Creation so understood is an expression of divine grace. Creatio ex nihilo rightly indicates that all that is was created out of nothing, but because “there is now something, since we exist by 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” (p. 55). That such is the case means that all the things we call evil — death, sin, the Devil, and hell — are, therefore, not God’s creation. They in fact are nothing (p. 57).
That we exist means we do so as creatures of time and space. Once we were not and soon we will no longer be, which means that there was a once and that there is a now. God is eternal, but we exist in time. That does not mean that there is no time in God, but it is a different time from ours. “God’s time and space are free from the limitations in which alone time and space are thinkable for us. God is Lord of time and the Lord of space. As He is the origin of these forms too, nothing in Him has any limitations or imperfections, such as pertain to creaturely existence” (p. 56).23
Yet we have agency befitting our status as creatures. We have the freedom to decide and act one way rather than another. Our freedom is, however, the freedom appropriate to our creaturely existence in time and space. We are subject to law as well as our fellow creatures. “For if we are free, it is only because our Creator is infinitely free. All human freedom is but an imperfect mirroring of divine freedom” (p. 56).
Barth concludes his exposition of the first article of the Confession with the affirmation that “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. . . . 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 marvelous reversal of our whole thinking!” (p. 57).
In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth makes explicit the eschatological character of creation by asserting that “the aim of creation is history.”24 God has willed and created the creature for the sake of the Son and for the glorification of the Son by the Holy Spirit. The very meaning of history is to be found in this covenant between God and us, known through the events that constitute a narrative in which God’s patience with the creature is manifest by his willingness to give creation time — “time which acquires content through these events and which is finally to be ‘fulfilled’ and made ripe for its end by their conclusion.”25
Creation is therefore not a timeless truth, but rather we know there was a beginning because we have seen the end. The end we have seen in Christ was in the beginning, and the beginning Christ has inaugurated is the end of the beginning. Real time, eschatological time, is the life-time of Jesus Christ. His life is “the turning point, the transition, the decision which was accomplished in His death and resurrection; together with the time preceding and following this event in the history of Israel and the existence of the Christian Church.”26 The very existence of the church, therefore, is a witness to the created character of our existence.
Such an understanding of creation obviously has profound implications for how ethics is understood and done. Barth develops his account of the ethics of creation in Church Dogmatics III/4. There he seeks to show how the command of the one God who is gracious to us in Jesus Christ is also the command of the Creator.27 He therefore insists that “the God who meets man as Creator in His commandment is the God ‘who is gracious to him in Jesus Christ.’ He is not, then, a new and strange God who could require of man as his Commander something new and strange.”28 Rather, he is the same God who is gracious to us in Christ, being no different from the Creator by whom all things were made and who is Lord over all. The significance of Barth’s understanding of these matters I think will be readily apparent in contrast to Porter’s use of creation to sustain a natural law ethic.
Porter on Creation and Natural Law
Jean Porter’s argument that natural law is inadequately understood if it is divorced from the doctrine of creation might seem to make her an ally of Barth. But she explicitly distinguishes her understanding of the relation of creation to natural law from Barth. She notes that Barth rejects all versions of natural law theory because he does not think we can draw ethical conclusions from our flawed knowledge of creation; but even more significant, Barth argues that we can know creation and the demands of God as Creator only through our knowledge of Christ.29
Porter responds to Barth’s objections by observing that Barth’s critique of natural law must be seen as but a subtheme of his wider critique of moral philosophy as a self-contained enterprise. According to Porter, Barth’s rejection of natural law is due to his confusion of a natural law ethic with the general conception of ethics, a conception based on the alleged autonomy of reason, which Barth identifies with our sinful attempt to be our own creator. Porter, however, finds Barth’s position problematic because Barth fails to appreciate the fact that we are heirs to a very different understanding of morality, that is, an understanding of morality that is “intrinsically transcendent and a locus of human contact with the divine.”30 In contrast to Barth’s critique of autonomous ethics, Porter argues that the scholastic concept of natural law was not the deliverance of pure reason, but rather itself a theological concept grounded in Scripture.31
Porter argues that Barth’s theological worries about natural law can be met by recognizing that the scholastic concept of natural law in fact is a theological construal of the moral significance of human nature based on the doctrine of creation. She recognizes, however, that this is only a partial response to Barth’s worries, because his concern is not that an account of natural law might not need a theological basis; instead, the issue is what kind of theological basis it would need. She acknowledges that for Barth the question is not only theological but Christological.32
Porter observes that the scholastics did situate natural theology in an overall theology in which the person and work of Christ were central; but they did not think, as Barth does, that Christology is directly relevant for shaping a natural law ethic. Porter, moreover, thinks it a very good thing that the scholastics thought the claim that the world is the good creation of God, without referencing Christ, is theologically appropriate.33 She does so because she thinks it important to recognize that Christians are not alone in affirming the doctrine of creation. According to Porter, the belief in creation may be a central belief for Christians, but that does not mean the Christian understanding of creation is unique.34
Porter’s way of putting this matter reflects her concern that Christian ethics not be thought to be distinctive or unique given the reality of, as well as need for, a common morality. She thinks it quite likely that our common secular morality is in fact more Christian than its critics suggest. Such critics confuse the question of a distinctive Christian account of morality with the question of what constitutes an