The doctrine of creation, or more accurately, of the Creator, speaks of God in His relation to our existence as such and to our world. To that extent it could be said: it brings to its sharpest, most fundamental expression what the words “Father Almighty” already declared. The doctrine says not only that we are completely and absolutely bound, and that we completely and absolutely belong to God, the Almighty, the Lord over life and death, the Father of Jesus Christ, but it says that without Him we should not be, and that we exist only through Him. It says that our real existence stands or falls with God’s giving it to us and maintaining it. There is much to be said for Luther’s placing man at the centre of the created world, in his explanation of the first Article: “I believe that God has made me together with all creatures”. The fact that God made heaven and earth does indeed concern man, man who lives under heaven upon earth, himself at once a visible and an invisible being. But there is also much and perhaps more to be said for doing what the symbol itself does—for not expressly emphasising man as creation of God or bringing him right into the centre. Most decidedly the knowledge of God as the Creator and of man as His creature and therefore the knowledge of the difference between God and man and of their true relationship would not be subserved if man was going with excessive forwardness to look upon himself as, and to enjoy the experience of being, the creature and the partner of God. Will he recognise, fear and love God as God the Creator, without at the same time recognising, as he looks down to earth and up to heaven, his own littleness and insignificance, both in body and soul, even within the creaturely sphere? Without indeed mentioning man, and significant in its failure to mention man, the statement that God created heaven and earth says the decisive thing even about him, and precisely about him. Of these two worlds he is the citizen, encompassed in truth with a special mystery, or the wanderer between these two worlds which indeed in God’s sight are only one world, the created world.
The statement: “God is the Creator of the World” has in the main a double content: it speaks of the freedom of God (one could also say: of His holiness) over against the world, and of His relationship (one could also say: of His love) to the world.
1. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we acknowledge that the relationship of God and world is fundamentally and in all its implications not one of equilibrium or of parity, but that in this relationship God has the absolute primacy. This is no mere matter of course, but rather a mystery, which all along the line determines the meaning and the form of this relationship: that there is a reality at all differentiated from the reality of God, a being beside the divine Being. There is that. There are heaven and earth, and between the two, between angel and animal, man. But quite apart from the explicit proposition about Creation, for Scripturally based thinking there follows from the fact that their being is so closely related to the Being of God, this: that their being can only be one that is radically dependent on the Being of God, therefore one that is radically relative and without independence, dust, a drop in the bucket, clay in the hand of the potter—mere figures of speech which far from saying too much, say decidedly much too little. Heaven and earth are what they are through God and only through God. This brings us to the true thought of creation.
Heaven and earth are not themselves God, are not anything in the nature of a divine generation or emanation, are not, as the Gnostics or mystics would again and again have it, in some direct or indirect way, identical with the Son or Word of God. In opposition to what even Christian theologians have on occasion taught, the world must not be understood as eternal. It has, and with it time and space have, a beginning. Their infinity is not only limited by the finite as such. Rather, their infinity is, along with everything finite, limited and encompassed by God’s eternity and omnipotence, i.e. by God’s lordship over time and space, in which it itself does not share. Therefore the creation of the world is not a movement of God in Himself, but a free opus ad extra, finding its necessity only in His love, but again not casting any doubt on His self-sufficiency: the world cannot exist without God, but if God were not love (as such inconceivable!), He could exist very well without the world. “And all this out of pure paternal, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine,” as again Luther says, speaking not yet of our salvation, but of our creation.
Again heaven and earth are not God’s work in the sense that God created them according to some ideas in themselves given and true, or out of some material already existing, or by means of some instrument apt in itself for that purpose. Creation in the Bible sense means: Creation solely on the basis of God’s own wisdom. It means, creatio ex nihilo (Rom. 4:17). It means, creation by the word, which is indeed the eternal Son and therefore God Himself. If that is so, if there is no question of an identity of the created world with God, no question of its existing under any circumstances as a legitimate possibility (i.e. apart from sin) in formal or material independence over against God, then it necessarily follows that the meaning and the end of the world of His creation is not to be sought in itself, that the purpose and the destiny of this world could only be to serve God as the world’s Creator and indeed to serve as “theatre of His glory” (Calvin). From God’s creating the world it follows that He created it for this purpose and with this destiny and therefore created it in accordance with this purpose and this destiny and therefore good. Here we must of course acknowledge anew the primacy of God and must therefore in our estimate of the “goodness” of this world hold to the judgment of God. He knows what serves His glory. We must believe that the world as He created it is appointed to serve His glory, and we must not allow ourselves to be misled here by our feelings and reflections over good and evil, however justified. No doubt it is scriptural to say that the world was created for man’s sake. But yet only because man was in a pre-eminent sense created for the service of God, created to be the “image of God,” not only as theatre, but as active and passive bearer of that glory. It is the concrete content of faith in God the Creator that the world is “good” for man in and for this service of God. How should man have to decide and decree what is “good”? He has just got to believe that God has created the world and him himself really good.
2. With the proposition: God is the Creator! we now recognise also that just in that so utterly unequal relationship in which it stands to God, the world has reality and indeed a reality of its own, that is willed and appointed by God, upheld, accompanied and guided by God. The world having once been created by God (apart from sin!) cannot obviously cease to be determined by this decisive fact. It can no doubt cease to exist, should God will that it no longer exist. But as long as it exists, it cannot cease to be the God-created world. It cannot be a world forsaken by God, left to itself or to chance or to fate or to its own laws. Not as if it could not do that of itself! In the world itself there are no eternal necessities, no eternal impossibilities. But it cannot do it because it is and remains true that God is its Creator. A sovereignty of chance, of fate, or of the world’s own system of laws would be at variance with this truth. That is impossible. Because God is the Creator of the world, therefore it stands under His sovereignty, therefore there is a co-existence of Him and it. It is the totally unequal co-existence of Creator and creature, a co-existence in strictest supremacy and subordination, but yet a co-existence, and therefore an existence of God not only in Himself, but also with and within the world, because it is, and in so far as it is, His creature. Therefore in the proposition, “God is the Creator,” we recognise not only God’s transcendence, but also the immanence of that God so completely transcendent to the world. Remembering the Creator’s transcendence, we shall be safeguarded against ascribing to the world as such any divinity