Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999),
This book, as per Welker, “offers initial steps toward correcting both the classic theistic caricature of God the Creator and a corresponding religious understanding of reality.”[1] These new approaches are a “burning theological interest”, for modern religious depictions are “boring, vapid, and banal.”[2]
A rereading of Genesis 1 and 2 shows the predominant conceptions of creation to be false abstractions. The summarizing conceptions of creation, according to Welker, are “very vague, mostly even obscure.”[3] I declare that creation in Genesis is not a creation out of nothing, as a one time event, but is instead a continuous creation, a transformative process or producing higher aggregate conditions out of an absence of structure and order. Creatio continua operates as an enabling condition for all that occurs thereafter. According to Welker, neither Genesis 1 or 2 “describes God as a highest being who in pure self-sufficiency does nothing other than produce and cause creaturely being.”[4]
Welker stipulates that in Genesis 1 and 2 God’s action corresponds to only a few ways in which we normally construe causation and production.[5] Seven times God is listed as evaluating (1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25, and 1:31). Three times God is listed as naming (1:5, 1:8, 1:10). Twice God is listed as intervening in what is already created in order to separate it and give it order (1:4, 1:7). The latter two instances of God’s intervention give credence to the notion of God acting upon formless matter, and thereby giving it order, structure, and complexity. Thus, the creating God is not merely an actor within creation, but also a reactor within creation. Indeed, God’s action is an action that reacts, and is an action that lets itself be determined. Genesis 1 and 2 depict a creation that as having its own activity, as itself being productive, and as itself being causative.[6] In the Genesis narrative, we are not able to derive a clear demarcation between God’s creativity and the creature’s activity.[7] On the one hand, God’s activity is clearly active in production and causation. On the other hand, God is equally reactive to that which is created. An abstract, minimal definition of creation is as follows: “creation is the construction and maintenance of associations of different, interdependent creaturely realms.”[8] The study of creation must, therefore, focus upon the interdependencies of natural and providential processes. Creation as a whole, the reality of it, and nature of it, continually flow into each other.
The earth is an active, empowering environment – even an empowering agent – that brings forth life of various independent processes of self-reproduction. Concurrently, the earth must be seen as an environment of various heterogeneous life-processes. So then, the earth brings forth, but it does not bring forth itself. By releasing the power of the self-directed earth, God enables – potentially – the continual production, variation, and sustenance of vegetable and animal life.[9] Welker suggests that imago dei refers to the partnership of God with humans, building upon the imagery that he inherited from Barth.[10] Moltmann likewise pictures imago dei.[11] However, Welker stipulates the imago dei goes farther than what Moltmann and Barth contend that it is, and that it also includes a definite dominion exercise.[12] We are to exercise dominion over creatures by protecting them and cultivating them.
Note Kierkegaard’s statement to the effect of the “infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity.” Feuerbach stated that God is heaven spiritualized, while heaven is God materialized.”[13] Descartes coined the phrase that “humankind is ordained to be master and possessor of nature.”
Interesting notes:
According to Calvin, natural instinct within the human mind can have only – at best – a vague sense of the deity.
We are all ensnared in a reality that we cannot adequately control. Moreover, we are all ensnared in a reality within which we must struggle. One must mercilessly insist on the insights of shattering sobriety. Resist delirious fancies and childish conceits, for they are unstable and fleeting.
[1] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 2.
[2] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 4.
[3] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 6 – 7.
[4] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 9.
[5] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 9.
[6] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 10.
[7] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 12.
[8] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 13.
[9] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 42.
[10] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 65.
[11] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985], 215ff.
[12] Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 69.
[13] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, G. Eliot trans. [New York: Harper and Row, 1957], 175