Creatio ex Nihilo in Luther's Genesis Commentary and theCausal Question

Dennis Bielfeldt, Institute of Lutheran Theology

Abstract

Within Luther scholarship the past 125 years, particular assumptions about substantiality, causality and ontology have obscured Luther's continuity with the semantic and metaphysical assumptions of the late medieval tradition. Such assumptions can be discerned in Johannes Schwanke's magisterial treatment of creatio ex nihilo in Luther's Genesisvorlesung (1535-45), where he argues that Luther’s creatio ex nihilo should not be understood primarily causally, but rather as a relationship between the Creator and creature, the “absolute dependence of all being upon God’s being” (schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit allen Seins von Gottes Sein). This relationship is “not of a theoretical nature,” but concerns “lived existence” (gelebter Existenz). I argue that because it is a mark of modernity to interpret theological assertions upon the ground of human existence generally, it follows that Schwanke’s presuppositions are thoroughgoingly modern. But while postmodern thinkers have often been critical of creatio ex nihilo -- claiming thereupon that God dominates creation and nonbeing and represses liminality, ambiguity and the messiness of creation generally -- postmodernity need not cut one way. While pre-modern global metaphysics gave way to modernity’s critique and anthropological reinterpretation of metaphysical/theological assertions, postmodernity can effect a regional retrieval of metaphysics shorn of the strong-armed presumptuousness of modernity. Causality need not entail a “God’s eye,” perspective, but rather can embrace the perspectival and humanly diverse attempts to employ singular causal statements to link physical and non-physical states of affairs. For Luther, God’s will and agency causally brings it about that something comes from nothing. This causal connection between God and the non-divine presupposed in Luther’s Genesisvorlesung is the condition for the possibility of Schwanke’s phenomenon of the “absolute dependence of all being upon God’s being.” ____________________________________________________________________

Introduction

‘Creatio ex nihilo’ means literally to produce being out of what is notprior. It connotes the radical contingency of all being; all that is not God depends upon God. Matter, space, time and the laws of nature themselves emerge from God’s unconditional free and purposeful choice. Simply put, God transcends the world; the world is neither God (pantheism) nor part of God’s being

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(panentheism). The universe’s ontological dependence upon God is displayed both through God’s creatio ex nihilo and through His loving creatio continua opening the universe to future possibilities and redemptive transformation. Accordingly, evil’s existence is notdue to some pre-existing material stuff that God could not eradicate during initial design. Indeterminate being (material stuff) from which all determinate being arises is not God, nor does it exist eternally in counterpoise to God.

Like most of the tradition before him, Luther held to the notion of creatio ex nihilo.1 But to hold to a view does not entail that a thinker holds it in the same sense as the tradition had. Different thinkers, working at different times and contexts, will naturallyemphasize different aspects of a view. This was certainly true of Luther and Augustine in their differing takes on creation.2 Similarly, with respect to creatio ex nihil the concerns of Copan and Craig’s Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical and Scientific Explanation, are strikingly different than Johannes Schwanke’s, Creatio Ex Nihilo: Luthers Lehre von der Schöpfung us dem Nichts in der Grossen Genesisvorlesung (1535-45).3 This is trivially true on one level, for Schwanke has

1 For a recent book examining Augustine’s commitment to the doctrine, see Natale Joseph Torchia, Creatio ex nihilo and the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond, (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). The extent andnature of creatio ex nihilo thinking in formative Judaism was explored by Jonathan Goldstein in “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo, Journal of Jewish Studies 35/2 (1984): 127-35. Goldstein claims that the creatio was formulated to address the problem of the resurrection. In the dissertation, Creatio ex nihilo: Matter, Creation and Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy through Aquinas (University of Pennsylvania Dissertation Series), James Hubler argues that it was precisely the possibility of resurrection that drove the Christian Apologists. Stoic, Platonic and Periphatetic philosophy all argued that matter carries with it a naturalnecessity of corruption and particular moral limitations. Christian hopes for coherently conceiving resurrection as a good thus hinged upon a redefinition of matter as a good gift of God. 2 As is well-known, Augustine believes that all of creation happened instantaneously by the power of God, and interpreted the Genesis 1 account allegorically as divine works of that instantaneous creation. Luther interprets the account of Genesis 1 much more literally -- thoughboth thinkers advocate that unformed matter itself is caused by God. 3 Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004).

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written a book on Luther whereas Copan and Craig have not. But this does not fully explain the difference in interpretations. Clearly, metaphysics plays a much greater role in the first text than the second. But why should this be? Why can a Lutheran reading Luther’s Genesisvorlesung not be deeply metaphysically engaged? 4 Is there an implicit anti-metaphysical bias in Luther’s work in general, and in the Genesis Vorlesung in particular, that makes it a category mistake of some kind to jointhe terms ‘Luther’ and ‘metaphysics’?5 While Johannes Schwanke should not perhaps be charged with an anti-metaphysical bias in his interpretation of Luther’s Genesisvorlesung, it is clear that he does not find the metaphysical question particularly interesting.6

Schwanke concludes that Luther’s creatio ex nihil is not concerned primarily with the causal “whence” (Woher) or the “how” (Wie) of the natural sciences, but rather simply the relationship between the creator and the creation.7 All that happens to me is given

Johannes Schwanke, Creatio ex nihilo: Luthers Lehre von der Schöpfung aus dem Nichts in der Grossen Genesisvorlesung (1535-45), (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). 4 Why specifically would Lutheran theologians reading Luther on originsnot also read William Lane Craig’s “Philosophical and Scientific Pointers to Creatio ex Nihilo,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 32/1 (March1980), pp. 5-13? How could Lutheran thinking about creatio ex nihilo not be helped by a careful study of Jonathan Kvanvig’s “Creation and Conservation,” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creation-conservation/), or Hans Halvorson’s “Cosmology and Theology,” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-theology/), or Mark Ian Thomas Robson’s Ontology and Providence in Creation: Taking Ex Nihilo Seriously, (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2008). 5 That Wilhelm Hermann thinks it so does not itself make it so. 6 It is not that Schwanke and much German Luther interpretation denies that Luther can speak metaphysically at times, it is just that this aspect of Luther’s thinking is not something that can or should be thematized in the modern situation. Cf., Bernard Lohse, Luthers Theologie inihrer historischen Entwicklyng une in ihrem systematischen Zuzammenhang, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995), p. 258 and especially Gerhard Ebeling, Lutherstudien, Band II, Disputatio de Homine, 3. Teil, (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1989), p. 490: “Darum liegt ihm die Einshränkung der creatio ex nihilo auf die Entstehung der Welt fern. Weder eine Vermengung mit Spekulationen über die material prima will er zulassen noch die Vorstellung von der Ershaffung der Welt in einem Nu.” 7Creatio ex Nihilo, p. 4.

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“out of pure fatherly, divine goodness, without any merit or worthiness within me.”8 Schwanke declares that this should not be understood according to a "causal scheme" (kausalen Schemata), but rather from the standpoint of God's inconceivable love.9 Creatio ex nihilo is properly understood as “the absolute dependence ofall being upon God’s being” (die schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit allen Seins von Gottes Sein).10 This dependence of the creation upon the Creator should not be understood “theoretically” (nicht theoretischer Natur), butrather as “lived existence” (gelebter Existenz), as the way in the “here and now” (hier und jetzt) God’s creativity (Schaffen) is experienced as “creation, conservation and new creation” (Schöpfung, Erhaltung und Neuschöpfung).11 This absolute dependence of the creature on the Creator is, according to Schwanke, affirmableeven by those who have difficulties with the notion of a personalGod.12 The parallels to Schleiermacher’s starting point for theology are striking.13

Schwanke argues persuasively that Luther's thinking about creatio exnihilo connects always to the concept of justification: Both speak of an always new and extrinsic bestowal of being. God in creation and redemption brings new being from nothing. Both concern the "kernel of divine creation" (Kern göttlichen Schaffens) andthe "constant situation of spiritual life" (ständige Situation des geistlichen Leben).14 Creation, conservation and new creation have

8 p. 5ff. 9 p. 5. 10 p.5.11 p.7.12 p. 7.13 Schleiermacher famously held that God is the “whence” of the feelingof absolute dependence. 14 p. 75. Schwanke refers with appreciation to Wilfried Joest's Ontologie der Person bei Luther (Göttingen: 1967), p. 265: ". . . die Situation der creatio ex nihilo, in der in der Tat Gott allein das Subjekt des Geschehens, das Geschehen selbst das von ihm allein als sein Werk zu Praedizierende ist. Und diese Situation denkt Luther als die ständige Situation des geistlichen Lebens."

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the same structure: All are dependent upon God who in one way or the other brings being out of nothing.15

This paper briefly examines Schwanke’s work, the tradition’s viewof creatio ex nihilo, and some of the philosophical assumptions of contemporary Luther scholarship in preparation for a reading of the early sections of the Genesisvorlesung that is straightforwardlymetaphysical and yet postmodern. I suggest, in fact, that a truly postmodern retrieval of Luther will have to engage again the question of divine causality. Modernity’s triumphalist disposal of divine causality must be examined again in the light of post-modernity’s non-internalist, epistemological starting point.16 I believe that the notion of causality is itself not a

15 A great many interpreters of Luther and Lutheran theology make this point. Mark Mattes says it very succinctly: “God’s salvation is a recommitment to his original work of creating out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). God not only creates us out of nothingness, but also providentially sustains our lives, together with those of all creatures,from moment to moment, out of nothingness. Just as God creates and sustains the world out of nothingness through his address, his speaking his creation into being and maintaining it in being, God re-creates humanity out of the nothingness of sin and death. Indeed, those who are self-justifying in any capacity must be reduced to nothing if they are to receive God’s justification” (http://lutherantheology.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/a-brief-introduction-to-justification/.) Unfortunately, statements such as “moment to moment” seem to suggest occasionalism, a philosophical position rife with difficulties. In order to avoid this problem, it seems there must be a different account of “bringing about” with regard to initial existence than that involved in post-creation existence. In order for this second “bringing about” to avoid deism – the idea that at initial creation causal mechanisms were established sufficient for later required “bringing abouts” – some form of divine concurrence must be clarified. Unfortunately, this has proven to be very difficult. The attempt to formulate how God can be causally involved in the unfolding of post-creation, while still advocating creatio ex nihilo has led to some rather interesting proposals, e.g., Phillip Clayton, “Open Pantheism andCreatio ex Nihilo,” Process Studies, 37/1 (Spring/Summer 2008), pp. 166-83. 16 See Alvin Plantiga’s classic critique of internalism -- the view that normative doxastic practice ultimately warrants knowledge -- in Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). While I suggest that post-modernity and its rejection of epistemological internalism makes possible again the service of metaphysics in theology,showing this to be so clearly lies outside the scope of this paper.

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modernist notion, but postmodern thinkers often regard it so because the tradition’s concomitant assumptions of universality and necessity. But before I begin I want to comment briefly about what post-modern thinking on creatio ex nihilo need not entail.

A Postmodern Meditation

John Caputo, in his 2005 The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, seeshis work of “theopoetics” as envisioning God as a “weak force” that creates by bringing forth life from the deep (tehom) of the waters and the potentiality of the void (tohu wa-bohu). In so doing, the messiness of creation becomes, “a beautiful risk.”17 For Caputo, ‘God’ and ‘nothing’ are seemingly comparable terms that allow for the drawing of a relation.18 God could only “dominate” that which is “there” to be dominated.

Brian Robinette responds to Caputo by pointing out that creatio ex nihilo ought not be understood on a continuum with respect to divine power, but should rather be interpreted as that which is truly transcendent. An infinite qualitative difference between God and that which is not God does not remove God from the universe, but allows God yet to be “near” in God’s very transcendence.19 Accordingly, creatio ex nihilo “does not mean domination which is the way Caputo frames his analysis of power, and which forces him to set up an untenable dichotomy between ‘strong’ and ‘weak theologies’.”20 The binary opposition here is not between God and the absolute nothing from which God pulls theworld into being, but rather between God and some chaos that could be shaped by the Creator. To claim that the absolutely

While postmodernity entails foundationalism, the converse does not hold.17 John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2005), p. 64. 18 Just as ‘100’ refers to that which is infinitely more than that to which ‘0’ refers, so too does ‘God’ refer to an infinitely powerful reality and ‘nothing’ to no reality at all. The point is that comparing ‘God’ and ‘nothing’ is in principle no more difficult than comparing ‘100’ and ‘0’. 19 Brian Robinette, “The Difference Nothing Makes,” Theological Studies 72 (2011): pp. 525-57, p. 526f. 20 p. 527.

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omnipotent God creates from absolute nothingness is to de-construct the binary opposition entirely; it is to make a claim of another kind, one that can’t be mapped onto a binary opposition.21 Because there is incommensurability between nothingness and divine omnipotence, one cannot infer that divine weakness and vulnerability are semantically more proximate to theactivity of God fashioning primal chaos than to God putatively creating from nothing.

Because divine omnipotence and absolute nothingness do not constitute a binary opposition to be overcome, it is not exactly clear how trying to de-construct, de-structure , de-center or otherwise mediate this dichotomy relates to the postmodernist project.22 In what follows, I adopt a different strategy in reading the creatio ex nihilo, a strategy allowing reclamation of a metaphysically singular causal relation in faithfully reading early sections of the Genesisvorlesung. Causal relations are, after all, presupposed by all thinking and doing, regardless of whetherone is modern or postmodern. First, however, we must briefly attend to how creatio ex nihilo has been understood in the tradition.

Creatio ex nihilo in the Tradition

Creatio ex nihilo is often regarded to be a post-biblical concept thatdeveloped in the second century within Christian theology, repudiating the eternality of matter as constituting a limitationupon divine power and freedom.23 Fundamental in this development

21 p. 529: “Rather than implying an agonistic picture that situates Godand creation in a relationship of rivalry - - such a picture only underwrites the serialization of binary and hierarchically arranged terms (e.g., power/weakness, higher/lower, spirit/body, male/female, active/passive, etc.) – creatio ex nihilo in fact ruptures such a picture as it emphatically denies that God is “part” of any continuum whatsoever.” 22 We shall thus by-pass discussions of creation ex nihilo like that which took place in one of the panels at the 2011 American Academy of Religion. See http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2012/05/25/the-creatio-ex-nihilio-debate/. 23 Others see the matter differently, e.g., Paul Copan, “Is Creatio ex Nihilo a Post-Biblical Invention? An Examination of Gerhard May’s Proposal,” Trinity Journal 17.1 (Spring 1996), pp. 77-93. Copan finds creatio ex nihilo clearly proclaimed in Scripture and in extra-Biblical Jewish and

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was the thematizing of the ontological fissure separating divine eternal creation from the temporal creatureliness of the world.24 Platonic and Gnostic notions served as the foil upon which the Christian assertion of creatio ex nihilo rests.25 Gerhard May argues persuasively that the Gnostic Basileides was pushed to the notionof creatio ex nihilo with his identification of the highest God with the creator God of Genesis.26 May writes, “the view that the productive work of the highest God transcends all human analogies

Christian sources: “To say that the biblical information about creationis ambiguous on the basis of the fact that several early church fathers held to world-formation is simply inaccurate. This reads back a Greek way of thinking into the OT text. To my mind, it seems doubtful that an un-hellenized Jewish student of the OT would have formulated something analogous to a Middle Platonist cosmology on his own” (92). We can safely say that while most would say creatio ex nihilo is consistent with the Genesis narrative, fewer would say that it is entailed by that narrative. Luther, however, does seem to believe it was. 24 It is useful to review ancient Greek thinking on “stuff” and “order.” The pre-Socratics advanced many notions of the primal stuff and explanations as to how that stuff was ordered. Famously, Parmenides claimed that the primal stuff was “the One,” an immutable, eternal, unitary being. Heraclitus thought the basic “stuff” of realitywas in flux, but nevertheless was ordered by the logos. Empedocles suggested that two such principles, Love (attraction) and Strife (repulsion), working upon four elements (earth, air, fire, water), produced the qualitative differentiation of the world. Plato postulated in the Timaeus that a creator (demiurge) formed existing material stuff according to patterns within the world of forms. Aristotle argued that the universe was eternal, but it orderliness, motion and purpose is due to a primitive unmoved mover. Philo’s views are not completely clear, but he seems to hold that the Platonic forms are divine ideas, and that both these forms and the primitive stuff so formed exist within, and arise from, from God. Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch in the second century denied that there was preexistent chaotic stuff -- a view that they may have gotten from Basileides. Writing in the late fourth century, Augustine claimed that even time was created by God ex nihilo. The problem for early Christian theology in understanding divine creation was how to think it cogently in the face of prevailing Neo-Platonic views that the One is beyond being and non-being, that there are three primary hypostases operating which bring the many from the one(the One, Nous, and the temporal soul), and that creation is closely connected to emanation, while redemption links to return. There are, infact, a number of differing creation views possible: 1) One could assert, in Dionysion style, that creation comes from nothing somehow

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and cannot be imagined as the fashioning of a pre-existent material is also to be found in Marcion and the Valentinians.”27 Yet, according to May, only Basileides really denies to the emanating Archons the activity of shaping pre-existing matter, for only Basileides asserts a single act by which the world-seed is instantaneously created. Despite this Gnostic beginning, May admits that the historically significant doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo took shape in the thinking of the anti-Gnostic fathers.28

Clearly, the notion of creatio ex nihilo was not easy for thinkers of Greek metaphysics to think, for according to Aristotle when A is an efficient cause of B, there must be some power in A to bring about in some substance X a change from X’s being in potential toB to actualizing B. For Aristotle, God could not have “caused” that which is not God because there would be nothing in the realmof the potential to be actualized as world. For Greek thinking generally, potentiality is the “no-thing” necessary for B; it is not absolute nothingness, but a relative not-being-anything-in-particular that can, under appropriate causal input, become B. If there is nothing at all, then how could anything be, for “nothing cannot come from nothing?”29

through an emanation; 2) One might argue, as did Justin Martyr, that thepower of the Word brings about this creation; 3) One might hold with Aristotle that the universe is of an infinite age, and finally 4), one could hold with Aquinas that it has a finite duration. Here are the possibilities: (1) & (3), (1) & (4), (2) & (3), and (2) & (4). 25 See Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought. Trans. by A.S. Worrall (London: T & T Clark International, 1994). 26 See p. 62ff. 27 p. 18028 Ibid. 29 The notion of creatio ex nihilo is nicely contrasted with the thesis ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ which may have been first advanced by Leucippus and the School of Democritus -- though some say Melissos or Parmenides -- was taught by Epicurus, and immortalized by Lucretius, Titus, Book 1, De Rerum Natura, line 142: “Principium cuius hinc nobis exordia sumet, nullamrem ex nihilo gigni divinitus umquam.” The distinction between the “nothing in particular” of unformed matter, and the absence of that matter altogether was known throughout the tradition and was thematized nicely within Lutheran orthodoxy. Karl

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Christian theology, over and against Greek metaphysics, learned to claim that God revealed that the non-divine creation emerged from absolute non-being, and it further came to realize that thisknowledge itself is a creatio ex nihilo; there is no pre-existing non-divine “matter” out of which such knowledge could arise. As JohnWebster has pointed out, “No doctrine of creation out of nothing can retain its Christian character unless it cleaves to the wordsof the prophets and expects those words to decide matters.”30 From the being of one’s own reason the knowledge of creatio ex nihilo cannot flow. If this creation is known at all, it is known of the basis of that which is other than one’s own being.

But creatio ex nihilo in the early tradition always understood the ontological fissure that separated God’s necessary movements within Himself and his effects in the non-divine region of being.It clearly conceived that God’s works pro nobis were ontologically distinct from God’s being in se. While Luther and Lutheran Hase distinguishes the nihil privativum (material inhabilis et rudis) of the first from the nihil negativum (negation omnia entitatis) of the second. See the interesting discussion on this, the tempus creationis, the modus creationis, andthe finis creationis in Karl August von Hase, Hutterus redivivus, oder Dogmatik der evangelisch-Lutheranischen Kirche. Ein Dogmatisches Repertoriuim für Studierende, Zweite verbesserte Auflage (Leipzig: Johann Friedrickleich, 1833), pp 167-72. As Schwanke points out the impossibility of something coming from nothing and the creatio ex nihilo is interpreted in a particular way by German idealism that believed the world is dependent upon the self-conscious ego. Hegel writes, “Mit dem freien, selbstbewussten Wesen tritt zugleich eine ganze Welt – aus dem Nichts hervor – die einzig wahre und gedenkbare Schöpfung aus Nichts.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Werke Bd. I, Frühe Schriften (stw 601), p. 234. Criticisms of creation ex nihilo are not difficult to find, both inside and outside Christian theological circles. For summary Christian criticism on conceptual, Biblical, scientific and theological grounds, see Sjoerd Bonting, “Chaos Theology: A New Creation Theology and its Applications,”Journal of Faith and Science Exchange, 4(2000):143-60. For an interesting attempt to use the techniques of analytical philosophy to clarify the notion of ‘creatio ex nihilo’ see Paul Clavier, “La creation ex nihilo: un concept inanaalysable?, TheoRemes 1 (2012), http://theoremes.revues.org/281. Unfortunately, too often advocates of creatio ex nihilo fail to appreciate the significance of the scientific measurements suggesting that the total energy of the universe is zero. 30 See his “‘Out of his will and goodness new things have stood forth’:Creatio ex Nihilo” (http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/wad005/pgrad/documents).

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theology knew deeply the epistemological problem of divine aseity – the divine contour in itself is unknowable -- only in the last two centuries has the distinctively ontological problem emerged – there is no divine contour in itself. But before we go furtherwe must attend to a very simple matter that Luther scholars sometimes ignore: The Kantian presupposition of Luther research and of Lutheran theology generally.

The Kantian Paradigm

For a variety of very plausible reasons Kant argued that substantiality and causality are “pure concepts of the understanding” (der reinen Verstandesbegriffe) which constitute part of the framework of the “transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such.”31 Percepts, formed through the a priori pure forms of sensibility (time and space), are organized both in general and specific ways by concepts which constitute the “rules by which the manifold of sense is united.” Substance and causality are both general rules by which this manifold is structured. Unfortunately, they are misapplied when synthesizing concepts rather than intuitions. The transcendental subruption or illusion is that malady of human thinking wherein concepts are extended beyond the bounds of possible experience.

The results of this unwarranted extension are exemplified by the “antinomies of human reason,” arguments in the Kritik where one can seemingly prove either A or ~A. (Kant “proves” that the world has a beginning and then that it has no beginning.) When the pure concepts of the understanding are projected beyond their proper usage, the traditional problems of metaphysics arise. Over and against the proceeding tradition Kant argued that the categories of substance and causality are not theoretically applicable to God. Human reason accordingly can have no knowledge of God’s being or divine causal relations with other beings. Instead, the notion of God becomes a mere regulative ideal of human reason, that unconditioned that must be thought inorder to complete coherent thinking of the conditioned.

31 See Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B83ff.

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After Kant the theological tradition had somehow to think God without violating the central affirmation of Kant: God cannot beknown as a substance perduring through time and causally-related to other beings.32 Accordingly, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel famously tried to think the being of God without thinking that God had causal relations with the universe. Schleiermacher found God in the whence of the “feeling of absolute dependence” (Das Gefühl der schlecthinnigen Abhängigkeit). Statements putatively referring to the being of God in and of Himself were given an alternative analysis in termsof human feeling, thinking and doing, for thinking the being of God in se was now deeply improper for human thinking. What an earlier age found attractive as incomprensible mystery was now rejected as a fruitless impediment to knowledge.

The Luther Renaissance generally accepted the Kantian starting-point and applauded in Luther statements that spoke of the human hubris of the sinner attempting to think the naked being of God. What could be more congenial for a Kantian of Lutheran persuasionthan to be told that the very attempt to peer into the noumenal was deeply prideful and sinful? What could be better than to learn that the Hidden God of Luther was, in effect, an entailmentfrom the Kantian thesis of the theoretical inaccessibility of thenoumenal?

But there was a downside to this heady identification. If the determinate nature of the unknowable Ding an sich is itself undermined in post-Kantian developments, then Luther’s Hidden Godbecomes ontologically indeterminate, a situation Luther could nothave held. If God has no real aseity, then the relational properties of God are His only determinacy. It now becomes quiteeasy to claim that a class of dyadic relations R are what is to

32Kant famously reintroduced God into his Critique of Practical Reason by arguing that divine existence is a “pure postulate of practical reason,”that which must be asserted cogently to think our moral life, a concept necessary to join human happiness to duty-doing. If X does Y out of a sense of duty, why think that X who is clearly worthy of happiness is orwill be happy? God is a necessarily postulate of the moral life allowing the duty-doer some hope for human happiness.

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be said about God, e.g., ‘God brings x out of nothing’. Accordingly, divine creatio ex nihilo has as its extension a class of relations, a relatum of each being that which is brought from nothing. If the application of the term ‘nothing’ is made suitably broad, then virtually all of God’s gracious acts fall under the creatio concept. Particularly, it seems, justification, conservation and new creation are subsets within the class of allcreatio ex nihil events.

This makes for some very interesting challenges theologically, not the least of which is the tendency to confuse the orders of creation and redemption entirely, and thus be led to a type of occasionalism where God is the direct cause of all things of any kind.33 If this happens, it seems, a different conceptuality attends redemption than was the case historically. But the very idea ofredemption seems to presuppose a “stability and endurance” of thecreated order, a “substrate” for new creation. Simply put, ‘redemption’, ‘conservation’ and ‘new creation’ presuppose being in a way that ‘creation’ does not.34 But this conceptual distinction is lost, it seems, if ‘creatio ex nihilo’ is claimed properly

33 Occasionalism emerged in the west in a context where thinking about causality was the task of both the natural philosopher, the metaphysician and the theologian. Nicolas Malebranche was the most famous holding that God’s agency was the one cause of all that happens, while natural substances only provided the occasion for this one activity. This has clear philosophical ramifications with respect to the ontological status of evil. See Sukjae Lee, “Occasionalism” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/occasionalism/).] Clearly, the prevailing paradigm of Luther interpretation has tended to downplay metaphysical and causal questions in Luther’s theological work in favor of hermeneutical and heuristic ones. This attempt has been in general a friendly one. Scholars realize that the kinds of metaphysical speculation that dominated high and late medieval thinking are not speculations that are generally plausible today. But with this has come problems. Fortunately, the Genesisvorlesung clearly and unambiguously claims the divinely-caused emergence of being from absolute nothingness,and it is only against the backdrop of this that Luther's statements about justification and new creation become theologically forceful. Fora nuanced treatment of the relationship of divine omnipotence, creatio ex nihilo and suffering see Christine Helmer, “More Difficult to Believe? Luther on Divine Omnipotence,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3/1 (March 2001): pp. 2-26.

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to apply to redemption and not be thought metaphorically to extend to it.

The Causal Question

Kant’s solution to the causal problem was to interpret cause as apure concept of the understanding which constitutes part of the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience. The experience that cause undergirds is empirical experience. While ‘cause’ could be used in a regulative sense, such use couldonly be heuristic and could never constitute theoretical knowledge. From a Kantian perspective, ‘cause’ only applies to the natural and (perhaps) social sciences. The hallmark of causality (nomological connection) is universality and necessity.The empirical order “obeys” natural law universally because the same conditions for the possibility of empirical experience

34 I quote at length a reservation of John Webster, “Out of His Will and Goodness,” pp.34-35: “Talk of creation out of nothing as a ‘presently occurring event’ readily generates an anthropology of dependence rather than self-constitution. In effect creatio ex nihilo is conflated with a certain understanding of justification as the ever-fresh, extrinsic bestowal of being. The (often somewhat highly-charged)anthropology comes at a price. Creation out of nothing is at one and the same time expanded and contracted: expanded into a potent image of the entire character of created and redeemed existence, contracted by the excision of the dogmatic and speculative theology of God in himself and god’s work of origination which properly form the basis for a theology of the creaturely condition and its redemption. Further, when creatio ex nihilo is transposed from a statement about the origination of created being to a statement about its continuance, ontological occasionalism is hard to resist: God’s redeeming work becomes his ceaseless rescue of created reality from tumbling back into nothingness,as if the creature had not been given being, as if there were no already-existing creaturely substrate to redemption. The renewal of creation presumes its stability and endurance as more than an immediate miracle. The ‘new creation’, however drastic its novelty, is not a further instance of the act of creation in the beginning, for there cannot be more than one such introduction of being; rather, it is a change within creation, a new episode in the history of God with what he has made. Inshort; creation out of nothing means that creaturely being really is, that by the act of the creator the gulf between non-being and being really has been crossed in a way which need not be repeated and which will not be revoked.”

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obtain for each and every knower. Kant began with Hume’s notion of causality as constant conjunction, and deduced the conditions necessary for this constant conjunction’s necessity and universality. The regularity theory of causation was the very presupposition for Kant’s theory.

But one need not start with regularity in understanding causality. One can begin with the truth of the singular causal statement and move to regularity on this basis. Instead of understanding the singular form on the basis of the general, one builds up the general out of the singular. If ‘this A causes this B’ and this is true without exception, then ‘A causes B’.

Donald Davidson writes persuasively about the need to distinguishthe extensional context of the singular causal statement from the intensional context of the causal law. While the truth of causal lawsis dependent upon how situations are described, the truth of a singular causal statement is not an affair of language at all.35

If we assume the Davidsonian analysis of causality, then we can break through the transcendental starting point of Kant to an assertion of causal realism, a view that the pre-modern Luther couldcountenance: There are extra-linguistic objects, properties and states of affairs, and these are causally-related.36 This is true

35 Davidson distinguishes the ontology of causation as a singular relation among particular events from a semantics of causal explanation.Accordingly, “events can instantiate laws, and hence be explained and predicted in the light of laws, only as those events are described in one way of the other.” See Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 215. 36 Davidson’s treatment of causality could be called “Neo-Humean”: “ If ‘a caused b’ it is true, then there are descriptions of a and b such that the result of substituting them for ‘a’ and ‘b’ in ‘a cause b’ is entailed by true premises of the form of (L) and (P) [where (L) providesthe form of a causal law, and (P) provides the form of premises describing initial conditions] . . . If this is correct, it does not follow that we must be able to dredge up a law if we know a singular causal statement to be true; all that follows is that we know there mustbe a covering law.” See “Causal Relations” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 149-62, esp. 159-60. Whatever Davidson says, however, his analysis of single causal statements is staunchly extensionalist and ontological and thus quite

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both of physical and metaphysical objects, properties, events and states of affairs. There is thus no reason to think that if we are talking about the extra-empirical order, the concept of causeis somehow illegitimate. It is, in fact, as legitimate in that order as it is anywhere else. The problem is that we have become so accustomed to thinking that ‘cause’ only properly applies within empirical contexts that we begin to think that using it outside those contexts involves some kind of category mistake. This fear of the category mistake seems particularly strong in theology.37

But if theologians cannot say with sense that the singular causalstatement ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ is true, then it seems that its resources for communicating and persuading men and women of this non-idealistic age are severely compromised. Most contemporary men and women implicitly understand that if theology is to be relevant to them, then God must have causal powers.38 God has that power necessary and sufficient for

congenial to Anscombe’s denial that singular statements must describe instantiations of universal regularities: “It is over and over again assumed that any singular causal proposition implies a universal statement running ‘Always when this, then that’. . . Even a philosopher acute . . . as Davidson . . . will say, without offering any reason at all for saying it, that a singular causal proposition implies that there is such a true universal proposition -- though perhaps we never can have knowledge of it. Such a thesis needs some revision for believing it! (147).” See Anscombe, “Causality and Determination” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 133-47. 37 The situation may have something to do with the old confusion between logical grounds and causes. Kant’s work strongly distinguished the one from the other. Do we fear that if we allow cause to apply outside the realm of the empirical, we shall somehow fall back into thisold confusion? 38 I have spoken elsewhere of the importance for theology of what Jaegwon Kim has called “Alexander’s Dictum:” To be is to have causal powers.” See Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993), p. 348. If God is not a causally efficacious entity, then what significance does God have for contemporary men and women? See my "The Promise and Peril of Supervenience for Theology,” pp. 117-152 in The Human Person in Science and Theology, eds. Niels Gregersen, Willem Drees, Ulf Görman (Edinburgh: T & T Clark & Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 2000), “Can the Western Monotheisms Avoid Substance Dualism?” Zygon: The Journal of

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bringing about the existence of the universe. Moreover, this Godthat causally brings about the creation of the world also causally produces its redemption.39

The metaphysics of causality is a discipline unto itself, and I cannot defend a comprehensive causal position in this paper. I can suggest, however, that some species of causality as an intrinsic relation offers hope for causally relating God to everything -- except possibly absolute nothing. Accordingly, whether or not a sequence of two distinct events x and y is causal depends wholly on the events x and y and their own properties and relations, that is, it depends wholly on the intrinsic and local features of the actual sequence of events.40 Science and Religion 36:1 (March 2001), pp. 153-178, "Can Downward CausalityMake the Mental Matter?" Center for Theology and Natural Science Bulletin 19:4 (Fall1999), pp. 11-21, and “Theological Realism,” Lutheran Forum 45:3 (Fall 2011), pp. 42-48.39 I believe that confusion in theology on the nature of causation is ubiquitous, and that theologians have not paid sufficient attention to it. But consider the following: ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ can mean either that ‘creating the heaven and the earth’ is analytic of God or it is synthetic. If it is analytic, then while God might be something more than a concept, or an abstract entity, there is nothing in the nature of creating the universe that makes it so. ‘A triangle is three-sided’ would be true in the same way that ‘God is the creator of the universe’. Using the old Kantian terminology, the predicate is contained within the subject. This is reminiscent, of course, of Hume’s “relation of ideas.” Now consider ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ is true synthetically. But what are the groundsfor it being synthetically true? It cannot be transcendentally synthetically true in the spirit of Kant, for Kant denies that God can be “that by concept of which the manifold of sense is united.” If we are not to descend into absolute idealism, then the only options left are to claim that either God is free to bring about or not bring about the reality ofthe universe, or I am free heuristically to think the universe as a freeact of God while still denying the metaphysical reality of God. But if one wishes to hold to the causal efficacy of divine salvific acts, then should one not afford divine creational acts robust truth-conditions as well? But what would they be? Following Tarski-Davidson, it would seemthat ‘God created the universe’ is true if and only if God did, in fact,causally bring about the universe. 40 For a helpful clarification of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic causal relations see Peter Menzies, “Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Conceptions of Causation,” in Causation and Laws of Nature, ed., H.

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A counterfactual account seems to best handle the creatio ex nihilo ofbeing from absolute nothingness: God’s willing the universe is the metaphysical cause of the universe if and only if God’s willing were not to occur, the universe would not have occurred either.

Realism and Idealism

Luther knew nothing of idealism because he knew nothing of the Enlightenment. He assumed God was in the heavens and a suitable causal relationship obtained between the Creator and His creation.41 Accordingly, Luther must be understood as a realist, as one who believed that God had being, and thathuman being did not determine the contour of divine being. While this may be shocking to some, it is a simple corollary of quite common sixteenth century assumptions Luther shared. I take them to include the following:

Sankey, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 313-29. 41 Such a causal relationship was necessary for God to be able to save human beings. There is no doubt that Luther is not interested in many ofthe theoretical questions that animated Dun Scotus. Luther’s interests instead are always solidly soteriological. While ontological investigations are a good in and of themselves for many medieval thinkers, Luther steadfastly believed that soteriology recapitulates ontology. “What is the case?” is always a question asked and answered within the context of the question of “How can I be saved?” Unfortunately Luther scholars have oftentimes confused the question of logical priority with the ontological question. While it is indeed truethat soteriology is logically prior to ontology in Luther, this does notmean that what is the case is determined by what counts as being saved. For x to be logically prior to y is in ordering within a logical field. It is to say that a full description of y cannot obtain apart from a full description of x. But this is not to say that the extension of y isdetermined by the extension of x. Simply put, while soteriology does indeed condition the description of the ontological situation, the extensionally ontology so described remains logically independent of soteriological demands. Accordingly, Luther’s preoccupation with the question of salvation, and his organization and description of human worldly existence from the hermeneutical center of Jesus Christ, does not entail a particular way that events, entities, properties and statesof affairs actually obtain.

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God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. The being of human being does notdetermine the being of God. (Theological Realism)

Language about God and God’s relationship to the world is itself capable of being true and false. The language depicts in logical space a possible situation that could, infact, obtain. (Semantic Realism)

God can cause things to be in the world that would not have come about were God not to have so acted or willed. (Theophysical Causation)

While the way these principles are enunciated could bring chargesof anachronism, it is apparent that Luther did not assume either their contraries or contradictories.42 Clearly, Luther did not assume that his thinking about God determined what God was in se, even if he admitted that what God was pro me was affected by such thinking. He did not assume that the very definite language he used to describe God and His relationship to us was merely expressive of his existential states and attitudes or merely regulative of the linguistic customs of his community. Finally,he did not think God to be an abstract object with which no causal relationship was possible. Luther believed God was the very power that moved all things.

Luther also rejected double truth, holding that truth is unitary.Accordingly, he assumed that two descriptions employing the same semantic interpretation cannot be true if they involve a contradiction. A cat cannot both sit and not sit on the same matat the same time. This does not mean, of course, that two alternate descriptions cannot both be true if the naming functionfrom word to extension were to change. Clearly 'the cat is on the mat' and 'it is not the case that the cat is on the mat' may both be true if the two phrases have different interpretations.43

42 I think these assumptions were in place in late medieval nominalism,even though there were no “positions” regarding them that philosophers staked off.

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Schwanke on the Genisvorlesung

When examining the Gensisvorlesung, the first question is whether the extant text faithfully reproduces Luther’s lectures. Two well-known scholars argued early in the last century that the texts could not be trusted to represent Luther’s views.44 Over 75years ago Peter Meinhold, in particular, raised substantial questions about the final edition of the Genesisvorlesung. The lectures were transcribed by Luther’s students, notably Viet

43 Postmodern theology oftentimes seems to make use of such simple manoeuvres as changing extensional naming functions in order to hold thedescriptions so naming constant. ‘The cat is on the mat’ is true, of course if ‘cat’ means ‘Obama’, ‘on’ means ‘is president of’ and ‘mat’ means ‘America’. But most people reject such moves quite naturally because the customs of their linguistic usage (and not some putative necessary connection between name and bearer) disallow such interpretations. Consider the description 'God created the heavens andthe earth'. Theologians know all about how evocative this assertion is and what precarious positions we occupy semantically when we speak of God and His actions. But there are certain things that almost all but the most sophisticated mean by 'God created the heavens and the earth'.They mean that God's creative action is necessary for there being heavensand earth, that is, 'Were God not to have so created, there would not beheavens and earth'. Moreover, they understand that there is a causal relation between God's creating and there being heavens and earth. Standardly, one might say that for A to cause B, A must be both necessary and sufficient for the bringing about of B. That is to say, if God creates, then there are heavens and earth, and if there are heavens and earth, God created them. So when believer B says that 'God creates the heavens and earth' she normally means that there is some divine being, the extension of 'God', and the totality of non-divine being, the extension of 'heavens and earth', and some causal relation ofproducing, the extension of 'creates'. Moreover, the Christian probably means by 'creating' a causal relation of producing something from nothing. Assuming the timelessness of God -- as Luther and Augustine did – ‘God created the universe ex nihilo’ must entail not that ‘God brought it about at some time that the universe exists’, but that ‘God brings it about that universe and all of its events exist at some time or other’. 44 See Erich Seeberg, Studien zu Luthers Genesisvorlesung: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Frage nach dem alten Luther (Güttersloh: Bertelsmann, 1932) and Peter Meinhold, Die Genesisvorlesung Luthers und ihre Herausgeber, vol. 8 in Forschungen zur Kirchen, Erich Seeberg et al, eds. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936)., pp. 22f.

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Dietrich. But Dietrich was drifting more towards Melanchthon’s views at this time, and Meinhold claimed to find this drift in the transcribed text. Moreover, the use of the law is treated differently in the Genesisvorlesung than it is in the Antinomian Disputations that Luther simultaneously was conducting against Agricola.45 How does one account for this?

However, through the painstaking labours of Hans-Ulrich Delius and Ulrich Asendorf, most of these doubts have been overcome, andthe text is once again receiving scholarly treatment as an authentic Luther source.46 Accordingly, Schwanke declares that that the voice of Deitrich (and Rörer and Cruciger) in the Genesisvorlesung can be separated from the authentic voice of Lutherand that his selection of the passages to consider is consistent with “the genuine Luther.”47 With the textual question answered, we turn to Schwanke’s interpretation of the Genesisvorlesung.48

According to Schwanke, the phrase ‘creatio ex nihilo’ does not, for Luther, primarily refer to an ontological or metaphysical

45 Luther is too antinomian for Melanchthon at this time, but to legalistic for Agricola. James Nestingen, “The Reformers and the Law,”World and Work 14.2 (1994), pp 186-95. Nestingen concludes that the Genesisvorlesung is a “compromised text . . . [that] was edited by Dietrichand his colleagues to use Luther’s authority in support of Melanchthon’stheological emendations. Consequently, it must be used very judiciously,particularly on those matters where the Philippists, as they were later call, found it necessary to make changes. The commentary can be safely used to illustrate or to amplify; in matters that remained uncontroverted in the Lutheran community, there would be no pressing reason for Dietrich and company to make revisions” (189). The issue of creation ex nihilo does not seem to fall within the region of the controversial. 46 See Hans-Ulrich Delius, Die Quellen für Martin Luthers Genesisvorlesungen (München, Kaiser, 1992) and Ulrich Asen dorf, Lectura in Bibel: Luthers Genesisvorlesungen (1535-45), (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Reuprecht, 1998). Seealso “Luther on Creation,” trans. John Betz, in Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church, ed. Timothy Wengert (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), pp. 78-98. 47 Creatio ex Nihilo, p. 40. 48 For a very good treatment of these matters and the Genesis Commentary in general, see John A. Maxfield, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity, (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008).

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hypothesis of origins, but rather to the relationship between theCreator and His creation, a relationship experienced by the latter as an absolute dependence on the incomprensible love of the former. Accordingly, what is at issue is not some event longago, but rather the simultaneous (gleichzeitig) and present (gegenwärtig) nature of God’s acts (Schöpfungshandeln) as they are displayed in creation, conservation and new creation.49 The deepest meaning of the text is therefore existential: The issue is not metaphysical origins, but rather the lived, existential-ontological dependence men and women have upon the gracious God.

In arguing this thesis, Schwanke points out that ‘creare’ has many meanings for Luther. It can, for instance, mean both God’s act of creation (Erschaffen) and God’s act of redemption (Errettung) of what is already created.50 Moreover, according to Schwanke, Luther identifies ‘creatio´ itself with ‘creatio ex nihilo’.51 Further complicating matters is Luther’s using of ‘nihil’ with many different senses. ‘Nihil’ can mean the absolute nothing prior to the creation of the world, the ‘nihil’ of the primal chaos of ‘Tohu-wa-Bohu’,52 the ‘nihil’ of the creature who is not dependent upon the creator, and the ‘nihil’ of humility (Demut), the ‘nihil’ ofdeath, the ‘nihil’ of darkness (Finsternis), the ‘nihil’ of

49 Creatio ex nihilo, p. 6. There are no creaturely limitations to God’s grace. In his treatment of the Jacob story, Luther interprets Jacob getting the inheritance to divine grace, a grace that exemplifies the daily creatio ex nihilo of God within His creation. Creatio ex nihilo concerns not merely creatio originalis, but also creatio continua and creatio nova. Thus creatio ex nihilo concerns human life in general: “Daher steht . . . dieser Personalität und Individualität nicht selbständig für sich. Menschliches Leben – ja, Leben überhaupt – ist verdanktes Leben. Gott is der Geber . . . “ 50 God creates and redeems His world out of his overflowing love, whichmeans for human beings an annihilation or bringing to nihium of their own striving. 51 p. 49: “. . . wenn er lediglich generell von der ‘Schöpfung’ spricht, den für Luther ist Schöpfung creatio ex nihilo.” 52 For exactly what Luther means by this expression, see WA 42, 7:9-12.“Sicut igitur nunc vides terram extantem super aquas, coelum ornatum stellis, agros arboribus, civitates dominibus etc., ita his omnibus demptis et confusis quasi in rudem molem, quod postea reliquum fuerit, vocat tohu et bohu.”

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desperation, the ‘nihil’ of the poor (Arme), the ‘nihil’ of shame (Schande), the ‘nihil’ to which creation is handed over with God’s providential presence, and finally, the ‘nihil’ of groundlessness or contingency (schlicht grundlos).53 Because Luther does always clearly distinguish these senses, ‘creatio ex nihilo’ turns out to havewide applicability for Schwanke.

The question naturally arises as to whether one of the senses hasconceptual priority over the others, that is, is ‘creatio ex nihilo’ properly (non-figuratively) applied in all of these ways, for Luther, or is there a metaphorical extension of the use of ‘creatioex nihilo’ from its controlling sense in creatio originalis to its use injustification and the creatio nova? Or perhaps Schwanke’s ‘creato ex nihilo’ has become a gerrymandered term, one designed to apply to aset having disparate elements? How might one go about answering these questions?

Analytical philosophical methods seek to distinguish senses of a term or phrase in order to determine the truth value of any statement that includes that term or phrase. Accordingly, semantics proceeds by clearly distinguishing the intensions and extensions to which the term in question maps. The idea is thatone cannot know the truth-value of a proposition until one knows the states of affairs that proposition projects into logical space. Using analytical techniques, one might claim that ‘creatio ex nihilo’ is merely a general term grouping together more particular notions whose semantics can be explored individually.

But analytical methods are not the only way to approach the matter. Instead of finding the identity conditions of a proposition in an intension or extension, one could discern it inthe linguistic element or event itself. The general philosophical development in Germany from Hegel and Daub through Heidgger, Gadamer and beyond presupposes that language is not, and cannot be, a human tool that uses words as a type of label tocommunicate pre-linguistic, sharply-determinate senses among

53 pp. 60-1. 23

speakers.54 From this perspective, the laborious effort to distinguish senses and thus give a “proper semantics” for a fieldof discourse is wrongheaded, for the meaning of a locution for a text or thinker is simply found in how that locution is used in the text or by the thinker. 55 On this view, it simply makes no sense to claim that ‘creatio ex nihilo must mean a production of beingout of ‘nihil’ in the first sense alone, because as Schwanke shows, ‘creatio ex nihilo’ has a wider meaning than just that.

Whatever might be thought about this, it is clear that Schwanke is advancing the following general argument:

‘Creatio ex nihilo’ just means ‘creation’ (Schöpfung). The meaning of ‘creatio ex nihilo’ includes its various senses on

different interpretations of ‘nihil’. Some of these senses include those meanings normally

associated with justification, conservation and new creation.

But God works justification, conservation and new creation. Therefore, the term ‘creation’ (Schöpfung) is properly

applied to all those activities whereby God brings somethingfrom nothing, e.g., the beginning of the universe, the justification of the sinner, and the new creation already dawning in the world.

Divine grace is that by which, in all phases of life, something is brought from nothing. Divine love constantly graces the universe unpredictably but not arbitrarily.56

54Of course, there are many now within the Anglo-American tradition that would deny the older notion of analytical philosophy. A famous attack on the idea that language is a tool box to communicate already constituted fixed meanings was marshalled by Wittgenstein in the Philosophische Untersuchungen. Throughout the text, Wittgenstein takes apartthe so-called “Augustinian picture of language” that presupposes that words are signs for determinate meanings existing “in the mind” or elsewhere. 55 While my employment of the term ‘use’ here might sound Wittgensteinian alone, I am not using it merely in a pragmatic sense, but in a sense that would include even Gadamer’s notion of “speculative language” whereby the language in some sense “uses” its speakers in its coming to expression. 56 Creatio ex nihilo, p. 171: “Die creatio ex nihilo . . . zeigt eine Schöpfung auf, die bestimmt wird durch Gottes zwar unvorhersagbar, aber keineswegs

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Given the above reconstructed argument, it is not surprising thatSchwanke emphasizes that Luther’s doctrine of creation is not an abstract, causal account, but rather a very personal one. He quotes David Löfgren: “Luther’s theology of creation does not begin with a depiction of the creator, but with the concretely created,”57 adding that “the relevance of the Creator is grounded in the relevance of this Creator to me.”58 Accordingly, “one mustfirst grasp the personal existence of creation before the global aspect of the created world can come into view.”59

Throughout his text Schwanke points out that history, for Luther,is not something in the past, but rather is that which is presentnow. Thus, the history of creation is “present history.”60 Schwanke argues that “human life owes its existence to a ‘fundamental communicative act’ which marks the beginning of human life.”61 Accordingly, “for Luther, the creation and development of human life is not a technical-mechanical production, but is embedded in an organic dialogue in which the Word of the Creator, the answer of the creature, and even the protest of the creature all have their place.”62

Finally, Schwanke proceeds to speak about the creative power of the divine Word calling being into existence. He provides an

willkürliche Liebe.” 57 David Löfgren, Die Theologie der Schöpfung bei Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 1960), p. 21. 58 “Luther on Creation,” p. 80. 59 Ibid. Schwanke quotes Luther, WA 42, 455:13: “Deinde non satis est Deum loqui, sed requiritur, ut tibi loquatur.” (It is not enough that God speaks, but it is required that he should speak to you.) Luther is talking here about the context of the sacrifice of Isaac where the word spoken to Abraham to sacrifice his son must be a personal address. 60 “Luther on Creation,” p. 81. 61 He cites here Johannes von Lüpke, “Den Zufall ausshalten. Reproduktionsmedizin verhindert Kommunikcation,” Evangelische Kommentare (2000): 32-34, esp. 32. 62 “Luther on Creation,” p. 83. It is unclear what precisely is meant by such an “organic dialogue.” If speaking is the causal joint linking thedivine and human, then how is this speaking dialogical -- having reciprocal causality? – that is, not productive in the sense normally assumed in so-called “technical-mechanical” accounts?

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extended Luther quote that demands greater study:63 “Therefore, any bird whatever and any fish whatever are nothing but nouns in the divine rule of language.”64 Schwanke declares, “It is not thecase here that birds and fish stand only for themselves as individual species, but through the opposition of the two environments of the air and the water, in Luther’s exposition of Genesis 1, they encompass all living things.”65 Luther’s notion of creation thus refers to God’s “comprehensive activity” in the origin and sustenance of life, and Schwanke can therefore conclude, “God does not wish to create without the human being, without the creature.”66

Reading Luther Rightly on ‘Divine Grammar’

In light of all that Schwanke has said, it is instructive to approach Luther’s early Genesis lectures with an eye towards understanding the nature of the creatio originalis. If this creatio mustbe understood causally, and if ‘creatio ex nihilo’ does apply to various senses of ‘creatio’ each bearing strong semantic similarities to one another, then creatio ex nihilo must be understood pace Schwanke as thoroughgoingly causal. Simply put, the absolute dependence of creation upon the creator must be seen as a causal dependence! Far from escaping a causal schema, the Gensisvorlesungwould then be seen to presuppose it. So let us look at the text.

While Luther admits that human reason cannot penetrate into the mysteries of the first chapter of Genesis, he does say that God has left to us the “general idea that the world had a beginning

63 WA 42, 17:15ff: “Illa verba, ‘Fiat lux’ Dei, non Mosi verba esse, hoc est, esse res. Deus enim vocat ea, quae non sunt, ut sint, et loquitur non grammatical vocabula, sed veras et subsistentes res, Ut quod apud nos vox sonat, id apud Deum res est. Sid Sol, Luna, Coelum, terra, Petrus, Paulus, ego, tu, etc., sumus vocabula Dei, Immo una syllaba vel litera comparatione totius creaturae. Nos etiam loquimur, sed tantum grammatice, hoc est, iam creatis rebus tribuimus appellationes. Sed grammatical divina est alia, nempe ut, cum dicit: Sol splende, statim adsit sol et splendeat. Sic verba Dei res sunt, nonnuda vocabula. 64 WA 42, 37:6f: “Quaelibet igitur avis, piscis quilibet sunt nihil nisi nomina divinae Grammaticae.” 65 “Luther on Creation,” p. 86. 66 Ibid.

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and was built up by God out of nothing.”67 While particular things are not known, the general notion of God creating a universe in time out of nothing is understandable. In fact, Luther goes on boldly and famously to assert that the six days ofGenesis 1 are literally six days. Calling “a spade a spade (Schapham scapham),” Luther compares the day of creation in Genesis 1 to the day referred to in the last chapter of Matthew.68

Denouncing allegory and speaking literally, Luther announces, “westate that Moses spoke properly, and not allegorically or figuratively, when just as the words say, the world with all of creatures was created in six days.”69

Since there was nothing before creation, Luther claims that the phrase ‘in the beginning’ must be read as God forming the “first matter of his future work” on this first day.70 This matter, which is nihil in Luther’s second sense, is an undifferentiated emptiness.71 “God created out of nothing the heavens and earth asan inchoate mass, such that the nebulous, inchoate earth was

67 WA 42, 3:24-28: “. . . ut satis appareat, Deum hanc sapientiae maiestatem et sanum intellectum huius Capita sibi soli reservasse, relicta ista generali notitia nobis, quod scimus, mundam cepisse et conditum esse per Deum ex nihilo.” 68 WA 42, 5, 9-11. Luther compares his unpacking of Genesis 1 with thatof Augustine and Hilary who thought that time itself most begin with creation so that it happened all at once. WA 42, 4:26-7: “Hilarius et Augustinus, quasi duo maxime Ecclesiae Lumina, sentiunt mundum creatum subito et simul non successive per sex dies.” 69 WA 42, 5:15-7: “. . . statuimus Mosen proprie locutum, non allegorice et figurate, hoc est, mundum cum omnibus Creaturis intra sex dies, ut verba somant, creatum esse. 70 WA 42, 6:13-15: “Hanc quasi primam materiam, ut sic vocem, futuri operis Deus condidit secundam Decalogi manifesta verba non extra sex dies sed in principio primi diei.” 71 WA 42, 6:31-37: “Maior significantia est in Hebraicis vocabulis Tohu et Bohu quam reddi posit. . . Tohu pro nihilo ponitur, ut terra tohu sit, quae simpliciter in se inanis sit, ubi nulla via, nulla locorum distinctio, non collis, non vallis, non gramina, non herbae, non animalia, non homines sunt. Talis enim fuit prima terrae incultae facies, quia enim admixtum aquae lutum fiat, nulla potuerunt discrimina notari, quae nunc, postquam exculta est, notantur.”

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circumfused by the inchoate sky.”72 While time was not present before God created the amorphous heavens and earth, it became present at their beginning. Luther can thus point out that “in the beginning” means ‘the time before which there was no time’.73 Before the very beginning, there is only the incomprehensibility of God in his essential rest, an incomprehensibility resting in the fact that the human intellect cannot comprehend that which isbeyond time.74 God can only be known in the “veils of his works and under certain visible appearances.”75 The only thing that canbe known about God prior to creation is that He is triune.76

But now comes God’s speaking into existence the universe. To the nihil of the rude mass present through God’s Word in the beginning, God now says, “let there be light.” The speaking “causes that to exist which had no existence before.”77 At this point Luther distinguishes ‘amar’ and ‘debar’. While both might be translated “to speak” (loqui), the first “signifies” (significant) the uttered word, while the second is the “thing signified” (rem significant). Dabar is the Word signified, while amar is the signifying word, and the uttering word (amar) signifies the uttered word (dabur). Luther concludes from this that the amar

72 WA 42, 8:31-33: “Deum ex nihilo condidisse coelum et terram quasi rudem massam, ita ut terra rudis rudi coelo ceu nebula fuerit circumfusa.” 73 WA 42, 9:10-12: “. . . initium temporis, ut sit in principium idem,ac sit dicat: Eo tempore, cum nullam esset tempus, seu eum inciperet mundus . . . “ 74 WA42, 9:26-32: “Quare . . . sentiamus Deum ante conditionem mundi fuisse incomprehensibilem in sua essentiale quiete, Nunc autem post creationem esse intra, extra et supra omnes creaturas, hoc est, etiam est incomprehensibilem. Aliud dici non potest, quia noster intellectus, quid extra tempus sit, non intelligit.” 75 WA 42, 10:5-6: “ . . ideo involvit se Deus in opera et certas species, sicut hodie involvit in Baptismum, in Absolutionem, etc.” 76WA 42, 10:27ff. 77WA 42, 13:16-19: “ . . . quod Deus dicendo id, quod non erat, facit, ut esset aliquid. Atque hic primum ponet Moses medium et instrumentum, quod Deus Pater in operando est usus, nempe Verbum.”

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of the Father’s expressing is properly distinct from then dabur of the Word (Christ) having been so expressed.78

It must be kept in mind that ‘significare’ is a technical term for Luther. Trained in the tradition of the via moderna at Erfurt, Luther would have known that ‘significare’ is the causal power of a word to make the mind think about a thing.79 The thing signified by the word is literally the effect of that word. This must be distinguished from the semantic notion of supposition which Luther knew but did not appeal to as often. The relation of supposition is the “standing in” relation concerned with truth. While ‘sheep’ signifies (causes the mind to think) about a species having certain determinate features, it supposits for either an indefinite ovine, a definite ovine, the collection of

78 WA 42, 13:19-29. 79 While contemporary philosophers of language often offer competing accounts of linguistic meaning, in the Middle Ages the notion of ‘significare’ is quite clear. Paul Vincent Spade points out that the notion is actually a triadic relation: To signify x =df to establish an understanding of x. [See Paul Vincent Spade, Thoughts, Words and Things: An Introduction to Late Medieval Logic and Semantic Theory (unpublished, 1996), 61ff.] Accordingly, for a word to signify x is for it to establish an understanding (constituere intellectum) in a person of x. Clearly the notion of signification has psychologico-causal overtones: A thing signifies that of which it makes one think. A late medieval definition runs: To signify is to represent i) something or ii) some things or iii) somehow to a cognitive power. [Ibid, p. 64.] A term’s signification is a property of the term prior to its particular use in utterances. [Stephen Reed, “Medieval Theories: Properties of Terms” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-terms/).] Medieval thinkers basically agree that written words immediately signify spoken words, and that spoken words immediately signify mental concepts, and that mental concepts immediately signify objects in the world. Signification is thus a transitive relation: just as it is true that if a causes b and b causes c, so a causes c, so too is it so that if a is a sign of b and b is a sign of c, so a is a sign of c. [Spade, 83.] It is important to note that while signification is transitive, reference or meaning is not. Thus signification cannot be simply synonymous with meaning. Medieval thinkers generally hold that written and spoken words can only mediately signify objects in the world. While the extra-linguistic thing is the “ultimate significant,” the written word is subordinate to the spoken word, and the spoken is subordinate to the mental concept.

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all ovines, or even the ovine species. Accordingly, supposition is related to the linguistic and semantic context in a way that signification is not.80

It is interesting that Luther uses the term ‘significare’ in thinkingthe relation of the speaking God and his spoken Word. Through God’s speaking his Word is signified. The Father causally and eternally speaks forth that which that speaking is in the nihil before the beginning, and his wording of the Word causally creates the created order in the nihil of the beginning. The Wordcausally produces the world by “turning” (vertuntur) darkness into light, that “most excellent creature.”81 This causal production has implications for reading the text about which we looked

80 As the tradition developed, signification was increasingly construed extensionally. Whereas earlier thinkers could hold that ‘man’ signifies the secondary substance man, and not Plato and Socrates who instance that substance, Ockham and the subsequent nominalist tradition hold that 'man' signifies all of those things of which it is truly predicated. A word’s supposition, however, is its capacity to “stand for” different things. Stephen Reed writes: “Just as signification corresponds most closely — though not exactly — to contemporary ideas ofmeaning or sense, so supposition corresponds in some ways to modern notions of reference, denotation and extension.” The medieval tradition knew that the supposition of a word changes within various contexts. While each word has a significatum (or significata), words suppositfor different objects on different occasions of use. A statement's truth-conditions are thus connected to supposition. A particular affirmative statement is true if and only if there is something that thesubject and predicate both supposit for. A universal affirmative statement is true if and only if it is not the case that the subject supposits for something which the predicate does not. Medievals distinguish three kinds of supposition: Formal or personal supposition occurs when a word stands for an extra-linguistic object, material supposition when the word stands for itself, and simple supposition whenthe word stands for a universal form or concept. Accordingly ‘man’ supposits personally when referring to a flesh and blood man, materiallywhen referring to the word ‘man’, and simply when referring to the humanity that the man has. In summary, the later medieval tradition held that while words might bring different concepts to mind - - they might signify this or that - - the proposition in which the words are ingredient is true only if the subject and predicate terms have the samesupposita. 81 WA 42, 13:37-38: “Sed tenebrae ex suo nihili esse vertuntur in illampraestantissimam creaturam, quae est lux.

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earlier, the one claiming that, for God, the sounding voice of speaking is itself a substantial reality. God speaks not grammatical words, but subsistent reality!82

Let us pause for a moment to take stock of the argument. The very terms that Luther uses in speaking out the Word of the Son in intratrinitarian movement is what we would today call “causal.” God the Father caused it to be the case eternally thatHis Word was spoken as a subsisting person in the Trinity. At a point of time, after God caused the nihil of the Tobu to be createdout of the nihil of absolute nothingness, God caused it to be the case that this second nihil was given the determinate form it has. God’s creatio ex nihilo of the creatio originalis must therefore be causal.

Luther continues by distinguishing human grammar from divine grammar. When humans speak they give names to created things; when God speaks created things appear: “The words of God are things, not bare words.”83 All of creation is the Word of God spoken forth outwardly,84 and “there is no more difficulty for Godin creating than there is for us in speaking.”85 To the question as to how God speaks into indeterminate being the particular things in creation, things that seemingly arise through nature, Luther responds: “Philosophy knows nothing of the cause of this and attributes everything to nature. But we know that nature wascreated by the Word itself, so that the seeds and the forms of things might be preserved.”86 Moreover, as Luther clearly points

82 WA 42, 17:16-17: “Deus enim vocat ea, quae non sunt, ut sint, et loquitur non grammatical vocabula, sed veras et subsistentes res.” 83 WA 42, 17:21-23: “Sed grammatical divina est alia, nempe ut, cum dicit: Sol splende, statim adsit sol et splendeat. Sic verba Dei res sunt, non nuda vocabula.” 84 WA 42, 17:25-26: “Nam quid est aliud tota creatura quam verbum Dei aDeo prolatum, seu productam foras. 85 WA 42, 17:30-31: “. . . et non plus negoeii Deo sit in creation quam nobis in appellatione.”86 WA 42, 28:7-10: “Philosophia causam ignorant et naturae tribuit ista. Sed nos naturam scimus verbo ita conditam, ut semina et species rerum conservarentur. Sic non solum multiplicatae sunt aquae in coelo, sed etiam prima semina multiplicata sunt, et servant speciem suam accurate.”

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out, this first creation is a “type and figure of the future world,” a creation and new creation about which we should limit our attention to the “solicitude, care, liberality and the goodness of God.”87

Luther realizes how the language of the Holy Spirit sounds next to the languages of what in his day was analogous to our “sciences.” Luther distinguished among the disciplines of the theoretical languages, affording them always a particular autonomy of terminology.88 The grammar of the Holy Spirit clearlyhas its own terminology:

We see that the Holy Spirit has its own language (lingua) andphraseology (phrasin), namely that God by speaking created all things and through his Word everything was made, and allof his works are such words of God created through the uncreated Word. Therefore, just as the philosopher uses hisown terms, so also the Holy Spirit uses his.”89

87 WA 42, 30:4-9: “Quare intueamur conditionem huius mundi primam, tamquam typum et figuram futuri mundi, atque ita Dei benignitatem discamus prius ditantis et locupletantis nos, quam nos cogitare de nobispossumus. Hanc solicitudinem, curam, liberalitatem, beneficentiam Dei tam in hac quam future vita considerare et admirari, longe melior cogitation est, quam illa: Cur tertia dei ceperit terram ornare.” 88 WA 42, 35:35-36: “Iam non debet ars artem impedire, sed unaquaque debet retinere suum quasi cursum et uti suis terminis.” 89 WA 42, 35:37-41: “Ad hunc modum igitur videmus Spiritum sanctam suamhabere linguam et phrasin, nempe quod Deus dicendo creaverit omnia et per verbum increatum creata. Sicut igitur Philosophus suis terminis utitur, ita etiam Spiritus sanctus utitur suis.” The question of the autonomy of the various languages is one in which I have been interestedfor many years. Luther often makes the distinction between the “old languages” of this world and the “new language (nova lingua) of theology.”See my “Theological Realism,” Lutheran Forum 45:3 (Fall 2011), pp. 42-48, “Luther’s Philosophy of Language,” pp. 61-68 in The Devil’s Whore:  Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradtion, ed. Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), The Substance of Faith: Luther's Doctrinal Theology for Today. Co-written with Paul Hinlicky and Mickey Mattox.  (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), "Semantic Realism, Luther, and the Reformation Tradition," Lutheran Forum 43:2 (Summer 2009), pp. 31-35, "Luther on Language," Lutheran Quarterly, 16:2 (Summer 2002), pp. 195-220, "Luther and the Strange Language of Theology:  How New is the Nova

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But this grammar of the Holy Spirit is a causal grammar to be sure. If God is causally going to bring about resurrection, thenGod had better causally bring about the world as well. Luther knew the two went hand in hand. If creation is not causal but a metaphor of lived experience in the face of the phenomenological experience of overwhelming gratuity and goodness, then resurrection is not causal either, but a metaphor of the restoration of phenomenological goodness in and despite the angst of death. Luther writes compellingly and causally:

For if God is able to produce the heaven and the stars from water . . . [and] from a small drop of water create the sun and moon, can he not also defend my body from enemies and Satan, or after my body is placed in the grave, can he not raise it again to new life? Therefore, from this book we must learn the power of God so that we ought not doubt thosethings that God promises clearly in his Word.90

A Concluding Comment

Lutheran theology has been dominated for a very long time by a set of modernist assumptions. The move to downplay the causal nature of divine creation in favour of viewing creation under thecategory of a basic lived relationship between creator and creatures is consistent with the modernist project of removing pre-modernity’s primary objects of religious reflection and experience from the realm of knowledge and being. The result is a re-location of the truth-conditions of theological discourse tothe horizon of human thought and experience. Post-modernity,

Lingua?", pp. 221-244 in Caritas et Reformatio: Essays on Church and Society in Honor ofCarter Lindberg, ed. David M. Whitford (St. Louis: Concordia Academic Press, 2002), "Luther, Metaphor, and Theological Language," Modern Theology, 6:2 (January 1990), pp. 21-135.  90 WA 42, 37:16-22: “Nam cum possit Deus ex aqua coelum producere et stellas, quarum singulae terram magnitudine aut aequant aut superant, Item cum possit ex guttula aquae condere solem et lunam: An non possit etiam corpus meum aut contra hostes et Satanam defendere, aut postquam in sepulchrum positum est, ad novam vitam resuscitare? Ergo Dei potentia hic est cognoscenda, ut plane nihil dubitemus de iis, qua Deus promittit in verbo suo.”

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however, grants a retrieval of pre-modernity on the other side ofglobal critique, a retrieval consisting in the full abandonment of the Cartesian project.

This paper has made a very preliminary attempt at a post-modern retrieval of the “causal Luther.” The attempt is sketchy and incomplete. It needs considerable philosophical development in formulating and defending an account of singular metaphysical causal statements. One needs to defend the notion of an intrinsic causal relation -- if one is not using postmodern garb simply to hide underdeveloped or sloppy philosophical thinking. The paper also demands a more extensive reading of the Luther text. Simply put, the paper did not cover enough of it. Those caveats aside, however, I think my reading is generally faithful to Luther. Clearly, the Reformer did think that God’s Word brought being into existence from absolute nothingness; God causedbeing.

While Schwanke is correct in pointing out that Luther’s creatio ex nihilo can have a variety of extensions, the controlling intension as the creatio originalis cannot be obscured. Luther is very interested in the causal aspects of creation because he is very interested in the causal aspects of redemption. If he is truly to be saved causally through the resurrection of the flesh, it isnecessary that he be truly created causally by a loving God. Yet, the meaning of ‘God created the heavens and earth’ is logically distinct from his soteriological concerns. Conceptually, redemption presupposes creation. From the ontological point of view, God created the universe that would serve as the stage of divine redemption.

Luther thought there is no ground for optimism in the face of thefuture, no ground for confidence in the face of death, no ground for “walking in the clouds” of the new creation unless God has raised His Son from the dead, and unless He promised to do the same for all who believe. Luther would not have understood the possibility of existential phenomenological empowerment in the absence of divine action, that is, in the absence of a divine

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cause that produces in the universe the concrete effects of being, redemption and new creation. The reason that Luther doesnot talk explicitly about this is that he and others of his time presupposed it. That we no longer presuppose it, and that we yet try to do coherent theology without it, simply shows that we havelearned to play a different game. Sadly it is not a game that most people of the west either know how, or any longer want, to play.91

91 Descartes’ starting-point in human subjectivity reversed the traditional relationship between ontology and epistemology. While pre-modern men and women believed in the intelligibility of “evidence-transcending truth-conditions” (semantic realism), and thus could hold that God had a particular ontological contour in the absence of epistemic access to that contour, the global critique of modernity pushed men and women to consider that epistemology recapitulates ontology, and thus that the search for, and hence existence of, a determinate ontological contour apart from epistemological concerns became profoundly problematic. The results in Lutheran theology have been palpable: The hidden God in Luther who had a definite being despite His incomprehensibility, became now domesticated as an indeterminate unknowable to whom human beings had a definite existentialattitude and relationship. What is the difference, however, between Luther’s hidden God and this domesticated counterfeit? The answer is causality. What does the pre-modern hidden God possess that the modern hidden God lacks? Causality. For Luther, the inscrutable will of the deus absconditus courses through all things. The natural response to a concrete causal entity that is unknowable is fear. One trembles before the God that causes the universe to pop into being. But such fear seems unreasonable in the face of the modern interpretation of Luther’s hidden God. Why? This God is causally inert: there can be in principle no causal connection drawn between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Accordingly, shorn of causal powers, this God becomes merely an abstract object, the “whence” of the feeling of absolute dependence, a fundamental experience upon or limiting our phenomenological horizon. A post-modern Lutheran retrieval of the hidden God must retrieve a God of causal power. This retrieval, starting from and cognizant of its ownhermeneutical standpoint, attempts to read the Luther texts in ways consistent with Luther’s own reading, i.e., in ways that unlock again the power of the divine that Luther fundamentally assumed. Such a reading moves beyond the standard objections of modernity to ask again about the fundamental causal joint connecting the divine to the universe. However, within the plethora of contemporary speculation about that which links time and eternity, the Lutheran response must simply be

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Luther’s: God’s speaking is causally related to the world coming into being and we can know no more than that. But sometimes the simplest conclusion alludes the most sophisticated of inquiry.

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