CLOSING REMARKS

Creation as an opus Dei ad extra is the work of the Triune God; that has been demonstrated in the doctrine of God. To speak of three Creators, or of a “division” of the work of creation among the three Persons, is contrary to Scripture and offends Christian thought. As each Person possesses the whole divine essence, which is one in number (una numero essentia), so all opera ad extra, including the creation, are wholly and entirely the work of each Person. They are eaedem numero actiones.24 Even Philippi slipped up when he said: “We see here [in the creation] the activity quite equally divided among all three Persons.” 25 The Lutheran theologians emphatically reject the idea as though there were a “creation corporation,” causae sociae creationis.26 Luther emphatically refuses to speak of three Creators (see Vol. I, page 424).

Creation is a free act of God, not necessary on His part (Ps. 115:3: “He hath done whatsoever He hath pleased”). Declaring the creation to be a necessary act of God would amount to pantheism and nullify the concept of a personal God. As God was a causa libera in the redemption through the incarnation of the Son of God, so also He was a causa libera in the creation.27

1 On the disagreement among the geologists see Luthardt, Apologie, I, 68 ff. Luthardt himself makes concessions that are out of place. In our own publications this subject has often been dealt with, e. g., Lehre und Wehre, 44, p. 364 ff: “Ueber das Alter der Erde.” For Geikie’s discussion of “palaeontological problems,” which so far have not been solved and whose certain solution cannot be expected in the future, see Lehre und Wehre, 59, p. 71.

2 Cp. Philippi, Glaubenslehre, II, 225 f., quoted in Baier-Walther, II, p. 98.

3 We read in Nitzsch-Stephan, p. 427: “A creation out of nothing is not immediately taught in the canonical books of the Bible, not even Heb. 11:3 (and Rom. 4:17); there only the raising from non-existence to existence is spoken of.” It is clear that the second sentence abolishes the first. Raising from non-existence to existence constitutes creation out of nothing. Compare on the “nothing” Twesten, Vorlesungen ueber die Dogmatik der ev.-luth. Kirche, II, Abteil. I, 75 f., quoted in Baier-Walther, II, 97 f.

4 Luther: “Hilary and Augustine, two great lights in the Church, believed that the world was made of a sudden and all at once (subito et simul), not successively during the space of six days. Augustine plays with these six days in a marvelous manner. He considers them to be mystical days of knowledge in the angels (mysticos dies cognitionis in angelis) and not six natural days… . As Moses is not instructing us concerning allegorical creatures or an allegorical world, but concerning natural creatures and a world visible and capable of bein~ apprehended by the senses, he calls, as we say in the proverb, ‘a post a post, he calls the thing by the right name, day and evening; his meaning is the same as ours when we use those terms, without any allegory whatever.” (St. L. 1:6.) Vilmar, too, admits: “The manner in which these ‘six days’ in Gen. 2:2-3 and later in the Law are used shows that days of twenty-four hours are meant, and the wording used (evening and morning, the first. day, the second day, etc.) seems to speak in favor of it” (Vilmar, Dogmatik, I, 247, quoted in Baier-Walther, II, 79). But later he adds: “On the other hand, the description of God given in Ps. 90:4 and 2 Pet. 3:8, according to which a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years with the Lord, favors the assumption of periods in the creation.” But it is utterly impossible to parallel Ps. 90:4 and 2 Pet. 3:8 with the record of the creation. These passages state that in God and with God there is no time. But the record of the creation announces by its very first words: “In the beginning,” that it deals with time, that is, it is a historical report. Both Luther and the dogmaticians stress this point. Quenstedt, I, 613.

5 See the quotations concerning the generatio aequivoca in Luthardt, Apol. I, 236 f., and Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, II, 5 ff., on the attempts in England to produce life from dead matter — unsuccessful attempts. Dr. Walther was accustomed to say, somewhat drastically, in connection with Ex. 8:18: “The dabblers in natural science may acquire lice, but make them they cannot.” Huxley admits that evolutionism presupposes the generation of life from dead matter. See Lehre und Wehre, 59, p. 71. The fact that there is no scientific proof for the evolution of a higher species from a lower and that in this respect true natural history is in agreement with Scripture (everything “after his kind”) is often presented in our periodicals, for example, Lehre und Wehre, 44, 303; 46, 233; 54, 559; 59, 75. Evolutionism and all that is involved is thoroughly treated and refuted in Lehre und Wehre, 46, 8–239 passim; 55, 289–550 passim.

6 See the long quotation from Kurtz’ Bibel und Astronomie, 2d ed., pp. 94, 96, in Baier-Walther, II, 83. Zoeckler, too, rejects the “restitution theory,” R. E., 2d ed., XIII, 645 f.

7 Quenstedt, I, 623: “A sweet daydream and a mere figment.”

8 What is light? Is it rarefied matter (emanation theory, or emission theory) or undulations of the “molecules of the ether” (undulation theory)? Baier (II, p. 84) takes it to be “a certain luminous body produced by the substance of the heaven.” Chemnitz, Loci, I, 120: “Because Paul says 2 Cor. 4:6: ‘God commanded the light to shine out of darkness,’ that is, while it was dark, the light suddenly appeared at God’s word and command, it seems that the light, too, was immediately created out of nothing.” The Century Dictionary, IV, p. 3445, s. v. “light,” does not define the status of the controversy exactly; it says that Newtons “emission theory” has been abandoned in our day.

9 Luther: “Now, this is a most wondrous thing, that Moses with clear words makes three parts and puts the firmament between the waters. I would like to think and speculate in this wise, that the firmament is the highest above all things and the waters would not be above, but below the heavens, namely, the clouds, which we see; that is to say, the waters which are divided from the waters are the clouds, which are separated from the waters which are in the earth. But Moses declares in plain words that the waters are above and below the firmament. Therefore I must take my thoughts captive and bow to the Word, albeit I do not comprehend it.” (St. L. 1:32.) John Meissner remarks, Phil. Sobria (P. I, p. 819): “The majority of theologians have always held it to be real water, which, they maintained, God in a singular and miraculous manner really and truly placed above the firmament, or stellar heavens.”

10 Dr. H. A. Daniel, Handbuch der Geographie, 3d ed., 1877, p. 9.

11 The Copernicans particularly have the bad habit of offering their “view of the cosmos” as the “assured result of science.” The Lisco vs. Knack affair (1868) is a case in point. Pastor Lisco had asserted in an “ecclesiastical report” to the Berlin District Synod that science had forever demolished “the world view of the Biblical writers” and that not one of the “modern orthodox” theologians would believe with the Bible that the earth stands still and the sun revolves about it. Pastor Knack answered this challenge by saying: “Indeed, I believe that. I know no other world view than that of Holy Scriptures.” This declaration raised the ire of the “scientific” Copernicans. And Lehre und Wehre (1868, p. 325) gives the following report of these repercussions: “The aged Oberkonsistorialrat Twesten said in his classroom: ‘Do not imagine that you as theologians have the pitiful prerogative to be narrow-minded.’ And Stroebel answered in the ‘Zeitschrift fuer luth. Theol. und Kirche,’ 1868, p. 734: ‘As long as man keeps his head, he will not accept the dream of a revolving earth as the finding of science, but as a madness indicating lack of thought or lack of reason.’ ” Stroebel wrote these words in a review of a pamphlet by Pastor J. L. Fueller, in which he praises the writing, but classes as a flaw the assertion: “We adherents of the Copernican system know what Joshua and his army did not know,” and says: “But the words ‘And the sun stood still’ (Joshua 10:13) are not the words of the son of Nun and the Children of Israel, but the words of the Holy Ghost; and must the Holy Ghost first go to Copernicus’ school before He can speak on this matter? Why did not Pastor Fueller apply his correct principle also to the Copernican system: ‘I do not think that anyone need be disturbed who has not yet entirely renounced all independence of thinking and investigating and does not yet in a blind collier’s faith accept all unproved and unprovable assumptions and assertions as the results of science!’ ” This is what we meant when we said above: “It is unworthy of a Christian to interpret Scripture, which he knows to be God’s own Word, according to human opinions (hypotheses).” Luther, we know, objects to all astronomical systems which are palmed off as objective truth beyond what experience teaches. (St. L. 1:33; XI:300 f.)—By the way, the newspapermen threatened about a year ago that Einstein’s theory of relativity would give Copernicanism the death blow.

12 Hollaz, Examen I, c. 3, qu. 26; Quenstedt, I, 607.

13 See the quotations in Baier-Walther, II, 87 sq. Luther, St. L. 1:249 ff. Gerhard, Loci, locus “De Creatione” § 33: “If someone asks as to the poisonous plants, the predatory animals, etc., we answer with Augustine (De Gen. ad literam III c. 15): ‘The noxious animals would not have harmed man if he had not sinned. To punish the vices and to test and perfect the virtues of the dwellers on earth, they began to be noxious; hence they were created harmless, but because of sin they became harmful.’ ” This matter seems ridiculous to Andrew White. He says in The Warfare of Science I, 30: “Luther, who followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in this” [namely, that there are “superfluous” animals]. “To him [Luther] a fly was not merely superfluous, it was noxious — sent by the devil to vex him when reading.” White takes everything taught by Scripture concerning the Creation, the Fall, and the consequences of the Fall to be myths.

14 In his Bibelwerk, Lucas Osiander comments on Gen. 2:7: “Man was made a living, but a rational, ‘animal,’ not a brute; for it is not said that God breathed life into the rest of the animals, as He did into man.”

15 Luther on Gen. 2:7: “Moses here returns to the work of the sixth day and shows whence the cultivator of the earth came, namely, that God formed him out of the ground, as the potter with his hand forms the vessel out of clay. He did not say in this case as in that of the other creatures: ‘Let the earth bring forth man,’ but: ‘Let Us make man.’ In this case, Moses describes God as thus speaking in order that he may set forth the excellency of the human race and make manifest the peculiar counsel of God according to which He created man, although afterwards man grew and multiplied, as all the other animals multiply… . But with reference to their first creation Moses shows that there was the greatest possible difference, since the human nature was created by a peculiar divine counsel and wisdom and formed by the finger of God. The difference which God made in the original creation of man and of cattle likewise shows man’s immortality. And though all the other works of God fill us with wonder and are truly magnificent, yet that man is the most excellent creature is evident from the fact that God in creating him had recourse to His deep counsel and proceeds in a new manner. For God does not leave it to the earth to bring forth man, as it brought forth the beasts and the trees. For God Himself forms man in His own image to be a participator of God and one designed to enjoy the rest of God. Hence Adam, before he is formed by the Lord, is a mere lifeless lump of earth, lying on the ground; God takes that lump of earth into His hand and forms out of it a most beautiful creature, partaking of immortality. If Aristotle were to hear these things, he would burst out into a loud laugh and would say that this whole matter is a fable, a very pleasant one indeed, but a very absurd one, namely, that man, who was originally a lump of earth, was formed by divine wisdom and designed for immortality. For although some of the philosophers, as Socrates and others, asserted the immortality of the soul, they were laughed at and almost cast out by their fellows. But how great is the folly of reason to be offended at this fact, when it beholds that the generation of man to this very day fills us with wonder! For who would not judge it an absurdity to suppose that man, who is designed to live eternally, should be born from one single drop of seed, as it were, from the loins of the father? This is just about as absurd as the statement of Moses that man was formed from a lump of earth by the finger of God. But reason shows by all this folly that it understands nothing of God, who by the efficacy of His thought makes out of a lump of earth not only the seed of man, but man himself, and makes also, as Moses afterwards says, the woman out of the rib of man. This, then, is the origin of man. Having thus been created male and female, man is generated out of their blood by the divine blessing. And although this generation is common to man and beasts, this similarity by no means detracts from the glory of our original formation, that we are vessels of God, fashioned by His own hand, that He is our Potter and we His clay, as Isaiah says in his 64th chapter.” (Opp. exeg., Erl. I, 104 sqq.; St. L. I:101 ff.)

16 See Luthardt, Komp., 11th ed., p. 166 f. (13th ed., p. 194.)

17 See the antithesis in Quenstedt, I, 738 sq., and the quotations in Baier-Walther, II, 91 sq.

18 Isaac La Peyrere (d. 1676) and others held that Adam was the forefather only of the Jews. Baier-Walther, II, 93, antithesis. Schelling, E. v. Bunsen, M’Causland, Zoeckler, R. E., 2d ed., IX, 383, held the same view.

19 Polygenesis, autochthonism. The Greeks disclaimed a common origin with the “barbarians.” Zoeckler, loc. cit.

20 Luthardt, Apologie, I, 76. Zoeckler, op. cit., p. 583 ff.

21 Thus Luther, Quenstedt, etc. Luther, Opp. exeg., Erl. I, 162; St. L. 1:157: “Therefore my view of the passage is that the Lord did not take the bare rib, but the rib clothed with flesh, as Adam himself says: ‘This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.’ And be it observed that God did this by His Word; we are not to suppose that God did any cutting, after the manner of a surgeon.” Quenstedt, I, 731: “The rib out of which the woman was formed was not dead or inanimate, but animate, since it was taken by the divine hand from a living body. And thus Eve was produced, soul and body, out of that rib. The soul of Eve was not created by God immediately out of nothing and put into her by divine power, but the rib of Adam was the bearer (tradux) of the human soul to Eve, that is, it did not come into existence by immediate creation, but by propagation and traduction. Out of the living rib the living woman was formed (Gen. 2:22).”

22 Zoeckler, for example, says on p. 629 ff. of Volume XIII of the R. E., 2d ed., s. v. “Schoepfung”: “If there is a living, personal God, nothing in this world can have originated except through the working of the absolute power and love of this one God… . That is the only true conception of creation, and the two records of the Biblical monotheism, the Old and the New Testament, present this concept in its purity.” But on pages 644 ff. this same Zoeckler criticizes the Biblical account. He represents “the strictly literalistic understanding of the six days as a period of exactly six times twenty-four hours, which since Luther’s day had become customary in Lutheran dogmatics … as aftereffects of the abstractly monotheistic conception of creation as held by early Jewry.” He demands adjustment “with the incontestable facts of geological and astronomical science.” He calls for “the indeterminate long periods of evolution that were at work on our globe before the human race appeared.” He gets rid of the idea that light was created before the sun and the sun later than the earth “by assuming that the description in Gen. 1:14-19 is optical or merely phenomenological.” In order to harmonize the Mosaic account of the creation with “the results of scientific investigation,” Godet, who does not belong to the radical party of modern theology, resorts to the vision theory and draws a “picture” of the hexaemeron which has all the marks of a romance. He writes in his Bibelstudien (on the Old Testament, 1875, p. 101 f.): “We are sitting on a mountain with the man of God… . The prophetic instinct, which is natural with us, stirs in us, and we envision the beginning of the universe… . This darkness is not that of the grave, but that of the fertile night which is the cradle of all life. And into this darkness, lasting only a moment, are crowded together innumerable centuries, all the ages that have passed from the creation of matter to the formation of a firm surface of the earth. Suddenly a voice breaks the silence of this long night: ‘Let there be light!’ … The rays of light gradually lose their brilliancy, fade more and more, and finally have again become entirely extinct. Darkness envelops us. In this one day we have seen the story of thousands of days that broke over our earth before there was a human eye to observe them. The voice sounds forth anew: ‘Let there be an expansion in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the lower from the upper waters.’ Again it becomes day,” etc.

23 See Fuerbringer, Introduction to the Old Testament, the entire chapter: ‘The Pentateuch,” p. 16 ff. Also Lehre und Wehre, 25, p. 321 ff. Jean Astruc, a French physician (d. 1776), is “the father of the source theory.” His book appeared in Brussels, in 1753, with the title Conjectures, etc.

24 See the chapters “The Trinitarian Controversies,” p. 381, and “Objections to the Unity of the Godhead,” p. 387.

25 Glaubenslehre, 3d ed., II, 126. It was shown above (p. 391, ‘Third Objection”) that Philippi’s terminology cannot be justified by the use of the so-called particulae diacriticae . Referring to these diacritical particles, Luther says: “Scripture uses this manner of speaking: The world is created through Christ, by the Father, in the Holy Ghost, for all of which there is a reason, though we cannot sufficiently explore or express it. But this much we know, that Scripture uses this manner of speaking in order to indicate that the Father does not derive His divine essence from the Son, but the Son has it from the Father, and that the Father is the first and original Person in the Godhead. For this reason the Bible does not say that Christ made the world through the Father, but that the Father made it through Him, so that the Father remains the first Person and that from Him, but through the Son, all things have their being. Also John uses this manner of speaking, chapter 1:3: ‘All things were made by Him.’ And Col. 1:16: ‘By Him were all things created,’ and [v. 17] ‘by Him all things consist.’ And Rom. 11:36: ‘Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things.’ ” (St. L. XII:157 f.) We summarized this relation, on page 391, thus: “As there is order,” etc.

26 Baier-Walther, II, 95: “There is, I say, one efficient cause of creation, not three associated causes. For the creative power of the three Persons is one.” Quenstedt treats the question exhaustively whether the three Persons may be called associated causes of creation. He answers the question negatively on the basis of the una numero essentia and the eaedem numero actiones divinae ad extra.

27 Quenstedt, I, 593: “Nor had there been any prevenient cause of creation except solely the pleasure of God, who communicated Himself not from a necessity of nature, but of His free will.” Baier, II, 96: “See Ps. 136:5 sqq., where the formula is added to every work of creation mentioned: ‘For His mercy endureth forever.’ ” Kirn, in his Grundriss der Evangelischen Dogmatik, 3d ed., p. 59, presents the matter correctly: “According to the Biblical viewpoint the world came into existence not by a necessary emanation from God, not through evolution of an eternal world substance, but through God’s free creative will.”

Divine Providence, or the Preservation and Government of the World

(DE PROVIDENTIA DEI)