Creation and Fall/That Which Is Firmly Fixed

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Vv. 6-10, 14-19 Gen. 1:6-10, 14-19. That Which Is Firmly Fixed 51 THAT WHICH Is FIRMLY FIXED

Vv. 6-10. And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it form a partition between the separate waters. And so it came to be,[1] And God made the firmament to be a partition between the waters under the firmament and the waters above the firmament. And God called the firmament heaven. So with evening and morning the second day came to be. And God said: Let the water under heaven gather together in one place,[2] so that the dry land may be seen. And so it came to be. And God called the dry land earth, but the gathering of the water God called sea. And God saw that it was good.

HERE THE ANCIENT IMAGE of the world confronts us in all its scientific naïveté. To us today its ideas appear altogether absurd. In view of the rapid changes in our own knowledge of nature, a derisive attitude that is too sure of itself is not exactly advisable here; nevertheless in this passage the biblical author is exposed as one whose knowledge is bound by all the limitations of the author's own time. Heaven and the sea were in any event not formed in the way the author says, and there is no way we could escape having a very bad conscience if we let ourselves be tied to assertions of that kind. The theory of verbal inspiration will not do. The writer of the first chapter of Genesis sees things here in a very human way.[3] This state of affairs makes it seem then that there is very little to 4 say about this passage. Yet on this next day of creation something completely new takes place. The world of what is fixed, or solid, the changeless, the inert, begins to exist. That is what is peculiar: that in the beginning just those works of creation are created which in their fixedness, their immutability, their repose, are to us the most distant, the most strange. Completely unaffected by human life, that which is fixed stands before God in undisturbed repose. An eternal law holds it fast.[4] This law is nothing other than the command of the word of God itself.

To the firmament of heaven belongs also the world of the stars. Therefore we look here in advance at

Vv. 14-19. And God said, Let there be lights on the firmament of heaven that separate day and night and give signs, times, days, and years and let them be lights on the firmament of heaven to shine upon earth. And so it came to be. And God made two great lights: a great light that rules the day and a small light that rules the night. God also made the stars. And God placed them on the firmament of heaven to shine upon the earth, to rule over the day and the night, and to separate light and darkness. And God saw that it was good. And with evening and morning the fourth day came to be.

As the firmament determines,[5] days, years, and epochs of time happen with complete regularity and without change. Here it is ~umber th~t rules with its inflexible law. What does this have to do with our existence? Nothing - the stars go their way, whether or not human .beings endure suffering, guilt, or bliss. And in being fixed they praIse the Creator. The stars do not look down on human beings; they do. not accuse, nor do they comfort. They are wholly themselves in inapproachable remoteness. They shine day and night, but they do do without any concern about us. The stars take no part in human existence, Human beings participate in the world of what is fixed, however. For they know numbers [Zahl].[6] Humankind in the middle retains knowledge of numbers, of the unchanging, the fixed, of that which IS .. apparently unaffected by humankind's fall. It is peculiar to human begins to realize that the higher they climb in the world of numbers.[7] the purer the air around them becomes; it also becomes thinner and more rarefied, however, so that they cannot live in this world. It is the great temptation of human beings who can count to want to seek comfort in the world of the unchanging, to flee to the world that is unaffected by their own existence,[8] without recognizing that this world existed before the world of humankind and takes no part in human life. Why do they not recognize this? Because human beings, to be sure, know about numbers and their laws[9] but no longer know that even numbers, which determine days, years, and periods of time, are not self-contained; human beings no longer know that numbers too are upheld by God's word and command alone. Numbers are not the truth of God itself.[10] On the contrary, like everything else, they are God's creatures and so receive their truth wholly from the Creator. We have forgotten this connection; when we have numbers, we believe we have truth and eternity. What draws our attention to our loss of truth and eternity is the fact that in the end mathematics too does not rise above paradox.[11]A knowledge of numbers that is godless ends in paradox and contradiction.

So it is with us, who hear in the middle about the beginning of the world. We know about that which is fixed, about numbers, only in the middle, not otherwise, yet thereby the world of that which is fixed discloses itself to us anew in its essence. Because we no longer understand number at its inception, we no longer understand the language of the world of that which is fixed. What we grasp is the godless language we speak ourselves, the language of an eternal law of the world that rests in itself, language that is silent about the Creator and sounds forth about the glory of the creature. When we hear of the Creator who created the world in the beginning, however, we know about the lost connection and believe in God as the Creator - without grasping in what way God rules over the world of what is fixed, without seeing the world of what is fixed, the world of numbers, in its proper creatureliness. Thus we fail also to see the world of the fixed, the unchanging, in its original creatureliness - the law has become autonomous - but we do believe in God as its Creator.[12]

The development that the formless undergoes in the form of what is fixed breaks down its power and at the same time increases it. Being that has form limits the primeval power of the unformed. At the same time this being in a distinctive form means that the praise of the Creator grows ever more complete, ever more powerful. The Creator brings about worship out of the distinctive being of what is fixed. This, however, also admits of the idea that once the world is torn away from its origin, from the Creator, then the peculiar being of what is fixed, of law, of numbers, relies on itself and snatches its own power away from the Creator. To us in the middle who hear of this beginning of what is fixed, of law and numbers, is also given the different knowledge that now, in this age, that which is fixed boasts of its own being in opposition to God and snatches its power away from the Creator - by way of our guilt and our loss of the beginning. For this reason we no longer see the Creator in the world of what is fixed, but instead believe in the Creator. We see law, numbers, but in their godlessness, and we believe in God beyond this created world.[13]

There remains the old rationalistic question about the creation of light on the first day and of the sun on the fourth day. [Gottfried] Herder spoke beautifully of how the biblical author was thinking of a dawn in which the light breaks forth before the sun appears.[14] Perhaps he was right. But one must at least add to that the point that after all it is primarily the light that makes the sun what it is and not the sun the light. The physical explanation of the origin of light after all amounts to no more than an indication of the chain of phenomena whose end is 'light'. The factual reality of light, however, is not thereby explained. It is much truer to say that the light makes the sun what it is, that because there is meant to be light, the sun shines. The fact that we are not able to conceive of light as existing independently of any source in no way invalidates this relation between it and the sun. The light of creation that was unbound, the light that shone formlessly upon the formless darkness.[15] becomes bound to form, to law, to what is fixed, to numbers. It remains in God, however; it remains God's creation and never itself becomes a calculable number.

[edit] Notes

  1. ↑ The phrase, "And so it came to be" (rendered in LB as "and so it came to pass" and by Kautzsch as "And it came to pass in this way"), stands in the Hebrew (Masoretic) text, and so inLB, at the end of verse 7. Kautzsch comments on verse 6 that "according to v. 9,11,15 etc." the formula belongs "after the creation command" (10). Bonhoeffer accordingly placed it at the end of verse 6.
  2. ↑ In LB this reads "in separate places." The singular is emphasized by Kautzsch's rendering, "in one place." Bonhoeffer follows Kautzsch's translation ofvv.6-10.
  3. ↑ The doctrine of "verbal inspiration" was developed above all in the old Protestant orthodoxy (on which see Bonhoeffer, DBW 9:309, written in 1925), but was evident already in antiquity. According to this doctrine, the Holy Spirit (as the causa principalis) inspired the prophets and apostles (as the causa instrumentalis) with what was to be written in terms of form and content, so that everything contained In Holy Scnpture, throughout and in every detail, was true and free of any error. See Heinrich Schmid, Dogmatik (Prolegomena, chap. 4, sect. 6, "Notio scripturae sacrae et inspiratio"), 18. EK reads, "Luther himself, though he opposed verbal inspiration, took these words far more seriously" (5). HP reads, "According to Luther one may not simply dismiss it as unscientific. See Luther's Lectures on Genesis. We cannot do that without becoming untrue" (16-17). FL reads, "(Luther concerning the snake ... in his Lectures on Genesis he develops quite abstruse ideas)" (19). See Luther, Stiasny ed., 53 and 67-69. [On "verbal inspiration" see also Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, and FranCIS Turretin, The Doctrine of Scripture.] UDEG]
  4. ↑ EK reads, "- 'Law' here for the first time!" (5); UK reads similarly (9).
  5. ↑ HP reads, "The fixed pole of the created world is the firmam.ent" (17); UK (9), FL (19), andEK (5) read very similarly. Bonhoefferfollows LB III vv. 14-19.
  6. ↑ [The German uses the singular, Zahl, "number," throughout; but the plural "numbers" is more idiomatic in English.] [DSB] Cf. th~ work by the philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, III the chapter "Concerning the Meaning of Numbers": "Pure numbers ... were ~or ~he. Greeks also the key to the meaning of that which had come to be, that which IS J:xed and therefore transitory" (1:95). "Number" is important in the defilatIon of name that Plato puts in the mouth of a Pythagorean in Plato's dialogueTzmaeus: an"eternal image of eternity that advances (and is therefore; .movable), by number - lCO; apt8IJ.ov - and to which we have given the name tune -.XPovo? (37d). In Plato s view time came into existence with the heavenly bodies (Tzmaeus, 38b). Cf. Luther's statement that the movement of the "heavenly bodies above" is what enables us to count the days and years - that "is God's act of kindnes~ and gracious order [Ordnung]." "Where number is lacking, however, there IS also no time" (Stiasny ed., 14-15).
  7. ↑ HP reads, " ... climb in mathematics" (17). .
  8. ↑ EK reads, "Humanity cannot flee t~ the eternal flow of the firmament (Kant), because that too is only God's creation. At this pomt theology s debate with exact natural science has to begin" (6). HP (18), FL (20), and UK (10) read similarly. Cf. Kant's "Conclusion" to his Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" (166).
  9. ↑ HP reads, Humankind "knows the law of number" (18).
  10. ↑ Cf. EK, who reads, "Number is not itself already the word of God and the truth (as Pythagoras held)" (6). This Greek mathematician (who died about 500 B.C.E.) is mentioned also in FL (19). Cf. Uberweg's paraphrase of Aristotle's account of the doctrine of the Pythagoreans (Metaphysics, A 5, 985b 23ff.): "because numbers seemed to them to be the first principle in all of nature and everything else seemed by its nature to have been modeled on numbers, they also supposed that the elements of numbers were the elements of everything that existed and that the whole of heaven was harmony and number" (1:67).
  11. ↑ Cf. UK, "the paradox offinal numbers" (10). In opposition to the theory of sets advanced by the mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918), which was intended to make aggregates with "uncountably" numerous terms accessible to mathematical treatment, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) showed that Cantor's set theory led to insoluble contradictions (the Russell Paradox or Antinomy).
  12. ↑ Cf.John 20:29.
  13. ↑ FL reads, it is the "KOUXTlIlO ['glory, pride'J of our knowledge of nature that is judged here. In spite of the law we believe in God beyond the law" (20). HP reads, "Even knowledge of nature is right only when it does not wish to be God itself" (18).
  14. ↑ UK reads, "Herder says: God already on the first day sees the light that makes the sunshine bright dawn" (ll). See Johann Gottfried Herder, Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1787), 1:70ff. Dillmann, Genesis, referred to this work (15).
  15. ↑ UK reads, "The light, as God's creation in the beginning, makes the sun (and, that is, the moon and the stars)" (11).
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