Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself. Individualism [pg 386]admits dualism but not complete division. Our dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man and man, man and nature, man and God. Even the physical creation is ethical at heart: each thing is dependent on other things, and must serve them, or lose its own life and beauty. The branch must abide in the vine, or it withers and is cut off and burned” (275).
Swedenborg held to emanation,—see Divine Love and Wisdom, 283, 303, 905—“Every one who thinks from clear reason sees that the universe is not created from nothing.... All things were created out of a substance.... As God alone is substance in itself and therefore the real esse, it is evidence that the existence of things is from no other source.... Yet the created universe is not God, because God is not in time and space.... There is a creation of the universe, and of all things therein, by continual mediations from the First.... In the substances and matters of which the earths consist, there is nothing of the Divine in itself, but they are deprived of all that is divine in itself.... Still they have brought with them by continuation from the substance of the spiritual sum that which was there from the Divine.” Swedenborgianism is “materialism driven deep and clinched on the inside.” This system reverses the Lord's prayer; it should read: “As on earth, so in heaven.” He disliked certain sects, and he found that all who belonged to those sects were in the hells, condemned to everlasting punishment. The truth is not materialistic emanation, as Swedenborg imagined, but rather divine energizing in space and time. The universe is God's system of graded self-limitation, from matter up to mind. It has had a beginning, and God has instituted it. It is a finite and partial manifestation of the infinite Spirit. Matter is an expression of spirit, but not an emanation from spirit, any more than our thoughts and volitions are. Finite spirits, on the other hand, are differentiations within the being of God himself, and so are not emanations from him.
Napoleon asked Goethe what matter was. “Esprit gelé,”—frozen spirit was the answer Schelling wished Goethe had given him. But neither is matter spirit, nor are matter and spirit together mere natural effluxes from God's substance. A divine institution of them is requisite (quoted substantially from Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40). Schlegel in a similar manner called architecture “frozen music,” and another writer calls music “dissolved architecture.” There is a “psychical automatism,” as Ladd says, in his Philosophy of Mind, 169; and Hegel calls nature “the corpse of the understanding—spirit to alienation from itself.” But spirit is the Adam, of which nature is the Eve; and man says to nature: “This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” as Adam did in Gen. 2:23.
3. Creation from eternity.
This theory regards creation as an act of God in eternity past. It was propounded by Origen, and has been held in recent times by Martensen, Martineau, John Caird, Knight, and Pfleiderer. The necessity of supposing such creation from eternity has been argued from God's omnipotence, God's timelessness, God's immutability, and God's love. We consider each of these arguments in their order.
Origen held that God was from eternity the creator of the world of spirits. Martensen, in his Dogmatics, 114, shows favor to the maxims: “Without the world God is not God.... God created the world to satisfy a want in himself.... He cannot but constitute himself the Father of spirits.” Schiller, Die Freundschaft, last stanza, gives the following popular expression to this view: “Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister; Fühlte Mangel, darum schuf er Geister, Sel'ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. Fand das höchste Wesen schon kein Gleiches; Aus dem Kelch des ganzen Geisterreiches Schäumt ihm die Unendlichkeit.” The poet's thought was perhaps suggested by Goethe's Sorrows of Werther: “The flight of a bird above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 31—“But I need now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men. And since, not even when the whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, To slake thy thirst.” But this regards the Creator as dependent upon, and in bondage to, his own world.
Pythagoras held that nature's substances and laws are eternal. Martineau, Study of Religion, 1:144; 2:250, seems to make the creation of the world an eternal process, [pg 387]conceiving of it as a self-sundering of the Deity, in whom in some way the world was always contained (Schurman, Belief in God, 140). Knight, Studies in Philos. and Lit., 94, quotes from Byron's Cain, I:1—“Let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne, Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence And unparticipated solitude.... He, so wretched in his height, So restless in his wretchedness, must still Create and recreate.” Byron puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer. Yet Knight, in his Essays in Philosophy, 143, 247, regards the universe as the everlasting effect of an eternal Cause. Dualism, he thinks, is involved in the very notion of a search for God.
W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“God is the source of the universe. Whether by immediate production at some point of time, so that after he had existed alone there came by his act to be a universe, or by perpetual production from his own spiritual being, so that his eternal existence was always accompanied by a universe in some stage of being, God has brought the universe into existence.... Any method in which the independent God could produce a universe which without him could have had no existence, is accordant with the teachings of Scripture. Many find it easier philosophically to hold that God has eternally brought forth creation from himself, so that there has never been a time when there was not a universe in some stage of existence, than to think of an instantaneous creation of all existing things when there had been nothing but God before. Between these two views theology is not compelled to decide, provided we believe that God is a free Spirit greater than the universe.” We dissent from this conclusion of Dr. Clarke, and hold that Scripture requires us to trace the universe back to a beginning, while reason itself is better satisfied with this view than it can be with the theory of creation from eternity.
(a) Creation from eternity is not necessitated by God's omnipotence. Omnipotence does not necessarily imply actual creation; it implies only power to create. Creation, moreover, is in the nature of the case a thing begun. Creation from eternity is a contradiction in terms, and that which is self-contradictory is not an object of power.