Creation and Fall/The Beginning

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Creation and Fall
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CHAP. 1, VV. 1-2

Gen. 1:1-2. The Beginning

THE BEGINNING

In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was formless and empty [wiist und leer};[1] and it was dark upon the deep. And the spirit of God hovered over the water.

THE PLACE WHERE THE BIBLE begins is one where our own most impassioned waves of thinking break, are thrown back upon themselves, and lose their strength in spray and foam. The first word of the Bible has hardly for a moment surfaced before us, before the waves frantically rush in upon it again and cover it with wreaths of foam. That the Bible should speak of the beginning provokes the world, provokes us. For we cannot speak of the beginning. Where the beginning begins, there our thinking stops; ,:hereit comes to an end.[2] Yet the desire to ask after the beginning is the innermost passion of our thinking; it is what in the end imparts reality to every genuine question we ask. We know that we continually have to ask about the beginning - and yet that we can never ask about it. Why not? Because [the beginning is the infinite, and because we can conceive of the infinite only as what is endless] and so as what has no beginning.[3] Because the beginning is freedom, and we can never conceive offreedom except in terms of necessity[4] and thus as one thing among others but never as the one thing that utterly precedes all other things [das Eine schlecthin vor allem anderen].[5]

We may ask why it is that we always think from the beginning and with reference to it and yet can never conceive it, never indeed ask after the beginning to find out about it. The question why, however, only gives expression to a series of questions that could be pushed back endlessly, yet would not reach the beginning. Thinking can never answer its own last question why, because an answer to this would produce yet another why? The question 'why' is really only an expression, an expression lW't' e~oxTjv,[6] of thinking that lacks a beginning. Our thinking, that is, the thinking of those who have to turn to Christ to know about God, the . thinking of fallen humankind, lacks a beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. But we also feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle.[7] It is possible to say that in that case the beginning is everywhere. But against that stands the equally valid statement that for that very reason there is no beginning at all. The decisive point, however, is that thinking takes this circle to be the infinite, the beginning itself, and is thereby caught in a circulus vitiosus.[8] For where thinking looks to itself as the beginning, it posits itself as an object, as an entity over against itself, and so again and again withdraws behind this object - or rather, finds itself in every instance before the object it is positing. It is therefore impossi, ble for thinking to make this final pronouncement about the beginning. Thinking pounds itself to pieces on the beginning. Because thinking wants to reach back to the beginning and yet never can want it, all thinking pounds itself to pieces, shatters against itself, breaks up into fragments, dissolves, in view of the beginning that it wants and cannot want.

The Hegelian question how we are to make a beginning in philosophy can therefore be answered only by the bold and violent action of enthroning reason in the place of GOd[9] That is why critical philosophy is but a systematic despair of its own beginning, indeed of any beginning[10] Critical philosophy may proudly renounce what it lacks the power to attain, or else lapse into a resignation that leads to its complete destruction; either alternative stems from the same human hatred of the unknown beginning.

Humankind no longer lives in the beginning; instead it has lost the beginning. Now it finds itself in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that it is in the middle. It knows therefore that it comes from the beginning and must move on toward the end. It sees its life as determined by these two factors, concerning which it knows only that it does not know them. The animals know nothing about the beginning and the end; they therefore know no hatred and no pride. Humankind knows itself to be totally deprived of its own selfdetermination, because it comes from the beginning and is moving toward the end without knowing what that means. This makes it hate the beginning and rise up in pride against it.

There can therefore be nothing more disturbing or agitating for human beings than to hear someone speak of the beginning as though it were not the totally ineffable, inexpressibly dark beyond of our own blind existence. People will fall upon such a person; they will call such a person the chief of liars, or else indeed the savior, and they will kill that person when they hear what he says.


Who can speak of the beginning? There are two possibilities. The speaker may be the one who has been a liar from the beginning,[11] the 28 evil one, for whom the beginning is the lie and the lie is the beginning, whom human beings believe because the evil one deceives them with lies. And as one who lies, the evil one will say: I am the beginning, and you, 0 humankind, are the beginning. You were with me from the beginning. I have made you what you are, and with me your end is done away [aufgehoben][12] I am the Beginning and the End, the A[lpha] and the O[mega];[13] worship me. I am the truth out of which comes the lie; for I am the lie that first gives birth to the truth. You are the beginning and you are the end, for you are in me. Believe me, the liar from the beginning: lie, and you will be in the beginning and will be lord of the truth. Discover your beginning yourself. So speaks the evil one, as the liar from the beginning. It is either the evil one who speaks or that other who speaks, the one who has been the truth from the beginning, and the way and the life[14] the one who was in the beginning, the very God, Christ, the Holy Spirit. Noone can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning.[15]

Thus the Bible begins with the free confirmation, attestation, and revelation of God by God: In the beginning God created ... [16] But this rock hardly surfaces for a moment in the sea, before the sea, roused to a furious storm by the sight of the one who is immovable, covers it again. What does it mean that in the beginning God is? Which God? Your God, whom you make for yourself out of your own need because you need an idol, because you do not wish to live without the beginning, without the end, because being in the middle causes you anxiety? In the beginning, God - that is just your lie, which is not better but even more cowardly than the lie of the evil one. How do you, an unknown stranger, you, the writer of this sentence, know about the beginning? Have you seen it, were you there in the beginning? Does your God not say to you, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you are so clever!" (Job 38:4).[17]

So what sort of statement are these first words of Scripture? An illusion produced by the fainthearted imagination of a person who is unable to live in the middle with pride or with resignation? And are we not all that person - we who out of the faintheartedness of our own lives, with their lack of a beginning and an end, cry out to a god who is but our own ego?[18] How can we meet this reproach? It is after all true that one who speaks of the beginning speaks of one's own anxiety within life's circle. This is true even of the person who wrote the Bible. Or rather it is not that person who speaks; it is God, the absolute beginning or primal reality, who had being before our life and thinking, with all its anxiety. God alone tells us that God is in the beginning; God testifies of God by no other means than through this word, which as the word of a book, the word of a pious human being, is wholly a word that comes from the middle and not from the beginning. In the beginning God created .... This word, spoken and heard as a human word, is the form of a servant in which from the beginning God encounters us and in which alone God wills to be found. It is neither something profound nor something frivolous but God's truth, to the extent that God speaks it.

In the beginning - God. That is true if by this word God comes alive for us here in the middle, not as a distant, eternal being in repose but as the Creator. We can know about the beginning in the true sense only by hearing[19] of the beginning while we ourselves are in the middle, between the beginning and the end; otherwise it would not be the beginning in the absolute sense which is also our beginning. Here in the middle, between the beginning we have lost and the end we have lost, we know of God as the beginning only - as God the Creator.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Not that first God was and then God created, but that in the beginning God created. This beginning is the beginning in the anxiety-causing middle and at the same time beyond the anxiety-causing middle in which we have our being. We do not know of this beginning by stepping out of the middle and becoming a beginning ourselves. Because we could accomplish that only by means of a lie, we would then certainly not be in the beginning but only in the middle that is disguised by a lie. This needs to be kept clearly in mind in everything that follows. It is only in the middle that we come to learn about the beginning.

The twofold question arises: Is this beginning God's own beginning, or is it God's beginning with the world? But the very fact that this question is asked shows that we no longer know what the beginning means. When the beginning can be spoken about only by those who are in the middle and worry about the beginning and the end, those who tug at their own chains, those who - to anticipate for a moment something that comes later - know only in their sin about having been created by God,[20] then it can no longer be asked whether this beginning is God's own beginning or God's beginning with the world. This is because for us God as the beginning is no other than the one who in the beginning created the world and created us, and because we can know nothing at all of this God except as the Creator of our world. Luther was once asked what God was doing before the creation of the world. His answer was that God was cutting sticks to cane people who ask such idle questions.[21] In this way Luther was not just cutting the questioner short; he was also saying that where we do not recognize God as the merciful Creator, we can know God only as the wrathful judge - that is, only standing in relation to the middle, between the beginning and the end. There is no possible question that could go back behind this God who created in the beginning. Thus it is also impossible to ask why the world was created, what God's plan for the world was, or whether the creation was necessary. These questions are exposed as godless questions and finally disposed of by the statement: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The statement declares not that in the beginning God had this or that idea about the purpose of the world, ideas that we must now try to discover, but that in the beginning God created. No question can go back behind the creating God, because one cannot go back behind the beginning.

From this it follows that the beginning is not to be thought of in temporal terms. We can always go back behind a temporal beginning. But the beginning is distinguished by something utterly unique - unique not in the sense of a number that one can count back to, but in a qualitative sense, that is, in the sense that it simply cannot be repeated, that it is completely free. One could conceive of a continual repetition of free acts;[22] such a concept would be basically mistaken only because freedom does not allow itself to be repeated. Otherwise freedom would have freedom as its own precondition, that is, freedom would be unfree, and no longer the beginning lW't' E~OX1JV.[23]

This quite unrepeatable, unique, free event in the beginning, which must in no way be confused with the number 4800[24] or any such date, is the creation. In the beginning God created heaven and earth. In other words the Creator - in freedom! - creates the creature. The connection between them is conditioned by nothing except freedom, which means that it is unconditioned. This rules out every application of causal categories for an understanding of the creation.[24] The relation between Creator and creature can never be interpreted in terms of cause and effect, because between the Creator and the creature there stands no law of thought or law of effect or anything else. Between Creator and creature there is simply nothing [das Nichts].[25] For freedom is exercised in, and on the basis of, this nothing [in und aus dem Nichts]. No kind of necessity that could, or indeed had to, ensue in creation can therefore be demonstrated to exist in God,[26] There is simply nothing that provides the ground for creation. Creation comes out of this nothing.

Now human beings could certainly once again attempt to move away from the middle that causes them anxiety and become a beginning themselves. They could endeavor to think of this nothing as something that in turn gives birth to creation. But where one speaks of creation that is, theologically - there nothingness has a wholly different meaning from where it appears as the endless end in thinking that lacks a beginning. Nothingness, nonbeing,[27] arises in our philosophical thinking at the point where the beginning cannot be conceived. Thus it is in the end never anything but the ground for being. Nothingness as the ground for being is understood as a creative nothingness. One then has to ask what lies back beyond this nothingness, yet without coming up against the beginning. Nothingness, as humankind in the middle conceives it without knowing about the beginning, is the ultimate attempt at explanation. It is the point through which that which is has passed in coming to be. We call it a filled, charged, self-glorifying nothingness.[28]

The nothingness that lies between the freedom of God and creation is by contrast not an attempted explanation for the creation of that which has being. It is thus not a substance out of which, paradoxically, the world then arose, the point through which what has being had to pass. It is not a something at all, not even a negative something. It is the particular word that alone is able to define and express the relation between God's freedom and God's creation.

This nothingness is therefore not a primal possibility or a ground of God; it 'is' absolutely 'nothing'. It happens instead in God's action itself, and it happens always as what has already been negated, as the nothing that is no longer happening but has always already happened. We call it the obedient nothing, the nothing that waits on God, the nothing whose glory and whose existence [Bestand] are neither in itself nor in its nothingness but only in God's action. Thus God needed no link between God and the creation; even the nothing constitutes no such 'between'. On the contrary God affirms the nothing only to the extent that God has already overcome it. This is what people of a bygone time[29] tried to express with their somewhat clumsy description of the nothing as the nihil negativum (as distinct from the nihil privativum.[30] which was understood as primal being). The nothing poses no reason for anxiety to the first creation. Instead, it is itself an eternal song of praise to the Creator who created the world out of nothing.

The world exists in the midst of nothing, which means in the beginning. This means nothing else than that it exists wholly by God's freedom. What has been created belongs to the [free] Oreator[31] It means also, however, that the God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of the resurrection. The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the dead.[32] Indeed it is because we know of the resurrection that we know of God's creation in the beginning, of God's creating out of nothing. The dead Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected KUpWC;;[33] of Easter Sunday - that is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning. The fact that Christ was dead did not provide the possibility of his resurrection but its impossibility; it was nothing itself, it was the nihil negativum. There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ, but the freedom of God that in the beginning created God's work out of nothing. Were it possible to intensify the nihil negativum even more, we would have to say here, in connection with the resurrec-tion, that with the death of Christ on the Cross the nihil negativum broke its way intO[34] God's own being. - a great desolation! God, yes God, is dead.[35] - Yet the one who is the beginning lives, destroys the nothing, and in his resurrection creates the new creation. By his resurrection we know about the creation. For had he not risen again,[36] the Creator would be dead and would not be attested. On the other hand we know from the act of creation about God's power to rise up again, because God remains Lord [over nonbeing[37]

In the beginning - that is, out of freedom, out of nothing - God created heaven and earth. That is the comfort with which the Bible addresses us who are in the middle and who feel anxiety before the spurious nothingness, before the beginning without a beginning and the end without an end. It is the gospel, it is Christ, it is the resurrected one, who is being spoken of here. That God is in the beginning and will be in the end, that God exists in freedom over the world and that God makes this known to us - that is compassion, grace, forgiveness, and comfort.

"And the earth was formless and empty; and it was dark upon the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the waters."[38]

The beginning has been made. But attention still remains fixed on that event, on the free God. That it is true, that it has been done, that heaven and earth are there, that the miracle has come to pass, deserves all wonder. Not the created work, no, but the Creator wills to be glorified. The earth is formless and empty; but the Creator is the Lord, the one who brings about the wholly new, the strange, inconceivable work of God's dominion and love. "The earth was formless and empty." It was nevertheless our earth which came forth from God's hand and now lies ready for God, subject to God in devout worship. God is praised first by ~5 the earth that was formless and empty. God does not need us human beings to be glorified, but brings about divine worship out of the world which is without speech, which, mute and formless, rests, slumbering, in God's will.

"And it was dark upon the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters .... " What can be said about the work considering the act, and what can be said about the creature considering the Creator, except that it is dark and that it is in the deep? That the creature is God's work, that is its honor; and that it lies dark before God, that is the glory of God's majesty as Creator. It lies in the abyss beneath God. Just as we look down, dizzy, from a high mountain into the depths, and the darkness of the depths lies beneath us, so the earth is at God's feet - distant, strange, dark, deep, but God's work,[39]

The dark deep - that is the first sound of the power• of darkness, of the passion of Jesus Christ. The darkness, the tehom, the tiharnat, the Babylonian "primeval sea [Urmeer],"[40] contains within itself - precisely in its depth - power and force. This power and force still serve to honor the Creator now, but once torn away from the origin, from the beginning, they become tumult and rebellion. In the night, in the abyss, there exists only what is formless. Thus the formless [wuste], empty, dark deep, which is not able to take on form by itself, the agglomeration of formlessness [die Zusammenballung des Gestaltlosen], the torpid unconscious, the unformed, is both the expression of utter subjection 3f and the unsuspected force of the formless, as it waits impatiently to be bound into form.

It is a moment [Augenblick] in God in which the unformed mass and its Creator exist over against each other. It is a moment of which it is said that the spirit of God hovered over the waters; it is a moment in which God is thinking, planning, and bringing forth form. It cannot be said that the relation of Creator and creature is in any way affected, that God here espouses what God has created in order to make it fruitful,[41] or that God becomes one with it. The cosmo gonic idea of the world-egg over which the divine being broods[42] is at any rate not intended here. God remains utterly Creator over the deep, above the waters.[43]

But this God who is the Creator now begins again. The creation of that which is formless, empty, and dark is distinguished from the creation of form by a moment in God that is described here as the hovering of the spirit over the waters. God reflects upon the divine work. The unbinding or release of formless force and the simultaneous binding of it into form, so that what merely exists [Dasein] begins to exist in a particular way [Sosein],[44] is a moment of hesitation in God. The divine praise that God prepares out of the rude darkness of the unformed is to be completed through its being given form. The creation still rests entirely in God's hand, in God's power; it has no being of its own. Yet the praise of the Creator is completed only when the creature receives its own being from God and praises God's being by its own being. In the creation of form the Creator denies [the Creator's own self],[45] in that this grants form to what is created and grants to it its own being or existence before the Creator; in that the existence of what is created serves the Creator, however, the Creator chooses to be glorified. Thereby the Creator enormously increases the power of the creation, by giving to creation its own being as that which has form. In this form creation exists over against God in a new way, and in existing over against God it wholly belongs to God.[46]

[edit] Notes

  1. ↑ The adjective unist can mean either "deserted, waste" or "chaotic, formless." The Hebrew noun tohu that it translates can also mean either "desert" or "chaos." As we shall see in what follows, however, Bonhoeffer understands the word here in the latter sense. For, like Luther, whose translation he here follows, and Augustine before him, he interprets the text to mean that a formless chaos was the first step of creation itself - not something that preexisted creation and ., supplied the necessary matter out of which the world was created. [DSB]
  2. ↑ Cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Ich glaube, "Belief in God the Creator": "This 'In the beginning' is something absolutely inconceivable. Thought tumbles into infinity, because before every beginning it must posit another beginning" (47).
  3. ↑ In the 1933 edition this sentence began: "Because we can conceive of the beginning only as something finite .... " EK (1), in agreement with FL (2) and UK (1), attests the wording that stands in the square brackets. .
  4. ↑ Friedrich Brunstad in his Idee der Religion exponnds the Hegelian idea of the unity of freedom and necessity; e.g., "True freedom is necessity that has been comprehended and appropriated" (113). Bonhoeffer had discussed Brunstad's book in his Habilitationsschrift or postdoctoral dissertation (AB [DBWE 2]:40-41) and in many other places.
  5. ↑ EK reads, " ... goes beyond every other thing" (1). HP also reads "beyond" (2).
  6. ↑ Gk. for par excellence. The literal meaning of e~oxil is "prominence, eminence." Cf. Acts 25:23. [DSB] ..
  7. ↑ For the image of the circle see Bonhoeffer's "Dogmatische Ubungen [Theologische Psychologie]" (Dogmatic exercises [on the theological analysis of the human person]) in the winter semester of 1932-33: "Kant: The I can never conceive ofitself. Hegel: dialectics. The I comes back to itself. Circle"(GS 5:342). [trans. DSB] Also see Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, "Concerning the Virtuous": "The circle's thirst is within you; every circle curves and turns in order to catch itself up again" (206). [trans. altered DSB] Cf. also Emil Brunner, God and Man: Four Essays on the Nature of Personality, "The Philosophers' Idea of God and the Creator God of Faith": "The ring of 'mine' encloses all" (58).
  8. ↑ Latin, meaning a faulty or erroneous circle, i.e., a circular argument. [DSB]
  9. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) begins the main body of the 1827 version of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion saying: "The question with which we have to begin is this: How are we to secure a beginning?" (1:365). In Bonhoeffer's copy of the Georg Lasson edition of the Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Religion, this passage is marked with exclamation marks in indeli-ble pencil in the margin (Lasson, 79). Also marked with a lead pencil is the passage which reads: The "true relation of the finite and the infinite is one in which their opposition finds its resolution in reason" (Philosophy of Religion, Pt. 1, The Concept of Religion, 1:301 [Lasson, 141]). See Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum 8:61, 78. While one may be surprised to find Hegel figuring so prominently in a commentary on Genesis, we need to remember both that Bonhoeffer's first two books up to this point - Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being- had engaged in a significant dialogue with Hegel and that in fact the final lecture series that Bonhoeffer was to give at the University of Berlin the following summer of 1933 was on the philosophy of Hegel.
  10. ↑ Hegel in the Philosophy of Religion compares Kant to a person from Gascony - by reputation a blustering person who, when it comes down to it, turns out to be irrationally cautious - "who does not want to go into the water until he can swim" (1:169, n. 51). This passage is marked in Bonhoeffer's copy of the Lasson edition with a double exclamation mark in pencil in the margin (57). It is particularly against Immanuel Kant that Hegel directs his diagnosis that "despair about knowledge" is the "plague of our time in view of what reason or knowledge is" (Lasson, 55). He scornfully reproaches Kant with even being proud that he has renounced the knowledge of God (see, e.g., Lasson, 5f.). These passages are marked by Bonhoeffer. See Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:57 and 28-29. See also AB (DBWE 2) where, speaking of 'Being in Adam' as opposed to 'Being in Christ,' Bonhoeffer wrote: "The thinking and philosophizing of human beings in sin is self-glorifying, even when it seeks to be self-critical or to become 'critical philosophy'" (138).
  11. ↑ See John 8:44: The devil "was a murderer from the beginning .... When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature." Augustine cites part of this text in his exposition of the creation story in the Confessions, 12/25:290.
  12. ↑ Aufheben is a key term in Hegel. The Hegelian meaning of this term is a dialectical one: it means "negating" or "overcoming," and yet at the same time "preserving" or "sustaining" in a higher unity (cf. AB [DBWE 2]: 31, editorial note 20). Thus the German sentence could also be interpreted to mean "and your end has been raised up to [be with] me." [DSB]
  13. ↑ Revelation 1:8. Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
  14. ↑ John 14:6.
  15. ↑ John 1:1-2.
  16. ↑ Here EK adds: "Whoever asks after the beginning asks after God; when you do not know the beginning, then you know you are not with God" (2). Similarly, UK (3).
  17. ↑ The NRSV reads, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." [DSB]
  18. ↑ Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: "God is in the same way also the finite, and I am in the same way the infinite" (308, n. 97). In Bonhoeffer's copy of the Lasson edition this passage is marked with wavy lines in pencil, indicating disapproval (148). See Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:81. Cf. the comment Bonhoeffer wrote in 1926: "'heavenly double' [Doppelganger] of my earthly ego!" (DBW 9:377).
  19. ↑ The word "hearing" is underlined in FL (5),just as in its repetition at the beginning of the second lecture (which HP [5] dates November 11, [1932)). FL reads, "In the middle one can hear of the beginning; otherwise it is speculation" (6). Similarly, see EK 2. Bonhoeffer stressed the hearing of the word in opposition to Hegel with his talk of a (speculative) human knowledge of God.
  20. ↑ See the exposition of Gen. 2:8-17 below, e.g., pages 90-92.
  21. ↑ EK reads, "God sat behind a hazelbush, cutting canes for such useless questions" (2). Bonhoeffer is referring to the passage in Luther's Table Talk where Luther is recalling Augustine, who wrote in his Confessions that God "was preparing hell for those who pry too deep" (11/12:253). Luther's actual words were: " ... Once, when he was asked, [Augustine] said, 'God was making hell for those who are inquisitive" (LW 54:377 [WA-TR 4:611, no. 5010)).
  22. ↑ Cf. below, pages 46-47, concerning creatio continua.
  23. ↑ See above, editorial note 6. [DSB]
  24. ↑ This is a calculation based on the figures given in the Bible, e.g., in Genesis 5 (the genealogy from Adam to Noah). Bonhoeffer noted in pencil next to this chapter in his copy of LB: "1656 yr. fr[ om]. Adam to the flood." [In the English-speaking world the equivalent traditional date of creation was 4004 B.C.E. This date was calculated by the seventeenth-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, and was then printed above Genesis 1 in many editions of the KJV.] [DSB]
  25. ↑ "das Nichts": the italics are Bonhoeffer's. Here and later, John Fletcher's previous translation of Creation and Fall used the term "the void" to translate das Nichts. While this term does convey something of the force of das Nichts as a noun, the problem is that many English translations render the Hebrew word bohu in Gen. 1:2 as "void" (= empty). Thus to translate das Nichts as "the void" here would convey the impression to the unwary English reader that Bonhoeffer's comments about das Nichts have to do with this word, bohu, in Gen. 1:2. In fact, however, Bonhoeffer is still expounding v. 1 ("In the beginning God created heaven and earth"), not yet v. 2. [DSB]
  26. ↑ According to Hegel, God - even in terms of the traditional idea of God as the One who created the world out of nothing - as the infinite had to choose to be determined as the finite, because outside of God nothing existed that could determine itself. See Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lasson, 146-48). Bonhoeffer's copy of the Lasson edition has this passage heavily marked in colored pencil; see also Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:81-82.
  27. ↑ Here I have used two terms to translate das Nichts: "nothingness" and "nonbeing." But "nonbeing" corresponds more exactly to the German term Nichtsein, which Bonhoeffer uses elsewhere and which in other places in the English edition of Bonhoeffer has been translated "nonbeing" (e.g., AB [DBWE 2]: 99). [DSB]
  28. ↑ HP (7), with reference to "the speculative creative primeval ground of what has being," notes: "(d. Idealism Heidegger's philosophy)." uk. (5) reads, "(Heidegger: Metaphysics of nonbeing.)" FL (7) says, "What is Metaphysics." The last of these is the title of Martin Heidegger's inaugural lecture, which considered the theme of nothingness. Heidegger's lecture was delivered three and a half years earlier at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau on July 24, 1929. (Only) FL mentions the name Hegel (7). Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion with reference to "God created the world out of nothing ... " (Lasson, 147); and see Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:13 and 81.
  29. ↑ EK reads, " ... the older dogmatic theologians" (3). Probably this referred above all to Johannes Andreas Quenstedt, a Lutheran theologian in the time of the old seventeenth-century Protestant orthodoxy. See Heinrich Schmid, Dogmatik, 113. Bonhoeffer liked to use Schmid's Dogmatik, along with von Hase's Hutterus redivivus, as is evident already in 1926 (see DBW 9:430,438-39).
  30. ↑ From the Latin privatio, meaning "(a state of) privation or deprivation." EK reads nihil negativum "over against the philosophical 'nihil prioatioum'" (3). UK also has the characterization "philosophical" (5). The German 'school phi-losophy' employed this idea of the 'nihil'. This is evident already in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762). Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) provided it with its definitive categorization in his Critique of Pure Reason, 295-96 (B 348).
  31. ↑ HPprovides the evidence for the word in square brackets (8). The 1933 edition lacks it.
  32. ↑ Cf. Wilhelm Vischer's 1927 article, "Das Alte Testament als Gottes Wort": "As absurd as it may seem to base the exposition of the first book of Moses on the Easter faith, so much does it make sense and so pertinent and essential is it to do so. For the Easter message is the verification of the message of the creation story, and the message of the creation story is the presupposition of the Easter message" (388).
  33. ↑ "Lord."
  34. ↑ FL (8) and EK (3) provide the evidence for this wording; the 1933 edition reads "was taken into."
  35. ↑ [In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel discusses the idea of the death of God as meaning that there is suffering, pain, and negation in God. He quotes the words of the Lutheran hymn, "God, yes God, is dead" (Gott selbst ist tod).] [JDEG] Georg Lasson, the editor of the edition of Hegel's Philosophie der Religion used by Bonhoeffer, comments as follows: "'0 great desolation! God, yes God, is dead' is the second verse of the hymn, '0 Traurigkeit, 0 Herzeleid' of Johannes Rist (1607-1667)" (14:157-58). In Bonhoeffer's copy of Lasson's edition these lines are marked with a pencil. See Internationales Bonhoeffer Forum, 8:99-100. By 1932-33 the 'patripassian' wording, "God, yes God, is dead," had disappeared from German hymnbooks; see the Evangelisches Gesangbuch filr Brandenburg und Pommern (1931), hymn 43, verse 2, and the Evangelisches Gesangbuch erarbeitet im Auf trag der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (1992), hymn 80, verse 2: "0 great desolation! The Son of God lies dead." [Bonhoeffer quoted the German text of the hymn as: "oh grosse Not, Gatt selbst ist tot."] [DSB]
  36. ↑ Cf. the Evangelisches Gesangbuch filr Brandenburg und Pommern, hymn 56, verse 2, and the Evangelisches Gesangbuch (1992): "Had he not risen, the world were undone."
  37. ↑ UK provides evidence for the words in square brackets (5), which are lacking in the 1933 edition.
  38. ↑ The wording of the text here follows the Kautzsch translation (10) in differing from the LB, which is quoted at the beginning of the section ("upon the water").
  39. ↑ Bonhoeffer takes v. 1 (in LB: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And ... ") to be not a heading or superscription for the acts of creation depicted from v. 3 on ("And God spoke: ... ") but the start of creation itself. Hermann Gunkel by contrast regards it as "an impossible interpretation" that God first created the world in a chaotic condition, only then to refashion it as an organism (Urgeschichte, 102). Bonhoeffer's interpretation corresponds to the reflections of Augustine in the twelfth and thirteenth books of his Confessions (see 12/29:294-95 and 13/33:330) about the informitas (formlessness) of what was created out of nothing primo (at first), the materia (matter, material, stuff) that waited to be given form.
  40. ↑ In both the Luther and Kautzsch translations of the Bible the Hebrew word tehom is translated with Tiefe ("deep, depth, abyss" [DSB]). Hans Schmidt proposes the translation "primeval sea" (Paradies und Sundenfall, 36). According to Kautzsch, 10, note d, tehom corresponds to the "Babylonian tiamat:" Cf. Kautzsch, 9 (in the Introduction), where he says that tiamat means the sea which is hostile to the gods on high but which "Marduk, the god of the spring sun," finally conquered. Hans Schmidt mentions the Babylonian story of creation, the Enuma elish (7, note 1). [In the Enuma elish, Tiamat represents salt water or the sea and so primeval chaos. Out of the original chaos which is constituted by her mingling with her mate Apsu (fresh or sweet water) is born the next generation of gods. Marduk, the god of Babylon, eventually kills Tiamat, bringing order to chaos, and thereby also justifying redemptive violence. He then divides her body, leaving half as the sea and using the other half to make the sky. The text of the myth can be found in Barbara Sproul, Primal Myths: Creating the World.] UDEG]
  41. ↑ Hans Schmidt (37) refers in a footnote to Albrecht Dietrich's 1905 book, Mutter Erde: "The cosmogonic myths of many primitive peoples know of a pri-mary couple from whom everything originates: the female is the earth, the male is often 'heaven' or alternatively the sun god. The fructifying element is naturally a sunbeam or rain" (15, note 2). In Gen. 2:6 and even in Gen. 1:2 Schmidt finds a corresponding idea: the "divine storm" passes over the "Mother of All Things, here the tehom" (38).
  42. ↑ Hermann Gunkel, for instance, finds this idea here (Urgeschichte, 102). Kautzsch very tentatively leaves open the possibility that it stands in the background (10, note e). Stiasny quotes Luther as saying that" ... just as a hen sits on the eggs," so the Holy Spirit settles upon the work that had been created out of nothing (Stiasny ed., 4).
  43. ↑ Cf. Augustine's Confessions (13/4:301), according to which the Holy Spirit hovered super aquas,' non ferebatur ab eis" (over the face of the waters,' ... not borne up by them"). FL (alone) records at this point the comment that the creation may not be played off against revelation: "There is a unique problem: creation and revelation. (This is the question about God today.) It concerns at bottom the theologia naturalis ['natural theology'] (gnosis in the sec-ond century)" (10). At this point the second lecture period ended. The third period is dated by HP (11) andFL (11) as November 22,1932. At the beginning of the third period FL reads, "(Must hold together the uniqueness of the revelation in creation and the revelation in Christ - therein lies the difficulty in the world today)" (11). Cf. UK: "Revelation happens only once: creation and the resurrection of]esus are one" (6).
  44. ↑ Cf. Bonhoeffer's discussion of "Definition of 'Being' in Adam" in AB (DBWE 2):136-50.
  45. ↑ HP (11) and EK (4) record that in the lecture Bonhoeffer used the words "the Creator denies the Creator's own self"; the 1933 edition lacks the reflexive.
  46. ↑ In the recapitulation at the beginning of the third lecture period EK adds "That today we can no longer think of form and material as separated is an indication of our origin and our end: we wholly come from God and wholly go to God. On the other hand it is an indication of the Fall; by our existing in a particular way [So-Sein] we have also snatched our being away from God" (4). HP (11) and FL (11) also have the last sentence, almost word for word.
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