McCall Notes on Gunton The Triune Creator
- I need to read and cite Ireneaus re: the “Two Hands” of God being the Spirit and the Son.
- Ireneaus, essentially, said NO to ex nihilo.
- For Ireneaus, God’s own Word [i.e. His ‘breath’, aka the Spirit] was both suitable and sufficient for the formation of all things (Against the Heresies, 2.2.4)
- It was not angels… who made us nor formed us… nor any one else, except the Word of the Lord, nor any power remotely distant from the Father of all things. For God did not stand in need of these [beings]… as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things… (Ireneaus, Against the Heresies20.1).
- The world, according to Gunton, does indeed cohere in the Son, but is diversified and particularized as the second hand of the Father enables things to be what they were created to be in the Son… even despite the chaos and disorder inserted into the good order of things by sin and evil (161).
- To Gunton (161), “the perfecting of creation by the Spirit sometimes involves the maintaining of the order of things in its regularity, sometimes the restoration of a lost order; and sometimes the eschatological transformation of the world into anticipation of that which it will become”.
- Creation is the outcome of God’s love, love that is unconstrained indeed.
- In Basil, On the Holy Spirit (15.38), Basil describes the Holy Spirit (hereafter HS), as the perfecting cause of nature and creation.
- Basil also taught that the Spirit was the maintaining cause within creation.
- Claus Wessterman, in Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (London: SPCK, 1984, p. 100), said that creation ex nihilo is not a question that the sacred writer of Genesis was prepared to answer, nor was seeking to answer.
- The “days” of creation, Colin Gunton asserts (The Triune Creator, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1998, 16), is in keeping with the ‘kenotic’, risk-taking, and self-limiting God that the Bible everywhere presents.
- Whereas for Augustine, creation must have been instantaneous, it does not logically follow that necessity warrants such.
- Indeed, Augustine claims that all of God’s actions must be timeless, for they are done by the timeless God; he therefore has to demythologize the “days” of creation away.
- Gunton asserts that the Spirit “gives life to”, and “gives form to” creation in a mysterious but effective manner (22).
- In accordance to Romans 4:17, God “calls” or “gives breath to” that which he creates (23).
- According to Philo, On The Creation, translated by F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, 1929, vol. 1, creation in and of itself means origination of both matter and time.
- According to Gunton, creation was created perfect in that it was destined to perfection eschatologically (55).
- For Ireneaus, “good” means that which is destined for perfection (Douglas Farrow, “Saint Ireneaus of Lyons. The Church and the World”, Pro Ecclesia 4, 1995, 335-355).
- If we accept the fact that the God of Jesus Christ is also the God of creation in Genesis, we must read into Genesis the same type of involvement by the Father that one sees in the life Jesus of Nazareth; in so doing, we will recognize that Genesis 1 involves the ministerial use of the created order in the forming of other created things.
- So then, creation is a ‘series’ of acts done by the Luring Spirit of creation that is done “in time”, as well as a ‘series’ of acts done by the Luring Spirit of creation that “takes time”.
- Indeed, just as God the Father ‘took His time’ in dealing with erring world in Christ, so too did He ‘take His time’ in bestowing creative and causal powers unto the Spirit in creation.
- Thus the created world is a project, of sorts, of the Spirit of God in that the creation takes time to become what it was intended to be (Gunton, 93).
- When Scripture mentions the creation taking place in terms of ‘days’, it wishes to establish the world’s relation to eternity, and wishes to depict distinctions in God’s modes of actions and the various resulting states of those actions (Gunton, 71).
- Get and read Hexaemeron by Basil, for in said Hexaemeron, Basil debunks the eternality of creation, celebrates the infinity of God’s creative power (1.2), and distinguishes the different forms of God’s creative powers (1.7).
- Basil is highly concerned with establishing the “ontological homogeneity” of creation in his Hexaemeron, which strongly asserts not that everything is similar in state, but rather that everything is similar in origination, and there is therefore not hierarchy within creation (Gunton, 71).
- Philoponos insisted that reality could not be apprehended by making mere deductions from known principle (Philoponos, Opif. 6.2).
- In Hexaemeron by Basil, it is written, “Like tops, which after the first impulse, continue their revolutions, turning upon themselves when once fixed in their centre; thus nature, receiving the impulse of this first command, follows without interruption the course of ages, until the consummation of all things” (5.10).
- Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XV.38, notes that whereas the Father is the origin of all creation and the Son is creative cause, the spirit is the perfecting cause [I, however, respectfully take issue here, as my own SDC posits that the Spirit is akin to the Efficient Cause, and not merely the Perfecting Cause].
- The Spirit of God enables creation to be itself by bestowing freedom unto creation, as well as enabling creation to become itself by bestowing causality to reside therein.
- Gunton asserts that the Spirit of God lures/draws creation to be itself by love.
- Barth (Church Dogmatics 2/1, 615-618), states that although God is not tied to time, He is not its negation either, so that He is able to be freely involved with creation in time.
- As in Galileo’s time, we too are in danger of making the intellectual mistakes of reading too much in the cosmological implications of Genesis 1 and 2, as well as relying too heavily upon the unbiblical cosmology of Aristotle.
- We see this error constantly repeating itself in the attacks proffered against Darwinistic interpretations of nature today, as well, sadly.
- Scientists have essentially taken over creation from the theologians in the modern era.
- Gunton contends that kenosis has no place for discussion within the creation narratives (141), but I vehemently disagree.
- Indeed, Gunton argues that in order for creation to have its own creaturely status, it must similarly have its own time and space given by God, but which are not continuous with His reality (142) [but again, I DISAGREE].
- Whereas Christ is the basis of a doctrine of omnipresence, He could not be understood to be such without the HS, by whose mediation the Son became incarnate (143).
- Get the following book by Roger Prenter, Spiritus Creator: Luther’s Concept of the Holy Spirit (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1953).
- In Calvin’s Institutes13.14, the Spirit is “everywhere diffused”, and thereby “sustains all things”, and “causes them to grow”.
- Calvin’s omnicausality arguments in part caused the resurgence of the same principle in Edwards theology.
- Pannenberg, in a theory at once both questionable and interesting, illustrates the Spirit’s activity as the divine “field of force” through which the world becomes and by which the world is upheld as what it essentially is.
- To Pannenberg, in Systematic Theology 2, translated by G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1994, pg. 32), the Spirit is the creative presence of the transcendent God, as well as the medium of participation of the creatures in divine life.
- To Pannenberg, the Spirit’s “field operations are temporally structured, so that each new event proceeds from the future of God” (Systematic Theology 2, translated by G. W. Bromiley, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1994, pg. 109).
- So then, this is a sort of Final Causation, or teleology.
- Like Ireneaus, Barth understands creation as project, a project to be completed eschatologically (Church Dogmatics, translation edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957-1975, 366).
- God’s activity, as energy giving rise to energy, shapes the day to day life of the world, even sometimes miraculously (Gunton, 176).
- General Providence is a name for the activity of God by which the order and teleology of creation is maintained (176).
- As the Lord and Giver of life, the Spirit is the upholder of everyday (177).
- Creation needs to be understood dynamically as a process.