¹ Karl Barth names two subsections of §41 ‘Creation and Covenant’ as ‘Creation as the External Basis of the Covenant’ and ‘The Covenant as the Internal Basis of Creation’ (see Church Dogmatics, III/1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958); hereafter referred to as CD).

² Eph. 1:3–4. All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.

³ Wittgenstein's comment that the believer and the unbeliever live in different worlds notwithstanding.

⁴ See Sokowlowski, Robert, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations in Christian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1982/1995)Google Scholar. He writes: ‘Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflection primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness’ (p. 23).

⁵ Tanner, Kathryn, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 11, 27.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 11, 11–12. She writes: ‘It makes sense then to recast the “material mode” of a theologian's statements about God and world into a “formal mode” whereby they express recommendations for talk about these matters. Statements about God and world become rules for discourse, proposals about what should and should not be said’ (p. 12).

⁸ Ibid., pp. 12–13; cf. pp. 49–53. She writes: ‘Although the referential character of theological discourse is crucial to the whole enterprise (what would be the point of doing theology if one were not really talking about God?), the informational vacuity of such talk should shift the focus of someone investigating it away from epistemological questions of truth and meaning. Theologians simply assume that what they say about God is meaningful and true: they have no way of actually specifying what they are talking about . . . apart from the meanings of the terms they use and it is just those meanings whose applicability to God they admit to failing to understand’ (p. 12). Such statements provide assurance of reference but of course raise as many questions as they answer, even among those sympathetic and indeed appreciative of Tanner's holistic account that refuses to separate theology and Christian practice (see ibid., p. 13).

⁹ I would argue that, once even significantly qualified referentiality in theological discourse is accepted, any strong distinction between formal rules and material statements pertaining to the relation between God and the world becomes attenuated (rightly so, in my view, and Tanner may well agree with this claim). The formal statements themselves point to some material commitments, for example, that God is transcendent, even while we might readily admit with Tanner that we cannot comprehensively specify the exact nature of such transcendence. Another way to put this question is to ask whether the rules of theological discourse are as akin to mathematical and grammatical rules as Tanner seems to hold. The first seem to imply some implicit material commitments in a way that the latter do not.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 38.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid., pp. 46–8. This does not mean that Tanner avoids all difficulties. By radicalising divine action in a manner that entails that God becomes the source of all that is, she introduces the problem of evil and yet chooses not to engage it (see pp. 47–8, p. 174 n. 12).

¹³ Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929/1969), p. 405Google Scholar; cited in Clifford, Anne M., ‘Creation’, in Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler and Galvin, John P. (eds.), Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 227Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Therefore, while Tanner expertly outlines the use and interplay of transcendence and divine activity, the grounding of such use receives less attention. There at times seems to be an abstractness in Tanner's work because the rules of the God–world relation are not explicitly rooted in the revelation of this relation itself. This observation is not a denial that Tanner may well ground such a relation in a particular event rather than in a general metaphysics. But the question remains from where such convictions regulating the description of the God–world relation come and why Christians have such a distinct doctrine of creation and specific understandings of divine transcendence and activity.

¹⁵ Sokowlowski, God of Faith, pp. 31–2. For the following, see also Norris, R. A. Jr., God and World in Early Christian Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1965), pp. 11–40Google Scholar; Tanner, God and Creation, pp. 37–80; Clifford, ‘Creation’, pp. 210–16.

¹⁶ See Sokowlowski, God of Faith, pp. 12–20, 33. He writes: ‘The being of pagan gods is to be a part, though the most important part, of what is; no matter how independent they are, the pagan gods must be with things that are not divine’ (p. 12).

¹⁷ ‘No matter how Aristotle's god is to be described, as the prime mover or as the self-thinking thought, he is part of the world and it is obviously necessary that there be other things besides him, whether he is aware of them or not’ (Sokowlowski, God of Faith, pp. 15–16).

¹⁸ Sokowlowski, God of Faith, p. 18. For Plato, as for Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans, ‘the divine, even in its most ultimate form, is never conceived as capable of being without the world. It is divine by being differentiated from what is not divine and by having an influence on what is not divine’ (p. 18).

¹⁹ Tanner, God and Creation, pp. 45–46.

²⁰ See Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk 12; also Stead, Christopher, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Plato, Timaeus, 69c.

²² Norris, God and World, p. 23.

²³ For the background in Second Temple Judaism of such Christian convictions regarding the uniqueness and transcendence of God, see Bauckham, Richard, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), pp. 1–22Google Scholar.

²⁴ Norris, God and World, pp. 37–9. For a similar distinction between Old Testament and modern scientific understandings of the world, see Clifford, ‘Creation’, p. 207. For patristic understandings of the material world, see also Lindberg, David C., ‘Science and the Early Church’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 19–48Google Scholar. He writes: ‘There was, of course, no unitary Christian view of the material world. But orthodox Christianity, as it developed, emphatically rejected the extremes; nature was neither to be worshiped nor to be repudiated’ (pp. 30–1; see also pp. 31–2, p. 41).

²⁵ Norris, God and World, p. 38.

²⁶ This is not to deny the complex history of the development of the conception of the divine in ancient Israel witnessed in its scriptures, in which one can find both reference to ‘gods’ (e.g. Psalm 82), as well as apparent ambiguous conceptions of the relationship between Yahweh and his messengers (see, for example, David N. Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), s.v. ‘Angels’ by Carol A. Newsom). Yet Bauckham convincingly argues that by Second Temple Judaism such ambiguity had cleared away (God Crucified, pp. 3–5, 16–22).

²⁷ Norris, God and World, pp. 38–9.

²⁸ Some of the most important biblical and apocryphal passages in support of this doctrine being Heb. 11:3; Rom. 4:17; 2 Macc. 7:28; and, according to some interpretations of it, Gen 1.

²⁹ The relation between God's triune identity and his eternal decision of election has become a matter of great controversy in recent years. While I acknowledge this difficulty here, addressing it would go far afield from the limited task at hand. Both sides in the controversy want to preserve the distinction of God and the world and so the answer given to the question does not fundamentally alter (but may have bearing upon) the distinction I am here trying to highlight.

³⁰ See Tanner, God and Creation, ch. 3.

³¹ Sokowlowski, God of Faith, pp. 19, pp. 31–4; see also Gunton, Colin, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, in Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994).

³² See also Isa. 42:5–7; 45:8–18; etc.

³³ As Clifford notes: ‘The Genesis creation texts were not composed to answer the scientific question of how the world came to be. On the contrary, they proclaim the relationship of God to reality, a relation of creator to creation’ (‘Creation’, p. 198; also pp. 203–4). Moreover, they themselves were written in light of the Exodus event, to which they were subservient.

³⁴ Sokowlowski, God of Faith, pp. 23–4, also p. xiv.

³⁵ John 1:3.

³⁶ Heb. 1:2.

³⁷ 1 Cor. 8:4–6. For the role New Testament christology plays with regard to the identity of God and the question of creation, see Bauckham, God Crucified, pp. 35–40.

³⁸ ‘As the only eternal one . . . God alone brought all other beings into existence. God had no helper, assistant or servant to assist or to implement his work of creation. God alone created and no one else had any part in this activity. This is axiomatic for Second Temple Judaism’ (ibid., p. 12).

³⁹ Col. 1:15–17; cf. Eph. 1:3–14.

⁴⁰ See Patzia, Arthur G., New International Biblical Commentary: Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1984/1990), p. 30Google Scholar.

⁴¹ 2 Cor. 4:6.

⁴² Clifford, ‘Creation’, p. 209. For a further discussion of the relation of Christ and creation in scripture, see Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1992/2005), pp. 11–34. Gunton there writes: ‘However remarkable the claim, whatever the origin of the words used to express it, and however incredible may appear the content, there appears to have developed soon after the death of Jesus a widespread Christian confession to the effect that the one through whom God had acted to save the world was also the agent of its creation’ (p. 22).

⁴³ That this is the case does not entail that there are no difficulties raised by the formulations of Logos christology among patristic authors. For example, at times the Logos can appear to be more a cosmic principle than a person, Jesus Christ. Such is certainly evident in Justin Martyr. Nevertheless, though Justin melded Christian and pagan conceptions through his understanding of Christ as the universal reason in a controversial manner, the sufficiency and uniqueness of Christ was for Justin not at issue (see Norris, God and World, pp. 53–4; for problematic aspects of Justin's doctrine of creation and christology, ibid., pp. 64–8). Upon a balanced reading, it is clear that Justin does not sacrifice the particularity of Christ for a Christ principle so as to trade a philosophy for christology (see Justin's Second Apology, chs 6 and 13; also First Apology, chs 5, 13 and 46). The balance may be precarious, but Justin does not abandon the historical person of Jesus for an atemporal metaphysics.

Further complicating this picture, the cosmic status of the Logos is not yet settled for early Christian thinkers, who often portray the Logos as a mediating principle subordinate to the Father. The full equality of the Logos (the Son) with the Father is of course not fully articulated until the work of Athanasius, the Cappadocians and Nicaea. For a discussion of the status of the Logos in the thought of Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen, see Norris, God and World, chs 2–6; also Stead, Philosophy, ch. 13; and J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. edn (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978), chs 4–10.

⁴⁴ See Stead, Philosophy, pp. 67–8; Norris, God and World, pp. 88–97; also Gunton, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, p. 148.

⁴⁵ ‘One result, then, of the dialogue of Christian faith with Greek philosophy was the formulation of an idea of God which, at its very center, embraced a fundamental tension between the ideals of an immutable Perfection beyond the world and a creative Sovereignty in and over it’ (Norris, God and World, pp. 164–5). In addition, the Neoplatonic influence upon Christian thinkers created a marked tension between the Platonic notion of the inferiority of the material world and the biblical notion of the goodness of the physical creation (see Lindberg, ‘Science’, pp. 30–2).

⁴⁶ Tanner, God and Creation, pp. 56–7. Tanner here provides an analysis of Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ, ch. 4.

⁴⁷ For some of the problems raised by making the forms central to the doctrine of creation, see Allen, Diogenes, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1985), ch. 1Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Gunton, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, p. 150.

⁴⁹ Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Der Christliche Glaube, 2 vols, ed. Redeker, Martin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960)Google Scholar; English translation: The Christian Faith, trans. and ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989); hereafter CF. For the doctrine of creation, see CF §§36–41; also §§42–5; for preservation, §§46–9. For Schleiermacher's subsuming creation into preservation, see §38.1. For the broader implications and scope of Schleiermacher's doctrine of creation beyond these sections, see Robert Sherman, The Shift to Modernity: Christ and the Doctrine of Creation in the Theologies of Schleiermacher and Barth (New York and London: T & T Clark, 2005), pp. 7–8.

⁵⁰ See CF §19.4 postscript; also §§28.2, 29.3.

⁵¹ See Bender, Kimlyn J., ‘Between Heaven and Earth: Schleiermacher's Christology in View of Intrasystematic Tensions and Relations within the Glaubenslehre’, in Richardson, Ruth Drucilla (ed.), Schleiermacher's ‘To Cecilie’ and Other Writings by and about Schleiermacher: Neues Athenaeum, Vol. 6 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), pp. 179–95Google Scholar, esp. pp. 186–95.

⁵² See CF §§47, 13, 88.4, 93.3.

⁵³ Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, trans. James Duke and Francis Fiorenza (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 60–5; see also CF §37.2; Sherman, Shift to Modernity, pp. 21–3.

⁵⁴ See Bender, ‘Between Heaven and Earth’, p. 181.

⁵⁵ And this is true regardless of Schleiermacher's statement that attributing to Christ an absolutely potent God-consciousness is equivalent to positing an existence of God in him (CF §94.1). For the problems raised by such a statement within Schleiermacher's system and its ultimate unintelligibility, see Bender, ‘Between Heaven and Earth’, pp. 192–3.

⁵⁶ Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre, pp. 60–1.

⁵⁷ For Schleiermacher's differentiation between speculative and dogmatic propositions, see CF §16.3 postscript. Whether Schleiermacher was consistent in maintaining such a separation is questionable in light of the previous discussion. Barth's understanding of theology's method and task is spelled out in CD I/1, §1. Barth's doctrine of creation is presented in CD III/1–4.

⁵⁸ For an insightful comparison between Schleiermacher and Barth on the question of creation and christology, see Sherman, Shift to Modernity. While Sherman rightly notes similar christological emphases in the doctrine of creation of both Schleiermacher and Barth, he fails to wrestle adequately with their very significant differences, especially in their respective christologies. Barth himself states that the doctrine of creation cannot be established upon a feeling of dependence (CD III/1, p. 9) and in this he distances himself from Schleiermacher, as he does on so many points.

⁵⁹ It is precisely this stark difference between Schleiermacher and Barth that Sherman does not adequately address (see Sherman, Shift to Modernity, pp. 2–3). I have borrowed the term ‘hermeneutical key’ from him here.

⁶⁰ Barth can state: ‘In contrast to everything that we know of origination and causation, creation denotes the divine action which has a real analogy, a genuine point of comparison, only in the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father and therefore only in the inner life of God Himself and not at all in the life of the creature’ (CD III/1, p. 14).

⁶¹ Barth can also say that creation is understood through the analogy of grace and justification (CD III/1, p. 30).

⁶² See, for example, CD IV/2, pp. 57–8.

⁶³ For a full investigation of this claim, see Bender, ‘Between Heaven and Earth’, pp. 179–95. Richard Niebuhr states that Schleiermacher's theology is better understood as Christo-morphic, rather than Christocentric (Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), pp. 211–12).

⁶⁴ As Gunton has noted: ‘What is to be avoided is not all anthropocentrism, but the tearing apart of creation and redemption, so that redemption comes to appear to consist in salvation out of and apart from the rest of the world’ (Christ and Creation, p. 33).

⁶⁵ Ibid., pp. 74–5.

⁶⁶ It might be added that only in acknowledging a (relative and circumscribed) special status of humanity can we truly take up our special responsibility and accountability for the environment and the well-being of the created order. To deny a special status to humanity among God's creatures is also to deny a special duty. It is an unwitting justification for ecological irresponsibility. For a related discussion, ibid., pp. 32–3.

⁶⁷ ‘There is free scope for natural science beyond what theology describes as the work of the Creator. And theology can and must move freely where science which really is science, and not secretly a pagan Gnosis or religion, has its appointed limit. I am of the opinion, however, that future workers in the field of the Christian doctrine of creation will find many problems worth pondering in defining the point and manner of this twofold boundary’ (CD III/1, p. x).

⁶⁸ To read the doctrine of creation under the second article is therefore not to remove it from its rightful home in the first (or to deny that it must also be read under the third). It is, rather, to assert that any Christian doctrine of creation must recognise that the God who creates the world does so through the Son by means of the Spirit, that the world is not only created by Christ but for him and that the paradigm and pattern for understanding all communion between God and creation is the incarnate Christ chosen for us and we for him before the world began. Furthermore, this principle does not deny a proper, though circumscribed, use for appropriation, such as the affirmation that it is the incarnate Son, rather than the Father or Spirit, who is identified as Jesus Christ and who dies upon the cross. The large actions of creation, redemption and regeneration cannot, however, be thus appropriated (for opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa). In regard to salvation, we are reminded that the New Testament speaks not of Christ as saving the world so much as that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’, and that ‘no one can confess “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Cor. 5:18–19; 1 Cor. 12:3; cf. 1 Cor. 6:11). In light of the New Testament, just as creation cannot be exhaustively subsumed under the first article, so redemption cannot simply be subsumed under the second (or third) article. As Barth relates: ‘We believe in Jesus Christ when we believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. These words of the first article do not make sense if for all the particularity of their meaning they do not anticipate the confession of the second and also the third articles’ (CD III/1, p. 19). For the history of the development of both informal and formal creeds, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd edn (New York: David McKay Co. Inc., 1972).

⁶⁹ Such a statement of course does not deny the role of the Spirit in creation as well, though, as Colin Gunton notes, the ‘work of the Spirit in creation is less prominent in the New Testament’ than that of the Son, or Word (Gunton, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, p. 146).

⁷⁰ Sokowlowski, God of Faith, p. xi.

⁷¹ For an example of such a nadir, see Fox, Matthew, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1983)Google Scholar.

⁷² Fox, Matthew, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)Google Scholar. Fox's approach to these matters is noted approvingly and largely adopted by Rosemary Radford Ruether – see Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 242. See also McFague, Sallie, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)Google Scholar. She suggests that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation ‘be radicalized beyond Jesus of Nazareth to include all matter. God is incarnated in the world’ (p. xi; see also pp. 159, 162, 179). For a distinct though similar discussion from the side of science, see Peacocke, Arthur, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine and Human (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁷³ Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 155Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ See Tanner's excellent discussion of such issues in relation to Aquinas. She writes: ‘A being that acts by rational volition . . . is not determined to bring about effects of a single kind like itself. A rational agent acts according to what it knows and not according to what it is; its effects may be various, therefore, and none of them need bear any necessary relation of identity or contrast with its own nature. A being acting deliberately is not a univocal cause, in other words; it need not act so as to produce a simple univocal relation between its effects and itself’ (p. 72; also pp. 71–2; for the weaknesses of transcendental arguments in general, see pp. 21–26). That divine and created causality are incommensurable is implicit in the Chalcedonian affirmation that the divine and human natures are without confusion. There is thus an implicit asymmetry and incommensurability between divine and created causality because they are not the action of members of a single class and thus they cannot be brought under a single heading or conception of activity. Is there then a place for apologetic arguments that defend the possibility of discrete divine activity in the world of nature? Yes, there is, in so far as some views of the universe rule out of hand, in an a priori fashion, the very possibility of divine agency by means of outdated science. Here knowledge of an open (quantum) universe may correct a closed (Newtonian) one. Yet one should not take such arguments as anything more than the disarming of false objections to Christian belief. They only specify that ruling miracles impossible based upon a closed universe is bad science. They should never be taken to mean that God requires or in fact utilises the quantum level to act. Such a view designates a causal joint that could once more become a gap and therein fails to recognise the ultimate incommensurability of divine and created causality.

⁷⁵ For an insightful discussion of Pascal's answer, see James Wm. McClendon, Jr., ‘The God of the Theologians and the God of Jesus Christ’, in Axel D. Steuer and James Wm. McClendon, Jr. (eds.), Is God God? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1981), pp. 185–205.

⁷⁶ Buckley, Michael J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 33Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Rom. 8:18–24. The world as the ‘theatre of God's glory’ was, of course, one of Calvin's favourite metaphors for creation.

⁷⁸ With apologies to Shakespeare (Hamlet, 2. 2. 623). I would like to thank Paul Molnar for his insightful comments upon an earlier draft of this paper, as well as those present at the Christian Theological Research Fellowship Section of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 2005.