with God, no question of its existing under any circumstances as a legitimate possibility (i.e. apart from sin) in formal or material independence over against God, then it necessarily follows that the meaning and the end of the world of His creation is not to be sought in itself, that the purpose and the destiny of this world could only be to serve God as the world’s Creator and indeed to serve as “theatre of His glory” (Calvin). From God’s creating the world it follows that He created it for this purpose and with this destiny and therefore created it in accordance with this purpose and this destiny and therefore good. Here we must of course acknowledge anew the primacy of God and must therefore in our estimate of the “goodness” of this world hold to the judgment of God. He knows what serves His glory. We must believe that the world as He created it is appointed to serve His glory, and we must not allow ourselves to be misled here by our feelings and reflections over good and evil, however justified. No doubt it is scriptural to say that the world was created for man’s sake. But yet only because man was in a pre-eminent sense created for the service of God, created to be the “image of God,” not only as theatre, but as active and passive bearer of that glory. It is the concrete content of faith in God the Creator that the world is “good” for man in and for this service of God. How should man have to decide and decree what is “good”? He has just got to believe that God has created the world and him himself really good.
2. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we now recognise also that just in that so utterly unequal relationship in which it stands to God, the world has reality and indeed a reality of its own, that is willed and appointed by God, upheld, accompanied and guided by God. The world having once been created by God (apart from sin!) cannot obviously cease to be determined by this decisive fact. It can no doubt cease to exist, should God will that it no longer exist. But as long as it exists, it cannot cease to be the God-created world. It cannot be a world forsaken by God, left to itself or to chance or to fate or to its own laws. Not as if it could not do that of itself! In the world itself there are no eternal necessities, no eternal impossibilities. But it cannot do it because it is and remains true that God is its Creator. A sovereignty of chance, of fate, or of the world’s own system of laws would be at variance with this truth. That is impossible. Because God is the Creator of the world, therefore it stands under His sovereignty, therefore there is a co-existence of Him and it. It is the totally unequal co-existence of Creator and creature, a co-existence in strictest supremacy and subordination, but yet a co-existence, and therefore an existence of God not only in Himself, but also with and within the world, because it is, and in so far as it is, His creature. Therefore in the proposition, “God is the Creator,” we recognise not only God’s transcendence, but also the immanence of that God so completely transcendent to the world. Remembering the Creator’s transcendence, we shall be safeguarded against ascribing to the world as such any divinity whether imparted to it by God or belonging to itself independently. This very same recollection of the Creator’s transcendence will, however, also warn us against denying God’s co-existence with the world and therefore His immanence, i.e. His free omnipotent presence and lordship in the world that He created. God never and nowhere becomes world. The world never and nowhere becomes God. God and world remain over against each other. The limit of this statement must not be forgotten: the Word of God in the flesh. Within that limit this statement certainly holds. But in standing over against the World that He has made, God is present to it—not only far, but also near, not only free in relation to it, but bound to it, not only transcendent, but also immanent. Here there can be no question of any conception of transcendence to be defined by logic. We are concerned with the transcendence of God the Creator. The knowledge of that compels the recognition of His immanence also.—The old Dogmatics handled this side of the doctrine of Creation under the title De providentia, of divine Providence. I can reproduce its content here only very briefly. To the world (also to man!) as His creature God the Creator is present in this way, that He maintains it in its relative independence and peculiar character, in its reality which differs from His reality; but at the same time also, as the absolutely supreme Lord, He accompanies and therefore rules the world in whole and in part, according to His divine will and pleasure, without totally or even partly abolishing the contingency of the creature, or the freedom of the human will. The Pelagian doctrine of freedom and the fatalistic doctrine of necessity, the indeterminism of the old Lutherans and Molinists and the determinism of Zwingli (which also, if I see aright, was still in 1525 that of Luther!) represent in what are fundamentally similar ways misreadings of that freedom in which providence recognises, encompasses and governs the contingency of the creature, the freedom of the human will as such. The school of Calvin has here shown the lines along which we can “understand,” on the one hand, the reality that belongs to the created world, without exalting it to be a god alongside of God, and on the other hand, the sovereignty of God, without taking from the created world its reality.
But the doctrine of Creation has its definite limits which have got to be known if that doctrine is to be rightly understood. God is no doubt even as Creator the one God in His totality, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but in knowing God, Who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Creator, we can only partly know Him. The first Article of the Creed must necessarily be followed by the second and the third. I conclude with pointing to these limits. There are again two things to which we have to pay attention:—
1. There are definite and necessary questions of faith which are not to be answered from the doctrine of creation, or at least not unequivocally and completely. Such is the question about the possibility of sin as the act in which, in defiance of the sovereignty of God, the creature arrogates to himself not only his own reality but independent reality, an absolute independence, and therefore makes himself God. Further, the question about the possibility of evil, i.e. of such experiences as notoriously are not to man’s highest advantage in spite of the goodness of the world made by God, as do not conduce to God’s being glorified by man, but rather the reverse. Finally, the question about the possibility of death as such an end of creaturely existence as, despite the sustaining grace of divine forbearance, means its precipitation into the void. These three questions, known by the name of the Problem of Theodicy, could be concentrated into the question about the possibility which the Devil had, and has, to be the Devil. From the viewpoint of the dogma of creation it is no doubt possible to answer with the assertion that God as the Creator of the world in its true reality which is determined by Him, is the supreme Lord and Victor also over these absurd, these impossible possibilities. But it cannot be said that God willed and created these possibilities also as such. The seriousness of the questions which are raised in view of these possibilities, the whole reality and the whole character of sin, evil, death and the devil would, with Schleiermacher and many others be misapprehended, or God would, with Zwingli, be turned into an incomprehensible tyrant, if these possibilities were to be included in the work of divine creation, and consequently justified as appointed and willed by God. In order to keep true to the facts, Dogmatics has here, as in other places, to be logically inconsequent. Therefore in spite of the omnipotence of God—or rather on the score of the rightly understood omnipotence of God, Dogmatics must not at this place carry the Creation-thought right to the end of the line. It must rather explain those possibilities as being such that we have indeed to reckon most definitely with their reality, but are unable better to describe their real nature and character than by forbearing to ask for their raison d’être either in the will of God the Creator or even with Marcion and the Manicheans in the will of a wicked Anti-God. These possibilities are to be taken seriously as the mysterium iniquitatis. The existence of such a thing, however, is not to be perceived from creation, but only from the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
2. But there are also definite and equally necessary answers of faith, which also admit of being ranged, though likewise not satisfactorily, within the framework of the knowledge of God the Creator. There is miracle as the event in which in an extraordinary manner the order of the world, destroyed by sin, evil, death and devil, is temporarily restored by God Himself, as an accompanying sign of His revelation. Prayer, in which man not only speaks with God, but in spite of sin, evil, death and devil is heard and answered by God, and, incomprehensibly, with and in spite of all difference between Creator and
