Tag: Creation

Posted on

The Image of God and Freedom

The text of Genesis 1, quite specifically connects existing as God’s image-bearers with the dominion humans possess in creation.  After affirming his intention to make humans in his image, God addresses both the man and woman saying: “. . . have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  Because God created humans in his image they share in God’s dominion over the primal creation and in his complete freedom.  This freedom exists in two horizons: coram Deo (before the face of God) and coram mundo (before the face of the world). 

Coram Deo, although primal humans are free from the law in the manner that Christians would later be free from the law in Christ, such freedom does not mean arbitrary or destructive lawlessness.  As the Formula of Concord correctly asserts, the law is God’s eternal will for his creation (lex aeterna) both before and after the Fall.  Nevertheless, in the state of integrity, God made human beings in the divine image. Therefore, human creatures wholly desired to perform the law.  The law was not contrary to their desires and therefore they did not need to place their desires in subordination to the law since their wills exactly mirrored God’s law.  Rules are only positive demands when they are not followed or if we do not desire to follow them.  If my expectation is for my children to clean their room, and they do it habitually on their own, then there is no reason to make it a family rule that children must clean their rooms each week.  Moreover, when children spontaneously clean their rooms, they are simply doing what they desire and are not subjecting their will to any higher authority than what they naturally desire.  In this scenario, they would clean their rooms out of perfect freedom, because in cleaning they would simply be doing what they wanted to do without any external authority telling them they must or coercing them to do so.   

Because humans share in God’s dominion and are free from the condemnation of the law in the primal state, they also possess a share in God’s rest as exemplified by the primal Sabbath.  Freedom from the law and its condemnation means rest from its demands relentlessly pressing down on humanity and demanding a response.  In the primal week, much as in the work of Christ, work led to rest and rest enabled work.  Regarding the primal week, God’s work in creation actualized the seventh day of rest.  Because God completed his works he could rest and bid his people enter into that rest.  Although a literal day in the primal week, the Sabbath as described by Genesis also has a typological meaning as the text itself indicates.  Genesis 2 gives the Sabbath has no boundaries since the language of evening and morning is intentionally missing, unlike with the other days.  Hence, the Sabbath becomes emblematic of the rest that the people of God enter into. Christians enter this rest when they receive by grace all that God has given them (Heb. 4), namely, the whole of creation along with God’s own self-donating presence with them.  This is true in the old creation within the narrative of the seven days. However, it is also true in the new creation when Christ’s work gives rest to the conscience of Christians suffering under sin and the condemnation of the law: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). 

Continue reading “The Image of God and Freedom”
Posted on

Inerrancy and Science Part 4: Creation Ex Nihilo as the Basis of Science

In the light of the paradigmatic anomalies of irreducible complexity, gene entropy, and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record, macroevolution has more problems as a theory regarding the origins of life than many allow.1

Along similar lines, it often is argued by materialists and atheists that Scripture cannot be truthful on the grounds that it contains supernatural events which, it is alleged, are intrinsically at variance with science and human reason. We have already seen in a previous chapter that this is an absurd argument. Science deals with temporal, finite causes which are observable and quantifiable. Miracles and other supernatural events occur because the supernatural God, who cannot be seen or limited, can transcend the laws of nature as He so chooses. Allowing that miraculous events have occurred in the past does not call into question the rational causal order of the universe. Rather, the entire point of a miracle is that it is an exception to the rule of imminent causation, thereby validating this natural causal order and the ability of the sciences to investigate it.

On another level, though, we should note that the atheist argument for the incompatibility of the Bible and science is ultimately self-contradictory. First, there is a growing body of historical evidence that Christianity and the Bible made the Scientific Revolution possible.2 Only by believing in a God who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) according to a rational plan could science work conceptually.3 Although the Greeks did engage in some science, by the Pax Romana classical science essentially had stalled.4 And science was possible for the Greeks only because their philosophy often posited a rational or divine principle underlying and organizing the chaotic matter of the universe (prime mover, demiurge, logos, etc.). Still, since at its deepest level nature remained chaotic, one could argue that science and rationality could go only so far in explaining it. Only a doctrine of creation ex nihilo as taught by the Bible, where God’s rationality determines nature all the way down to its deepest level, could provide a stable and consistent basis for science.

To be continued…..

Part 1 available here; Part 2 available here; Part 3 available here; and Part 5 available here

[1] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).

[2] Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 121–200.

[3] Stark, For the Glory of God, 176–77.

[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67.

Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 115-116.

Image from Richard Beck, “Creation Ex Nihilo,” Experimental Theology, April 23, 2019, http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2019/04/creation-ex-nihilo.html.

Posted on

Creation by Word

Central to the biblical narrative is the creative and redemptive power of the Word of God.  God calls both the old and new creation into existence by means of his efficacious word (creatio per verbum).  This is why Oswald Bayer, in his exposition of Luther’s doctrine of creation has argued that creation itself is a form of justification.[1]  In calling creation into existence, God judicially affirms its status and identity as his good creation.  Moreover, just as Christians are justified and sanctified by the work of the Word and the Spirt (Jn. 3:5, Eph. 5:26), so too creation comes about by way of God speaking his Word in the power of the Spirit: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Ps. 33:6).  As Luther observes in his Genesis commentary, this makes creatures created words in analogy to God’s eternal created Word: “By speaking, God created all things and worked through his Word.  All his works are words of God, created by the uncreated Word.”[2] 

Much like human words, God’s Word possesses a number of different dimensions.  Scriptures speak of God’s will and reality as being revealed by his Word.  Indeed, the idea of the Word of God as the “testimony” of God’s previous creative and redemptive acts is of central importance in the Bible (Ps. 71:15-18, 119:46, 2 Tim. 1:8, 1 Jn. 1:1-4, Rev. 12:11).[3]  In John’s Gospel, Jesus is consistently described as the true and eternal Word of God because he reveals and represents the Father (Jn. 14:9).  Luther in his own writings referred to this dimension of the divine Word as “Call-Words” (Heissel-Wort).[4]  Call-words are signifiers that signify states of affairs are already an actuality. 

The second dimension of God’s Word is its efficacious nature.  The word functions in such a way so as not merely to testify to states of affairs that already are actualized (testimony), but to call into existence new realities.  Luther called this phenomenon “Deed-Words” (Thettel-Wort).[5]  God calls creation into existence (Gen. 1), Jesus heals by his word, and the word of the disciples forgives and binds sins because of Jesus’ divine promise and command (Jn. 20).  Human language functions analogously when effective statements are made such as: “I pronounce you man and wife” or “I bestow this office upon you.”  This efficacious quality of language is what is encompassed in what modern speech-act theory has parsed into the categories of “Illocutionary” and “Perlocutionary” speech.[6]

[1] Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 95-101.

[2] LW 1:47. See discussion in Bayer’s description of Luther’s position in “Creation as Speech Act.”  Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 101-5. 

[3] Gerhard von Rad described this as the theme of “Recitation.”  See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology: Single Volume Edition, 2 vols. trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Peabody, Mass: Prince Press, 2005). 

[4] David Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 115.

[5] See LW 37:180-88 for Luther on the different dimensions of the word.  On Luther’s position, David Steinmetz writes:“Luther draws a distinction between two kinds of words in order to make clear what the Bible means when it speaks of the Word of God.  There is, of course the Heissel-Wort, the Call-Word, the word which people use when they apply names to things which already exist.  The biblical story of Adam in the garden is a fine example of this.  He names all the biblical creatures.  He does not create them; he only sorts them out and gives them labels.  But there is a second kind of word, the Thettel-Wort or Deed-Word, which not only names but effects what it signifies.  Adam looks around him and says, “There is a cow and an owl and a horse and a mosquito.”  But God looks around him and says, “Let there be light,” and there is light.”  Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” 115.

[6] See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).