Transcript
Let us pray. Father Almighty, we praise and give thanks to you for your strong love which has redeemed us in Jesus Christ and which draws us ever increasingly into your fellowship by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It is my pleasure to introduce our Warfield lecturer this afternoon. I first met Professor Torrance many years ago when I was a senior BD student here at the seminary. I believe Professor Torrance was here on sabbatical leave that
year. As a guest speaker in a theology class, he made a point that I have not forgotten. He said that we should not split up our study of the Bible into a devotional reading on the one hand and a critical or scientific reading on the other. That was sound advice. With remarkable consistency, Professor Torrance has continued over the years to expose dualisms of all sorts and to work toward a truly integral expression of deep Christian commitment
and rigorous theological reflection. This afternoon, he continues his lectures on the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. His title is The Father Almighty. Thank you, sir, for your kindly word of introduction. One God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. Let me put beside that a text for this evening from St. Hilary. God can never be anything else but love or anything but Father. He who is Father is holy and entirely
Father. The primacy of the notion of the Fatherhood of God means that the notion of God as Almighty Creator must be understood by reference to the concept of God as Father and not the other way round. But the notion of Father is a strict correlate of the notion of Son, for our knowledge of the Father and of the Son mutually condition one another. Thus the concept of God as Almighty Creator is to be determined from within
the Father-Son relationship. To cite Hilary again, it is the Father to whom all existence owes its origin in Christ and through Christ. He is the source of all. It is therefore the stamp of the Father-Son relationship that we must allow to be imprinted upon all that we think and speak of in creation. In view of discussion yesterday of the primacy and centrality of the Father-Son relation, of the fact that we have access to
knowledge of God the Father only through the incarnate Son, we must go on to say this. We cannot understand the almightiness or the creatorship of God in terms of abstract possibilities when we would have to work, as we saw yesterday, with negative concepts and vague generalities. From what we imagine, God is not. It is only in the light of God's actual self-revelation and self-giving to us in Jesus Christ, His Son, the offspring of His
own divine nature that we can get any real understanding of who God is and come to know Him, as far as we may, in accordance with His own nature. Thus our understanding of God's omnipotent power and His creation must be strictly controlled from within that centre of actual knowledge of God in Jesus. Really, to know what God's almightiness and creative power mean, we must contemplate them at work in Jesus Christ, for all power in heaven and
earth has been committed to Him. And so we return again to the Nicene use of the idea that God has made Christ, the Arche, the source and the controlling principle, the criterion, of all His ways and works. God is certainly revealed to the Son as infinite and without limit, but the way in which we are to understand that is conditioned and controlled by what we know of God in and through the incarnation of His love in
Christ Jesus. But here we have a problem, all of us. We already have notions of power, which we extrapolate from our own worldly experiences and conceptions, and we raise that concept of power to the nth degree and make it infinite, and then we attribute that power to God. But that is precisely what the Nicene theology destroys. For it turns that kind of approach upside down. It is not from any conception of infinite possibility that we can
construe the divine almightiness, but from the actualities of God's ways and works among us in space and time, that is, from what He actually has done and continues to do in Jesus Christ. Hence the need for a radical Christianizing or an evangelizing of our preconceived notions of power. In other words, Christology has a critical significance for our understanding of God as Almighty Creator. Look at it in the way these Greek fathers looked at it. They were
utterly staggered by the fact of the incarnation. They found it quite breathtaking to think that God Almighty came as man and is found as a helpless baby crying and wailing in the arms of Mary. And that they held to be an incredible manifestation of God's almightiness, that God can become so little and become so weak, while remaining eternally God is a supreme manifestation of what almightiness means, almighty power. Now that's something we don't believe anymore. That
is why the modern church is always seeking to create its own Holy Ghost. It doesn't believe that the cross of Christ is the power of God. It doesn't really believe in prayer. And therefore in order that Christian ends may be met, people are unceasingly busy in creating instruments of power which they identify with God's power. Now that's the exact antithesis of the New Testament and the early church who insisted that the power of God has to
be measured by the utter weakness of Jesus, the utter littleness of the baby at Bethlehem. And they carried that through consistently. And precisely by carrying that out consistently that they transformed the whole doctrine of the power and the creativity of God. Now let us try and draw out some of the implications for our understanding of God as almighty power. And here I turn back again to the guidance of the great theologians who influenced the Nicene theology
before Nicene Council and afterwards up to the Council of Constantinople. And above all at this point the great Athanasius. But at this point may I pause for a moment to make a tribute to one who died here last year, Georges Florovsky. No one has written more profoundly of the doctrine of creation in the Greek fathers or understood that more fully or more acutely than Georges Florovsky. One of the greatest theologians of our time, coming back to
Princeton and finding him no longer here, it's sad. But it's also an occasion for tribute and thanksgiving for we have learned so very much from him. And I myself have learned a great deal from him. I've worked with him for ten years on certain commissions of faith and order in which we wrestled and struggled together with interpretation of Greek patristic theology. Now, I said let us try and draw out some of the implications for the fact
that it is the fatherhood of God that governs our notion of the creator and it's from the centre of the father-son relation that we are really to understand what the creative power of God is. The first point is this, God is not eternally creator. Now in a subsequent lecture I shall discuss the ontological relation of the son to the father, the fact that he is of one and the same nature as the father, in fact
on Thursday, of one and the same being as the father and that as the son of the father he is eternally generated by the father but without beginning, anarchos as the Greeks say, without beginning as the father is, without beginning. God is eternally father and eternally son in himself. There is no interval of time or being between the father and the son. There always was the father, if I may be forgiven that use of the tense,
which is never accurate, there always was the father and always was the son. God is eternally father and eternally son in himself as God. But compared to that the relation between the creation and God is something very different for the creation comes from God, is produced by God on a very different level. It is not a product of the nature of God, the creation comes from the will of God, whereas the son is begotten of God's
own eternal being. Now that distinction calls the church, or rather the failure to make that distinction caused the church a great deal of trouble owing to the way in which Origen and Arius, for example, conceived it. For they did not seem able to separate the generation of the universe from the generation of the son. Arius rather less than Origen. If God is eternally creator, eternally Pantocrator, as he is eternally father, then the cosmos or universe is
itself eternally coexistent with God. Now very soon the church found that the logical relation between the generation of the son by the father and the creation of the universe had to be cut, otherwise everything would lapse back into paganism. And it was above all Athanasius that did that and thus laid the basis for a proper Christian doctrine of creation in the profoundest way. The son is eternally generated of and in the nature of God, but the
world is created as something utterly different from God, not from his nature, but by his free act of will as something utterly differentiated in nature and being from God. Now here we have the radicalization of the Judaic doctrine of the creation of the universe out of nothing, to which I shall come back in a moment. But at this point, let us note, let us think of it in this way. If God is not eternally creator, as
he is eternally father, if God did not eternally produce the creation as he eternally generated the son, then the act of creation was something entirely new even for God. God is eternally father, but he is not eternally creator. It was something new in the life of God when out of his sheer love and grace he created the universe out of nothing. Now that sheds remarkable light upon the doctrine of God, for it means that God the
Father is free to bring quite new things to pass. He is free to do what he had never done before, free to be other than he eternally was, to be creator and yet to remain eternally the God that he is. This doctrine then of a temporal origin, again we are using the word temporal in an ambiguous sense, a temporal origin of the creation, the doctrine that in the creation something entirely new took place, new even for
God, was quite offensive to the Greek mind, but it was reinforced by the doctrine of the incarnation. And then we come to the really decisive point for the doctrine of creation. The incarnation was something new for God, for God was not eternally man, but he became man by actually becoming man and came to us as man. Now that has again breathtaking implications for understanding of God, and that conflicted in the sharpest possible way with Greek notions
of the timelessness, the immutability, the unchangeability of God. Thus the fact of the sheer novelty of the incarnation for God, even for God, radicalized the Christian understanding of creation as something quite new in the life of God, especially as it was a creation through the word or son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. We shall come back to this point a little later when we come to discuss the freedom of the creation, but I wish to
emphasize just before I pass on that here we see once again the point I was insisting on yesterday, that far from a Hellenization of Christianity having taken place, we have a radical change in the fundamental concepts of Hellenism. And I believe that it is only when we see that Christian theology as in the sharpest conflict with the basic presuppositions of Greek philosophy, science and culture, and see the reconstruction of those basic concepts taking place that then
we begin to appreciate what was going on in the early church and what the significance of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is. God then is not eternally creator, but second, God does not will to exist for himself alone. In himself, God is not solitary, for he is revealed through the Son and in the Spirit to be an eternal communion of persons in himself, the eternal communion of love and being and the one God. St. Hilary, more than
any other, goes out of his way to attack the notion of the solitariness of God very sharply, as though he had already perceived the dangers of an Aristotelianizing of the notion of God, especially when it was brought into relation to the Aryan conception of God. It's almost as though Hilary perceived what would happen when that form of debased Christianity led at last into the notion of the monotonous solitariness of the God of Islam. The expression that
Athanasius, Hilary and other Nicene theologians generally used was quite distinctive. God does not grudge existence to the universe he has made, but on the contrary, he freely brought it into being out of his sheer liberality in order to lavish his love upon it. Here again, it is through the incarnation of the incarnation of the beloved Son, the one through whom all things were made, that the Nicene theologians understood this. That the existence of the universe, its
coming into being, is grounded upon the ultimate love of God. The love which God eternally is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes then a primary principle in all their thought. How are we to think of the relation of God to the universe? It is neither a necessary relation nor is it an arbitrary relation. The universe does not come into being as a necessary emanation from the being of God, nor has it suddenly come into being
as accidentally related to him as the product of irrational random chance. No, the universe is grounded in the eternal love that God is, and it is in that love that God is that the ultimate reasonableness of the universe, its very existence and its order, as we shall see, is to be found. Although God has no need of the universe, for he is entirely self-sufficient in himself, he nevertheless freely created it out of his grace and
love, so that the universe must be regarded as grounded beyond itself in the reason of the love of God. And it was the fact that that love became manifest to the incarnation of the reason of the logos of God, which showed these theologians that the universe has a reason for its being, grounded beyond itself in the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now this meant that we must really think of the
universe as brought into being by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in such a way that it is meant to be, what in our own day Karl Barth has called a created or a covenanted correspondence to the Holy Trinity. And that is indeed what we find again and again throughout patristic theology, not always successfully by any man of means, but they sought to understand the work of creation as the work of the Father and the work
of the Son and the work of the Holy Spirit in distinctive ways in which the universe is to be thought of as the created correlate of the fellowship and communion and the faithfulness which are manifested in God himself. But the whole [unintelligible] of the universe lies in the fact that God will not be alone, he will not be without us, but he has deliberately created the universe as a sphere where he may pour out his love
and where we may enjoy communion with him. And certainly we come to consider the fact that the universe is created by God freely out of nothing. This is of course a Judaic concept, the creatio ex nihilo, and it's not easy at all to understand, especially as it is radicalized and reinforced to the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The creation of the universe out of nothing does not mean that God created the universe out of some stuff called
nothing, but that what he created was not created out of anything and that you can't think. And that's the extreme difficulty of the notion of creation out of nothing and of its cognate concept, that of contingence. Because it's not a concept that is susceptible of logical formalization, for by its very nature it breaks through any kind of necessitarian thought. Now there was a sense in which the Greeks understood this, because in all Greek thought, in whatever
area of Greek thought you're concerned with, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the atomists, and so on, contingence was understood only as the accidental, and the accidental was understood as the opposite of the necessary, and the necessary was understood to be the rational. So by identifying the rational with the necessary, anything that was contingent was, by definition, irrational, unthinkable, impossible, and a form of evil. And therefore there was an inbuilt resistance to any concept of the contingence of
the universe. But let's try to think of that for a moment, because it's not an easy concept. Creation of the universe out of nothing means that the universe is brought freely into being as something utterly distinct from God, having a reality of its own, and therefore a genuine independence of God. But that independence that God has given the creation is itself dependent upon God. Now that is the difficulty. God has made nature to operate with a
certain kind of autonomy. It brings forth its fruit and its kind of itself automatically, as the New Testament says, spontaneously. And that's why when we pursue natural science we are concerned not to read theology into biology, because you can't understand plants and morphology by bringing theology to bear upon it. You can only understand nature by looking at nature, and by determining the independent structures and laws of nature. And yet the very fact that nature has this
independence, this autonomous character, is itself dependent upon God. And it is this interlocking of dependence and independence that is so difficult. The independence is itself dependent upon God. And the universe is dependent, contingent upon God in such a way that it is utterly different from God and independent of Him. Now this is such a difficult concept that even when lip service was given to it, it was not properly understood. There were certain aspects of it that
were understood. The universe, as created out of nothing, was understood as sustained by God and its being. It is not only given an origin out of nothing, but it was continuously sustained by God. As such it was not self-supporting or self-explaining reality, but is created reality unceasingly sustained by the power and presence of God to it. And is unceasingly grounded creatively upon God Himself. If God were to withdraw His presence or His creative power,
the universe would vanish into nothing. It is considered in itself intrinsically labile, evanescent, as Athanasius argued. The creation continues to exist and to hold together by the power of God, suspended as it were, over the abyss of nothingness. And is unceasingly dependent upon the free grace of God. The creation continues, the creation is what it is and continues to be what it is, through this relation to God so that in the last result its inherent meaning
and truth lie beyond itself and its own limits in God who loves it and sustains it and backs it up in His own divine reality. But to work out the implications of that, that was difficult. And quite frankly, when you look at the history of thought, with one or two exceptions, and they are very remarkable, the concept of creation out of nothing, the concept of contingence, was rarely understood. In fact, one can say that it was
really lost, it went underground, it pops up now and then, people like Duns Scotus, and after the Reformation even the Reformers didn't adequately understand this. And yet it's one of the most remarkable conceptions in the whole history of thought and it's upon that conception that indeed all modern science depends and it's in our own day that the radical concept of contingence has emerged to the surface and in this light we begin to see the real significance of
what the fathers were at when they insisted upon this doctrine. But let me point to the problem. Although the Nicene theology had formulated the doctrine, so to speak, on paper very clearly, when we come to see how the doctrine is applied to the physical universe, then we find almost everywhere the fathers constantly reverting back to a pre-Christian understanding. Unfortunately, the works of John Philoponus, for the most part, are lost, but he wrote two very powerful
books on the eternity of the world, one against the Aristotelians and one against the Platonists and Neoplatonists from both sides. He found he had to battle for the sheer contingence of the universe, the sheer doctrine of creation out of nothing as he sought to translate the theological understanding of Athanasius and Cyril and Severus of Antioch into physical conditions. But although he performed magnificent service, that was smothered and lost and his books disappeared. The theological books disappeared.
But we can't understand contingence until we go on and try to understand something else. The creation is endowed by God with the created and contingent order of its own. That is, creation of the universe out of nothing carries with it the very difficult concept of a created rationality, of a created reason, of a created intelligibility. Now, difficult as the notion of contingence was for the Greek thought, the notion of a contingent order or a contingent rationality
was even more difficult and in fact impossible. Let's approach it from the fact that in creating the universe out of nothing, God created time and space along with it. These ideas are usually attributed to Augustine, but they are found from the second century right on in the Greek fathers and it's certainly in Alexandria that they were really developed in the fullest sense. Now, I've written much of this elsewhere and so I won't spend much time on
it, but did we note that here we have in this doctrine of creation of space and time out of nothing, a struggle between the Christian doctrine of doctrines of creation and incarnation with the Greek notions of space and time and again, notions of space and time whether they were Platonic, Aristotelian or Stoic and above all with the Aristotelian concept, especially those formulated in the first and the fourth book of physics, which space particularly is thought of
as an inertial container inseparable from what it contains. Now, these notions of space made nonsense of the incarnation. How can God become man in such a way that he can be contained in and controlled inertially by the baby at Bethlehem or the swaddling clothes in which he was wrapped? How can God be grasped by the human mind contained in our concepts in such a way that he could be controlled by us all? Well, that also the
Greeks had some difficulty with. But the interesting thing is that when the Christian theologians sought to relate the coming of God in space and time in the incarnation to the contemporary notions of space and time, they found they had to smash the fundamental concepts in Greek science and philosophy. And in doing so, they came up with certain doctrines of very, very far-reaching importance. First, we have a development of the relational notions of space and time.
Now, one cannot really lay sufficient emphasis upon this fact. But again and again as you read the Fathers and see how they expounded this, and here this is also true of the Cappadocians as well as the Alexandrian theologians, we find that God is related to space and time in such a way that he can come in space and time and be within space and time and yet not be what he eternally was. So that they had
to develop an elastic or what I would call a topological understanding of space and time. The Fathers used different words to express what I've just expressed, elastic, topological. And they actually used some form of the term topology, though as you know topology is a modern way of mathematical thought. They were struggling very hard to see that here in the created order therefore there are relational patterns which are open to the creative activity of God and it's
in that way alone that we can think of the incarnation in any realist way. But along with that went the second concept of a created or contingent rationality. Space and time are the bearers of all rational order in the universe. And I don't simply mean physical order but mental order because when we try to think our concepts they are inevitably governed in some way by spatial temporal thoughts. That's why once or twice already I've had to
beg your pardon for the tenses that I used because our thoughts are inevitably determined by these patterns. Now, what the Christians taught was that the rational form and order of the creation are brought into being out of nothing along with the universe. It's not only matter that is created out of nothing but form created out of nothing. The creed says that he made all things visible and invisible. And as the fathers expounded it, all things material
and all things intelligible. Everything is created out of nothing. Even geometry? Yes, even geometry. Now, granted that the books of geometry don't come down from heaven like the books of Mormon but we have to create our geometry. But we do not create the basic intelligible forms in geometry. They are there before us, the Greeks said. They are there eternally in nature. They belong to Fuses. No, the Christians said when God created the universe out of nothing
and created space and time out of nothing he created those patterns also out of nothing. The patterns you find in crystals, for example. The patterns you find in nature everywhere. Those patterns that we use and develop in our geometries. Now, this implied the rejection by the Nicene theology of the Hellenic notion of seminal reasons. The rejection of the idea that the universe is composed of irrational matter that is informed by rational timeless forms which are derived
from God. Look at it like this. The Greeks thought of the universe as having a sensible aspect and an intelligible aspect. The sensible aspect is that which is evanescent and passes away. Its appearance is not real. It's not finally real. It's accidental. And it only is insofar as it is because it is held together and informed by eternally divine forms. And the forms, whether you get them in geometry or in logic or in biology, these forms
are ultimately divine. And so you could have different ways of thinking about this. The Stoic way thought of the world as animated by God, the great body animated by divine soul. Aristotle and Plato thought of it in somewhat different ways. But they all thought of these divine forms in nature as eternal and timeless. Now, the Christians came along and said, look, when God created the world out of nothing, he created those forms out of nothing. Now,
how do they come to think that? Again, it was the incarnation that was decisive. If the incarnation means that the eternal logos of God, the one logos of God, became incarnate in that particular man, Jesus. He came as man. Then that means that the logos of God is not found in nature in general. So the concreteness and the reality of the incarnation undermined entirely this Greek notion that the whole universe is impregnated with divine forms. And
that is what gives it reality and being. And so it was the incarnation, which really radicalized the doctrine of the creation to the point which Philo couldn't accept, Jew though he was, that the rational patterns we have everywhere in nature are also created out of nothing along with matter itself. Now, when the Greeks realized the Christians were speaking seriously about this, they held up their hands in horror. They said, that is sheer impiety. In fact, it's
atheism. If you Christians hold that the eternal forms in nature are created out of nothing, what you have said is that God is created out of nothing. And that is utterly impious. In fact, it's a form of atheism. Now that indicates, does it not, as much as anything else, the vast difference between the Christian understanding of nature and the Hellenic understanding of nature. And the vast difference between the Hellenization of Christianity and the Christianization of Hellenism.
Now, once again, this concept of the created order or created intelligibility of the world went underground. It was smothered, smothered in the West by Augustinian thought, because Augustine revives the neoplatonic and platonic notions of eternal forms and our participation in eternal light. And it was smothered in the West by the Byzantine thought, by a mixture of neoplatonic and Aristotelian ideas, and indeed, in John of Damascus, by an insertion right back into the heart of Christian theology
in the De Fide orthodoxa of the teachings of space from Aristotle's fourth book of the physics. So, unfortunately, these basic ideas were swamped in East and West, and they have struggled, one can say, they have struggled for a millennium and a half with our basic thought. And yet, today, they now have a massive significance. We now realize that all modern science, all our understanding of the intelligibility of nature and the order and regularity of the universe,
is contingent. We know that no science could produce this idea, and no science, by being rigorously formalistic or logical, can explain it. And yet, all our modern science today relies upon this concept of contingent and contingent order. So, today, when we have discovered that time belongs to the, is intrinsic to dynamic states of matter, suddenly, the whole concept of contingent has come to the surface in a massive way. Now, did Newton not have that? Yes, he
did. But with Newton, the concepts of contingent were bracketed outside his science, just as in logic. The time coefficients were bracketed outside all logical formula, and today we've been struggling hard to bring them within the brackets. So, modern science is faced today with the fact that if we really are to understand the nature of the universe, the nature of contingents, the nature of order, we must bring in contingent intelligibility into this intrinsic structure of physical law.
And that is what we're trying to do, and it's very difficult to do. And I do not believe it can be done, unless we have a far profounder dialogue between theology and natural science. Now, I have gone much beyond here, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, but the points that I have been making are already found, especially in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, in the latter part of the fourth and the fifth, and the early part of
the sixth centuries, and we see the tensions already at work. All the basic ideas, to my knowledge, are already found there, because there we see the implications of this Christian doctrine of creation coming to the surface, but the church, as well as culture around it, was not really ready to take it in and to work it out. Now, let me come to a last point, and that is the freedom of creation, the freedom of creation. Now,
superficially, this is something that was also very new to the ancient world. When you read your Greek or Latin poetry or classics, when you look at Greco-Roman religion, when you look at the philosophy, when you look at the point I mentioned earlier, the identity of rationality with necessity and the excommunication, so to speak, of anything that is contingent as irrational and unreal, then you can see that the whole ancient world was governed by a concept
of fate or determinism, Ananke or Moirai. Read, for example, the two early books about Athanasius, the Contingentes and De Incarnatione, and you see how he put his finger again and again upon the fact that it is precisely by the incarnation of the world that the world was liberated from the chains of necessity and fate and determinism. Now, that is something quite new in the ancient world, and it is quite new to the whole world, new to
the Orient as well. How did that concept of the freedom of nature, because that is what we are concerned with, the freedom of the universe, the freedom of nature, arise? Now, certainly it comes from understanding the universe. But in the light of Jesus, in the light of the fact that he came to set people free and to set nature free, in the light of the fact that God the Creator himself in the Word had broken into
this world that had somehow enclosed itself and bound itself, imprisoned itself within itself in order to break it open again for God. The very fact that God in Jesus Christ and the cross of Christ broke through the bonds of guilt and sin and death itself in the resurrection meant that here we have a relation between the creation and God in which the creation is given a freedom that is grounded upon the transcendent and unlimited freedom of
God. Now, this is something that is far stronger in Greek thought than in Latin thought. St. Augustine is ready to allow this world really to go to the devil because we are going to be saved out of this world. But that is an impossible concept in Greek theology. The fact that the Creator himself became incarnate, the Creator himself who is the ground and source of all being and all order and all rationality, himself became incarnate in
Jesus Christ, himself penetrated into our death and rose again from the dead means that the whole universe is ontologically related to the incarnate and the risen Jesus Christ. So that the whole universe is infected by, affected by the freedom of the Creator. Now, this is a fascinating subject that is very little discussed. But look at it in one or two ways. If the universe is free, it is a contingent freedom and therefore a limited freedom. But
it is not less free because it is limited. Unlimited freedom of our contingent existence would be a contradiction in terms and nonsensical. But the fact that the freedom of the created universe is contingent means that it is limited by that freedom in God, which is the ground of its freedom. And so here again we have the peculiar interlocking of dependence and independence, we noted in the concept of contingent itself. But if the universe is correlated to
the freedom of God and the freedom of God is unlimited and inexhaustible, then the freedom of God's creation is also unlimited and inexhaustible. Now, that is part of the concept of contingent. That is why you cannot engage in your science by thinking logically or deductively about nature. That is why you can only understand nature if you put your questions to it and allow nature spontaneously to tell you about itself without imposing upon it the presuppositions hidden
in your questions. Now, this already the fathers see, and therefore they are unwilling, they are unwilling to impose logical deductive patterns upon nature. And they were unready at that stage, therefore, to develop any adequate doctrine of nature. What they did see is that nature as correlated to the freedom of God has about it a spontaneity and a freedom which will always take us by surprise. You can never anticipate it. And yet, and this is the staggering
thing about it, in this freedom of nature, as in the freedom of God, there is a staggering constancy and a reliability. Now, the one person I think who really expands this clearly is again a person who is a favourite thinker of mine, John Philoponus, through developing his physics of light. I've written about that in a recent book which is coming out over here called Christian Theology and Scientific Culture. But Philoponus saw quite clearly that the kind
of light that we have in the physical realm is a reflection of and is correlated to the constancy and the invariance of God's light. And in the correlation of created to uncreated light, he also saw the relation between created freedom and uncreated freedom in God. Now, we understand that, however, in and through Jesus. And it's in and through Jesus that we see this combination between freedom and constancy, spontaneity and reliability. In our day, Karl Barth has
expounded that in terms of the faithfulness of God, the fact that the covenant is the internal, intrinsic presupposition of the creation and the creation is the external presupposition of the covenant. But you can find this in its own way already taught in Cyril of Alexandria, where the creation is related quite distinctly to the covenant faithfulness of God, so that in all the freedom of creation we find ourselves relying at every point upon God who will not
let us down, who will not deceive us. Now, that hinges upon what we understand of Jesus. That is the crucial point. In other words, and this is the point I shall come to in lecture tomorrow, is Jesus a faithful representation of God? Is God in Jesus what he is eternally in himself? Is the relation of absolute fidelity between the self-manifestation of God in Jesus and what God is eternally in his own being? If there is
a relation of utter constancy and fidelity there, then Jesus, in his freedom, his love and constancy, as in carne creator word, is the pledge for our understanding of the freedom and yet the integrity and the reliability of the physical order. Now, it may be difficult for us thinking back to realize the colossal significance of this fact. You see, the Greeks did not really believe in the integrity of what we call nature. Integrity, what they called nature,
which is identified with God. But the integrity of the physical world, that was something difficult for them. But to find that this physical universe, the world of sensible physical existence, has in it an integrity and reliability, that was something quite new. And this comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it is the integrity of the love and the constancy of God in Jesus that was the point at which Christian theology came to understand that. And so
even the doctrine of creation hinges finally entirely upon the Homoousion, upon whether Jesus Christ is a one and the same being as God. And to that we shall come in the lecture tomorrow.