Part 4 — Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees.

Section I.—Creation.

I. Definition Of Creation.

By creation we mean that free act of the triune God by which in the beginning for his own glory he made, without the use of preëxisting materials, the whole visible and invisible universe.

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 [pg 372]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.

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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.

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II. Proof of the Doctrine of Creation.

Creation is a truth of which mere science or reason cannot fully assure us. Physical science can observe and record changes, but it knows nothing of origins. Reason cannot absolutely disprove the eternity of matter. For proof of the doctrine of Creation, therefore, we rely wholly upon Scripture. Scripture supplements science, and renders its explanation of the universe complete.

Drummond, in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, claims that atoms, as “manufactured articles,” and the dissipation of energy, prove the creation of the visible from the invisible. See the same doctrine propounded in “The Unseen Universe.” But Sir Charles Lyell tells us: “Geology is the autobiography of the earth,—but like all autobiographies, it does not go back to the beginning.” Hopkins, Yale Lectures on the Scriptural View of Man: “There is nothing a priori against the eternity of matter.”Wardlaw, Syst. Theol., 2:65—“We cannot form any distinct conception of creation out of nothing. The very idea of it might never have occurred to the mind of man, had it not been traditionally handed down as a part of the original revelation to the parents of the race.”

Hartmann, the German philosopher, goes back to the original elements of the universe, and then says that science stands petrified before the question of their origin, as before a Medusa's head. But in the presence of problems, says Dorner, the duty of science is not petrifaction, but solution. This is peculiarly true, if science is, as Hartmann thinks, a complete explanation of the universe. Since science, by her own acknowledgment, furnishes no such explanation of the origin of things, the Scripture revelation with regard to creation meets a demand of human reason, by adding the one fact without which science must forever be devoid of the highest unity and rationality. For advocacy of the eternity of matter, see Martineau, Essays, 1:157-169.

E. H. Johnson, in Andover Review, Nov. 1891:505 sq., and Dec. 1891:592 sq., remarks that evolution can be traced backward to more and more simple elements, to matter without motion and with no quality but being. Now make it still more simple by divesting it of existence, and you get back to the necessity of a Creator. An infinite number of past stages is impossible. There is no infinite number. Somewhere there must be a beginning. We grant to Dr. Johnson that the only alternative to creation is a materialistic dualism, or an eternal matter which is the product of the divine mind and will. The theories of dualism and of creation from eternity we shall discuss hereafter.

1. Direct Scripture Statements.

A. Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To this it has been objected that the verb ברא does not necessarily denote production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1:27 “God created man in his own image”; cf. 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground”; also Ps. 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart”).

“In the first two chapters of Genesis ברא is used (1) of the creation of the universe (1:1); (2) of the creation of the great sea monsters (1:21); (3) of the creation of man (1:27). Everywhere else we read of God's making, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of his forming the beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of his building upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Bara is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of life, and the spiritual world represented by man.”

We grant, in reply, that the argument for absolute creation derived from the mere word ברא is not entirely conclusive. Other considerations in connection with the use of this word, however, seem to render this interpretation [pg 375] of Gen. 1:1 the most plausible. Some of these considerations we proceed to mention.

(a) While we acknowledge that the verb ברא “does not necessarily or invariably denote production without the use of preëxisting materials, we still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of divine agency.” For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of God, and is never accompanied by any accusative denoting material.

No accusative denoting material follows bara, in the passages indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent. See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1:177. The quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy, 67. But E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 88, remarks: “Whether the Scriptures teach the absolute origination of matter—its creation out of nothing—is an open question.... No decisive evidence is furnished by the Hebrew word bara.”

A moderate and scholarly statement of the facts is furnished by Professor W. J. Beecher, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893:807—“To create is to originate divinely.... Creation, in the sense in which the Bible uses the word, does not exclude the use of materials previously existing; for man was taken from the ground (Gen. 2:7), and woman was builded from the rib of a man (2:22). Ordinarily God brings things into existence through the operation of second causes. But it is possible, in our thinking, to withdraw attention from the second causes, and to think of anything as originating simply from God, apart from second causes. To think of a thing thus is to think of it as created. The Bible speaks of Israel as created, of the promised prosperity of Jerusalem as created, of the Ammonite people and the king of Tyre as created, of persons of any date in history as created (Is. 43:1-15; 65:18; Ez. 21:30; 28:13, 15; Ps. 102:18; Eccl. 12:1; Mal. 2:10). Miracles and the ultimate beginnings of second causes are necessarily thought of as creative acts; all other originating of things may be thought of, according to the purpose we have in mind, either as creation or as effected by second causes.”

(b) In the account of the creation, ברא seems to be distinguished from עשה, “to make” either with or without the use of already existing material (ברא לעשות, “created in making” or “made by creation,” in 2:3; and ויעש, of the firmament, in 1:7), and from יצר, “to form” out of such material. (See ויברא, of man regarded as a spiritual being, in 1:27; but ויצר, of man regarded as a physical being, in 2:7.)

See Conant, Genesis, 1; Bible Com., 1:37—“ ‘created to make’ (in Gen. 2:3) = created out of nothing, in order that he might make out of it all the works recorded in the six days.” Over against these texts, however, we must set others in which there appears no accurate distinguishing of these words from one another. Bara is used in Gen. 1:1, asah in Gen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, both yatzar and asah are used in Is. 45:18. In regard to man, in Gen. 1:27 we find bara; in Gen. 1:26 and 9:6, asah; and in Gen. 2:7, yatzar. In Is. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse: “whom I have bara for my glory, I have yatzar, yea, I have asah him.” In Is. 45:12, “asah the earth, and bara man upon it”; but in Gen. 1:1 we read: “God bara the earth,” and in 9:6 “asah man.” Is. 44:2—“the Lord that asah thee (i. e., man) and yatzar thee”; but in Gen. 1:27, God “bara man.” Gen. 5:2—“male and female bara he them.” Gen. 2:22—“the rib asah he a woman”; Gen. 2:7—“he yatzar man”; i. e., bara male and female, yet asah the woman and yatzar the man. Asah is not always used for transform: Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree” in nature—bara; Ps. 51:10—“bara in me a clean heart”; Is. 65:18—God “bara Jerusalem into a rejoicing.”

(c) The context shows that the meaning here is a making without the use of preëxisting materials. Since the earth in its rude, unformed, chaotic condition is still called “the earth” in verse 2, the word ברא in verse 1 cannot refer to any shaping or fashioning of the elements, but must signify the calling of them into being.

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Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absolute berashith, ‘in the beginning,’ the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.” Verse 2 cannot be the beginning of a history, for it begins with “and.”Delitzsch says of the expression “the earth was without form and void”: “From this it is evident that the void and formless state of the earth was not uncreated or without a beginning. ... It is evident that ‘the heaven and earth’ as God created them in the beginning were not the well-ordered universe, but the world in its elementary form.”

(d) The fact that ברא may have had an original signification of “cutting,” “forming,” and that it retains this meaning in the Piel conjugation, need not prejudice the conclusion thus reached, since terms expressive of the most spiritual processes are derived from sensuous roots. If ברא does not signify absolute creation, no word exists in the Hebrew language that can express this idea.

(e) But this idea of production without the use of preëxisting materials unquestionably existed among the Hebrews. The later Scriptures show that it had become natural to the Hebrew mind. The possession of this idea by the Hebrews, while it is either not found at all or is very dimly and ambiguously expressed in the sacred books of the heathen, can be best explained by supposing that it was derived from this early revelation in Genesis.

E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“Rom. 4:17 tells us that the faith of Abraham, to whom God had promised a son, grasped the fact that God calls into existence ‘the things that are not.’ This may be accepted as Paul's interpretation of the first verse of the Bible.” It is possible that the heathen had occasional glimpses of this truth, though with no such clearness as that with which it was held in Israel. Perhaps we may say that through the perversions of later nature-worship something of the original revelation of absolute creation shines, as the first writing of a palimpsest appears faintly through the subsequent script with which it has been overlaid. If the doctrine of absolute creation is found at all among the heathen, it is greatly blurred and obscured. No one of the heathen books teaches it as do the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. Yet it seems as if this “One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.”

Bib. Com., 1:31—“Perhaps no other ancient language, however refined and philosophical, could have so dearly distinguished the different acts of the Maker of all things [as the Hebrew did With its four different words], and that because all heathen philosophy esteemed matter to be eternal and uncreated.” Prof. E. D. Burton: “Brahmanism, and the original religion of which Zoroastrianism was a reformation, were Eastern and Western divisions of a primitive Aryan, and probably monotheistic, religion. The Vedas, which represented the Brahmanism, leave it a question whence the world came, whether from God by emanation, or by the shaping of material eternally existent. Later Brahmanism is pantheistic, and Buddhism, the Reformation of Brahmanism, is atheistic.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:471, and Mosheim's references in Cudworth's Intellectual System, 3:140.

We are inclined still to hold that the doctrine of absolute creation was known to no other ancient nation besides the Hebrews. Recent investigations, however, render this somewhat more doubtful than it once seemed to be. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 142, 143, finds creation among the early Babylonians. In his Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397, he says: “The elements of Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself was a Babylonian conception; but the spirit which inspires the cosmology is the antithesis to that which inspired the cosmology of Babylonia. Between the polytheism of Babylonia and the monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which cannot be spanned. So soon as we have a clear monotheism, absolute creation is a corollary. As the monotheistic idea is corrupted, creation gives place to pantheistic transformation.”

It is now claimed by others that Zoroastrianism, the Vedas, and the religion of the ancient Egyptians had the idea of absolute creation. On creation in the Zoroastrian system, see our treatment of Dualism, page 382. Vedic hymn in Rig Veda, 10:9, quoted by J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:205—“Originally this universe was soul [pg 377]only; nothing else whatsoever existed, active or inactive. He thought: ‘I will create worlds’; thus he created these various worlds: earth, light, mortal being, and the waters.” Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 216-222, speaks of a papyrus on the staircase of the British Museum, which reads: “The great God, the Lord of heaven and earth, who made all things which are ... the almighty God, self-existent, who made heaven and earth; ... the heaven was yet uncreated, uncreated was the earth; thou hast put together the earth; ... who made all things, but was not made.”

But the Egyptian religion in its later development, as well as Brahmanism, was pantheistic, and it is possible that all the expressions we have quoted are to be interpreted, not as indicating a belief in creation out of nothing, but as asserting emanation, or the taking on by deity of new forms and modes of existence. On creation in heathen systems, see Pierret, Mythologie, and answer to it by Maspero; Hymn to Amen-Rha, in “Records of the Past”; G. C. Müller, Literature of Greece, 87, 88; George Smith, Chaldean Genesis, chapters 1, 3, 5 and 6; Dillmann, Com. on Genesis, 6th edition, Introd., 5-10; LeNormant, Hist. Ancienne de l'Orient, 1:17-26; 5:238; Otto Zöckler, art.: Schöpfung, in Herzog and Plitt, Encyclop.; S. B. Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Beliefs, 281-292.

B. Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear” = the world was not made out of sensible and preëxisting material, but by the direct fiat of omnipotence (see Alford, and Lünemann, Meyer's Com. in loco).

Compare 2 Maccabees 7:28—ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν αὐτὰ ὁ Θεός. This the Vulgate translated by “quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus,” and from the Vulgate the phrase “creation out of nothing” is derived. Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, points out that Wisdom 11:17 has ἐξ ἀμόρφου ὕλης, interprets by this the ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων in 2 Maccabees, and denies that this last refers to creation out of nothing. But we must remember that the later Apocryphal writings were composed under the influence of the Platonic philosophy; that the passage in Wisdom may be a rationalistic interpretation of that in Maccabees; and that even if it were independent, we are not to assume a harmony of view in the Apocrypha. 2 Maccabees 7:28 must stand by itself as a testimony to Jewish belief in creation without use of preëxisting material,—belief which can be traced to no other source than the Old Testament Scriptures. Compare Ex. 34:10—“I will do marvels such as have not been wrought [marg. “created”] in all the earth”; Num. 16:30—“if Jehovah make a new thing” [marg. “create a creation”]; Is. 4:5—“Jehovah will create ... a cloud and smoke”; 41:20—“the Holy One of Israel hath created it”; 45:7, 8—“I form the light, and create darkness”; 57:19—“I create the fruit of the lips”; 65:17—“I create new heavens and a new earth”; Jer. 31:22—“Jehovah hath created a new thing.”

Rom. 4:17—“God, who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were”; 1 Cor. 1:28—“things that are not” [did God choose] “that he might bring to naught the things that are”; 2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness”—created light without preëxisting material,—for darkness is no material; Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and he is before all things”; so also Ps. 33:9—“he spake, and it was done”; 148:5—“he commanded, and they were created.” See Philo, Creation of the World, chap. 1-7, and Life of Moses, book 3, chap. 36—“He produced the most perfect work, the Cosmos, out of non-existence (τοῦ μὴ ὄντος) into being (εἰς τὸ εἶναι).” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 94—“We have no reason to believe that the Hebrew mind had the idea of creation out of invisible materials. But creation out of visible materials is in Hebrews 11:3 expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use of anypreëxisting materials.”

2. Indirect evidence from Scripture.

(a) The past duration of the world is limited; (b) before the world began to be, each of the persons of the Godhead already existed; (c) the origin of the universe is ascribed to God, and to each of the persons of the Godhead. These representations of Scripture are not only most consistent with the view that the universe was created by God without use of preëxisting material, but they are inexplicable upon any other hypothesis.

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(a) Mark 13:19—“from the beginning of the creation which God created until now”; John 17:5—“before the world was”; Eph. 1:4—“before the foundation of the world.” (b) Ps. 90:2—“Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God”; Prov. 8:23—“I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, Before the earth was”; John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word”; Col. 1:17—“he is before all things”; Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit” (see Tholuck, Com. in loco). (c) Eph. 3:9—“God who created all things”; Rom. 11:36—“of him ... are all things”; 1 Cor. 8:6—“one God, the Father, of whom we are all things ... one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; John 1:3—“all things were made through him”; Col 1:16—“in him were all things created ... all things have been created through him, and unto him”; Heb. 1:2—“through whom also he made the worlds”; Gen. 1:2—“and the Spirit of God moved [marg. “was brooding”] upon the face of the waters.” From these passages we may also infer that (1) all things are absolutely dependent upon God; (2) God exercises supreme control over all things; (3) God is the only infinite Being; (4) God alone is eternal; (5) there is no substance out of which God creates; (6) things do not proceed from God by necessary emanation; the universe has its source and originator in God's transcendent and personal will. See, on this indirect proof of creation, Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:231. Since other views, however, have been held to be more rational, we proceed to the examination of

III. Theories which oppose Creation.

1. Dualism.

Of dualism there are two forms:

A. That which holds to two self-existent principles, God and matter. These are distinct from and coëternal with each other. Matter, however, is an unconscious, negative, and imperfect substance, which is subordinate to God and is made the instrument of his will. This was the underlying principle of the Alexandrian Gnostics. It was essentially an attempt to combine with Christianity the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of the ὕλη. In this way it was thought to account for the existence of evil, and to escape the difficulty of imagining a production without use of preëxisting material. Basilides (flourished 125) and Valentinus (died 160), the representatives of this view, were influenced also by Hindu philosophy, and their dualism is almost indistinguishable from pantheism. A similar view has been held in modern times by John Stuart Mill and apparently by Frederick W. Robertson.

Dualism seeks to show how the One becomes the many, how the Absolute gives birth to the relative, how the Good can consist with evil. The ὕλη of Plato seems to have meant nothing but empty space, whose not-being, or merely negative existence, prevented the full realization of the divine ideas. Aristotle regarded the ὕλη as a more positive cause of imperfection,—it was like the hard material which hampers the sculptor in expressing his thought. The real problem for both Plato and Aristotle was to explain the passage from pure spiritual existence to that which is phenomenal and imperfect, from the absolute and unlimited to that which exists in space and time. Finiteness, instead of being created, was regarded as having eternal existence and as limiting all divine manifestations. The ὕλη, from being a mere abstraction, became either a negative or a positive source of evil. The Alexandrian Jews, under the influence of Hellenic culture, sought to make this dualism explain the doctrine of creation.

Basilides and Valentinus, however, were also under the influence of a pantheistic philosophy brought in from the remote East—the philosophy of Buddhism, which taught that the original Source of all was a nameless Being, devoid of all qualities, and so, indistinguishable from Nothing. From this Being, which is Not-being, all existing things proceed. Aristotle and Hegel similarly taught that pure Being = Nothing. But inasmuch as the object of the Alexandrian philosophers was to show how something could be originated, they were obliged to conceive of the primitive Nothing as capable of such originating. They, moreover, in the absence of any conception of absolute creation, were compelled to conceive of a material which could be fashioned. Hence the Void, the Abyss, is made to take the place of matter. If it be said that they did [pg 379]not conceive of the Void or the Abyss as substance, we reply that they gave it just as substantial existence as they gave to the first Cause of things, which, in spite of their negative descriptions of it, involved Will and Design. And although they do not attribute to this secondary substance a positive influence for evil, they notwithstanding see in it the unconscious hinderer of all good.

Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“In the Alexandrian Gnosis ... the stream of being in its ever outward flow at length comes in contact with dead matter which thus receives animation and becomes a living source of evil.” Windelband, Hist. Philosophy, 129, 144, 239—“With Valentinus, side by side with the Deity poured forth into the Pleroma or Fulness of spiritual forms, appears the Void, likewise original and from eternity; beside Form appears matter; beside the good appears the evil.”Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 139—“The Platonic theory of an inert, semi-existent matter, ... was adopted by the Gnosis of Egypt.... 187—Valentinus does not content himself, like Plato, ... with assuming as the germ of the natural world an unformed matter existing from all eternity.... The whole theory may be described as a development, in allegorical language of the pantheistic hypothesis which in its outline had been previously adopted by Basilides.” A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:181-192, calls the philosophy of Basilides “fundamentally pantheistic.” “Valentinus,” he says, “was not so careful to insist on the original non-existence of God and everything.” We reply that even to Basilides the Non-existent One is endued with power; and this power accomplishes nothing until it comes in contact with things non-existent, and out of them fashions the seed of the world. The things non-existent are as substantial as is the Fashioner, and they imply both objectivity and limitation.

Lightfoot, Com. on Colossians, 76-113, esp. 82, has traced a connection between the Gnostic doctrine, the earlier Colossian heresy, and the still earlier teaching of the Essenes of Palestine. All these were characterized by (1) the spirit of caste or intellectual exclusiveness; (2) peculiar tenets as to creation and as to evil; (3) practical asceticism. Matter is evil and separates man from God; hence intermediate beings between man and God as objects of worship; hence also mortification of the body as a means of purifying man from sin. Paul's antidote for both errors was simply the person of Christ, the true and only Mediator and Sanctifier. See Guericke, Church History, 1:161.

Harnack, Hist. Dogma, 1:128—“The majority of Gnostic undertakings may be viewed as attempts to transform Christianity into a theosophy.... In Gnosticism the Hellenic spirit desired to make itself master of Christianity, or more correctly, of the Christian communities.”... 232—Harnack represents one of the fundamental philosophic doctrines of Gnosticism to be that of the Cosmos as a mixture of matter with divine sparks, which has arisen from a descent of the latter into the former [Alexandrian Gnosticism], or, as some say, from the perverse, or at least merely permitted undertaking of a subordinate spirit [Syrian Gnosticism]. We may compare the Hebrew Sadducee with the Greek Epicurean; the Pharisee with the Stoic; the Essene with the Pythagorean. The Pharisees overdid the idea of God's transcendence. Angels must come in between God and the world. Gnostic intermediaries were the logical outcome. External works of obedience were alone valid. Christ preached, instead of this, a religion of the heart. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:52—“The rejection of animal sacrifices and consequent abstaining from temple-worship on the part of the Essenes, which seems out of harmony with the rest of their legal obedience, is most simply explained as the consequence of their idea that to bring to God a bloody animal offering was derogatory to his transcendental character. Therefore they interpreted the O. T. command in an allegorizing way.”

Lyman Abbott: “The Oriental dreams; the Greek defines; the Hebrew acts. All these influences met and intermingled at Alexandria. Emanations were mediations between the absolute, unknowable, all-containing God, and the personal, revealed and holy God of Scripture. Asceticism was one result: matter is undivine, therefore get rid of it. License was another result: matter is undivine, therefore disregard it—there is no disease and there is no sin—the modern doctrine of Christian Science.”Kedney, Christian Doctrine, 1:360-373; 2:354, conceives of the divine glory as an eternal material environment of God, out of which the universe is fashioned.

The author of “The Unseen Universe” (page 17) wrongly calls John Stuart Mill a Manichæan. But Mill disclaims belief in the personality of this principle that resists and limits God,—see his posthumous Essays on Religion, 176-195. F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 4-16—“Before the creation of the world all was chaos ... but with the creation, order began.... God did not cease from creation, for creation is going on [pg 380]every day. Nature is God at work. Only after surprising changes, as in spring-time, do we say figuratively, ‘God rests.’ ” See also Frothingham, Christian Philosophy.

With regard to this view, we remark:

(a) The maxim ex nihilo nihil fit, upon which it rests, is true only in so far as it asserts that no event takes place without a cause. It is false, if it mean that nothing can ever be made except out of material previously existing. The maxim is therefore applicable only to the realm of second causes, and does not bar the creative power of the great first Cause. The doctrine of creation does not dispense with a cause; on the other hand, it assigns to the universe a sufficient cause in God.

Lucretius: “Nihil posse creari De nihilo, neque quod genitum est ad nihil revocari.”Persius: “Gigni De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti.” Martensen, Dogmatics, 116—“The nothing, out of which God creates the world, is the eternal possibilities of his will, which are the sources of all the actualities of the world.” Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:292—“When therefore it is argued that the creation of something from nothing is unthinkable and is therefore peremptorily to be rejected, the argument seems to me to be defective. The process is thinkable, but not imaginable, conceivable but not probable.” See Cudworth, Intellectual System, 3:81 sq. Lipsius, Dogmatik, 288, remarks that the theory of dualism is quite as difficult as that of absolute creation. It holds to a point of time when God began to fashion preëxisting material, and can give no reason why God did not do it before, since there must always have been in him an impulse toward this fashioning.

(b) Although creation without the use of preëxisting material is inconceivable, in the sense of being unpicturable to the imagination, yet the eternity of matter is equally inconceivable. For creation without preëxisting material, moreover, we find remote analogies in our own creation of ideas and volitions, a fact as inexplicable as God's bringing of new substances into being.

Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 371, 372—“We have to a certain extent an aid to the thought of absolute creation in our own free volition, which, as absolutely originating and determining, may be taken as the type to us of the creative act.” We speak of “the creative faculty” of the artist or poet. We cannot give reality to the products of our imaginations, as God can to his. But if thought were only substance, the analogy would be complete. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“Our thoughts and volitions are created ex nihilo, in the sense that one thought is not made out of another thought, nor one volition out of another volition.” So created substance may be only the mind and will of God in exercise, automatically in matter, freely in the case of free beings (see pages 90, 105-110, 383, and in our treatment of Preservation).

Beddoes: “I have a bit of Fiat in my soul, And can myself create my little world.”Mark Hopkins: “Man is an image of God as a creator.... He can purposely create, or cause to be, a future that, but for him, would not have been.” E. C. Stedman, Nature of Poetry, 223—“So far as the Poet, the artist, is creative, he becomes a sharer of the divine imagination and power, and even of the divine responsibility.” Wordsworth calls the poet a “serene creator of immortal things.” Imagination, he says, is but another name for “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.” “If we are ‘gods’ (Ps. 82:6), that part of the Infinite which is embodied in us must partake to a limited extent of his power to create.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 289—“Will, the expression of personality, both as originating resolutions and moulding existing material into form, is the nearest approach in thought which we can make to divine creation.”

Creation is not simply the thought of God,—it is also the will of God—thought in expression, reason externalized. Will is creation out of nothing, in the sense that there is no use of preëxisting material. In man's exercise of the creative imagination there is will, as well as intellect. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 256, points out that we can be original in (1) the style or form of our work; (2) in the selection of the objects we imitate; (3) in the invention of relatively novel combinations of material. Style, subject, combination, then, comprise the methods of our originality. Our new conceptions [pg 381]of nature as the expression of the divine mind and will bring creation more within our comprehension than did the old conception of the world as substance capable of existing apart from God. Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena, 294, thinks that we have power to create visible phantasms, or embodied thoughts, that can be subjectively perceived by others. See also Hudson's Scientific Demonstration of Future Life, 153. He defines genius as the result of the synchronous action of the objective and subjective faculties. Jesus of Nazareth, in his judgment, was a wonderful psychic. Intuitive perception and objective reason were with him always in the ascendant. His miracles were misinterpreted psychic phenomena. Jesus never claimed that his works were outside of natural law. All men have the same intuitional power, though in differing degrees.

We may add that the begetting of a child by man is the giving of substantial existence to another. Christ's creation of man may be like his own begetting by the Father. Behrends: “The relation between God and the universe is more intimate and organic than that between an artist and his work. The marble figure is independent of the sculptor the moment it is completed. It remains, though he die. But the universe would vanish in the withdrawal of the divine presence and indwelling. If I were to use any figure, it would be that of generation. The immanence of God is the secret of natural permanence and uniformity. Creation is primarily a spiritual act. The universe is not what we see and handle. The real universe is an empire of energies, a hierarchy of correlated forces, whose reality and unity are rooted in the rational will of God perpetually active in preservation. But there is no identity of substance, nor is there any division of the divine substance.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 36—“A mind is conceivable which should create its objects outright by pure self-activity and without dependence on anything beyond itself. Such is our conception of the Creator's relation to his objects. But this is not the case with us except to a very slight extent. Our mental life itself begins, and we come only gradually to a knowledge of things, and of ourselves. In some sense our objects are given; that is, we cannot have objects at will or vary their properties at our pleasure. In this sense we are passive in knowledge, and no idealism can remove this fact. But in some sense also our objects are our own products; for an existing object becomes an object for us only as we think it, and thus make it our object. In this sense, knowledge is an active process, and not a passive reception of readymade information from without.” Clarke, Self and the Father, 38—“Are we humiliated by having data for our imaginations to work upon? by being unable to create material? Not unless it be a shame to be second to the Creator.” Causation is as mysterious as Creation. Balzac lived with his characters as actual beings. On the Creative Principle, see N. R. Wood, The Witness of Sin, 114-135.

(c) It is unphilosophical to postulate two eternal substances, when one self-existent Cause of all things will account for the facts. (d) It contradicts our fundamental notion of God as absolute sovereign to suppose the existence of any other substance to be independent of his will. (e) This second substance with which God must of necessity work, since it is, according to the theory, inherently evil and the source of evil, not only limits God's power, but destroys his blessedness. (f) This theory does not answer its purpose of accounting for moral evil, unless it be also assumed that spirit is material,—in which case dualism gives place to materialism.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 121—“God becomes a mere demiurge, if nature existed before spirit. That spirit only who in a perfect sense is able to commence his work of creation can have power to complete it.” If God does not create, he must use what material he finds, and this working with intractable material must be his perpetual sorrow. Such limitation in the power of the deity seemed to John Stuart Mill the best explanation of the existing imperfections of the universe.

The other form of dualism is:

B. That which holds to the eternal existence of two antagonistic spirits, one evil and the other good. In this view, matter is not a negative and [pg 382] imperfect substance which nevertheless has self-existence, but is either the work or the instrument of a personal and positively malignant intelligence, who wages war against all good. This was the view of the Manichæans. Manichæanism is a compound of Christianity and the Persian doctrine of two eternal and opposite intelligences. Zoroaster, however, held matter to be pure, and to be the creation of the good Being. Mani apparently regarded matter as captive to the evil spirit, if not absolutely his creation.

The old story of Mani's travels in Greece is wholly a mistake. Guericke, Church History, 1:185-187, maintains that Manichæanism contains no mixture of Platonic philosophy, has no connection with Judaism, and as a sect came into no direct relations with the Catholic church. Harnoch, Wegweiser, 22, calls Manichæanism a compound of Gnosticism and Parseeism. Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Mani und die Manichäer, regards Manichæanism as the fruit, acme, and completion of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a heresy in the church; Manichæanism, like New Platonism, was an anti-church. J. P. Lange: “These opposing theories represent various pagan conceptions of the world, which, after the manner of palimpsests, show through Christianity.” Isaac Taylor speaks of “the creator of the carnivora”; and some modern Christians practically regard Satan as a second and equal God.

On the Religion of Zoroaster, see Haug, Essays on Parsees, 139-161, 302-309; also our quotations on pp. 347-349; Monier Williams, in 19th Century, Jan. 1881:155-177—Ahura Mazda was the creator of the universe. Matter was created by him, and was neither identified with him nor an emanation from him. In the divine nature there were two opposite, but not opposing, principles or forces, called “twins”—the one constructive, the other destructive; the one beneficent, the other maleficent. Zoroaster called these “twins” also by the name of “spirits,” and declared that “these two spirits created, the one the reality, the other the non-reality.” Williams says that these two principles were conflicting only in name. The only antagonism was between the resulting good and evil brought about by the free agent, man. See Jackson, Zoroaster.

We may add that in later times this personification of principles in the deity seems to have become a definite belief in two opposing personal spirits, and that Mani, Manes, or Manichæus adopted this feature of Parseeism, with the addition of certain Christian elements. Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:470—“The doctrine of the Manichæans was that creation was the work of Satan.” See also Gieseler, Church History, 1:203; Neander, Church History, 1:478-505; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Dualism; and especially Baur, Das manichäische Religionssystem. A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:194—“Manichæism is Gnosticism, with its Christian elements reduced to a minimum, and the Zoroastrian, old Babylonian, and other Oriental elements raised to the maximum. Manichæism is Oriental dualism under Christian names, the Christian names employed retaining scarcely a trace of their proper meaning. The most fundamental thing in Manichæism is its absolute dualism. The kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness with their rulers stand eternally opposed to each other.”

Of this view we need only say that it is refuted (a) by all the arguments for the unity, omnipotence, sovereignty, and blessedness of God; (b) by the Scripture representations of the prince of evil as the creature of God and as subject to God's control.

Scripture passages showing that Satan is God's creature or subject are the following: Col. 1:16—“for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers”; cf. Eph. 6:12—“our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”; 2 Pet. 2:4—“God spared not the angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment”; Rev. 20:2—“laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan”; 10—“and the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.”

The closest analogy to Manichæan dualism is found in the popular conception of the devil held by the mediæval Roman church. It is a question whether he was regarded as a rival or as a servant of God. Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself. Moral evil is reality, and there is that element of truth in Parseeism. But there is no reconciliation, [pg 383]nor is it shown that all things work together for good. E. H. Johnson: “This theory sets up matter as a sort of deity, a senseless idol endowed with the truly divine attribute of self-existence. But we can acknowledge but one God. To erect matter into an eternal Thing, independent of the Almighty but forever beside him, is the most revolting of all theories.” Tennyson, Unpublished Poem (Life, 1:314)—“Oh me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser God had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would Till the high God behold it from beyond, And enter it and make it beautiful?”

E. G. Robinson: “Evil is not eternal; if it were, we should be paying our respects to it.... There is much Manichæanism in modern piety. We would influence soul through the body. Hence sacramentarianism and penance. Puritanism is theological Manichæanism. Christ recommended fasting because it belonged to his age. Christianity came from Judaism. Churchism comes largely from reproducing what Christ did. Christianity is not perfunctory in its practices. We are to fast only when there is good reason for it.” L. H. Mills, New World, March, 1895:51, suggests that Phariseeism may be the same with Farseeism, which is but another name for Parseeism. He thinks that Resurrection, Immortality, Paradise, Satan, Judgment, Hell, came from Persian sources, and gradually drove out the old Sadduceean simplicity. Pfleiderer, Philos, Religion, 1:206—“According to the Persian legend, the first human pair was a good creation of the all-wise Spirit, Ahura, who had breathed into them his own breath. But soon the primeval men allowed themselves to be seduced by the hostile Spirit Angromainyu into lying and idolatry, whereby the evil spirits obtained power over them and the earth and spoiled the good creation.”

Disselhoff, Die klassische Poesie und die göttliche Offenbarung, 13-25—“The Gathas of Zoroaster are the first poems of humanity. In them man rouses himself to assert his superiority to nature and the spirituality of God. God is not identified with nature. The impersonal nature-gods are vain idols and are causes of corruption. Their worshippers are servants of falsehood. Ahura-Mazda (living-wise) is a moral and spiritual personality. Ahriman is equally eternal but not equally powerful. Good has not complete victory over evil. Dualism is admitted and unity is lost. The conflict of faiths leads to separation. While one portion of the race remains in the Iranian highlands to maintain man's freedom and independence of nature, another portion goes South-East to the luxuriant banks of the Ganges to serve the deified forces of nature. The East stands for unity, as the West for duality. Yet Zoroaster in the Gathas is almost deified; and his religion, which begins by giving predominance to the good Spirit, ends by being honey-combed with nature-worship.”

2. Emanation.

This theory holds that the universe is of the same substance with God, and is the product of successive evolutions from his being. This was the view of the Syrian Gnostics. Their system was an attempt to interpret Christianity in the forms of Oriental theosophy. A similar doctrine was taught, in the last century, by Swedenborg.

We object to it on the following grounds: (a) It virtually denies the infinity and transcendence of God,—by applying to him a principle of evolution, growth, and progress which belongs only to the finite and imperfect. (b) It contradicts the divine holiness,—since man, who by the theory is of the substance of God, is nevertheless morally evil. (c) It leads logically to pantheism,—since the claim that human personality is illusory cannot be maintained without also surrendering belief in the personality of God.

Saturninus of Antioch, Bardesanes of Edessa, Tatian of Assyria, Marcion of Sinope, all of the second century, were representatives of this view. Blunt, Dict. of Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Emanation: “The divine operation was symbolized by the image of the rays of light proceeding from the sun, which were most intense when nearest to the luminous substance of the body of which they formed a part, but which decreased in intensity as they receded from their source, until at last they disappeared altogether in darkness. So the spiritual effulgence of the Supreme Mind formed a world of spirit, [pg 384]the intensity of which varied inversely with its distance from its source, until at length it vanished in matter. Hence there is a chain of ever expanding Æons which are increasing attenuations of his substance and the sum of which constitutes his fulness, i. e., the complete revelation of his hidden being.” Emanation, from e, and manare, to flow forth. Guericke, Church History, 1:160—“many flames from one light ... the direct contrary to the doctrine of creation from nothing.” Neander, Church History, 1:372-74. The doctrine of emanation is distinctly materialistic. We hold, on the contrary, that the universe is an expression of God, but not an emanation from God.

On the difference between Oriental emanation and eternal generation, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:470, and History Doctrine, 1:11-18, 318, note—“1. That which is eternally generated is infinite, not finite; it is a divine and eternal person who is not the world or any portion of it. In the Oriental schemes, emanation is a mode of accounting for the origin of the finite. But eternal generation still leaves the finite to be originated. The begetting of the Son is the generation of an infinite person who afterwards creates the finite universe de nihilo. 2. Eternal generation has for its result a subsistence or personal hypostasis totally distinct from the world; but emanation In relation to the deity yields only an impersonal or at most a personified energy or effluence which is one of the powers or principles of nature—a mere anima mundi.” The truths of which emanation was the perversion and caricature were therefore the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit.

Principal Tulloch, in Encyc. Brit., 10:704—“All the Gnostics agree in regarding this world as not proceeding immediately from the Supreme Being.... The Supreme Being is regarded as wholly inconceivable and indescribable—as the unfathomable Abyss (Valentinus)—the Unnameable (Basilides). From this transcendent source existence springs by emanation in a series of spiritual powers.... The passage from the higher spiritual world to the lower material one is, on the one hand, apprehended as a mere continued degeneracy from the Source of Life, at length terminating in the kingdom of darkness and death—the bordering chaos surrounding the kingdom of light. On the other hand the passage is apprehended in a more precisely dualistic form, as a positive invasion of the kingdom of light by a self-existent kingdom of darkness. According as Gnosticism adopted one or other of these modes of explaining the existence of the present world, it fell into the two great divisions which, from their places of origin, have received the respective names of the Alexandrian and Syrian Gnosis. The one, as we have seen, presents more a Western, the other more an Eastern type of speculation. The dualistic element in the one case scarcely appears beneath the pantheistic, and bears resemblance to the Platonic notion of the ὕλη, a mere blank necessity, a limitless void. In the other case, the dualistic element is clear and prominent, corresponding to the Zarathustrian doctrine of an active principle of evil as well as of good—of a kingdom of Ahriman, as well as a kingdom of Ormuzd. In the Syrian Gnosis ... there appears from the first a hostile principle of evil in collision with the good.”

We must remember that dualism is an attempt to substitute for the doctrine of absolute creation, a theory that matter and evil are due to something negative or positive outside of God. Dualism is a theory of origins, not of results. Keeping this in mind, we may call the Alexandrian Gnostics dualists, while we regard emanation as the characteristic teaching of the Syrian Gnostics. These latter made matter to be only an efflux from God and evil only a degenerate form of good. If the Syrians held the world to be independent of God, this independence was conceived of only as a later result or product, not as an original fact. Some like Saturninus and Bardesanes verged toward Manichæan doctrine; others like Tatian and Marcion toward Egyptian dualism; but all held to emanation as the philosophical explanation of what the Scriptures call creation. These remarks will serve as qualification and criticism of the opinions which we proceed to quote.

Sheldon, Ch. Hist., 1:206—“The Syrians were in general more dualistic than the Alexandrians. Some, after the fashion of the Hindu pantheists, regarded the material realm as the region of emptiness and illusion, the void opposite of the Pleroma, that world of spiritual reality and fulness; others assigned a more positive nature to the material, and regarded it as capable of an evil aggressiveness even apart from any quickening by the incoming of life from above.” Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 139—“Like Saturninus, Bardesanes is said to have combined the doctrine of the malignity of matter with that of an active principle of evil; and he connected together these two usually antagonistic theories by maintaining that the inert matter was co-eternal with God, while Satan as the active principle of evil was produced from matter (or, according to another statement, co-eternal with it), and acted in conjunction with it. 142—The [pg 385]feature which is usually selected as characteristic of the Syrian Gnosis is the doctrine of dualism; that is to say, the assumption of the existence of two active and independent principles, the one of good, the other of evil. This assumption was distinctly held by Saturninus and Bardesanes ... in contradistinction to the Platonic theory of an inert semi-existent matter, which was adopted by the Gnosis of Egypt. The former principle found its logical development in the next century in Manichæaism; the latter leads with almost equal certainty to Pantheism.”

A. H. Newman, Ch. History, 1:192—“Marcion did not speculate as to the origin of evil. The Demiurge and his kingdom are apparently regarded as existing from eternity. Matter he regarded as intrinsically evil, and he practised a rigid asceticism.”Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 210—“Marcion did not, with the majority of the Gnostics, regard the Demiurge as a derived and dependent being, whose imperfection is due to his remoteness from the highest Cause; nor yet, according to the Persian doctrine, did he assume an eternal principle of pure malignity. His second principle is independent of and co-eternal with, the first; opposed to it however, not as evil to good, but as imperfection to perfection, or, as Marcion expressed it, as a just to a good being. 218—Non-recognition of any principle of pure evil. Three principles only: the Supreme God, the Demiurge, and the eternal Matter, the two latter being imperfect but not necessarily evil. Some of the Marcionites seem to have added an evil spirit as a fourth principle.... Marcion is the least Gnostic of all the Gnostics.... 31—The Indian influence may be seen in Egypt, the Persian in Syria.... 32—To Platonism, modified by Judaism, Gnosticism owed much of its philosophical form and tendencies. To the dualism of the Persian religion it owed one form at least of its speculations on the origin and remedy of evil, and many of the details of its doctrine of emanations. To the Buddhism of India, modified again probably by Platonism, it was indebted for the doctrines of the antagonism between spirit and matter and the unreality of derived existence (the germ of the Gnostic Docetism), and in part at least for the theory which regards the universe as a series of successive emanations from the absolute Unity.”

Emanation holds that some stuff has proceeded from the nature of God, and that God has formed this stuff into the universe. But matter is not composed of stuff at all. It is merely an activity of God. Origen held that ψυχή etymologically denotes a being which, struck off from God the central source of light and warmth, has cooled in its love for the good, but still has the possibility of returning to its spiritual origin. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 2:271, thus describes Origen's view: “As our body, while consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an immense living being, which is held together by one soul, the power and the Logos of God.” Palmer, Theol. Definition, 63, note—“The evil of Emanationism is seen in the history of Gnosticism. An emanation is a portion of the divine essence regarded as separated from it and sent forth as independent. Having no perpetual bond of connection with the divine, it either sinks into degradation, as Basilides taught, or becomes actively hostile to the divine, as the Ophites believed.... In like manner the Deists of a later time came to regard the laws of nature as having an independent existence, i. e., as emanations.”

John Milton, Christian Doctrine, holds this view. Matter is an efflux from God himself, not intrinsically bad, and incapable of annihilation. Finite existence is an emanation from God's substance, and God has loosened his hold on those living portions or centres of finite existence which he has endowed with free will, so that these independent beings may originate actions not morally referable to himself. This doctrine of free will relieves Milton from the charge of pantheism; see Masson, Life of Milton, 6:824-826. Lotze, Philos. Religion, xlviii, li, distinguishes creation from emanation by saying that creation necessitates a divine Will, while emanation flows by natural consequence from the being of God. God's motive in creation is love, which urges him to communicate his holiness to other beings. God creates individual finite spirits, and then permits the thought, which at first was only his, to become the thought of these other spirits. This transference of his thought by will is the creation of the world. F. W. Farrar, on Heb. 1:2—“The word Æon was used by the Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote: ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14).”

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself. Individualism [pg 386]admits dualism but not complete division. Our dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man and man, man and nature, man and God. Even the physical creation is ethical at heart: each thing is dependent on other things, and must serve them, or lose its own life and beauty. The branch must abide in the vine, or it withers and is cut off and burned” (275).

Swedenborg held to emanation,—see Divine Love and Wisdom, 283, 303, 905—“Every one who thinks from clear reason sees that the universe is not created from nothing.... All things were created out of a substance.... As God alone is substance in itself and therefore the real esse, it is evidence that the existence of things is from no other source.... Yet the created universe is not God, because God is not in time and space.... There is a creation of the universe, and of all things therein, by continual mediations from the First.... In the substances and matters of which the earths consist, there is nothing of the Divine in itself, but they are deprived of all that is divine in itself.... Still they have brought with them by continuation from the substance of the spiritual sum that which was there from the Divine.” Swedenborgianism is “materialism driven deep and clinched on the inside.” This system reverses the Lord's prayer; it should read: “As on earth, so in heaven.” He disliked certain sects, and he found that all who belonged to those sects were in the hells, condemned to everlasting punishment. The truth is not materialistic emanation, as Swedenborg imagined, but rather divine energizing in space and time. The universe is God's system of graded self-limitation, from matter up to mind. It has had a beginning, and God has instituted it. It is a finite and partial manifestation of the infinite Spirit. Matter is an expression of spirit, but not an emanation from spirit, any more than our thoughts and volitions are. Finite spirits, on the other hand, are differentiations within the being of God himself, and so are not emanations from him.

Napoleon asked Goethe what matter was. “Esprit gelé,”—frozen spirit was the answer Schelling wished Goethe had given him. But neither is matter spirit, nor are matter and spirit together mere natural effluxes from God's substance. A divine institution of them is requisite (quoted substantially from Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40). Schlegel in a similar manner called architecture “frozen music,” and another writer calls music “dissolved architecture.” There is a “psychical automatism,” as Ladd says, in his Philosophy of Mind, 169; and Hegel calls nature “the corpse of the understanding—spirit to alienation from itself.” But spirit is the Adam, of which nature is the Eve; and man says to nature: “This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” as Adam did in Gen. 2:23.

3. Creation from eternity.

This theory regards creation as an act of God in eternity past. It was propounded by Origen, and has been held in recent times by Martensen, Martineau, John Caird, Knight, and Pfleiderer. The necessity of supposing such creation from eternity has been argued from God's omnipotence, God's timelessness, God's immutability, and God's love. We consider each of these arguments in their order.

Origen held that God was from eternity the creator of the world of spirits. Martensen, in his Dogmatics, 114, shows favor to the maxims: “Without the world God is not God.... God created the world to satisfy a want in himself.... He cannot but constitute himself the Father of spirits.” Schiller, Die Freundschaft, last stanza, gives the following popular expression to this view: “Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister; Fühlte Mangel, darum schuf er Geister, Sel'ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. Fand das höchste Wesen schon kein Gleiches; Aus dem Kelch des ganzen Geisterreiches Schäumt ihm die Unendlichkeit.” The poet's thought was perhaps suggested by Goethe's Sorrows of Werther: “The flight of a bird above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 31—“But I need now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men. And since, not even when the whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, To slake thy thirst.” But this regards the Creator as dependent upon, and in bondage to, his own world.

Pythagoras held that nature's substances and laws are eternal. Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:144; 2:250, seems to make the creation of the world an eternal process, [pg 387]conceiving of it as a self-sundering of the Deity, in whom in some way the world was always contained (Schurman, Belief in God, 140). Knight, Studies in Philos. and Lit., 94, quotes from Byron's Cain, I:1—“Let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence And unparticipated solitude.... He, so wretched in his height, So restless in his wretchedness, must still Create and recreate.” Byron puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer. Yet Knight, in his Essays in Philosophy, 143, 247, regards the universe as the everlasting effect of an eternal Cause. Dualism, he thinks, is involved in the very notion of a search for God.

W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“God is the source of the universe. Whether by immediate production at some point of time, so that after he had existed alone there came by his act to be a universe, or by perpetual production from his own spiritual being, so that his eternal existence was always accompanied by a universe in some stage of being, God has brought the universe into existence.... Any method in which the independent God could produce a universe which without him could have had no existence, is accordant with the teachings of Scripture. Many find it easier philosophically to hold that God has eternally brought forth creation from himself, so that there has never been a time when there was not a universe in some stage of existence, than to think of an instantaneous creation of all existing things when there had been nothing but God before. Between these two views theology is not compelled to decide, provided we believe that God is a free Spirit greater than the universe.” We dissent from this conclusion of Dr. Clarke, and hold that Scripture requires us to trace the universe back to a beginning, while reason itself is better satisfied with this view than it can be with the theory of creation from eternity.

(a) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God's omnipotence. Omnipotence does not necessarily imply actual creation; it implies only power to create. Creation, moreover, is in the nature of the case a thing begun. Creation from eternity is a contradiction in terms, and that which is self-contradictory is not an object of power.

The argument rests upon a misconception of eternity, regarding it as a prolongation of time into the endless past. We have seen in our discussion of eternity as an attribute of God, that eternity is not endless time, or time without beginning, but rather superiority to the law of time. Since eternity is no more past than it is present, the idea of creation from eternity is an irrational one. We must distinguish creation in eternity past (= God and the world coëternal, yet God the cause of the world, as he is the begetter of the Son) from continuous creation (which is an explanation of preservation, but not of creation at all). It is this latter, not the former, to which Rothe holds (see under the doctrine of Preservation, pages 415, 416). Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 81, 82—“Creation is not from eternity, since past eternity cannot be actually traversed any more than we can reach the bound of an eternity to come. There was no timebefore creation, because there was no succession.”

Birks, Scripture Doctrine of Creation, 78-105—“The first verse of Genesis excludes five speculative falsehoods: 1. that there is nothing but uncreated matter; 2. that there is no God distinct from his creatures; 3. that creation is a series of acts without a beginning; 4. that there is no real universe; 5. that nothing can be known of God or the origin of things.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 22—“The ideas of creation and creative energy are emptied of meaning, and for them is substituted the conception or fiction of an eternally related or double-sided world, not of what has been, but of what always is. It is another form of the see-saw philosophy. The eternal Self only is, if the eternal manifold is; the eternal manifold is, if the eternal Self is. The one, in being the other, is or makes itself the one; the other, in being the one, is or makes itself the other. This may be called a unity; it is rather, if we might invent a term suited to the new and marvellous conception, an unparalleled and unbegotten twinity.”

(b) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God's timelessness. Because God is free from the law of time it does not follow that creation is free from that law. Rather is it true that no eternal creation is conceivable, since this involves an infinite number. Time must have had a beginning, and since the universe and time are coëxistent, creation could not have been from eternity.

[pg 388]

Jude 25—“Before all time”—implies that time had a beginning, and Eph. 1:4—“before the foundation of the world”—implies that creation itself had a beginning. Is creation infinite? No, says Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:459, because to a perfect creation unity is as necessary as multiplicity. The universe is an organism, and there can be no organism without a definite number of parts. For a similar reason Dorner, System Doctrine, 2:28, denies that the universe can be eternal. Granting on the one hand that the world though eternal might be dependent upon God and as soon as the plan was evolved there might be no reason why the execution should be delayed, yet on the other hand the absolutely limitless is the imperfect and no universe with an infinite number of parts is conceivable or possible. So Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225—“What has a goal or end must have a beginning; history, as teleological, implies creation.”

Lotze, Philos. Religion, 74—“The world, with respect to its existence as well as its content, is completely dependent on the will of God, and not as a mere involuntary development of his nature.... The word ‘creation’ ought not to be used to designate a deed of God so much as the absolute dependence of the world on his will.” So Schurman, Belief in God, 146, 156, 225—“Creation is the eternal dependence of the world on God.... Nature is the externalization of spirit.... Material things exist simply as modes of the divine activity; they have no existence for themselves.” On this view that God is the Ground but not the Creator of the world, see Hovey, Studies in Ethics and Religion, 23-56—“Creation is no more of a mystery than is the causal action” in which both Lotze and Schurman believe. “To deny that divine power can originate real being—can add to the sum total of existence—is much like saying that such power is finite.” No one can prove that “it is of the essence of spirit to reveal itself,”or if so, that it must do this by means of an organism or externalization. Eternal succession of changes in nature is no more comprehensible than are a creating God and a universe originating in time.

(c) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God's immutability. His immutability requires, not an eternal creation, but only an eternal plan of creation. The opposite principle would compel us to deny the possibility of miracles, incarnation, and regeneration. Like creation, these too would need to be eternal.

We distinguish between idea and plan, between plan and execution. Much of God's plan is not yet executed. The beginning of its execution is as easy to conceive as is the continuation of its execution. But the beginning of the execution of God's plan is creation. Active will is an element in creation. God's will is not always active. He waits for “the fulness of the time” (Gal. 4:4) before he sends forth his Son. As we can trace back Christ's earthly life to a beginning, so we can trace back the life of the universe to a beginning. Those who hold to creation from eternity usually interpret Gen. 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word,” as both and alike meaning “in eternity.” But neither of these texts has this meaning. In each we are simply carried back to the beginning of the creation, and it is asserted that God was its author and that the Word already was.

(d) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God's love. Creation is finite and cannot furnish perfect satisfaction to the infinite love of God. God has moreover from eternity an object of love infinitely superior to any possible creation, in the person of his Son.

Since all things are created in Christ, the eternal Word, Reason, and Power of God, God can “reconcile all things to himself” in Christ (Col. 1:20). Athanasius called God κτίστης, ού τεχνίτης—Creator, not Artisan. By this he meant that God is immanent, and not the God of deism. But the moment we conceive of God as revealing himself in Christ, the idea of creation as an eternal satisfaction of his love vanishes. God can have a plan without executing his plan. Decree can precede creation. Ideas of the universe may exist in the divine mind before they are realized by the divine will. There are purposes of salvation in Christ which antedate the world (Eph. 1:4). The doctrine of the Trinity, once firmly grasped, enables us to see the fallacy of such views as that of Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:286—“A beginning and ending in time of the creating of God are not thinkable. That would be to suppose a change of creating and resting in God, which would equalize God's being with the changeable course of human life. Nor [pg 389]could it be conceived what should have hindered God from creating the world up to the beginning of his creating.... We say rather, with Scotus Erigena, that the divine creating is equally eternal with God's being.”

(e) Creation from eternity, moreover, is inconsistent with the divine independence and personality. Since God's power and love are infinite, a creation that satisfied them must be infinite in extent as well as eternal in past duration—in other words, a creation equal to God. But a God thus dependent upon external creation is neither free nor sovereign. A God existing in necessary relations to the universe, if different in substance from the universe, must be the God of dualism; if of the same substance with the universe, must be the God of pantheism.

Gore, Incarnation, 136, 137—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.... It enjoys all the riches of pantheism without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making God dependent on the world, as the world is dependent on God. On the other hand, Christianity converts an unintelligible deism into a rational theism. It can explain how God became a creator in time, because it knows how creation has its eternal analogue in the uncreated nature; it was God's nature eternally to produce, to communicate itself, to live.” In other words, it can explain how God can be eternally alive, independent, self-sufficient, since he is Trinity. Creation from eternity is a natural and logical outgrowth of Unitarian tendencies in theology. It is of a piece with the Stoic monism of which we read in Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 177—“Stoic monism conceived of the world as a self-evolution of God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter. It is consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation. That which is always has been under changed and changing forms. The theory is cosmological rather than cosmogonical. It rather explains the world as it is, than gives an account of its origin.”

4. Spontaneous generation.

This theory holds that creation is but the name for a natural process still going on,—matter itself having in it the power, under proper conditions, of taking on new functions, and of developing into organic forms. This view is held by Owen and Bastian. We object that

(a) It is a pure hypothesis, not only unverified, but contrary to all known facts. No credible instance of the production of living forms from inorganic material has yet been adduced. So far as science can at present teach us, the law of nature is “omne vivum e vivo,” or “ex ovo.”

Owen, Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates, 3:814-818—on Monogeny or Thaumatogeny; quoted in Argyle, Reign of Law, 281—“We discern no evidence of a pause or intromission in the creation or coming-to-be of new plants and animals.” So Bastian, Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms, Beginnings of Life, and articles on Heterogeneous Evolution of Living Things, in Nature, 2:170, 193, 219, 410, 431. See Huxley's Address before the British Association, and Reply to Bastian, in Nature, 2:400, 473; also Origin of Species, 69-79, and Physical Basis of Life, in Lay Sermons, 142. Answers to this last by Stirling, in Half-hours with Modern Scientists, and by Beale, Protoplasm or Life, Matter, and Mind, 73-75.

In favor of Redi's maxim, “omne vivum e vivo,” see Huxley, in Encyc. Britannica, art.: Biology, 689—“At the present moment there is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis does take place or has taken place within the period during which the existence of the earth is recorded”; Flint, Physiology of Man, 1:263-265—“As the only true philosophic view to take of the question, we shall assume in common with nearly all the modern writers on physiology that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation,—admitting that the exact mode of production of the infusoria lowest in the scale of life is not understood.” On the Philosophy of Evolution, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 39-57.

[pg 390]

(b) If such instances could be authenticated, they would prove nothing as against a proper doctrine of creation,—for there would still exist an impossibility of accounting for these vivific properties of matter, except upon the Scriptural view of an intelligent Contriver and Originator of matter and its laws. In short, evolution implies previous involution,—if anything comes out of matter, it must first have been put in.

Sully: “Every doctrine of evolution must assume some definite initial arrangement which is supposed to contain the possibilities of the order which we find to be evolved and no other possibility.” Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 258—“If no creative fiat can be believed to create something out of nothing, still less is evolution able to perform such a contradiction.” As we can get morality only out of a moral germ, so we can get vitality only out of a vital germ. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 14—“By brooding long enough on an egg that is next to nothing, you can in this way hatch any universe actual or possible. Is it not evident that this is a mere trick of imagination, concealing its thefts of causation by committing them little by little, and taking the heap from the divine storehouse grain by grain?”

Hens come before eggs. Perfect organic forms are antecedent to all life-cells, whether animal or vegetable. “Omnis cellula e cellula, sed primaria cellula ex organismo.”God created first the tree, and its seed was in it when created (Gen. 1:12). Protoplasm is not proton, but deuteron; the elements are antecedent to it. It is not true that man was never made at all but only “growed” like Topsy; see Watts, New Apologetic, xvi, 312. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 273—“Evolution is the attempt to comprehend the world of experience in terms of the fundamental idealistic postulates: (1) without ideas, there is no reality; (2) rational order requires a rational Being to introduce it; (3) beneath our conscious self there must be an infinite Self. The question is: Has the world a meaning? It is not enough to refer ideas to mechanism. Evolution, from the nebula to man, is only the unfolding of the life of a divine Self.”

(c) This theory, therefore, if true, only supplements the doctrine of original, absolute, immediate creation, with another doctrine of mediate and derivative creation, or the development of the materials and forces originated at the beginning. This development, however, cannot proceed to any valuable end without guidance of the same intelligence which initiated it. The Scriptures, although they do not sanction the doctrine of spontaneous generation, do recognize processes of development as supplementing the divine fiat which first called the elements into being.

There is such a thing as free will, and free will does not, like the deterministic will, run in a groove. If there be free will in man, then much more is there free will in God, and God's will does not run in a groove. God is not bound by law or to law. Wisdom does not imply monotony or uniformity. God can do a thing once that is never done again. Circumstances are never twice alike. Here is the basis not only of creation but of new creation, including miracle, incarnation, resurrection, regeneration, redemption. Though will both in God and in man is for the most part automatic and acts according to law, yet the power of new beginnings, of creative action, resides in will, wherever it is free, and this free will chiefly makes God to be God and man to be man. Without it life would be hardly worth the living, for it would be only the life of the brute. All schemes of evolution which ignore this freedom of God are pantheistic in their tendencies, for they practically deny both God's transcendence and his personality.

Leibnitz declined to accept the Newtonian theory of gravitation because it seemed to him to substitute natural forces for God. In our own day many still refuse to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution because it seems to them to substitute natural forces for God; see John Fiske, Idea of God, 97-102. But law is only a method; it presupposes a lawgiver and requires an agent. Gravitation and evolution are but the habitual operations of God. If spontaneous generation should be proved true, it would be only God's way of originating life. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 91—“Spontaneous generation does not preclude the idea of a creative will working by natural law and secondary causes.... Of beginnings of life physical science knows nothing.... Of the processes of nature science is competent to speak and against its [pg 391]teachings respecting these there is no need that theology should set itself in hostility.... Even if man were derived from the lower animals, it would not prove that God did not create and order the forces employed. It may be that God bestowed upon animal life a plastic power.”

Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:180—“It is far truer to say that the universe is a life, than to say that it is a mechanism.... We can never get to God through a mere mechanism.... With Leibnitz I would argue that absolute passivity or inertness is not a reality but a limit. 269—Mr. Spencer grants that to interpret spirit in terms of matter is impossible. 302—Natural selection without teleological factors is not adequate to account for biological evolution, and such teleological factors imply a psychical something endowed with feelings and will, i. e., Life and Mind. 2:130-135—Conation is more fundamental than cognition. 149-151—Things and events precede space and time. There is no empty space or time. 252-257—Our assimilation of nature is the greeting of spirit by spirit. 259-267—Either nature is itself intelligent, or there is intelligence beyond it. 274-276—Appearances do not veil reality. 274—The truth is not God and mechanism, but God only and no mechanism. 283—Naturalism and Agnosticism, in spite of themselves, lead us to a world of Spiritualistic Monism.” Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 36—“Spontaneous generation is a fiction in ethics, as it is in psychology and biology. The moral cannot be derived from the non-moral, any more than consciousness can be derived from the unconscious, or life from the azoic rocks.”

IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.

1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.

(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.

All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—bara again).

Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains the survival of the fittest, but cannot explain the arrival of the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”

Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense the cause of the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection [pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.” New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) the a priori self-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.

Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.” D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective “because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.” Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”