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On Being a Creature
By George S. Hendry

IN WHAT some regard as the twilight of Christendom, when beliefs that have long sustained and directed human lives fade into the shadows, there is one belief that seems to remain luminous to a majority of people, including many outside the church. It is the belief that we are created, or made, by God. People who have shed most beliefs may still be heard referring to their "Maker."

This belief no doubt owes much of its tenacity to the obvious fact that we did not create ourselves; we are not the originators of our own existence. And if we are not, then who is? Our parents? Our parents are the immediate source of our existence; it is the), who gave us birth. But we do not think of them as our creators. We think of them rather as intermediaries; the part they play we call "pro-creation," a service they perform pro, on behalf of the Creator.

The purpose of this essay is not to examine the validity of the belief, but to inquire into its significance in the lives of those who profess it. What does it mean to them? What effect does it have on their understanding of themselves and the way they live their lives? In his Small Catechism, Luther asked the question what we mean when we say, "I believe in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," and he answered, "I believe that God has created me … ." Luther saw rightly that when we confess our faith in God as Creator, we are not only saying something about God, we are also saying something about ourselves; we are saying that we are creatures of God. But what does it mean to be a creature?

I

The point of the question may be sharpened if it is applied to the creation of the world. This idea has acquired a fresh interest at the present time because of recent developments in science. Astronomers have found in the composition of the universe indications that it came into existence at a point in time billions of years ago in a manner which they use the biblical word "creation" to describe-though they picture it in a different way than the Bible does, a "big bang," not a spoken word.¹ Some people are disposed to see in this development a rapprochement between science and religion, which have often been at logger

George S. Hendry is Professor of Systematic Theology, Emeritus, at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books on theology and a past president of the American Theological Society.
¹ Is it relevant here to recall I Kings 19:11f.

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heads.² But even if science and religion, from their different perspectives, have come to agree on the fact that the world had a beginning, that beginning lies so far distant in the past that it seems to be a matter of only scientific curiosity or antiquarian interest, and to have no bearing on the condition of the world today.³ If we view our own creation in like manner as the beginning of our existence, the effect is also to relegate it to the past and to leave it little or no bearing on our present existence.

This is what happened to creation in deism. When the deists of the eighteenth century undertook to strip religion down to its rational core, they preserved the doctrine of creation, because it seemed to them to be a rational way of accounting for the fact of existence. But it had little effect on their understanding of themselves. On the contrary, it is their understanding of themselves, which they had reached by another route, that led to their reductionist view of creation. This is evident in the Declaration of Independence, which reflects the deism of Thomas Jefferson, its principal composer. The Creator makes a brief appearance at the beginning as the author of our existence and the source of our endowments, and then, having performed this function, retires from the stage and leaves us to exercise our endowments in the formation of governments for the protection of our rights, without reference to the Deity. When we compare it with the French version, which dispenses with the Creator and asserts that human rights are by birth, the Creator in the American version comes to look rather like a midwife who assists at the birth and then takes her departure.

If creation has to do merely with the origination of our existence, it is of doubtful relevance to the contemporary conduct of life, and it has been so judged by some theologians who were not deists. Theologians who have emphasized the relation of faith to experience have tended to push the doctrine of creation out to the periphery. The best known is Schleiermacher. He described faith as the "feeling of absolute dependence," but this feeling, as he saw it, could be aroused only by a providential preservation of the world, not by God's creation of it. Creation lies beyond the bounds of experience-of all possible experience-and therefore it does not come within the reach of faith. "The question of the origin of all finite being is raised not in the interest of piety but in that of curiosity; hence it can only be answered by such means as curiosity offers. Piety can never show more than an indirect interest in it."⁴

Luther, who also stressed the relation of faith to experience,⁵ was led to take a somewhat similar position. The opening words of his answer to

² Cf. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, New York, Norton, 1978.
³ The same facts which have led to the scientific theory that the world had a beginning lead also to the theory that it will have an end (though this appears to be more debatable). But the end, like the beginning. is so remote in time, it does not affect the present state of the world.
⁴ The Christian Faith, §39, 1, p. 148.
⁵ Luther wrote elsewhere, "… all the other articles [than the forgiveness of sins] are

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the question about creation in his Small Catechism were cited above as a testimony to the experiential, or "existential" significance of the doctrine, but the continuation of the answer deals entirely with God's providential care; Luther tells us what it means to be a beneficiary of God's providence, but not what it means to be a creature.

This is the real question in the controversy which has arisen in various parts of the country over the demand, presented by some groups, that "creationism" be introduced as an alternative to "evolutionism" in the teaching of biology in the public schools. If the authors of the demand desire only that the creation narratives in Genesis be presented as a "scientific" account of human origins-and this is what their language suggests-this would put them in a biblical "inerrancy" movement, which is resurgent at the present time. But it is clear that more than the question of origins is at stake. It is the fear that the evolutionary theory of the "descent of man" may lead to a "descent of man" in another sense of the word, a descent from dignity and responsibility as a human being, to the belief that if we are descended from the ape, we are nothing but apes and may behave like apes, as if origin were determinative of essence.

This is one of the earliest fears that was aroused by the Darwinian theory at its first publication, and it was quickly laid to rest by T. H. Huxley, one of Darwin's most ardent and eloquent supporters. Huxley argued in a famous lecture, without appeal to the Genesis idea of special creation, that if evolution had produced a being possessed of a sense of moral obligation, it would be inconsistent with evolution to suggest that we should deny our moral consciousness and revert to the law of the jungle. The good of human life, he said, depends, not on imitating animal behavior, but on combatting it.⁶

The basic fact on which Luther laid his finger is that creation tells us not only how we came into existence. it tells us what we are.

II

To be a creature is to recognize, not merely that one's existence is derived from a source other than itself, but that it is not centered in itself; it revolves around a center other than itself; it is (if there were such a word) extra-centric. In this respect it is radically opposed to the prevailing modern attitude, which accords the centrality in all thought and action to the self. The substitution of self-certainty for certainty of God, as the foundation and touchstone of knowledge, was the work of Descartes, who formulated his position in the words, "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum).

outside of us and do not come into our experience, do not touch us daily. But the article about forgiveness of sins gets right home to us; it enters into our continual experience and daily practice and touches you and me incessantly…. What does it profit me that God created heaven and earth if I do not believe in the forgiveness of sins?" WA, XXVIII, 271 ff., cited in E. Brunner, Dogmatics, III, pp. 208f.
⁶ T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Romanes Lecture). 1893, p. 83.

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Descartes initiated a new direction in human thought which may be identified by the profligate use of the first personal pronoun. I think was followed by I feel, and then by I will. In each case the basis of certainty was sought in some function of the self, and the place of the not-self was determined on this basis. The new trend reached theology, which took its stand on I believe and proceeded to establish the logos of theos as a "doctrine of belief" (Glaubenslehre).

It is to the effect of the Cartesian approach that Helmut Thielicke attributes the present plight of theology, and he sees its replacement by a non-Cartesian approach as the prime requisite for theological reconstruction.⁷ Thielicke looks to the Holy Spirit as the only possibility of displacing the self from its self-assumed position of centrality and reinstating it in its proper place, which is, in effect, (though he does not develop his thesis in these terms) that of a creature.

It may also be noted that the language of the Bible is more restrained than that of modern times in its use of the first personal pronoun. Speakers in the Bible tend to identify themselves by their relation to the hearer, as, for example, "your servant." "I am" was regarded as the prerogative and even the name of God ;⁸ and the use of this prerogative is one of the ways in which Jesus is identified in the Fourth Gospel.⁹ The characteristic utterance of the creature is not self-assertion but praise and prayer:

O come, let us worship and bow down:
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For he is our God;
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.¹⁰

Creaturehood understood in this way carries with it a suggestion of inferiority, and this is reflected in the use of the term in common speech. A creature is, almost by definition, a poor creature, one to be pitied or despised. In his classic analysis of the human experience of the holy, Rudolf Otto identified one element in it as creature-feeling," which he described as "the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures."¹¹ This element may certainly be present in it, as the biblical examples cited by Otto testify. But it may be questioned whether this feeling, "self-abasement into nothingness before an overpowering, absolute might of some kind," is the definitive index of creaturehood.

Creature is a term of relationship, like father, mother, son, sister, etc. To be a creature means to be related to the Creator-and not merely as nothing (that is the negative pole), but also as something. The dialectic of the relationship may be illustrated by comparing the old and the new

⁷ H. Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, Vol. I. Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974.
⁸ Exod. 3:14; Isa. 41:4: 43:10- 13, 25. 45:4; 48:12.
⁹ Jn. 8:24, 28, 58, etc.
¹⁰ Ps. 95:6f.
¹¹ R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, 1925, p. 10.

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translations of Psalm 100:3: the KJV, following the kethibh, has, "Know ye that the Lord he is God: It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves"; the RSV, with most modern versions, follow the qere and reads, "Know that the Lord is God: it is he that made us. and we are his." To be a creature does not mean to be of no account. It means to be related to God. Creature is a title of dignity and consequence. Some aspects of this may be indicated briefly.

(1) Creaturehood means basically that existence is an act of God. It is not accidental or contingent. When existence is regarded naturally, that is, as a product of nature, it has much of the appearance of fortuitousness, and as nature has displaced God more and more as the ultimate context of human existence, the sense of its fortuitousness has increased. A philosopher of the twentieth century described one of the basic features of existence as "thrownness"; we are thrown into existence, like dice from a shaker, and we have to pick ourselves up and make of ourselves what we can.¹² Another put it more strongly; existence, he said, is absurd, and it takes place in a world which is absurd, a world which provides no framework of meaning. no signs, no stars by which to plot a course.¹³ In the biblical view, existence is created by God and thereby has meaning. The instrument of creation is the word, and the word is the bearer of meaning. To be a creature is to have an existence which is charged with a transcendent meaning. ¹⁴

(2) Creaturehood means co-existence. Luther was profoundly right when he answered the question about creation in his Catechism, "I believe that God has created me together with all creatures… ." The creature is not the solitary self, isolated from all others, like Descartes when he shut himself up in that hot room and sought the ground of certainty in his conscious self. The two narratives of creation in Genesis, despite the considerable differences between them, have this in common that they depict the human creature, not as a solitary existent standing over against God in an I-Thou relationship, but as one who is organically related to the world, both the human world and the world of nature.

The popular term for one human being in modern speech is an

¹² M. Heidegger, Being and Time, London. SCM Press, 1962. pp. 320f. The notion of "thrownness" has been traced back to the Gnostic religions of the ancient world which posited a fundamental dualism and saw man "thrown" into a world in which he was an alien and from which he sought to be delivered. (H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston, Beacon Paperback, 1963, pp. 63ff.; R. Bultmann, Primitive Christianity, New York, Meridian Books, 1956, pp. 164f.).
¹³ A. Camus, The Rebel, New York, Vintage Books, 1956.
¹⁴ Theologians. in their eagerness to exalt the freedom of God in creation, have sometimes been led to stress the contingency of creation, as if it were a matter of indifference to God whether to create or not. Perhaps this is a consequence of the importance accorded to creatio ex nihilo, a concept which barely appears in the Bible and which is aside from the main emphasis of the Bible on the word, or logos, as the medium of creation (Gen. 1; in. 1: 1 - 14).

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individual. Individual means indivisible; it applies to the smallest unit into which something can be divided, like the atom which is (or used to be) the smallest unit of matter. But God did not create individuals; God created us in the divine image-which means that we are defined by our relation to God (however that be understood in detail), and as a reflex of that God created us male and female. As creatures, we are not isolated units of existence; we are co-existent with God and with one another. ¹⁵

(3) While it is true that "God has created me together with all creatures," so that I cannot be myself by myself, it is also true that God has created me to be myself. A prominent feature of creation, as it is pictured in the first story in Genesis, is that the world which God created is an articulated whole, in which the lines of distinction between its component parts are clearly drawn, while "all things hold together" (Col. 1:17), each thing is its definite self. In striking contrast to the world of Hindu thought, in which no such lines of demarcation exist, and "this is that, this also is that," the world which God created is a world of definition, a world in which "everything is what it is and not another thing."

God has given to the creature a specific identity within the context or the whole. In creating me, God did not merely put me (or "throw" me) into the creaturely sphere, or into the class homo sapiens; I was created to be the particular person I am. God gave me my identity. and as a creature of God I have no -identity-crisis"; I know who I am and where I belong. All that remains for me is to become who I am. This is my task.

(4) If existence is a creation of God and not a product of chance or accident, it follows that it is good. In the first Genesis story "good" is the emphatic and repeated judgment on the world God has created. The idea or creation is thus a positive affirmation of existence against non-existence. Biblical faith shows an affirmative attitude toward creaturely existence which is fundamental and comprehensive. It is fundamentally affirmative, in contrast to the tendency in oriental thought to regard existence as intrinsically evil and to seek salvation in deliverance from it.

This tendency found an echo in the melancholy of the Greeks, exemplified in the word of Aeschylus, "Not to be born is best of all."¹⁶ Biblical faith, by contrast, affirms that existence is good. The Old Testament is particularly strong in praise of life. Even Ecclesiastes, which has a long list of grievances against life, concludes that it is good to be alive:

¹⁵ Co-existence, according to Karl Barth. is "the basic form of humanity" (Church Dogmatics, III/2. pp. 222-285).
¹⁶ Ariston men to me genesthai, Agamemnon, 395. Some scholarly editor is said to have written the inspired comment, "How few there are who enjoy that privilege."

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Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun ( 11:7).

Biblical faith is also affirmative in a comprehensive way. It is opposed to the tendency found in some cultures to divide the world into two parts and to pronounce one good and the other bad. This dualism received its classical expression in Plato, who divided the spiritual from the material and declared material existence, such as that of the body, to be evil. The body, he said, is the prison of the soul, from which it longs to be released.¹⁷ Against this, the Bible asserts that the world of matter, and not only spirit, is God's creation--"and God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very, good" (Gen. 1:31). God's good creation includes the body and all its appurtenances. When God initiated the renewal of the created world, it was by taking a body, of our flesh.

(5) To be a creature is not only to be somebody, it is to be somebody of consequence in the context of God's great enterprise, which is called creation. For the creation of the world in the beginning is not an isolated act, it is the beginning of a project which is to proceed to its fulfillment in time. Creation must not be torn from its context in the biblical understanding of God, God is not merely the one who created in the beginning; God is the first and the last, the one who unites the beginning and the end (Isa. 44:6, 48:12). And the human creature is appointed to play a cardinal role in the project, as the New Testament brings out more explicitly (Rom. 8:19f.). It is to equip, or re-equip humanity for this role that the sending of Jesus Christ was designed (Heb. 2:5-9). By becoming a creature and completing the course of a human life, he assumed the role of the humanity appointed to conduct creation to its goal, and if anyone hears his call to join him in this mission, the new creation is already there (II Cor. 5:l7; Gal. 6:15). A creature, so far from being a weak, helpless, inconsequential nothing, is a fellow-worker with God (I Cor. 3:9).

(6) To be a creature means to recognize that existence is held by appointment from God and that we have to seek its direction in God's vocation. Vocation is mentioned in Scripture mostly in connection with persons for whom God had special tasks, such as prophets and apostles. But vocation is not only for the few; it is for everyone who is a creature, for the creature is not abandoned to the determining forces of the world but is held open to the call of God. "Calling in this sense is the new thing which is added to what man already is before God … a broadening, lengthening, alteration or more precise definition of the frontiers within which he already has his being according to the eternal counsel of God, a modification of human existence which reaches out beyond its earlier form."¹⁸

¹⁷ Soma sema (the body a prison), Gorgias 493A.
¹⁸ K. Barth. Church Dogmatics III/4, p. 598. Cf. Bonhoeffer. Ethics, p. 223.

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The "beyond" of vocation may be illustrated by reference to the question of abortion which is the center of so much controversy at the present time. A strong case can be made against abortion on theological grounds if "the right to life" is traced to its source in the Creator (as is done in the Declaration of Independence) and not treated as a right inherent in the fetus by virtue of conception. Interruption of pregnancy then becomes a violation of God's creation. The weakness of this argument is that it pays insufficient regard to the rights of the woman who bears the child. She also is a creature of God, and, as such, she has the ground and directive of her existence in the vocation of God. To require her to bear a child under any circumstances, in the absence of a vocation, is to reduce her to an incubator. To bear a child is a vocation that should be freely accepted; it is not a duty that is automatically constituted by conception. This is something to be learned from the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, though it is often overlooked. It is not the absence of a male that is so important, but the fact that Mary received this task as a vocation which she freely accepted. That is why the annunciation is a subject that has attracted so many artists. In the Old Testament models of the story, likewise, the annunciation is always the primary thing, and the annunciation, which does not preclude the role of the male in conception (Gen. 18: 10; I Sam. 1:17), may be made to the husband (Gen. 18: 10), as it is in the case of Mary's kinswoman, Elizabeth (Lk. 1: 13), and in Matthew's version of the story of Mary, where the annunciation is made to Joseph, who also makes the response (Matt. 1:18-25).

If the question be raised whether there is anything in human experience which points in the direction of vocation, the answer has been sought in the experience of moral demands, which, while they are felt in the inner depth of the self, are felt strongly to come from some source external to the self, whether it be conscience understood as the voice of God, or an independent categorical imperative. It is interesting to note that Heidegger in his analysis of human existence included conscience as "a primordial phenomenon of Dasein" and identified its characteristic mode of expression as a "call."¹⁹ This call, according to Heidegger, comes from the authentic self, which, as a potentiality, has no substance, and thus the call is wordless. To a believer in creation the call may be heard as the call of the creature created in the image of God and represented in Jesus Christ, who is, to his followers, the proximate source of the call.

III

It has been argued that creature is a title of dignity and consequence, not of meanness and contemptibility It has, however, certain attributes which seem to belie that claim. Chief among these are its frailty and

¹⁹ Being and Time, pp. 312ff.

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brevity; these help to give the name "creature" the depreciatory tone it bears in common speech.

The dignity of creaturehood resides in the fact that it denotes a mode of existence which is related to God, not only as regards its origin, but also its meaning and destiny. The creature is created to participate in the purpose of God's creation, and, as such, it is given an existence which, so to speak, runs parallel with the being of God. But the outstanding difference between the creature and the Creator is that the existence of the creature is incommensurate with the being of the Creator. As creatures, we have been given a lease of existence by God, but it is a terminable lease. We are tenants of the home created for us, but we do not have tenure. The existence given us, God also takes away. What are we to make of this? Are we to say with Job, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1:21 )? Is that the last word?

It is, of course, the termination of our existence by death (timely or untimely) that presents the most persistent problem. To some, death has seemed so incompatible with an existence related to God that it has been ascribed to a radical dislocation of that relation. The traditional interpretation of death as a penalty imposed on humanity because of its defection from God is classically summarized in Paul's word, "The wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). But it presents difficulties which were recognized quite early.

The implication of an originally deathless existence would appear to transgress one of the basic distinctions between the creature and the Creator, who "alone has immortality" (I Tim. 6:16). Moreover, the absence of death would not merely remove one blemish, it would involve a radical alteration of the structure of human existence: the self-reproductive capacity, for example, would become otiose. Several of the fathers wrestled with the problem, and two of the most eminent advanced ideas of a conditional immortality. Athanasius taught that man was created subject to death, so far as the constitution of his own being is concerned, but he was given the possibility of attaining to immortality through adherence to the Word (Logos), in whom he had been graciously enabled to participate-though not, apparently, by escaping natural death.²⁰ Augustine, in like manner, taught that man as created was conditionally or potentially immortal (posse non mori), and that he could have attained to this immortality if he had, with the assistance of the grace provided, abstained from sin. Augustine did not conceive of this potential immortality as an endless continuation of existence in this temporal world; his thought was that unfallen man should grow to a ripe old age, but without the usual debilities of age, and should then be peacefully translated to the eternal order, after the manner of Enoch or Elijah.²¹

²⁰ On the Incarnation of the Word, 3.
²¹ On Merit and Forgiveness. 1,3,5. Augustine saw the connection between death and the reproductive capacity, and, though he came as near as anyone to identifying sin with

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The view that mortality is indigenous to creaturely existence as such is more in accord with modern knowledge of the universality of death. We know of no life in this world that is not subject to death; death is an essential characteristic of life.²² Theologians for the most part recognize this and accept the biblical and classical view of mortality as the distinguishing mark of the creature over against the Creator.

The question persists, however, why the creature, who, as such, is defined by reference to the Creator, has been given an existence that is cut short by death. The argument that God alone is immortal and that the creation or another immortal would have been equivalent to the creation of another divine being is circular.²³ Origen felt that if God is Creator, as he is Father, both the Creator-creature and the Father-Son relationships are determined by God, and there is no reason why the former should be temporal and the latter eternal. Aquinas' well known difficulty with the idea of a creation in time goes back to the same root. And Luther recognized the predominance of the divine pole in the Creator-creature relationship when he wrote, "Wherever and with whomsoever God speaks, whether in anger or in grace, that person is surely immortal. The person of God who speaks and the word indicate that we are such creatures as God wills to speak with to all eternity."²⁴

It is probably the experienced overflow of the relationship beyond the temporal limits of creaturely existence that led to the emergence in later Judaism of the belief that the existence of the creature does not come to a full end with death but continues, in some form, beyond it.

IV

Theology has for the most part been oblivious to the fact that the abbreviation of our creaturely existence by birth also presents a problem. Our creaturely existence not only comes to an end in time, it also begins in time. And by its beginning in time it is already less than commensurate with the being of God. If there will be time after we are dead, there was also time-and lots of it-before we were born. But this fact does not distress us. If we shudder at the prospect of our departure from this life, few of us shed a tear over our exclusion from it before our arrival.

There is a difference between our attitude and that of the Bible in this matter. In the Bible existence is not a property peculiar to this generation; it is essentially, "in-existence," that is, existence in the continuity of family and people. Thus they had no sense of exclusion from the past, because by their continuity with their predecessors, they participated in it. It was this sense of in-existence in the past, and not an

sex. he allowed a place for sex in unfallen existence-a sex actuated by volition and not by lust (City of God XIV. 16ff.) And even a Puritan like Milton allowed to Adam and Eve in Paradise "the rites mysterisous of connubial love" (Paradise Lost IV, 742f.).
22 Goethe called death "Nature's stratagem to secure more abundant life."
23 Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2, pp. 558f.
24 Comm. on Genesis 26:24f., Luther's Works, 5, p. 76.

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intellectual interest in history, that led to the preservation of the traditions; for in them the past was made present. In like manner biblical people were not greatly perturbed at the prospect of exclusion from the future through death, because through their continuing in-existence in progeny they were also participant in it. Strangely, this sense of an in-existence continuing from the past into the future could on occasion be coupled with an adverse judgment on existence in the present (Gen. 47:9).

The biblical sense of in-existence pre-dated the articulation of belief in life after death, but it was not abolished by the emergence of that belief; it determined the shape of that belief, which was not concentrated on the individual but embraced "the bundle of life" (I Sam. 25:29). The hope was not one of individual survival after death but of a consummation of all life, past, present, and to come.²⁵ The same is true of the Christian version of the hope in its earliest expressions.²⁶

The discovery of the individual, and the elevation of the individual to primacy as the subject of existence, have altered the picture and led to an almost exclusive preoccupation with the possibility of continuance (in some form) of individual existence after death. This has become a major theme in contemporary apologetics.²⁷ In the crisis which has arisen in recent decades over the question of meaningful language about God, a number of theologians have argued that there are aspects of our experience as existing individuals which, despite the prevailing secularity of our time, point to dimensions that transcend the temporal limits of existence. One form of the argument (which is by no means new) focuses on the objectives. the projects, the aspirations, which direct our activities but which cannot be attained in the time available to us. In this way the existing self transcends itself.

Pannenberg speaks of "a generally demonstrable anthropological finding that the definition of the essence of man does not come to ultimate fulfillment in the finitude of his earthly life … it belongs to the structure of human existence to press on, even beyond death, that search for one's own destiny, which never comes to an end."²⁸ Peter Berger has also identified several features of human experience which function as "signals of transcendence," and among them he points to the place of hope in the human situation, and particularly to hope in the face of death. "in a world where man is surrounded by death on all sides, he continues to be a being who says 'no' to death-and through this 'no' is brought to faith in another world, the reality of which would validate his

²⁵ Cf. Isa. 26:19; Dan. 12:2. To "be gathered to one's fathers" means primarily to be buried in the family grave, but it also carries with it the thought of a family reunion. Cf. Gen. 49:29.
²⁶ Most explicitly in Heb. 11:39.
²⁷ No one calls it apologetics today, but apologetics by any other name is still apologetics.
²⁸ Jesus, God and Man London. SCM Press, 1968, pp. 83ff.

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hope as something other than illusion."²⁹ Robert Browning summed up this argument in two lines:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp.
Or what's a heaven for?³⁰

Langdon Gilkey, who develops the theme at length in his massive response to the "God-is-dead" theologies of the 1960s, is the only one (so far as I know) to identify one place for the appearance of "ultimacy (the term he favors) in human experience in "'the source, ground or origin of what we are"³¹ He finds an "intimation" of transcendence (if not of immortality) in where we come from, and not only in where we are going. His sensitive description of the event of birth, especially as it is experienced by the mother, leads him to the conclusion that, while birth is the proximate source of our existence, "all the aspects of birth bespeak the experience of an ultimate power of life which works in and through the mother, not by her." ³² Here we glimpse "the wonder, beauty, meaning, and joy of existence as it comes to us from transcendence."³³ There is something anterior to birth, and this we call creation.

The distinction between creation and birth has traditionally been expressed in terms of the distinction between the body and the soul, especially when the origin of the soul has been ascribed to an immediate act of divine creation distinct from the generative function of the parents. If the distinction can no longer be expressed in these terms, it has not on that account lost its significance. If the self now regards itself as a psychosomatic unity and locates the source of its existence in the event of birth, the self as a creature looks to a source of existence which transcends birth (whether or not the experience of birth points to it, as Gilkey suggests), a source which belongs to a different level and operates in a different mode. At birth we are brought into existence by our parents at a point In time, but as creatures we have our existence from God (I Cor. 8:6), and our past is in God.

V

The priority of creation is the fundamental truth underlying the doctrine of predestination. It is unfortunate that in the course of history this doctrine came to be taken to mean that God had from eternity predetermined the final destiny of each individual created or yet to be created. In this sense the doctrine was traced to a "special decree" of God which w&as distinguished from the "general decree" to create, and the relation between the two decrees, especially the sequence, became a subject of intense controversy.

²⁹ A Rumor of Angels. Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970, p. 64.|
³⁰ Andrea del Sarto.
³¹ Naming the Whirlwind. the Renewal of God Language, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. 1969, p. 313.
³² Op. Cit., p. 318.
³³ Op. cit., p. 315.

72 - On Being a Creature

The controversy tended to blot out of sight the "general" truth of predestination, namely that God has appointed for human creatures a destiny which takes precedence over, and transcends, all determinations to which they are exposed in the temporal course of their existence. It is thus the charter of our liberty.

The traditional understanding of predestination has been held to destroy the freedom of the individual, and has led some to call for a revolt against God in the name of human freedom. But, as events have shown, the revolt against God has not brought an enhancement of human freedom, it has increased the power of the secular determinants of human existence and left human beings relatively defenseless against them. Recent theology has attempted to find a foundation for freedom in a revised concept of God, projected into the future as the coming God, whose kingdom draws us beyond all that already exists. But no firm ground of freedom for the creature can be found in a kingdom which is exclusively eschatological, and which is indistinguishable from Utopias.³⁴ The hope of the kingdom has a base in the kingdom that has already come and draws its strength from the faithfulness of God, who will bring all creation to the end predestined in the beginning.

³⁴ The concept of freedom plays a major part in Pannenberg's attempt to find a meaningful base for theology in anthropology (The Idea of God and Human Freedom) Philadelphia. Westminster Press, 1973). But Pannenberg tends to switch God from the past to the future in a rather unguarded manner. He pits God as "the power of the future" against the God of "traditional Christian theism" which he explains as "An almighty and omniscient being thought of as existing at the beginning of all temporal processes [who] excludes freedom within the realm of his creation" ( p. 108). He fails to demonstrate what makes this God of the future God or his power for freedom effective over that of his rituals. In his polemic against the "traditional" concept of God. he eliminates creation in the beginning and asserts that "creation happens from the end" (Jesus, God and Man. London, SCM Press, 1968, p. 169).