Creation and Fall/The Day
From YoKim
- And God separated the light from the darkness and called the light day and the darkness ~ht. So with evening and morning the first day came to be. [1]
THE FIRST FINISHED WORK of God is the day. God creates the day in the beginning. The day bears along everything else; the world exists in the process of one day's turning into another [im Wechsel des Tages]. The day has its own being, its own form, its own power. It is not to be understood in physical terms as the rotation of the earth around the sun or as the change of darkness and light that can be calculated as a period of time; it is something beyond all that, something that determines the essence of the world and of our existence. It is, one might almost say if the term did not suit the context here so badly, what we call a mythological entity. To be sure, the gods of the day and of the night who in pagan belief animate and fill the world are here wholly dethroned; the day nevertheless remains God's first creature, something wondrous and mighty in God's hand.
The day in its creatureliness and wonder is wholly lost to us. We have withdrawn from its power. We no longer allow ourselves to be determined by it. We count up the days and tick them off. We do not accept the day as a gift; we do not live it. Today we do so less than ever, for technology wars against the day. The Bible itself already speaks of days in the way we speak of them, namely, as periods of time that can be counted. But the Bible still knows that days cannot simply be counted up as periods of time determined by the earth's rotation but are instead the great rhythm, the natural dialectic [2] of creation. What the Bible means when it speaks of the creation of the day is that what is formless becomes form in the morning and sinks back into formlessness in the evening, that the clear and distinct existence of things over against one another in the light dissolves into oneness in the dark, that the noise of life dies away in the silence of the night, that expectant wakening in the light is followed by sleep, and that there are times (reaching far beyond the physical day) of wakening and of slumbering in nature, in history, and in the nations [in den Volkern], The Bible means all of that when it speaks of the creation of the day, of the day without humankind, a day that sustains everything, including the fate of humankind.[3] The rhythm that is both rest and movement, that gives and takes and gives again and takes again and so points forever to God's giving and taking, to God's freedom beyond rest and movement - that is what the day is.
When the Bible speaks of six days of creation, the term "day" may well have been meant in the sense of a day of morning and evening. Even so, however, it did not mean such days as periods of time that one could just count up; instead what is being thought of is the power of the day, which alone makes the physical day what it is: the natural dialectic of creation. Where the Bible speaks of the "day," it is not at all the physical problem that it is discussing. Whether the creation occurred in rhythms of millions of years or in single days, this does no damage to biblical thinking. We have no reason to assert the latter or to doubt the former; the question as such does not concern us. That the biblical author, to the extent that the author's word is a human word, was bound by the author's own time, knowledge, and limits is as little disputed as the fact that through this word God, and God alone, tells us about God's creation. God's daily works are the rhythms in which the creation rests.[4]
[edit] Notes
- ↑ The text is close to that of LB; d. Kautzsch, "And it became evening and became morning, a first day" (10).
- ↑ Cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Ich glaube, 55.
- ↑ The German has an untranslatable wordplay, "von dem menschenlosen Tag, del' alles, auch das Menschenlos, tragt," in which los as the suffix in menschenlosen means "without" and as a noun in Menschenlos means "fate, destiny." [DSB].
- ↑ EK reads, "For the Bible thesix days are nothing other than the rhythm which God put in his creation and to which God gave the power to bear along the world" (5).
