Details on the biblical account of creation.
1. Whether Moses received the account of creation by direct divine revelation or had it from the tradition of the first created, who in their turn were instructed by God, need not be made the decisive point of controversy."1467) In any case, the biblical account of creation is God's own account because all Scripture is inspired by God. The biblical account of creation bears the divine stamp recognizable even to human reason, especially also when we compare it with the creation narratives of other peoples."1468) — Because modern theologians cannot recognize Scripture as God's Word, and therefore cannot recognize the biblical account of creation as God's account, the compliments they pay to the biblical account naturally end with a criticism that springs from the impious ego of the theologizing individual." 1469)
Adam infra dicit: "Hoc est ox ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea." Porro* hoc quoque fecit Dominus per verbum, suum, ne putemus, eum chirurgi more sectione aliqua usum esse. [Google] Quenstedt 1, 731: Costa, ex qua mulier formata est, non mortua fuit aut inanimis, sed animata, utpote de vivo corpore- divina manu sumpta. Atque ita Eνa secundum animam et corpus eas ea producta est, non vero anima Evae a Deo immediate creata est ex nihilo ipsique divinitus indita, sed costa Adami fuit animae humanae ad Evam tradux, hoc est, extitit ea non immediata creatione, sed propagatione et traductione.... Ex costa animata animata formata est mulier, Gen. 2:22. [Google]
1467) Cf. Luther on Gen. 25:5-6. St. L. 1, 1758.
1468) Zöckler, RE. 2 XIII, 631 ff.
1469) This is also true with respect to Zöckler, if we compare RE. 2 XIII, sub-"Creation", p. 629 ff., with p. 644 ff. Zöckler first says: "If there is only one living personal God, nothing in the world can have taken its origin otherwise than through the absolute will of power and love of this one God; his creative activity must be the cause of the existence of the epitome of all beings which are not themselves God find. This only true concept of creation is nowhere more purely conceived and carried out than in the two documents of biblical monotheism, the Old and the New Testament"; p. 644 ff. but Zöckler calls e.g. "the rigidly literal version of the work of six days as a period of exactly 6x24 hours, as it became common in orthodox dogmatics since Luther", "the after-effects of the abstract monotheistic concept of creation of older Judaism". Very seriously Zöckler also demands a balance "with the incontrovertibly established facts of geological and astronomical science". He wants, "indeterminably long periods of a prehuman history of development of our globe". That the light before the sun and the sun only after the earth,
584 ><w:t xml:space="preserve">The Creation of the World and of Man. [English ed. 479]
2. In Gen. 1 and 2 we do not have two different creation reports, but Gen. 2 clearly reveals itself as a more elaborated report about the creation and the first dwelling place of man. That ch. 2 calls God יְהוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֧ים [HEBREW], while
Zöckler eliminates "by assuming that the account in Gen. 1:14-19 is an optical or merely phenomenological one". In order to harmonize the Mosaic creation account with "the results of scientific research", Godet, who does not belong to the liberal wing of the newer theologians, resorts to the vision theory and creates a "painting" of the Hexaemeron, which is not only remotely reminiscent of a novel. He writes in his Bibelstudien (Erster Teil, zum A. T., Hannover 1875, pp. 101 ff.): "We sit with the Man of God on the mountain. Darkness reigns all around us. Around us and in us that silence prevails which precedes divine revelations. The prophetic sense, which everyone possesses by nature, awakens in us, and just as St. John saw in his vision from the rocky island of Patmos the last times of the world and, as it were, their flowing out into eternity, so we see the beginning of the universe, see, as it were, the stream of time bursting forth from the springs of eternity. In this solemn darkness a dull sound strikes our ear as of a sea moved by a mighty wind, whose surface rises and falls in mighty waves and whose waves crash and break against each other. The sound comes from the ocean in which our whole earth is still wrapped as in a shroud. The moving wind is the breath of the Spirit of God that broods over this egg full of mysteries, so that from it a world full of wonders, a humanity, a Christ may come forth. We feel it: this darkness is not that of the night of the grave, but that of the fruit-bearing night, which is the cradle of all life. And in this darkness, which lasts only a moment, find countless centuries crowded together, all the times that have passed since the creation of matter until the formation of the solid crust of the earth and until the condensation of the waters on its surface. Suddenly a voice breaks the silence of this long night: Immediately an elucidation illuminates the scene, and on all sides of the horizon shimmering sheaves are sprouting. It is a crown of light, like the one that now and then lights up the inhabitants of the far north during their month-long nights. In this light, through the dense mists that cover the earth, we perceive the shoreless expanse of water all around us. From time to time, hot vapors emanating from the volcano in the earth's interior stir the waves and raise a bottom to their surface, which, however, soon sinks again. The rays of light gradually lose their luster, pale more and more, and finally go out again completely. We hear only the roar of the great waters that flow around us. Darkness surrounds us. In this one day, however, we have seen the representation of thousands of days that shone above our earth before a human eye was there to observe them. Again the voice resounds: 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it be a separation between the lower and the upper waters!' Again it becomes day" etc.
585 ><w:t xml:space="preserve">The Creation of the Wett and the Man. [English ed. 479]
Ch. 1 אֱלֹהִ֧ים [HEBREW] serves to designate God, has factual reason, since ch. 2 describes God's doings in relation to man in particular, and thus in ch. 2 we have the beginning of the history of man."1470)
3. The dispute about the best world. That the world, as God created it, is good, we know from Genesis 1:31: "God looked at all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (טֹ֖וב מְאֹ֑ד [HEBREW]). Whether this world is the best in the sense that God could not have made a better world is a useless question, since God's will is the standard of all things, including goodness and beauty. The goodness of the creatures consists in the fact that they are in such a way, as God wanted to have them. Axiom: Causam exemplarem (pattern) creationis ideae divinae rerum creandarum constituunt. [“They constitute the pattern of the creative idea of the divine creation of things.”] 1471)