Karl Barth - Dogmatics in Outline Ch. 8

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. When we approach the truth which the Christian Church confesses in the word ‘Creator’, then everything depends on our realising that we find ourselves here as well confronted by the mystery of faith, in respect of which knowledge is real solely through God’s revelation. The first article of faith in God the Father and His work is not a sort of ‘forecourt’ of the Gentiles, a realm in which Christians and Jews and Gentiles, believers and unbelievers are beside one another and to some extent stand together in the presence of a reality concerning which there might be some measure of agreement, in describing it as the work of God the Creator. What the meaning of God the Creator is and what is involved in the work of creation, is in itself not less hidden from us men than everything else that is contained in the Confession. We are not nearer to believing in God the Creator, than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article needs a revelation. But in the same sense in both cases we are faced with the mystery of God and His work, and the approach to it can only be one and the same. For the Confession does not speak of the world, or at all events it does so only incidentally, when it speaks of heaven and earth. It does not say, I believe in the created world, nor even, I believe in the work of creation. But it says, I believe in God the Creator. And everything that is said about creation depends absolutely upon this Subject. The same rule holds always, that all the predicates are determined by Him. This holds also for creation. Fundamentally what is involved here is the knowledge of the Creator; and after that and from that viewpoint His work must be understood.

It is of God the Creator we have to speak and therefore of His work as the creation, the making of heaven and earth. If we take this concept seriously, it must be at once clear that we are not confronted by a realm which in any sense may be accessible to human view or even to human thought. Natural science may be our occupation with its view of development; it may tell us the tale of the millions of years in which the cosmic process has gone on; but when could natural science have ever penetrated to the fact that there is one world which runs through this development? Continuation is quite a different thing from this sheer beginning, with which the concept of creation and the Creator has to do. It is assuredly a basic error to speak of creation myths. At best a myth may be a parallel to exact science; that is, a myth has to do with viewing what has always existed and will exist. A myth has to do with the mighty problem that at all times propounds itself to man and therefore is timeless, the problem of life and death, of sleep and wakening, of birth and dying, of morning and evening, of day and night, and so on. These are the themes of myth. Myth considers the world as it were from its frontier, but always the world which already exists. There is no creation myth because creation as such is simply not accessible to myth. Thus in the case of the Babylonian myth of creation, for example, it is quite clear that we are concerned with a myth of growth and decay which fundamentally cannot be brought into connexion with Genesis 1 and 2. At most we can say that certain mythical elements are to be found there. But what the Bible makes of that has no parallel in myth. If we are to give the biblical narrative a name, or put it in a category, then let it be that of saga. The Bible speaks in Genesis 1 and 2 of events which lie outside of our historical knowledge. But it speaks upon the basis of knowledge, which is related to history. In fact, the wonderful thing about the biblical creation narratives is that they stand in strict connexion with the history of Israel and so with the story of God’s action in the covenant with man. According to the Old Testament narrative, this begins with God’s having created heaven and earth. The first and second creation accounts alike stand plainly in connexion with the theme of the Old Testament: the first account shows the covenant in the institution of the Sabbath as the goal, the second account as the continuation of the work of Creation.

It is impossible to separate the knowledge of God the Creator and of His work from the knowledge of God’s dealings with man. Only when we keep before us what the triune God has done for us men in Jesus Christ can we realise what is involved in God the Creator and His work. Creation is the temporal analogue, taking place outside God, of that event in God Himself by which God is the Father of the Son. The world is not God’s Son, is not ‘begotten’ of God; but it is created. But what God does as the Creator can in the Christian sense only be seen and understood as a reflection, as a shadowing forth of this inner divine relationship between God the Father and the Son. And that is why the work of creation is ascribed in the Confession to the Father. This does not mean that He alone is the Creator, but surely that this relationship exists between the work of creation and the relationship of Father and Son. Knowledge of creation is knowledge of God and consequently knowledge of faith in the deepest and ultimate sense. It is not just a vestibule in which natural theology might find a place. How should we recognise this paternity of God, were it not manifest to us in the Son? So it is not the existence of the world in its manifoldness, from which we are to read off the fact that God is its Creator. The world with its sorrow and its happiness will always be a dark mirror to us, about which we may have optimistic or pessimistic thoughts; but it gives us no information about God as the Creator. But always, when man has tried to read the truth from sun, moon and stars or from himself, the result has been an idol. But when God has been known and then known again in the world, so that the result was a joyful praise of God in creation, that is because He is to be sought and found by us in Jesus Christ. By becoming man in Jesus Christ, the fact has also become plain and credible that God is the Creator of the world. We have no alternative source of revelation.

In the article on Creator and creation the decisive point is the recognition that God does not exist for Himself, but that there is a reality distinct from Him – namely, the world. Whence do we know that? Has not each of us put to himself the question whether this entire world around us might not really be a seeming and a dream? Has not this come over you too as a fundamental doubt – not of God; that is a stupid doubt! but – of yourself? Is the whole enchantment in which we exist real? Or is not that which we regard as reality only the ‘veil of Maya’ and thus unreal? Is the only thing left to us just to dream this ‘dream’ to the end as swiftly as possible, so as to enter the Nirvana from which we derive? The statement on creation is opposed to this horrible thought. Whence can we be told authoritatively that that is a perversion and that life is not a dream but reality, that I myself am, and that the world around me is? From the standpoint of the Christian Confession there can only be one answer: this Confession tells us in its centre, in the second article, that it pleased God to become man, that in Jesus Christ we have to do with God Himself, with God the Creator, who became a creature, who existed as a creature in time and space, here, there, at that time, just as we all exist. If this is true, and this is the presupposition everything starts with, that God was in Christ, then we have a place where creation stands before us in reality and becomes recognisable. For when the Creator has Himself become a creature, God become man, if that is true (and that is the beginning of Christian knowledge), then the mystery of the Creator and His work and the mystery of His creation are open to us in Jesus Christ, and the content of the first article is plain to view. Because God has become man, the existence of creation can no longer be doubted. Gazing at Jesus Christ, with whom we live in the same space, there is told us – told as the Word of God – the Word of the Creator and the Word of His work and of the most astonishing bit of this work, of man.

The mystery of creation on the Christian interpretation is not primarily – as the fools think in their heart – the problem whether there is a God as the originator of the world; for in the Christian sense it cannot be that first of all we presuppose the reality of the world and then ask whether there is also a God. But the first thing, the thing we begin with, is God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And from that standpoint the great Christian problem is propounded, whether it can really be the case that God wishes to be not only for Himself, but that outside Him there is the world, that we exist alongside and outside Him? That is a riddle. If we make even a slight effort to look on God, to conceive Him as He reveals Himself to us, as God in mystery, God in the highest, God the Triune and Almighty, we must be astonished at the fact that there are ourselves and the world alongside and outside Him. God has no need of us, He has no need of the world and heaven and earth at all. He is rich in Himself. He has fullness of life; all glory, all beauty, all goodness and holiness reside in Him. He is sufficient unto Himself, He is God, blessed in Himself. To what end, then, the world? Here in fact there is everything, here in the living God. How can there be something alongside God, of which He has no need? This is the riddle of creation. And the doctrine of creation answers that God, who does not need us, created heaven and earth and myself, of ‘sheer fatherly kindness and compassion, apart from any merit or worthiness of mine; for all of which I am bound to thank and praise Him, to serve Him and to be obedient, which is assuredly true’. Do you feel in these words Luther’s amazement in face of creation, of the goodness of God, in which God does not will to be alone, but to have a reality beside Himself?

Creation is grace: a statement at which we should like best to pause in reverence, fear and gratitude. God does not grudge the existence of the reality distinct from Himself; He does not grudge it its own reality, nature and freedom. The existence of the creature alongside God is the great puzzle and miracle, the great question to which we must and may give an answer, the answer given us through God’s Word; it is the genuine question about existence, which is essentially and fundamentally distinguished from the question which rests upon error, ‘Is there a God?’ That there is a world is the most unheard-of thing, the miracle of the grace of God. Is it not true that if we confront existence, not least our own existence, we can but in astonishment state the truth and reality of the fact that I may exist, the world may exist, although it is a reality distinct from God, although the world including man and therefore myself is not God? God in the highest, the Triune God, the Father, the Almighty, is not arbitrary; He does not grudge existence to this other. He not only does not grudge it him, He not only leaves it to him, He gives it him. We exist and heaven and earth exist in their complete, supposed infinity, because God gives them existence. That is the great statement of the first article.

But this means also that since God does not grudge this world its existence, its own reality, nature and freedom, this implies that this world is not God Himself, as pantheistic confusion again and again wishes to assert. It is not that we are God; but it can never be anything but our disastrous error that ‘we should like to be as God’. It is therefore not, as ancient and modern gnosis claims, that what the Bible calls the Son is fundamentally the created world, or that the world is by nature God’s child. Nor is it that the world is to be understood as an outflow, an emanation from God, as something divine which wells out of God like a stream out of a spring. That would really not be creation, but a living movement of God, an expression of Himself. But creation means something different; it means a reality distinct from God. And, finally, the world must not be understood as a manifestation of God, so that God would be to some extent the Idea. God who alone is real and essential and free, is one; and heaven and earth, man and the universe are something else, and this something else is not God, though it exists through God. So this other thing is not based independently on itself, as though the world had its own principle, and thus was on its own feet and independent, so that from its standpoint there might be a God, but a God far away and separated from it, so that there would be two realms and two worlds: on the one side this world with its own reality and lawfulness, and quite elsewhere and otherwise God as well, His kingdom and His world, perhaps to be depicted in very fine rich hues, perhaps also in a relation between here and beyond, perhaps in such a way as for it to be granted to man to be on the way from here to there. But this world would not be by God’s agency, would not be from Him and thus would not completely belong to Him and be grounded in Him.

No; what God does not grudge the world is creaturely reality, a creaturely nature and creaturely freedom, an existence appropriate to the creation, the world. The world is no appearance, it exists, but it exists by way of creation. It can, it may exist alongside of God, by God’s agency. Creaturely reality means reality on the basis of a creatio ex nihilo, a creation out of nothing. Where nothing exists – and not a kind of primal matter – there through God there has come into existence that which is distinct from Him. And since there is now something, since we exist because of divine grace, we must never forget that, as the basis of our existence and of the existence of the whole world, there is in the background that divine – not just facere, but – creation. Everything outside God is held constant by God over nothingness. Creaturely nature means existence in time and space, existence with a beginning and an end, existence that becomes, in order to pass away again. Once it was not, and once it will no longer be. And it is not one but many. As there is a once and a now, there is also a here and a there. The world, in this process, is called time, and, in this separateness, space. But God is eternal. That does not mean that there is no time in Him, but it is a different time from ours; for fundamentally we never have presence, and for us spatiality means apartness. God’s time and space are free from the limitations in which alone time and space are thinkable for us. God is the Lord of time and the Lord of space. As He is the origin of these forms too, nothing in Him has any limitation or imperfection, such as pertains to creaturely existence.

And creaturely freedom means, finally, that there is a contingency of what is, a specific existence of the creature; and this specific existence, at any rate of the human creature, means freedom to decide, ability to act one way or another. But this freedom can only be the freedom appropriate to the creature, which possesses its reality not of itself, and which has its nature in time and space. Since it is real freedom, it is established and limited by the subjection to law, which prevails in the universe and is again and again discernible; it is limited by the existence of its fellow creatures, and on the other hand by the sovereignty of God. For if we are free, it is only because our Creator is the infinitely free. All human freedom is but an imperfect mirroring of the divine freedom.

The creature is threatened by the possibility of nothingness and of destruction, which is excluded by God – and only by God. If a creature exists, it is only maintained in its mode of existence if God so wills. If He did not so will, nothingness would inevitably break in from all sides. The creature itself could not rescue and preserve itself. And man’s freedom to decide, as it is given to man by God, is not a freedom to decide between good and evil. Man is not made to be Hercules at the cross-roads. Evil does not lie in the possibilities of the God-created creature. Freedom to decide means freedom to decide towards the Only One for whom God’s creature can decide, for the affirmation of Him who has created it, for the accomplishment of His will; that is, for obedience. But we have to do with freedom to decide. And here too danger threatens. Should it happen that the creature makes a different use of his freedom than the only possible one, should he want to sin – that is, to ‘sunder’ himself from God and from himself – what else can happen than that, entered into contradiction to God’s will, he is bound to fall by his disobedience, by the impossibility of this disobedience, into this possibility not foreseen in creation? Now to be in time and space must cause his destruction; now for him this coming and passing away, this here and there in his existence must mean the reverse of salvation. There must now take place the fall into nihil. Could it be otherwise? I am speaking here now of this, in order to make clear that this whole realm that we term evil – death, sin, the Devil and hell – is not God’s creation, but rather what was excluded by God’s creation, that to which God has said ‘No’. And if there is a reality of evil, it can only be the reality of this excluded and repudiated thing, the reality behind God’s back, which He passed over, when He made the world and made it good. ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.’ What is not good God did not make; it has no creaturely existence. But if being is to be ascribed to it at all, and we would rather not say that it is non-existent, then it is only the power of the being which arises out of the weight of the divine ‘No’. We must not look for darkness in God Himself. He is the Father of light. If we begin to speak of a Deus absconditus, we are speaking of an idol. God the Creator is He who does not grudge the creature its existence. And what is in being, what is in truth real, is by this favour of God. God’s Word is the power of all creaturely being. God creates, rules and sustains it as the theatre of His glory. I should like by this to point to the ground and the goal of creation, which are in the end one and the same thing.

The ground of creation is God’s grace, and the fact that there is a grace of God is real and present to us, alive and powerful in God’s Word. By God speaking and having spoken His Word in the history of Israel, in Jesus Christ, in the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ and right up to this day, and by His speaking to all futurity, the creation was and is and will be. What exists exists, because it exists not of itself, but by God’s Word, for His Word’s sake, in the sense and in the purpose of His Word. God upholds all things (ta panta) by His Word (Heb. 1. 2; cf. John 1. 1 f. and Col. 1). The whole was made by Him for its own sake. The Word which is attested for us in Holy Scripture, the story of Israel, of Jesus Christ and His Church, is the first thing, and the whole world with its light and shadow, its depths and its heights is the second. By the Word the world exists. A marvellous reversal of our whole thinking! Don’t let yourselves be led astray by the difficulty of the time-concept, which might well result from this. The world came into being, it was created and sustained by the little child that was born in Bethlehem, by the Man who died on the Cross of Golgotha, and the third day rose again. That is the Word of creation, by which all things were brought into being. That is where the meaning of creation comes from, and that is why it says at the beginning of the Bible: ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth and God said, ‘Let there be . . .’. This unheard-of utterance of God in that uncanny first chapter of the Bible! Think of this utterance, not as a magic word of an Almighty, who now let the world go forth, but listen: God speaks concretely, as Scripture attests; and since this was God’s reality from the beginning, everything that is came into being – the light and heaven and earth, plants and beasts, and last of all, man. And if we inquire into the goal of creation, the object of the whole, the object of heaven and earth and all creation, I can only say that it is to be the theatre of His glory. The meaning is that God is being glorified. Doxa, gloria, means quite simply to become manifest. God wills to be visible in the world; and to that extent creation is a significant action of God. ‘Behold, it was very good.’ Whatever objections may be raised against the reality of the world, its goodness incontestably consists in the fact that it may be the theatre of His glory, and man the witness to this glory. We must not desire to know a priori what goodness is, or to grumble if the world does not correspond to it. For the purpose for which God made the world it is also good. ‘The theatre of His glory, theatrum gloriae Dei’, says Calvin of it. But man is the witness; he who is allowed to be where God is made glorious, is not a merely passive witness; the witness has to express what he has seen. That is man’s nature, that is what he is able to do, to be a witness of God’s acts. This purpose of God ‘justifies’ Him as the Creator.