Section I.—Creation.

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.[pg 374]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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.[pg 374]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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.[pg 374]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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.[pg 374]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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.[pg 374]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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.[pg 373]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.

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.

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 callsdynamism, 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 asresiding insomething is to introduce an entirely incongruous concept, for it continues our guestad 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 nocausa posteriororextranea, which spurs him on. We must recognize in the source what appears in the outcome. We can speak ofabsolute, but not ofinfiniteorimmutable, 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 (versusBradley, 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.”

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

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 nothinga prioriagainst 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.

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 nothinga prioriagainst 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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.[pg 376]Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting materials.”

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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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.”

“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'smaking, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of hisformingthe beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of hisbuilding upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Barais 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 followsbara, 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 wordbara.”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.”

No accusative denoting material followsbara, 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 wordbara.”

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’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem into a rejoicing.”

See Conant, Genesis, 1; Bible Com., 1:37—“‘created to make’(inGen. 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.Barais used inGen. 1:1,asahinGen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, bothyatzarandasahare used inIs. 45:18. In regard to man, inGen. 1:27we findbara; inGen. 1:26and9:6,asah; and inGen. 2:7,yatzar. InIs. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse:“whom I havebarafor my glory, I haveyatzar,yea, I haveasahhim.”InIs. 45:12,“asahthe earth, andbaraman upon it”; but inGen. 1:1we read:“Godbarathe earth,”and in9:6“asahman.”Is. 44:2—“the Lord thatasahthee(i. e., man) andyatzarthee”; but inGen. 1:27, God“baraman.”Gen. 5:2—“male and femalebarahe them.”Gen. 2:22—“the ribasahhe a woman”;Gen. 2:7—“heyatzarman”;i. e.,baramale and female, yetasahthe woman andyatzarthe man.Asahis not always used fortransform:Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree”in nature—bara;Ps. 51:10—“barain me a clean heart”;Is. 65:18—God“baraJerusalem 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.

Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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.”

Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absoluteberashith,‘in the beginning,’the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.”Verse 2cannot 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. 4:17tells 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.

E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“Rom. 4:17tells 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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting materials.”

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. CompareEx. 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 alsoPs. 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 ofinvisiblematerials. But creation out ofvisiblematerials is inHebrews 11:3expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use ofanypreëxisting 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.[pg 378](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

(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.

(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

(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

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