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- Herausgeber: WS
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Catholic Dogmatics is the definitive text on the structure of Catholic dogmatics, written by one of the most important authors in the Catholic Church today. The author is highly placed in the Vatican hierarchy. Cardinal Mueller oversaw the collected writings of Pope Benedict. The book will enhance both the scholar's and lay reader's knowledge of dogmatics.
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The Crossroad Publishing Company
www.crossroadpublishing.com
© 2017 by Gerhard Ludwig Müller.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
The text of this book is set in 12/15 Adobe Garamond Pro.
Composition by Rachel Reiss.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request.
Ebook: 978-0-8245-2238-4
CONTENTS
Preface to the American Edition of Dogmatics
Introduction
1. Goal and Program of the “Course Book Dogmatics”
2. Dogmatics as a Theological Discipline
3. The Structure of the Dogmatics
4. Outline of the Structure of the Dogmatics
GOD’S SELF-REVELATION AS THE CREATOR OF THE WORLD (THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION)
I. Themes and Perspectives of a Theology of the Creation
1. Creation—A Theological Concept
2. Creation: God’s Original Self-Revelation
3. Important Doctrinal Statements on the Creation Doctrine
4. The Dogma of Creation in Its Constitutive Elements
5. The Creation Theology within the Structure of Church Dogmatics
6. The Creation Theology in Distinction to Religious and Scientific Doctrines of the Origin of the World
II. The Belief in God the Creator in Biblical Testimony
1. The Creation Belief in the Old Testament
2. Creation Statements in the New Testament
III. The Formative Development of the Creation Teaching in the History of Theology
1. In Patristics
2. The Creation Theme in the Theology of the Early Middle Ages
3. The Creation Theology of High Scholasticism
4. In the Context of the New Worldview of the Natural Sciences and the Foundational Crisis of Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology
5. The More Recent Catholic and Reform Controversy over Philosophical Theology as a Portal to Historical Revelation
IV. Systematic Exposition
1. The Realization of Non-Divine Being through God’s Actuality
2. Creation Realized through Evolution and the History of Human Freedom
3. God’s Self-Revelation as Creator and Redeemer
4. God’s Universal World Government and Active Presence in the World
5. Creation and Grace, Principles of Created Freedom, or the Secret of Providence
THE SELF-REVELATION OF THE THREEFOLD GOD IN THE CONSUMMATION OF MAN (ESCHATOLOGY)
I. Horizons and Perspectives of Eschatology
1. Eschatology and Its Place in Dogmatics
2. Questions Treated in Eschatology
3. The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Statements
4. Important Statements on Eschatology in Church Dogma
5. Differences from the Orthodox and Reformed Profession of Faith
6. Christian Eschatology in Association and Contradiction
7. The Rediscovery of Eschatology as a Fundamental Christian Purpose
8. Categories of Thinking in Current Eschatology
II. The Eschatology of God’s Self-Revelation in Biblical Testimony
1. Adventist Eschatology in the Old Testament
2. The Core of the New Testament’s Eschatology in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Jesus
III. Aspects of the History of Theology
1. Problems in Patristics
2. The Resurrection Treatise in Scholastics
IV. Systematic Presentation of the Eschatology
1. God Is Love: The Reign of the Father
2. God Is Our Righteousness: The Reign of the Son
3. God Is Eternal Life: the Koinonia in the Spirit of the Father and the Son
ABBREVIATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF DOGMATICS
The most important task in dogmatic theology is the mediation of God’s free self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth with the person’s intellectual and ethical orientation in his world. The never-ending process of appropriating faith into human thought is characterized by the tension between the finality of God’s self-communication in history and the repeatedly new attempts to translate them into the recipient’s worldview and milieu.
Katholische Dogmatik: Für Studium und Praxis der Theologie, which was first published in 1994 in one volume, maintains a classic twelve-tract division, but puts them in an order that coordinates with a newly developed “outline of the structure of dogmatics” (vide p. xx) so that the first tracts to be treated have God’s self-revelation as their subject (Series A) and then those tracts in which the person’s response in faith are treated (Series B).
Since the single English edition is to appear in multiple volumes, this affords an opportunity to express the inner relationship of dogmatics as a whole, so that in each volume a tract from Series A is combined with the corresponding tract of Series B.
The present first volume includes the tracts on creation (protology) and last things (eschatology). They refer to the beginning and end points of God’s historical action: He is the Creator of and the One who brings to fulfilment the human person and of all being.
Sincere thanks are due to the publisher Herder in Freiburg and New York for including this book in its publishing program.
Rome, in September, 2016
Gerhard Cardinal Müller
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
INTRODUCTION
1. Goal and Program of the “Course Book Dogmatics”
Catholic Theology, as it is taught at universities, colleges and seminars, provides a sheer unlimited body of general and specialized knowledge. In the field of dogmatics in particular students are presented with such a massive amount of material that it is nearly impossible for them to get an overview of the subject, not to mention insight into the the heart of the matter. In light of the discrepancy between accumulated detailed knowledge and the absence of an intellectual synthesis, we might be reminded of the ironic words of Mephistopheles talking to the student in Goethe’s Faust:
Then he has the parts in his hand / What’s missing—sadly!—is merely the spiritual thread.
Of course, the wide-ranging nature of Christian theology should not be simply trivialized as mere historical ballast. Its breadth is a necessary consequence of the universal claim to validity asserted by the Christian belief. The commitment to the truth that God has revealed himself in the creation, redemption and reconciliation as the beginning and the end of man and the world requires that theology as a principle does not exclude anything as a possible object of its reflections.
Throughout the 3500-year-old history of revelation, for all its isolated tensions and upheavals, a tradition of continuity in which Yahwe forms the subject of the revelation and in which the people of the covenant of the Old and New Testament finds its identity in the response of belief in the one Word of God proclaimed in history. Especially owing to the universality of the revelation manifested in Jesus Christ, the historical and eschatological understanding of truth in Christianity must be transmitted critically and positively with all the forms of human expression. Hence, it is crucial to confront the Christian self-conception with competing claims to the truth of concrete religions of men as well as with the theoretical and practical conceptions of the vision of man and the world in philosophy, history and the social and natural sciences.
Other tasks emcompassed by Catholic theology fall under the headings of the ecumenical movement and the inculturation in Latin American, Africa and Asia of a Christianity that was formed in Europe. Last but not least, it is integral to the study of theology that students familiarize themselves with the different auxiliary sciences (foreign languages, acquiring the philological and historical methods as part of a set of hermeneutical instruments).
The “spiritual thread” is the “thread of Ariadne,” which leads out of the Labyrinth of theology’s apparently inexhaustible material object. It is the consequence of comprehending the unity of theology in the source of the indivisible act of personal faith. The unity of theology depends on the antecedent unity of faith that in its profession and practice owes itself to the self-mediation of God. Inasmuch as theological reason is understood to mean the interpretation of faith, it proves itself to have been constituted along with belief. As belief itself, theology is determined by the event of man’s encounter with the Word of God in the form of his self-mediation in the Christ event and the sending of the Spirit. Belief is the effect of the Holy Spirit.
The general perspective that is needed, one that provides insight into the inner coherence of the individual themes and methods of theology, is the self-revelation of the triune God as mediated by the person and history of Jesus of Nazareth for the salvation of men.
Construction and structure of the Christian profession of faith (credo) reveal the three interlocking reference planes of theology. It is through belief that man’s “I” or “we” is in a relation to God. This relation is mediated through Jesus Christ and remains present in the Church through the Holy Spirit. In this way, the three main mysteries of Christian belief are named: Trinity, incarnation, and the gift to men of the Spirit and of grace. To them are allocated the three main thematic groups: theology—Christology—anthropology. The individual tractates of the dogmatics can thus be presented in the context of this comprehensive perspective.
The three basic dogmas of Christianity
The Trinity of God:
The persons of the one divine essence
Incarnation:
The incarnation of the eternal Son
Spirit and grace:
The coming of God in the Holy Spirit
Starting from the theology’s task of setting the diversity of themes (material object) in relation to the unity of the perspective (formal object), the goals and the program for this “Course Book Dogmatics” are:
1. Basics
To the extent that material itself does not require a departure from this—it is outlined as follows:
I. Current challenges of the subject matter
II. The biblical foundations
III. The historical development of dogma
IV. The systematic representation
2. Guidance towards the Formation of Independent Theological Judgment.
In terms of genre, this course book is neither a theological encyclopedia nor does it take the place of a lexicon, nor is it an introduction to Christianity, much less a catechism. It is a guide to dogmatic theology.
2. Dogmatics as a Theological Discipline
While the historical and practical subject areas of theology study the formal prerequisites of historical circumstances and the ethical, social and pastoral consequences of Christian faith, dogmatics considers the substance of the revelation in light of the central idea (formal object) of God’s self-revelation as the origin and goal of the world, to the extent that this event makes a systematic (= speculative) understanding accessible. Formally, the dogmatics stems from the need of reason to convey the orientation towards God in the personal act of belief as the truth and life of man in a reasonable manner with the natural knowledge of worldly reality (Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion 1: “Credo ut intelligam”).
Dogmatics can be defined as follows:
Dogmatics is the methodologically reflected presentation of the real substance and inner coherence of the “self-mediation of the threefold God in Jesus Christ as the salvation and life of man,” as expressed through the medium of human language in the ecclesiastical profession of faith (= symbolum, dogma).
Though the name of this discipline (roughly since the eighteenth century) has been taken from the individual dogmas, dogmatics is not restricted to the dogmas in the formal sense: to certain doctrinal principles accepted in Catholic belief on divine authority due to a council or papal definition (e.g., the belief in Christ in the Nicene Creed or the dogma of the corporeal assumption of Mary in God’s glory).
Dogma means here the whole of Christian belief in terms of the creed and practice of the Church.
3. The Structure of the Dogmatics
The purpose of dogmatics is to present the inner coherence of the revelation. However, this does not mean that God’s revelation may be subordinated to human reason’s absolute will to systematize (as this term is understood in German idealism). Human reason’s manner of perception and historicity permit merely a relative systematization of the revelation that will always remain a mystery that eludes reason. In the context of unapproachable articles of faith (articuli fidei) only a summary representation in ordering perspectives and interrelated central ideas is possible. That is why a final system of the dogmatics has never asserted itself either.
In the neo-scholastic theology a structure crystallized in some 10-12 tractates that, however, has turned out in some instances to be somewhat schematic:
1. Theological epistemology;
2. Doctrine of the one and threefold God;
3. Creation doctrine;
4. Theological anthropology;
5. Christology/soteriology;
6. Mariology;
7. Ecclesiology;
8. Pneumatology;
9. Doctrine of grace;
10. Sacramental doctrine;
11. Eschatology.
By contrast, Karl Rahner suggests the abandonment of the tractates in thematic sequences (Grundkurs des Glaubens, Freiburg 1976 [Foundations of Christian Faith, Herder & Herder, 2005]). Each of nine sequences is designed to provide access to a view of the particular aspect and the Christian message as a whole: The Hearer of the Message; Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery; Threatened Radically by Guilt; The Event of God’s Self-Communication; The History of Salvation and Revelation; Jesus Christ; Christianity as Church; Remarks on Christian Life; Eschatology.
This structure clearly reflects the necessity of a commitment considering the questionable nature of man’s existence that is conditioned in part by the anthropological-epistemological turning point of the modern era.
In contrast to this, the “old dogmatics” starts directly with the theology of God. Following the profession of faith, attention is turned to the unity and triunity of God: God as the foundation of his work of salvation in creation, redemption and sanctification through to consummation of man in the resurrection and in eternal life. Of course, the anthropological dimension is also given consideration, to the extent that it is included in the “I believe” or “We believe” with which the symbolum begins (the God-likeness of man, the foundation of his spiritual creatureliness as “desiderium naturale ad videndum Deum,” personal character, ecclesiastical nature of belief, etc.). However, the problem here consists in how the salvation historical course of the revelation cannot be brought into congruence with the structural point of departure of a systematization. In the event of salvation history, God appears only at the end in the Christ Event as the threefold God, who, however, of course, is already the threefold God, author of the creation and the Old Testament salvation history.
As depicted in one volume of this course book (original edition in German, Italian and Spanish translations), the now classic division of the tractates is retained but present in an inner coherence that follows the event of the revelation and the condition of the possibility of its acceptance in man.
Following the revelation-theological Epistemology as an introduction, Series A opens a more formal Anthropology in which the dependence of man on God is thematized. The Doctrine of Creation shows that the fundamental relatedness of man to God reflects God’s free self-relation to his creature. The following three tractates show in terms of salvation history the self-revelation of the threefold God (economic trinity) as the subject of salvation history in the Old Testament and as the Father of Jesus Christ in the New Testament; the revelation of God in his Son (Christology / Soteriology) and in the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology). The salvation historical self-revelation of the threefold God then opens a view of God’s threefold life (doctrine of a trinitarian God). This tractate is, so to speak, in the center of the whole theological thematic sequence.
The following section, Series B, is structured from the perspective of man’s response in the history of faith corresponding to God’s revelation treated in Series A. It opens with Mariology. In this section, in an exemplary manner, statements of the self-mediation of God related to anthropology make clear, inasmuch as Mary is the archetype of the blessed individual and of the Church as the congregation of the faith. Then, corresponding to God’s self-revelation as Creator (protology), the theme of the consummation of man (Eschatology) follows, corresponding to the self-revelation of the Father, the community of the Church as God’s people (Ecclesiology). Christology corresponds to the salvatory presence of Christ, the Head and Lord of the Church in the sacraments (doctrine of the sacraments), while subsequently—corresponding to the pneumatology—the doctrine of grace rounds off the dogmatic discourse.
The structure can be illustrated by the following “outline.”
In the edition of the course book in several volumes, as it is presented here, each tractate in Series A is linked with its corresponding tractate in Series B.
The first volume contains the tractates on the creation doctrine and eschatology.
4. Outline of the Structure of the Dogmatics
GOD’S SELF-REVELATION AS THE CREATOR OF THE WORLD
(The Doctrine of Creation)
I.
THEMES AND PERSPECTIVES OF A THEOLOGY OF THE CREATION
1. Creation—A Theological Concept
The Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed begins with the fundamental statement: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” (DH 150)
As can be seen from the structure of the sentence, the substance of this belief is not a statement about the world; it states a faith in God as a personal reality (credere in Deum). This is also an expression of faith in him (credere Deo), which is impossible without the belief in his existence and his active sovereignty (credere Deum). In the light of this personal faith in God, man can designate the world, in a universal qualification, as creation. Hence, the doctrine of creation proves to be a transcendental perspective on the world at the level of a personal relationship to God. Due to the Christian understanding of God as a spiritual, free, omniscient and omnipotent personal reality, Christian belief in creation differs in principle from mythical cosmogonies and theogonies, natural philosophic and natural scientific doctrines of how the world originated, but also from the natural theology of metaphysics.
The personal faith-based relationship to God the Creator is rooted in Israel’s historical experience of God. This is why the Symbolum identifies the “Father almighty,” specifically the God of the Covenant, as the universal Creator of the world. The God who liberated Israel from slavery, the God of the Covenant, the law and the messianic promise, is identical with the Sovereign Creator, Ruler and Consummator of “heaven and earth” (Gen 1:1), the God and Father of all men and peoples. The God of the creation and the Covenant is also identical with the Consummator of the world in the “creation of the new heaven and the new earth” (Isa 65:17), when he brings together Israel with all the peoples for the “revelation of his glory” (Isa 66:19) in the eschatological communion of saints.
The belief in God the Creator does not flow from two completely different sources. Belief in God the Creator and Redeemer is rooted in the one experience of his power in history, in the cosmos and in the life of the individual man. In terms of this fundamental experience of God’s powerful presence, the horizon extends to the all-encompassing origin (protology) and the entire and final perfection of the world (eschatology). God reveals himself in the present from the core of the personal experience of God as the transcendent origin and transcendent goal of man and the world. The conceptual rendering of the belief in creation is a contribution to the general historical development of the understanding of God in salvation history. Only in the light of the Christ event does God the Creator reveal his identity as God and as the Father of Jesus Christ.
The belief in creation takes on further aspects: the eternal Word or the eternal Son as the mediator of creation, the trinitarian God as the origin and purpose, the eschatological perfection of the world in light of Christ, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit.
Hence, “creation” designates the universally transcendental relationship between the world and God which shines in the spiritual and free relationship between man and the world and history as both their underlying foundation and consummating goal.
2. Creation: God’s Original Self-Revelation
One essential principle of any human speech about God stands out here: God is known through the historical world and its human community, he mediates himself indirectly as its absolute Author through the world’s existence, its guidance and perfection as expressed in the totality of its existence and working. “Since the beginning of the world”, i.e. coextensively with the existence of the created reality, God reveals his “invisible reality”, his “eternal power and divinity” (Rom 1:19 f.), by making himself knowable through the light (intellectus agens) of human reason (intellectus possibilis).
The created world is not an exchangeable medium that God takes up casually for the purpose of revealing himself. The being of the world which lights up man’s acquisition of knowledge is how God irrefutably penetrates human reason. Wherever man in his transcendental self-awareness enquires into existential meaning and human purpose, he encounters God at least tangentially and implicitly as the transcendent foundation of finite existence and knowledge. Because in man’s experience of himself and the world, God, the free origin of both world and man, of finite existence and finite knowledge, proclaims himself as the divine mystery, the discussion must be explicitly about God’s self-revelation. This original knowledge of God as the Creator also goes far beyond any philosophical approach to God as the transcendent first cause of the world, because this original experience of the divine is itself already a salvation-mediating encounter with God.
The Christian concept of creation brings man and the world into a special co-ordinate system in relation to God’s personal transcendence, consequently, to God’s personal immanence in the specific history of his self-mediation in the Word and in the Mediator of the Covenant, Jesus Christ:
• God himself is in terms of his essence and being infinitely dissimilar from the world. He possesses himself such that his possession of self and disposition of his personal reality is unlimited.
• Man as a creature is a being of this world and at the same time is the addressee of God’s self-revelation as the Creator and Partner in the history of the Covenant.
• The world as the creation is not a part of God or a moment in an intra-divine dialectical process; the world as the creation is the environment of man and a medium of the revelation of the glory and power of God.
• Hence, the theological concept of creation consists of three interwoven reference levels:
1) The act of creation: The creation, as an act of God, coincides with the God’s act of being existential act itself through which he autonomously calls into existence the totality of all non-divine existence and lets all individual beings really subsist individually in the specificity of their nature. What is created is essentially distinct from God, but from the divine act establishing reality, God is intimately and deeply present in all creatures in a manner which corresponds to their finite natures. This basic creative relationship to the world unfolds into individual aspects which designate the beginning, the execution and the perfection of the created things of this world. God the Creator is from the beginning (creatio ex nihilo) the unceasing foundation which preserves all things in their existence and form (conservatio mundi). He steers and effects the world’s progress for the salvation of creatures through his care and providence (providentia Dei). Man is not guided to his ultimate goal from without but rather by means of and within human freedom as the correspondence of divine and human freedom (concursus divinus).
2) The created world: Creation also means the totality of all things created: “the heavens and earth” (cf. Gen 1:1; the universe, the realm of space, the cosmos or “the world”). Of course, creation is more than merely the sum of what exists. The creation is God’s medium of self-revelation and self-communication. This is why God’s creative activity culminates in the one creature which, thanks to its intellectual endowment, is capable of self-transcendence. God’s creative activity is centered on man because man can transcend the creatureliness of the world and, in the light of his self-knowledge as a creature, can rise to become the personal interlocutor of God’s Word. The creation has its inner ultimate purpose in the Covenant of Grace.
3) The order of creation: Both in its existence and in its essence, the order of creation is an indication of God’s goodness, sovereignty and wisdom, reflected in the functional structure of matter and in the processuality which preserves and bears life. God reveals his salvific will in the order of the world.
The order of creation includes the enablement of man to bear responsibility actively for:
• Material nature (ecology, environmental ethics);
• Human environment: the political, social and economic management of the habitat (moral theology, social ethics) derived from the reality of creation;
• Personhood: man’s realization of the quest for meaning, and man’s transcendental reliance on God as the hearer of God’s Word and, consequently, religion, faith, community of the Church (philosophy of the revelation).
3. Important Doctrinal Statements on the Creation Doctrine
1. The Synod of Constantinople 543 condemned the doctrine of the “Origenists,” that God’s power is finite, and he created all that he could comprehend and think (DH 410).
2. Regarding the “Priscillianists” (a Manichaean–Gnostic sect), canons 5–13 of the First Synod of Braga (561) invoke an anathema against all those who defend the following views:
(can. 5): Human souls or angels come from the substance of God (DH 455),
(can. 7): The devil was not first a good angel; he had no Creator but is himself the principle and substance of evil (DH 457);
(can. 8): The devil made some of the creatures in the world, and he damages by his own power the world and man (e.g., by storms; DH 458);
(can. 9): Human souls and bodies are by their fate bound to the stars (DH 459);
(can. 11): Condemnation of human marriage and loathing of the procreation of children (DH 461);
(can. 12): The formation of the human body is the work of the devil, and there is no such thing as the resurrection of the flesh (DH 462);
(can. 13): The creation of all flesh is not the work of God but of bad angels (DH 463).
3. Against the idealistic, Neoplatonic understanding of the creation and the idea of a natural cycle, the Lateran Synod (649) emphasizes the realistic salvation historic orientation of Church doctrine: can. 1: Deus Trinitas est creatrix (Creator) omnium et protectrix (protector): DH 501.
4. In 1208 Pope Innocent III prescribed to the Waldensians (who, like the Albigensians, Catharists and Lombards, taught that matter was evil and that the devil created it from nothing) this profession of faith: The one and threefold God is the creator of all things, corporeal and spiritual, he is the one author of the OT and NT; and is the Creator of all things from nothing (DH 790).
5. The caput Firmiter of the Lateranense IV (1215) completely rejects Catharism: “We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty, and ineffable, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . < They are > the one principle of the universe, the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal, who by his almighty power from the beginning of time made at once out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then the human creature, who, as it were, shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body. For the devil and the other demons were indeed created by God naturally good, but they became evil by their own doing. As for man, he sinned at the suggestion of the devil” (DH 800).
6. Pope John XXII criticized (1329) some articles written by Meister Eckhart (whereby what Meister Eckhart meant by these teachings is a matter of dispute). The following teachings are refuted: the eternal co-existence of the world with God; the complete parallelism of the eternal begetting of the Son from the Father with the creation; all creatures are one pure nothing; there is something in the soul that is uncreated and incapable of being created (DH 951–53, 976f.).
7. Against Manichaean dualism the Church taught at the Council of Florence (1442) in the Decree for the Jacobites in the Bull of Union Cantate Domino: “The one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, who when he so willed, out of his bounty, made all creatures, spiritual as well as corporeal. They are good since they were made by him who is the highest good, but they are mutable because they were made out of nothing. . . . There is no such thing as a nature of evil, because all nature, as nature, is good. . . . One and the same God is the author of the OT and the NT.” There are not “two first principles, one of the visible things, the other of invisible things” (DH 1333–36).
8. In response to the Catholic theologians G. Hermes und A. Günther, whose orientation had been too influenced by Kant and Hegel, the Synode der Rheinischen Kirchenprovinz in Köln (1860) takes a position against pantheism, deism and the Hegelian understanding of a “becoming God.” Set forth in detail: God is complete in himself. He is immutable. His becoming is not dependent on the becoming of the world. God creates the world, free of any inner compulsion or outer force, in order to convey to it his goodness. God could have created another world. The world was created by God in time. The purposes of the creation are the happiness of man and the revelation of the glory of God as well as his perfections, especially his wisdom, power and goodness. A distinction is drawn between gloria Dei subiectiva (= prayer, gratitude, the worship of God by man) and gloria Dei obiectiva (= God stands revealed in his works), while, in turn, regarding the gloria Dei obiectiva, a distinction is drawn between the gloria Dei interna and the gloria Dei externa (NR 303–313).
9. The Vaticanum I had the same errors in mind when in the constitution Dei Filius (chap. 1, can. 1–5) it teaches:
chap. 1: God is a singular, completely simple and immutable spiritual being. He is really and essentially distinct from the world (re et essentia a mundo distinctus). The definition from the Lateranse IV is repeated as the definition of creation.
Specifically can. 3: “If anyone says that the substance and essence of God and all things is one and the same: let him be anathema.”
Can. 4: “If anyone says that finite beings, the corporeal as well as the spiritual . . . have emanated from the divine substance, or that the divine essence becomes all things by self-manifestation or self-evolution, or lastly that God is the universal or indefinite being which, by self-determination, constitutes the universality of beings, differentiated in genera, species, and individuals: let him be anathema.” (Hence, the being of beings is not God.)
Can. 5: “If anyone refuses to confess that the world and all things contained in it, the spiritual as well as the material, were in their whole substance produced by God out of nothing; or says that God created, not by an act of will free from all necessity, but with the same necessity by which he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was made for the glory of God: let him be anathema.” (DH 3001–03; 3021–25)
10. Finally, the Vaticanum II addressed questions of the creation doctrine, especially in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes (1965): Man has received from God the ability and the mission to manage the world in a responsible manner, to foster community in the family and in society. In his cultural and scientific achievements man is not God’s rival. The Christian message of eternal life does not distract man from taking responsibility for the world and providing the care needed for a human world, it challenges him to accept explicitly this responsibility and provide this care (GS 33–39).
4. The Dogma of Creation in Its Constitutive Elements
The term creation (as an act) is understood to mean the production of a thing in its entire substance, nothing being presupposed either uncreated or created (cf. Thomas, S. th. I q. 65 a. 3: “creatio est productio alicuius rei secundum suam totam substantiam nullo praesupposito quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum”).
The dogma of creation contains both theological statements in the narrow sense (i.e., statements about God) as well as cosmological statements (about the world as it is) and anthropological statements (about man).
Statements about God:
• The threefold God is the origin and ultimate purpose of the whole of creation and salvation history (DH 171; 790; 800; 1333). Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three origins, but the one origin of the whole creation (DH 501; 1331).
• God reveals himself in and towards the world in his transcendent person–reality. In contrast with pantheistic, emanationist process-philosophical ideas according to which God is naturally caught up in the world process and in the constitution or perfection of his essence in proceeding through the world realizes himself, the First Vatican Council emphasizes the absolute transcendence and freedom, the subjectivity and the person–reality of God (DH 3001).
• God’s aseity (aseitas), which holds him aloof of natural involvement in the world process (God’s immutability), as God’s personal transcendence, is simultaneously also the reason for his personal immanence in the world, his forcefulness in history and his spontaneous influence. This is directed against a deistic idea according to which God only has an influence on the origin of the world, but not the course of history (D 2902; 3003).
• The presence and immanence of God in the world is given by the Person of the Father, the “Maker of heaven and earth,” the Person of the Son, “by whom all things were made” and the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is the “Lord and giver of life.” The self-revelation of the threefold God is finally completed when the Son in the Holy Spirit turns over his kingdom to the Father, “so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).
Statements about the world:
• Everything that exists apart from God exists due to God’s creative activity. Creatures are not divine appearances. The world possesses in the form of individual things and living beings a created subsistence which lends individuals in the scope of their nature their own reality, activity and value.
• God creates the world by sovereignly positing finite being (in existence and form) without resorting to any pre-existing matter (against the idea that God is a mere demiurge). Only God can create out of nothing (DH 800).
• God creates, along with the world, space and time as perceptible forms accessible to man, in which he can order the manifold empirical existence of sensual experience. The mere thought–object of time eternal and an endless expanse of empty space without matter has nothing to do with the eternity which is identical with God’s essence.
• The created world is from its origin one (in opposition to metaphysical dualism). But it consists, at least in man, of the duality of the principles of spirit and matter, which differ essentially from one another, with the spirit–soul as the unifying principle (in opposition to metaphysical monism).
• God creates the world in freedom, without any need for an inner necessity or outer force. As God’s freedom is identical with his essence, in relation to his creation it signifies the rendering possible of a certain contribution to the freedom created in the divine realization of freedom. God’s freedom vis à vis the world has its anthropological reflection in the enabling of human freedom for self-realization in love and for the participation in the life of the threefold God.
• The “motive” for the act of creation is God’s essence itself, his love (GS 19) and his goodness (DH 3002): “Not for the increase of his own happiness or for the acquirement of his perfection, but in order to manifest his perfection through the benefits that he bestows on creatures.”
• The motive of the creation has its correspondence in the world to the extent that all created things and living beings by reason of their nature and in their nature (i.e. in the mode of participation in being which realizes them) are themselves good (cf. Gen 1:31: “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good”). The inner goodness of the creature also includes the materiality of the world and the corporeality of man.
• For this reason, against Manichaeism, it can be deduced from creation theology that moral evil has no created nature (DH 1333). From the perspective of creation theology, tracing moral evil back to created nature or stating that creation’s finiteness is accompanied quasi inevitably by misfortune and evil in no way takes wickedness seriously but rather, on the contrary, treats misfortune as trivial and provides moral evil with a specious excuse. Moral evil has no intrinsic existence. It coexists with a personally created will which, against its own salvation, turns against the order of the world and the orientation towards God and, in so doing, exposes itself in its abysmal perversity (mysterium iniquitatis).
• The superordinate purpose of creation is the revelation of the glory of God (DH 3025). Corresponding to this is the revelation of the ultimate purpose of man: participating in God’s life, attaining to beatitude.
• In revealing himself as the beginning, the middle and the ultimate goal of all of creation, God preserves man’s world and guides the history of mankind (GS 39).
Statements about man:
• Man is the goal of the act of creation and the inner movement of the world process. Man is created in the image of God as a spiritual and physical essentia. Through his personhood, he is free to act in relation to the world. An integral aspect of his being is his personal and transcendental relationship with God.
• The sovereignty of the human spirit, its cultural formation and productivity do not characterize man as a rival to the Creator but are “. . . a sign of God’s grace and the flowering of his own mysterious design.”
• For man, created in God’s image, is called upon
