Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

Creation is designed origination, by a transcendent and personal God, of that which itself is not God. The universe is related to God as our own volitions are related to ourselves. They are not ourselves, and we are greater than they. Creation is not simply the idea of God, or even the plan of God, but it is the idea externalized, the plan executed; in other words, it implied an exercise, not only of intellect, but also of will, and this will is not an instinctive and unconscious will, but a will that is personal and free. Such exercise of will seems to involve, not self-development, but self-limitation, on the part of God; the transformation of energy into force, and so a beginning of time, with its finite successions. But, whatever the relation of creation to time, creation makes the universe wholly dependent upon God, as its originator.

F. H. Johnson, in Andover Rev., March, 1891:280, and What is Reality, 285—“Creation is designed origination.... Men never could have thought of God as the Creator of the world, were it not that they had first known themselves as creators.” We agree with the doctrine of Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause. Man creates ideas and volitions, without use of preëxisting material. He also indirectly, through these ideas and volitions, creates brain-modifications. This creation, as Johnson has shown, is without hands, yet elaborate, selective, progressive. Schopenhauer: “Matter is nothing more than causation; its true being is its action.”

Prof. C. L. Herrick, Denison Quarterly, 1896:248, and Psychological Review, March, 1899, advocates what he calls dynamism, which he regards as the only alternative to a materialistic dualism which posits matter, and a God above and distinct from matter. He claims that the predicate of reality can apply only to energy. To speak of energy as residing in something is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guest ad infinitum. “Force,” he says, “is energy under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change of pure energy into force is creation—the introduction of resistance. The progressive complication of this interference is evolution—a form of orderly resolution of energy. Substance is pure spontaneous energy. God’s substance is his energy—the infinite and inexhaustible store of spontaneity which makes up his being. The form which self-limitation impresses upon substance, in revealing it in force, is not God, because it no longer possesses the attributes of spontaneity and universality, though it emanates from him. When we speak of energy as self-limited, we simply imply that spontaneity is intelligent. The sum of God’s acts is his being. There is no causa posterior or extranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak of absolute, but not of infinite or immutable, substance. The Universe is but the partial expression of an infinite God.”

Our view of creation is so nearly that of Lotze, that we here condense Ten Broeke’s statement of his philosophy: “Things are concreted laws of action. If the idea of being must include permanence as well as activity, we must say that only the personal truly is. All else is flow and process. We can interpret ontology only from the side of personality. Possibility of interaction requires the dependence of the mutually related many of the system upon an all-embracing, coördinating One. The finite is a mode or phenomenon of the One Being. Mere things are only modes of energizing of the One. Self-conscious personalities are created, posited, and depend on the One in a different way. Interaction of things is immanent action of the One, which the perceiving mind interprets as causal. Real interaction is possible only between the Infinite and the created finite, i. e., self-conscious persons. The finite is not a part of the Infinite, nor does it partly exhaust the stuff of the Infinite. The One, by an act of freedom, posits the many, and the many have their ground and unity in the Will and Thought of the One. Both the finite and the Infinite are free and intelligent.

“Space is not an extra-mental reality, sui generis, nor an order of relations among realities, but a form of dynamic appearance, the ground of which is the fixed orderly changes in reality. So time is the form of change, the subjective interpretation of timeless yet successive changes in reality. So far as God is the ground of the world-process, he is in time. So far as he transcends the world-process in his self-conscious personality, he is not in time. Motion too is the subjective interpretation of changes in things, which changes are determined by the demands of the world-system and the purpose being realized in it. Not atomism, but dynamism, is the truth. Physical phenomena are referable to the activity of the Infinite, which activity is given a substantive character because we think under the form of substance and attribute. Mechanism is compatible with teleology. Mechanism is universal and is necessary to all system. But it is limited by purpose, and by the possible appearance of any new law, force, or act of freedom.

“The soul is not a function of material activities, but is a true reality. The system is such that it can admit new factors, and the soul is one of these possible new factors. The soul is created as substantial reality, in contrast with other elements of the system, which are only phenomenal manifestations of the One Reality. The relation between soul and body is that of interaction between the soul and the universe, the body being that part of the universe which stands in closest relation with the soul (versus Bradley, who holds that ‘body and soul alike are phenomenal arrangements, neither one of which has any title to fact which is not owned by the other’). Thought is a knowledge of reality. We must assume an adjustment between subject and object. This assumption is founded on the postulate of a morally perfect God.” To Lotze, then, the only real creation is that of finite personalities,—matter being only a mode of the divine activity. See Lotze, Microcosmos, and Philosophy of Religion. Bowne, in his Metaphysics and his Philosophy of Theism, is the best expositor of Lotze’s system.

In further explanation of our definition we remark that

(a) Creation is not “production out of nothing,” as if “nothing” were a substance out of which “something” could be formed.

We do not regard the doctrine of Creation as bound to the use of the phrase “creation out of nothing,” and as standing or falling with it. The phrase is a philosophical one, for which we have no Scriptural warrant, and it is objectionable as intimating that “nothing” can itself be an object of thought and a source of being. The germ of truth intended to be conveyed in it can better be expressed in the phrase “without use of preëxisting materials.”

(b) Creation is not a fashioning of preëxisting materials, nor an emanation from the substance of Deity, but is a making of that to exist which once did not exist, either in form or substance.

There is nothing divine in creation but the origination of substance. Fashioning is competent to the creature also. Gassendi said to Descartes that God’s creation, if he is the author of forms but not of substances, is only that of the tailor who clothes a man with his apparel. But substance is not necessarily material. We are to conceive of it rather after the analogy of our own ideas and volitions, and as a manifestation of spirit. Creation is not simply the thought of God, nor even the plan of God, but rather the externalization of that thought and the execution of that plan. Nature is “a great sheet let down from God out of heaven,” and containing “nothing that is common or unclean;” but nature is not God nor a part of God, any more than our ideas and volitions are ourselves or a part of ourselves. Nature is a partial manifestation of God, but it does not exhaust God.

(c) Creation is not an instinctive or necessary process of the divine nature, but is the free act of a rational will, put forth for a definite and sufficient end.

Creation is different in kind from that eternal process of the divine nature in virtue of which we speak of generation and procession. The Son is begotten of the Father, and is of the same essence; the world is created without preëxisting material, is different from God, and is made by God. Begetting is a necessary act; creation is the act of God’s free grace. Begetting is eternal, out of time; creation is in time, or with time.

Studia Biblica, 4:148—“Creation is the voluntary limitation which God has imposed on himself.... It can only be regarded as a Creation of free spirits.... It is a form of almighty power to submit to limitation. Creation is not a development of God, but a circumscription of God.... The world is not the expression of God, or an emanation from God, but rather his self-limitation.”

(d) Creation is the act of the triune God, in the sense that all the persons of the Trinity, themselves uncreated, have a part in it—the Father as the originating, the Son as the mediating, the Spirit as the realizing cause.

That all of God’s creative activity is exercised through Christ has been sufficiently proved in our treatment of the Trinity and of Christ’s deity as an element of that doctrine (see pages 310, 311). We may here refer to the texts which have been previously considered, namely, _John 1:3, 4_—“_All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made. That which hath been made was life in him_”; _1 Cor. 8:6_—“_one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things_”; _Col. 1:16_—“_all things have been created through him, and unto him_”; _Heb. 1:10_—“_Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands._”

The work of the Holy Spirit seems to be that of completing, bringing to perfection. We can understand this only by remembering that our Christian knowledge and love are brought to their consummation by the Holy Spirit, and that he is also the principle of our natural self-consciousness, uniting subject and object in a subject-object. If matter is conceived of as a manifestation of spirit, after the idealistic philosophy, then the Holy Spirit may be regarded as the perfecting and realizing agent in the externalization of the divine ideas. While it was the Word though whom all things were made, the Holy Spirit was the author of life, order, and adornment. Creation is not a mere manufacturing,—it is a spiritual act.

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:120—“The creation of the world cannot be by a Being who is external. Power presupposes an object on which it is exerted. 129—There is in the very nature of God a reason why he should reveal himself in, and communicate himself to, a world of finite existences, or fulfil and realize himself in the being and life of nature and man. His nature would not be what it is if such a world did not exist; something would be lacking to the completeness of the divine being without it. 144—Even with respect to human thought or intelligence, it is mind or spirit which creates the world. It is not a ready-made world on which we look; in perceiving our world we make it. 152-154—We make progress as we cease to think our own thoughts and become media of the universal Intelligence.” While we accept Caird’s idealistic interpretation of creation, we dissent from his intimation that creation is a necessity to God. The trinitarian being of God renders him sufficient to himself, even without creation. Yet those very trinitarian relations throw light upon the method of creation, since they disclose to us the order of all the divine activity. On the definition of Creation, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:11.