Creation and Fall/That Which Lives

From YoKim

Gen. 1:11-13,20-25.

That Which Lives ^[1]

And God said: Let the earth put forth grass and plants that bear seed and trees that bear fruit, each bearing fruit on earth according to its kind and with its own seed. And so it came to be. And the earth put forth grass and plants that bore seed, each according to its kind, and trees that bore fruit with their own seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And with evening and morning the third day came to be.

And God said: Let the water swarm with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth near the firmament of heaven. And God created the great sea animals and all the living creatures that gambol about, with which the waters swarm,^[2] each according to its kind, and also every kind of feathered bird, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them and said: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the sea, and let the birds multiply on the earth. And with evening and morning the fifth day came to be. And God said: Let the earth bring forth living animals, each according to its kind.^[3] And so it came to be. And God made the wild animals, each according to its kind, and the cattle according to their kind, and every kind of reptile on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

LIKE A WATERFALL that plunges from the heights down into a valley, creation moves from on high down to its final work. First there is the formless, then form in rhythm, and then a second form in law, in numbers. More and more creation attains its own being, more and more sharply it stands out in distinction from the form of the Creator, and more and more jubilantly it proclaims the Creator's nearness.

The peculiar being of what has been created so far is dead, however. It does not praise the Creator by carrying on the Creator's work but only by its own existence. But now something totally new occurs, with no continuity with what has happened before. The Creator wills that the creation should itself, in obedience, endorse and carryon the Creator's work - wills that creatures should live and should in tur^[4] themselves create life. That which is living differs from that which is dead in that it can itself create life. God gives to God's work that which makes God Lord, namely the ability to create. God calls it to life. And that God does so, and that what lives belongs to God now as something that itself creates and lives in an obedience of its own - that is the new way in which the Creator is glorified by the Creator's work. God does not will to be Lord of a dead, eternally unchangeable, subservient world; instead God wills to be Lord of life with its infinite variety of forms.

Thus at God's word there breaks forth out of the dead stone, out of the unfruitful earth, that which is alive and fruitful. It is no process of evolution from death to life; instead it is God's command which creates that which lives out of what is dead - it is God's being able to raise up children to Abraham out of these stones.^[5] and calling Christ to rise up from the dead earth. The earth becomes the mother of the living; from now on life will break forth out of her dead darkness, and the world of plants, with their seed and their fruit, comes to be. This means that what comes to be is life, the peculiar nature of which is to create life again _ plants with seed according to their kind, which means in all the manifold variety of things that live.^[6] Not only the earth but also the sea, which is without life, and heaven, which is fixed, become animated with living creatures that move about. While the plants cling to the ground, the animals move about; they are in control of the ground, free to move over it, and are not bound to it. Fish and birds according to their kind and cattle and reptiles and wild animals according to their kind with their seed, in their fecundity.

It is not the Creator's own nature that the Creator here places within what lives and creates life. That which lives and is creative is not something divine; instead it is and remains a work that is creaturely, that has been created, that is separate from the Creator and under the Creator's free command. In the lively process of its coming to be, however, the Lord wills to look upon the Lord's own doing in what now stands over against the Lord; the Creator wills to see the Creator's own self in the process of creating, and the work is obliged to honor the one who made it.

One could suppose that God has now handed over to living creatures the work of upholding, so that the world or nature would provide for itself and so that the fixed nature of law and the fecundity of living things are the powers that together uphold the world. The clock is wound up and now runs on its own^[7] But what the Bible knows is just this, that in the created world nothing runs 'on its own'. Law and life that creates life are, as God's work, created out of nothing and exist only in the midst of nothingness, only in the freedom of God's word. If God withdraws the word from the work, it sinks back into nothingness. Thus neither the subjection of the course of the world to law nor the living nature of what has been created is to be identified with God's upholding activity; on the contrary, law and life are upheld only by the free word of God. Neither law nor life is worthy of adoration - they are creatures like everything else; only the Lord of the law and the Lord of the living is so worthy.

This section too closes with the words that the text repeats again and again: "and God saw that it was good." For us this has two meanings. On the one hand God's work in the unspoiled form in which God's will has shaped it is good. On the other hand it is "good" only in the way that the creaturely can be good, that is, by the Creator's looking upon it, acknowledging it as the Creator's own, and saying about it, "It is good." That God looks upon God's work is the only thing that makes the work good. This really means, however, that the work is good only because the Creator alone is good. The work never has its goodness in itself, but only 5: in the Creator. The goodness of the work consists precisely in its pointing emphatically away from itself to the Creator and to the Creator's word alone as that which is good - that is, in its pointing out that "none is good but God alone."^[8] It is in the sense of this word of Jesus that the first creation is "good." If none is good except God alone, then God alone will be given the glory. And the creature's being good - but now being genuinely good - consists in this: that it lets the Creator, as the only Lord, be good and receives its own being good from the Creator's word alone and knows this word alone to be good. One is saying the same thing in other words when one says that the peculiar being of the creature, that is, its creaturely being, is wholly suspended and sustained [aufgehoben]^[9] in God's being and is fully obedient to God. After all, the being of that which is without form - of that which in greater and greater intensification of its own being^[10] is given form as rhythm, as what is fixed, and as what lives - always remains wholly created being, that is, obedient being. It never knows about its own being except by looking at the word of God, at the freedom with which God creates and upholds.

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ At this point the fifth lecture period began, which HP (19) and FL (21) date Dec. 6, 1932.
2. ↑ The text on the third day (vv. 11-13) mostly follows LB, while that on the fifth and sixth days up to v. 25 mainly follows Kautzsch, 10-11; d. LB (vv. 20-21): " ... let the waters be agitated with creatures that live and move, and birds fly over the earth under the firmament of heaven. And God created great whales and all kinds of animals that live and move there, with which the waters were agitated .... "
3. ↑ Here in v. 24 the words are left out: "Cattle and reptiles and wild animals each according to its kind" (Kautzsch, 11).
4. ↑ Instead of the German word wieder (translated here as "in turn"), to which HP (19), FL (21), and EK (6) bear evidence, the 1933 edition incorrectly reads weiter, "further."
5. ↑ Cf. Luke 3:8b.
6. ↑ Cf. UK, which reads "in all the manifold variety of the individual" (ll). HP also has "individual" (19, 20).
7. ↑ Christian Wolff (1679-1754) compared the world t~. a clock or a machine, so that no chance accident was conceivable for it. See Uberweg 3:452. FL refers to the "Deists" (22). Deism was the way in which God was conceived in the English and French Enlightenment. It assumed that once the world was created, its author no longer intervened in the course of things. [The Enlightenment rebelled against a dogmatic Christianity that claimed to be based on scriptures that were inerrant and on a revelation that was 'proved' by prophecies and miracles and was not subject to rational evaluation. The Deists thus attempted to substitute for traditional Christianity a 'natural' or rational religion. In content this was a belief in a benevolent God, who had created the world so that it was governed by natural laws that precluded miracles, and in an unchanging moral law.] [JDEG]
8. ↑ Mark 10:18b. LB translates, "No one is good, except the one God." EK reads, 'Jesus is good in that he points to God as good" (6). UK adds: " ... and does not make the claim for himself that he is good" (12). Cf. FL (22).
9. ↑ See page 28, editorial note 12.
10. ↑ The 1933 edition incorrectly reads Tun, "activity," instead of Sein, "being," both at this point and later in the sentence.