Chapter IV: Section I: Creation (2)

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

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

2. Emanation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Creation from eternity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Spontaneous generation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(_b_) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.

Martensen wrongly asserts that “Judaism represented the world
exclusively as _creatura_, not _natura_; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”
This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth,
not of something dead, but of something living and capable of
self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not
only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which
the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4,
6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from
darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting
apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man’s body;
planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the
productive powers of the things and beings created (_Gen. 1:12,
22, 24, 28_—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose
seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man
commanded to be fruitful and multiply).

The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the
whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution,
thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and
along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest
member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to
Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our
common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He
argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by
gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there
is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a
different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877,
regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet
natural modification of species. “When catastrophic change burst
in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every
living thing the words: ‘Change or die!’ plasticity became the
sole principle of action.” Nature proceeded then by leaps, and
corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.

We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call
species were produced in some such ways. If science should render
it certain that all the present species of living creatures were
derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that
these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and
materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as
proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our
interpretation of the word _bara_ in _Gen. 1:21, 27_, and to give
it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such
a meaning might almost seem to be favored by _Gen. 1:11_—“_let the
earth put forth grass_”; _20_—“_let the waters bring forth
abundantly __ the moving creature that hath life_”; _2:7_—“_the
Lord God formed man of the dust_”; _9_—“_out of the ground made
the Lord God to grow every tree_”; _cf._ _Mark 4:28_—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή
καρποφορεῖ—“_the earth brings forth fruit automatically_.” Goethe,
Sprüche in Reimen: “Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt’s die Welt im
Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass,
was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen
Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets
the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell
within.”

All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in
May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark
and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force
from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment
changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent
transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes
great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to
express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so
groaned and bled when wounded. God’s life is in all. In evolution
we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is
“derived from the lower.” Rather let us say that both the higher
and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will
of God. The lower is only God’s preparation for his higher
self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.

Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic
narrative “two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of
separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive
development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere
admiration on the Jewish lawgiver’s grand insight into nature, and
his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering
in it a divine revelation.” Henry Drummond, whose first book,
Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days
regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic
direction, came to believe rather in “spiritual law in the natural
world.” His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the
methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that
the past history of life upon the planet was a history of
heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for
its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was “red in
tooth and claw with ravine.” But further thought has shown that
this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts.
Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a
struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to
be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of
offspring. In every lion’s den and tiger’s lair, in every
mother-eagle’s feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice
which faintly shadows forth man’s subordination of personal
interests to the interests of others.

Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond’s
doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one’s own
life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of
others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of
right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature
owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an
adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine
warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then
preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of
humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The
Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to
the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the
conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic
movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in
the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a
dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure
and stedfast.” God is not limited to creating from without: he can
also create from within; and development is as much a part of
creation as is the origination of the elements. For further
discussion of man’s origin, see section on Man a Creation of God,
in our treatment of Anthropology.

2. Its proper interpretation.

We adopt neither (_a_) the allegorical, or mythical, (_b_) the hyperliteral, nor (_c_) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (_d_) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God’s work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.

(_a_) The _allegorical_, or _mythical interpretation_, represents
the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek
cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the
origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation
upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably
connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most
naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the
narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover,
prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision
granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original
revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses’ time, and used
by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.

We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of
Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of
Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two
accounts of man’s creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”
Charles A. Briggs: “The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is
altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.” W. N. Clarke,
Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the
two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination
shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a
tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as
literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man
was created.” To these utterances we reply that the two accounts
are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of
Genesis describing man’s creation as the crown of God’s general
work, the second describing man’s creation with greater
particularity as the beginning of human history.