Читать книгу Credo - Karl Barth - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTHE doctrine of Creation turns our attention for the first time directly to a reality different from the reality of God, the reality of the world. This doctrine has, for all that, absolutely nothing to do with a “world view,” even with a Christian world view. Nor is it any part of a general science that has got perhaps to be crowned and completed by Christian knowledge. If man looks at the world generally and from out of himself, and thinks he knows something of its origin, and if he perhaps decides to name this origin “God,” he must yet turn round again and become as a child in order to hear and comprehend what the symbol in common with Holy Scripture says: Creator of heaven and earth. But again, it is not by any means a specifically “Christian” world view that the Creed offers us. The wording itself should warn us off this idea, for it does not speak (in analogy with the expressions of the second and third Articles) of a creatio coeli el terrae, and therefore of a mundus a Deo creatus, but—and that is something different—of the creator coeli et terrae. A statement is here made about God. Let it be carefully noted: about the same God of Whom we have just heard that He is, and in what sense He is, the “Almighty Father”. And Creator is the name here applied to God. Let it be carefully considered whether what people think they know generally and of themselves about an origin of the world is not something quite different from what the word “Creation” implies. And it is “Creator of heaven and earth” that He is called. It must once more be carefully considered whether that which people think they are able generally and of themselves to say about Creator and creation does not perhaps merely amount to a description of the relationship in which heaven is superior to earth and that it has absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the world which comprehends heaven and earth (of all things visible and invisible, as the Nicene symbol supplements the statement). It has to be borne in mind that the word credo stands before the words creatorem coeli et terrae. “By faith we understand that the worlds were fashioned by the word of God” (Heb. 11:3). By the very same word that has also got to be said to us in order that we may be able to know it.
The doctrine of creation, or more accurately, of the Creator, speaks of God in His relation to our existence as such and to our world. To that extent it could be said: it brings to its sharpest, most fundamental expression what the words “Father Almighty” already declared. The doctrine says not only that we are completely and absolutely bound, and that we completely and absolutely belong to God, the Almighty, the Lord over life and death, the Father of Jesus Christ, but it says that without Him we should not be, and that we exist only through Him. It says that our real existence stands or falls with God’s giving it to us and maintaining it. There is much to be said for Luther’s placing man at the centre of the created world, in his explanation of the first Article: “I believe that God has made me together with all creatures”. The fact that God made heaven and earth does indeed concern man, man who lives under heaven upon earth, himself at once a visible and an invisible being. But there is also much and perhaps more to be said for doing what the symbol itself does—for not expressly emphasising man as creation of God or bringing him right into the centre. Most decidedly the knowledge of God as the Creator and of man as His creature and therefore the knowledge of the difference between God and man and of their true relationship would not be subserved if man was going with excessive forwardness to look upon himself as, and to enjoy the experience of being, the creature and the partner of God. Will he recognise, fear and love God as God the Creator, without at the same time recognising, as he looks down to earth and up to heaven, his own littleness and insignificance, both in body and soul, even within the creaturely sphere? Without indeed mentioning man, and significant in its failure to mention man, the statement that God created heaven and earth says the decisive thing even about him, and precisely about him. Of these two worlds he is the citizen, encompassed in truth with a special mystery, or the wanderer between these two worlds which indeed in God’s sight are only one world, the created world.
The statement: “God is the Creator of the World” has in the main a double content: it speaks of the freedom of God (one could also say: of His holiness) over against the world, and of His relationship (one could also say: of His love) to the world.
1. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we acknowledge that the relationship of God and world is fundamentally and in all its implications not one of equilibrium or of parity, but that in this relationship God has the absolute primacy. This is no mere matter of course, but rather a mystery, which all along the line determines the meaning and the form of this relationship: that there is a reality at all differentiated from the reality of God, a being beside the divine Being. There is that. There are heaven and earth, and between the two, between angel and animal, man. But quite apart from the explicit proposition about Creation, for Scripturally based thinking there follows from the fact that their being is so closely related to the Being of God, this: that their being can only be one that is radically dependent on the Being of God, therefore one that is radically relative and without independence, dust, a drop in the bucket, clay in the hand of the potter—mere figures of speech which far from saying too much, say decidedly much too little. Heaven and earth are what they are through God and only through God. This brings us to the true thought of creation.
Heaven and earth are not themselves God, are not anything in the nature of a divine generation or emanation, are not, as the Gnostics or mystics would again and again have it, in some direct or indirect way, identical with the Son or Word of God. In opposition to what even Christian theologians have on occasion taught, the world must not be understood as eternal. It has, and with it time and space have, a beginning. Their infinity is not only limited by the finite as such. Rather, their infinity is, along with everything finite, limited and encompassed by God’s eternity and omnipotence, i.e. by God’s lordship over time and space, in which it itself does not share. Therefore the creation of the world is not a movement of God in Himself, but a free opus ad extra, finding its necessity only in His love, but again not casting any doubt on His self-sufficiency: the world cannot exist without God, but if God were not love (as such inconceivable!), He could exist very well without the world. “And all this out of pure paternal, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine,” as again Luther says, speaking not yet of our salvation, but of our creation.
Again heaven and earth are not God’s work in the sense that God created them according to some ideas in themselves given and true, or out of some material already existing, or by means of some instrument apt in itself for that purpose. Creation in the Bible sense means: Creation solely on the basis of God’s own wisdom. It means, creatio ex nihilo (Rom. 4:17). It means, creation by the word, which is indeed the eternal Son and therefore God Himself. If that is so, if there is no question of an identity of the created world with God, no question of its existing under any circumstances as a legitimate possibility (i.e. apart from sin) in formal or material independence over against God, then it necessarily follows that the meaning and the end of the world of His creation is not to be sought in itself, that the purpose and the destiny of this world could only be to serve God as the world’s Creator and indeed to serve as “theatre of His glory” (Calvin). From God’s creating the world it follows that He created it for this purpose and with this destiny and therefore created it in accordance with this purpose and this destiny and therefore good. Here we must of course acknowledge anew the primacy of God and must therefore in our estimate of the “goodness” of this world hold to the judgment of God. He knows what serves His glory. We must believe that the world as He created it is appointed to serve His glory, and we must not allow ourselves to be misled here by our feelings and reflections over good and evil, however justified. No doubt it is scriptural to say that the world was created for man’s sake. But yet only because man was in a pre-eminent sense created for the service of God, created to be the “image of God,” not only as theatre, but as active and passive bearer of that glory. It is the concrete content of faith in God the Creator that the world is “good” for man in and for this service of God. How should man have to decide and decree what is “good”? He has just got to believe that God has created the world and him himself really good.
2. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we now recognise also that just in that so utterly unequal relationship in which it stands to God, the world has reality and indeed a reality of its own, that is willed and appointed by God, upheld, accompanied and guided by God. The world having once been created by God (apart from sin!) cannot obviously cease to be determined by this decisive fact. It can no doubt cease to exist, should God will that it no longer exist. But as long as it exists, it cannot cease to be the God-created world. It cannot be a world forsaken by God, left to itself or to chance or to fate or to its own laws. Not as if it could not do that of itself! In the world itself there are no eternal necessities, no eternal impossibilities. But it cannot do it because it is and remains true that God is its Creator. A sovereignty of chance, of fate, or of the world’s own system of laws would be at variance with this truth. That is impossible. Because God is the Creator of the world, therefore it stands under His sovereignty, therefore there is a co-existence of Him and it. It is the totally unequal co-existence of Creator and creature, a co-existence in strictest supremacy and subordination, but yet a co-existence, and therefore an existence of God not only in Himself, but also with and within the world, because it is, and in so far as it is, His creature. Therefore in the proposition, “God is the Creator,” we recognise not only God’s transcendence, but also the immanence of that God so completely transcendent to the world. Remembering the Creator’s transcendence, we shall be safeguarded against ascribing to the world as such any divinity whether imparted to it by God or belonging to itself independently. This very same recollection of the Creator’s transcendence will, however, also warn us against denying God’s co-existence with the world and therefore His immanence, i.e. His free omnipotent presence and lordship in the world that He created. God never and nowhere becomes world. The world never and nowhere becomes God. God and world remain over against each other. The limit of this statement must not be forgotten: the Word of God in the flesh. Within that limit this statement certainly holds. But in standing over against the World that He has made, God is present to it—not only far, but also near, not only free in relation to it, but bound to it, not only transcendent, but also immanent. Here there can be no question of any conception of transcendence to be defined by logic. We are concerned with the transcendence of God the Creator. The knowledge of that compels the recognition of His immanence also.—The old Dogmatics handled this side of the doctrine of Creation under the title De providentia, of divine Providence. I can reproduce its content here only very briefly. To the world (also to man!) as His creature God the Creator is present in this way, that He maintains it in its relative independence and peculiar character, in its reality which differs from His reality; but at the same time also, as the absolutely supreme Lord, He accompanies and therefore rules the world in whole and in part, according to His divine will and pleasure, without totally or even partly abolishing the contingency of the creature, or the freedom of the human will. The Pelagian doctrine of freedom and the fatalistic doctrine of necessity, the indeterminism of the old Lutherans and Molinists and the determinism of Zwingli (which also, if I see aright, was still in 1525 that of Luther!) represent in what are fundamentally similar ways misreadings of that freedom in which providence recognises, encompasses and governs the contingency of the creature, the freedom of the human will as such. The school of Calvin has here shown the lines along which we can “understand,” on the one hand, the reality that belongs to the created world, without exalting it to be a god alongside of God, and on the other hand, the sovereignty of God, without taking from the created world its reality.
But the doctrine of Creation has its definite limits which have got to be known if that doctrine is to be rightly understood. God is no doubt even as Creator the one God in His totality, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but in knowing God, Who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Creator, we can only partly know Him. The first Article of the Creed must necessarily be followed by the second and the third. I conclude with pointing to these limits. There are again two things to which we have to pay attention:—
1. There are definite and necessary questions of faith which are not to be answered from the doctrine of creation, or at least not unequivocally and completely. Such is the question about the possibility of sin as the act in which, in defiance of the sovereignty of God, the creature arrogates to himself not only his own reality but independent reality, an absolute independence, and therefore makes himself God. Further, the question about the possibility of evil, i.e. of such experiences as notoriously are not to man’s highest advantage in spite of the goodness of the world made by God, as do not conduce to God’s being glorified by man, but rather the reverse. Finally, the question about the possibility of death as such an end of creaturely existence as, despite the sustaining grace of divine forbearance, means its precipitation into the void. These three questions, known by the name of the Problem of Theodicy, could be concentrated into the question about the possibility which the Devil had, and has, to be the Devil. From the viewpoint of the dogma of creation it is no doubt possible to answer with the assertion that God as the Creator of the world in its true reality which is determined by Him, is the supreme Lord and Victor also over these absurd, these impossible possibilities. But it cannot be said that God willed and created these possibilities also as such. The seriousness of the questions which are raised in view of these possibilities, the whole reality and the whole character of sin, evil, death and the devil would, with Schleiermacher and many others be misapprehended, or God would, with Zwingli, be turned into an incomprehensible tyrant, if these possibilities were to be included in the work of divine creation, and consequently justified as appointed and willed by God. In order to keep true to the facts, Dogmatics has here, as in other places, to be logically inconsequent. Therefore in spite of the omnipotence of God—or rather on the score of the rightly understood omnipotence of God, Dogmatics must not at this place carry the Creation-thought right to the end of the line. It must rather explain those possibilities as being such that we have indeed to reckon most definitely with their reality, but are unable better to describe their real nature and character than by forbearing to ask for their raison d’être either in the will of God the Creator or even with Marcion and the Manicheans in the will of a wicked Anti-God. These possibilities are to be taken seriously as the mysterium iniquitatis. The existence of such a thing, however, is not to be perceived from creation, but only from the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
2. But there are also definite and equally necessary answers of faith, which also admit of being ranged, though likewise not satisfactorily, within the framework of the knowledge of God the Creator. There is miracle as the event in which in an extraordinary manner the order of the world, destroyed by sin, evil, death and devil, is temporarily restored by God Himself, as an accompanying sign of His revelation. Prayer, in which man not only speaks with God, but in spite of sin, evil, death and devil is heard and answered by God, and, incomprehensibly, with and in spite of all difference between Creator and creature, with the will of God has part in determining the will of God. Finally, the Church as the place where, in the midst of the dominion of sin, evil, death and devil, there is proclaimed and accepted a special presence of God, the presence of God in His revelation in contradistinction to the presence of God the Creator, which, in spite of everything, cannot and must not be denied to the rest of human history and society. All these are in any case very special forms of divine immanence in the world. In view of these things our forefathers were in the habit of speaking of providentia speciallissima. And these things pass beyond our range of vision because they are all bound up with the central mystery of the Incarnation, which is most assuredly misunderstood if with Schleiermacher it is understood as the completion and crown of creation. It is not that in Christ creation has reached its goal, but that in Christ the Creator has become—and this is something different—Himself creature; the creature has been assumed into unity with the Creator as first-fruits of a new creation. Projecting our thought “consequently” along the line of the creation dogma, we should have in one way or another to deny the Incarnation, Miracle, prayer, the Church. That has often enough been done. But the facts demand that we give it up, though consistency seems to demand it. In truth it is just in the knowledge of Jesus Christ that we stand at the source of the creation, faith and dogma. If we did not know about the immanence, once and for all and in an altogether special sense, of the Word of God in the flesh, how would and could we dare, in despite of sin, evil, death and devil, to believe in a general immanence of God in the world, and to live? Therefore far from our having to, or being able to, deny the former for the sake of the latter, we have to acknowledge the former in order rightly to believe and teach the latter.
