Yet the knowledge of God the Father gained from the act of His revelation of omnipotence is not to be taken as a misunderstanding to be corrected in a higher knowledge, in order then to disappear. For the Father is not the Son and not the Holy Spirit, although the Son and the Holy Spirit are not without the Father. So He also in His revelation is, it is true, not without them, as they are not without Him, but in the unity and simplicity of the divine being He is yet precisely in His omnipotence precisely the Father. If the activity of God like His Being is a unity, it is nevertheless an ordered unity and in this order the reflection and repetition of the order of His being. The fact that we lay stress upon the knowledge of the “Father Almighty” as a special first knowledge of God, and that there is a special first Article of the Creed, is as much justified, indeed demanded by the knowledge of the eternity of the divine Fatherhood as that same knowledge must summon us to see the Almighty Father in His unity with the Son and the Spirit, and therefore also to understand the three Articles of the Creed as a unity.
THE doctrine of Creation turns our attention for the first time directly to a reality different from the reality of God, the reality of the world. This doctrine has, for all that, absolutely nothing to do with a “world view,” even with a Christian world view. Nor is it any part of a general science that has got perhaps to be crowned and completed by Christian knowledge. If man looks at the world generally and from out of himself, and thinks he knows something of its origin, and if he perhaps decides to name this origin “God,” he must yet turn round again and become as a child in order to hear and comprehend what the symbol in common with Holy Scripture says: Creator of heaven and earth. But again, it is not by any means a specifically “Christian” world view that the Creed offers us. The wording itself should warn us off this idea, for it does not speak (in analogy with the expressions of the second and third Articles) of a creatio coeli el terrae, and therefore of a mundus a Deo creatus, but—and that is something different—of the creator coeli et terrae. A statement is here made about God. Let it be carefully noted: about the same God of Whom we have just heard that He is, and in what sense He is, the “Almighty Father”. And Creator is the name here applied to God. Let it be carefully considered whether what people think they know generally and of themselves about an origin of the world is not something quite different from what the word “Creation” implies. And it is “Creator of heaven and earth” that He is called. It must once more be carefully considered whether that which people think they are able generally and of themselves to say about Creator and creation does not perhaps merely amount to a description of the relationship in which heaven is superior to earth and that it has absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the world which comprehends heaven and earth (of all things visible and invisible, as the Nicene symbol supplements the statement). It has to be borne in mind that the word credo stands before the words creatorem coeli et terrae. “By faith we understand that the worlds were fashioned by the word of God” (Heb. 11:3). By the very same word that has also got to be said to us in order that we may be able to know it.
The doctrine of creation, or more accurately, of the Creator, speaks of God in His relation to our existence as such and to our world. To that extent it could be said: it brings to its sharpest, most fundamental expression what the words “Father Almighty” already declared. The doctrine says not only that we are completely and absolutely bound, and that we completely and absolutely belong to God, the Almighty, the Lord over life and death, the Father of Jesus Christ, but it says that without Him we should not be, and that we exist only through Him. It says that our real existence stands or falls with God’s giving it to us and maintaining it. There is much to be said for Luther’s placing man at the centre of the created world, in his explanation of the first Article: “I believe that God has made me together with all creatures”. The fact that God made heaven and earth does indeed concern man, man who lives under heaven upon earth, himself at once a visible and an invisible being. But there is also much and perhaps more to be said for doing what the symbol itself does—for not expressly emphasising man as creation of God or bringing him right into the centre. Most decidedly the knowledge of God as the Creator and of man as His creature and therefore the knowledge of the difference between God and man and of their true relationship would not be subserved if man was going with excessive forwardness to look upon himself as, and to enjoy the experience of being, the creature and the partner of God. Will he recognise, fear and love God as God the Creator, without at the same time recognising, as he looks down to earth and up to heaven, his own littleness and insignificance, both in body and soul, even within the creaturely sphere? Without indeed mentioning man, and significant in its failure to mention man, the statement that God created heaven and earth says the decisive thing even about him, and precisely about him. Of these two worlds he is the citizen, encompassed in truth with a special mystery, or the wanderer between these two worlds which indeed in God’s sight are only one world, the created world.
The statement: “God is the Creator of the World” has in the main a double content: it speaks of the freedom of God (one could also say: of His holiness) over against the world, and of His relationship (one could also say: of His love) to the world.
1. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we acknowledge that the relationship of God and world is fundamentally and in all its implications not one of equilibrium or of parity, but that in this relationship God has the absolute primacy. This is no mere matter of course, but rather a mystery, which all along the line determines the meaning and the form of this relationship: that there is a reality at all differentiated from the reality of God, a being beside the divine Being. There is that. There are heaven and earth, and between the two, between angel and animal, man. But quite apart from the explicit proposition about Creation, for Scripturally based thinking there follows from the fact that their being is so closely related to the Being of God, this: that their being can only be one that is radically dependent on the Being of God, therefore one that is radically relative and without independence, dust, a drop in the bucket, clay in the hand of the potter—mere figures of speech which far from saying too much, say decidedly much too little. Heaven and earth are what they are through God and only through God. This brings us to the true thought of creation.
Heaven and earth are not themselves God, are not anything in the nature of a divine generation or emanation, are not, as the Gnostics or mystics would again and again have it, in some direct or indirect way, identical with the Son or Word of God. In opposition to what even Christian theologians have on occasion taught, the world must not be understood as eternal. It has, and with it time and space have, a beginning. Their infinity is not only limited by the finite as such. Rather, their infinity is, along with everything finite, limited and encompassed by God’s eternity and omnipotence, i.e. by God’s lordship over time and space, in which it itself does not share. Therefore the creation of the world is not a movement of God in Himself, but a free opus ad extra, finding its necessity only in His love, but again not casting any doubt on His self-sufficiency: the world cannot exist without God, but if God were not love (as such inconceivable!), He could exist very well without the world. “And all this out of pure paternal, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine,” as again Luther says, speaking not yet of our salvation, but of our creation.
Again heaven and earth are not God’s work in the sense that God created them according to some ideas in themselves given and true, or out of some material already existing, or by means of some instrument apt in itself for that purpose. Creation in the Bible sense means: Creation solely on the basis of God’s own wisdom. It means, creatio ex nihilo (Rom. 4:17). It means, creation by the word, which is indeed the eternal Son and therefore God Himself. If that is so,
