Creation and Fall/The Word

From YoKim

And God said: Let there be light, ^[1] and there was light.

THERE ARE MYIHS OF CREATION in which the deity imparts its own nature, so that the world springs from the natural fecundity of the deity. In these myths, then, creation is understood as the self-unfolding of the deity or the deity's giving form to itself or giving birth; the creation itself is a portion of what belongs to God's very nature, and the pangs of nature, in its birth and in its decay, are pangs that the deity itself suffers. ^[2]

In opposition to all such myths, however, the God of the Bible remains wholly God, wholly the Creator, wholly the Lord, and what God has created remains wholly subject and obedient, praising and worshiping God as Lord. God is never the creation but always the Creator. God is not the substance [Substanz] of nature. There is no continuum that ties God to, or unites God with, God's work - except God's word. God said .... The only continuity between God and God's work is the word. That is, 'inherently' ['an sich']^[3] there is no continuum; were the word not there, the world would drop into a bottomless abyss.^[4] This word of God is neither the nature [Natur] nor the essence [Wesen] of God; it is the commandment of God. It is the very God who thinks and creates in this word, but as One who chooses to encounter the creature as its Creator. God's creatorship is not the essence, the substance, but the will or commandment of God; in it God gives us God's very self as God wills. That God creates by the word means that creation is God's order or command, and that this command is free.

God says, God speaks.^[5] This means that God creates in complete freedom. Even in creating, God remains wholly free over against what is created. God is not bound to what is created; instead God binds it to God. God does not enter into what is created as its substance [substantiell]; instead what relates God to what is created is God's command. That is, God is never in the world in any other way than as one who is utterly beyond (jenseits] it. God is, as the word, in the world, because God is the one who is utterly beyond, and God is utterly beyond the world, because God is in the world in the word. Only in the word of creation do we know the Creator; only in the word addressed to us in the middle do we have the beginning. It is not 'from' God's works, then, that we recognize the Creator ^[6] - as though the substance, the nature, or the essence of the work were after all ultimately somehow identical with God's essence or as if there were some kind of continuum between them, such as that of cause and effect. On the contrary we believe that God is the Creator only because by this word God acknowledges these works as God's own, and we believe this word about these works. There is no via eminentiae, negationis, causalitatis! ^[7]

First of all we need to understand in exactly what sense one can say that God speaks. The term word means a spoken word, not a symbol, a meaning, or an idea, but just what it designates. ^[8] If That God creates by speaking means that in God the thought, the name, and the work are in their created reality one. What we must understand, therefore, is that the word does not have 'effects'; instead, God's word is already the work.^[9] What in us breaks hopelessly asunder - the word of command and what takes place - is for God indissolubly one. With God the imperative is the indicative. The indicative does not result from the imperative; it is not the effect of the imperative. Instead it is the imperative.

One cannot call God's act of creating an 'effecting' either, because this term doesnot include within its meaning the character of creation as a command,^[10] the absolute freedom of the act of creation, and the freedom from the creation of the one who creates, all of which expresses itself in the word. The 'word' thus encompasses a specific reality. The 'word' expresses the fact that the act of creation is done out of freedom, just as the taking place of creation expresses the fact that it is done out of omnipotence. Our complete inability to hold the indicative and the imperative together in our minds shows that we no longer live in the unity of the active word of God but are fallen. We can never conceive of any connection between imperative and indicative except as something mediated by a continuum, usually in the framework of a pattern of causality, of cause and effect. This then justifies the inference from the 'effect' to the 'cause' .^[11] That, however, is just what does not apply to the creation. Creation is not an 'effect' of the Creator from which one could read off a necessary connection with the cause (the Creator); instead it is a work created in freedom in the word.

God speaks and by speaking creates. Strangely enough the Bible first says this when it comes to the creation of form, the wresting of form out of the formless. Form corresponds to the word. The word brings into relief; it outlines and limits the individual, the real, the whole. The word summons that which comes to be out of nonbeing, so that it may be.^[12] It is a completely dark, wholly inaccessible background that discloses itself here behind the word of creation. For us it remains simply impossible to comprehend that first, wordless act of creation - because the Creator is One, and we as creatures are created by the Creator's word.^[13] These two moments [Augenblicke] in God are one act; we can express it no other way.

"Let there be light, and there was light." Because it was dark upon the formless deep, the light must create form. As the formless night takes form in the light of morning, as the light unveils and creates form, so that primeval light had to order the chaos and unveil and create form. If the preceding word about the darkness upon the deep was the first thing that pointed to the passion of Jesus Christ, so now the light that frees the subjected, formless deep so that it comes to have its own being points to the light that shines in the darkness.^[14] The light awakens the darkness to its own being and to free praise of the Creator. Without the light we would not exist, because without the light things do not exist over against each other - for then no form exists. But without existing over against one another there is no freely offered worship of God. The deep that was made subject worshiped God in a subject, torpid state that was unfree, a state in which nothing stood over against anything else. In the light, however, form becomes aware of existing over against something else and so becomes aware of its own existence; and it gives all thanks for this to the Creator. The light dispenses to the created form the limpid, clear, and carefree nature of its own being in existing over against the other created form and over against the Creator. That is the work of the first word of the Creator. In the created light the creation sees the Creator's light.^[15]

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ The LB and Kautzsch's version (10) both read: "Let there be light!"
2. ↑ August Dillmann, Genesis, 4-9, and Hermann Gunkel, Urgeschichte, 113-15, provide lists of such cosmogonies.
3. ↑ The phrase an sich, "in itself" or "as such," is an allusion to the term das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself, the thing as such," which Kant used to distinguish the reality of something from what it appears to be, i.e., from the way we experience it. [DSB]
4. ↑ Cf. Emil Kautzsch, who said that biblical cosmogony is quite different from the Babylonian cosmogony in that the Bible sees God as standing "over against the world, which is fundamentally distinct and different from God. . .. God called it into being through a mere word and from the beginning provided it with the laws of its preservation" (9). EK reads, "Were the word not there, the world would be without God - more correctly, would not be. This word [is] thought and deed in one, the beginning" (4). HP (12) andFL (12) read similarly.
5. ↑ The German has just "Gatt spricht." The two English verbs bring out the two nuances here of the single German verb; for it both refers back to "And God said" in Gen. 1:3 and means that "God speaks," as Bonhoeffer discusses here. [DSB]
6. ↑ Cf. Emil Brunner, God and Man, 60-61: "The God who is known from the world is precisely not the creator .... As the creator he is only to be known by the fact that he is not to be known in continuity with the world, but from his Word alone."
7. ↑ According to Bernhard Bartmann, Dogmatik, scholastic theology identified "a threefold procedure on the one way to the knowledge of God: that of affirmation (via affirmationis or causalitas), that of negation (via negationis) and that of perfection (via eminentiae). It wished thereby to say that we are able to discern from created things that God exists as their cause, but is not identical with them; on the contrary God is essentially distinct from them and without any of their imperfections and can be thought of only in terms of the infinite heightening of creaturely perfections" (94). See FL: "The only way that God proceeds [=] by speaking" (13). HP reads, "Not the miracle of law or of beauty" (13) as a way ("via"). According to EK: "The miracles of causality and nature could also be works of the devil; they are not that only because God calls them God's work" (4).
8. ↑ Kautzsch states concerning Gen. 2:20 that "the name, according to the ancient Hebrew way of looking at things, is completely identical with the object that it signifies" (13, note c; cf. Kautzsch, 10, note g, on Gen. 1:5). Brunner comments: "The thing indicated is at all times detachable from the symbol" (God and Man, 55).
9. ↑ HP reads, "The word itself is the. deed" (13). UK (7) and EK (4) have the same, word for word; FL has the same except that it omits "itself' (13).
10. ↑ (Only) FL has a note, in pencil: "Titius" (13). For Arthur Titius, the obvious way in which to differentiate the idea of creation from the idea of the world being formed as an emanation from a primeval being is by the analogy of an act of will. He sees this understanding of creation in terms of a command as most consistently developed in Israelite prophecy. He also refers to Ps. 33:9, which says (as translated in LB) "as he commands, so it stands forth" (see Arthur Titius, Naturund Gott, 111-12).
11. ↑ Cf. the form of oath prescribed by Pope Pius X against modernism (1910): "I profess that God ... can be known with certainty, and that his existence can also be proved ... from the visible works of creation, as the Cause from its effect" (Neuner and Dupuis, eds., The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, 49). Cf. Brunner, God and Man, 61-62: "He creates it out of nothing - that is the stumbling block for all idealism .... He creates the world through his Word - that is the stumbling block for realism, which tries to conceive of the creation by means of the category of causality .... "
12. ↑ See Rom. 4:17.
13. ↑ According to HP, "As creatures we are dependent on his word" (12-13). FL (alone), emphasized with a line down the margin: "The word is the key to understanding election" (14).
14. ↑ See John 1:7.
15. ↑ See Ps. 36:9.