically the questions we consider will line up with our larger topic for this season and that's certainly true for our time today.

This season on Knowing Faith, we are

discussing Genesis 1 through 11 and I get the privilege today to chat with Dr.

Ken Keithley. Dr. Keithley is the senior professor of theology and

director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture at the

South Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He is the author of Salvation and Sovereignty, a Molinist approach.

He is the co-author of 40 questions about creation and evolution.

Dr. Keith Lee, welcome to After the Fact. Thanks for joining us.

Glad to be here. So here is the question for today. What is a crucial but often forgotten

essential about the Christian doctrine of creation?

What's something that's absolutely essential

to a meaningful coherent Christian doctrine of creation but that we often overlook or forget.

Well, the doctrine of creation can be summed up in one sentence and that is that the triune God without opposition or equal

and without the use of pre-existing materials created the world by his will and for his good pleasure.

And so, you know, there's a lot, each one of those phrases is loaded.

One of the things that most people pay attention to is the idea that he did use no

pre-existing materials, Kriateo X Nihilo. That is, and the reason for that is,

is to, because God is truly sovereign

over that which he created.

It is not that he is one of many deities that he happens to be the one that created the world

and that the world is made out of some kind of pre-existing material or divine stuff in which he had to battle it and defeat it and so do it, which would really impugn on the

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