dogmatics 43 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> Your answer implies that God doesn't need us. Is that right? That sounds cold, even harsh. >> I take it you're referring to the last part of my answer about God, about the concept of God that's implied by the Christian doctrine of creation; namely, that it shows the fullness of God's power and it shows His complete freedom with respect to creation. And yes, in a certain definite sense, it is a difficult thing to say. It is a cold, perhaps even a harsh truth in the sense that no, God doesn't need us. God is no less God without creation, as is sometimes put. God minus the world still equals God. That doesn't mean that the created world is nothing, but that God does not require, God does not need us. Rather, that creation itself exists solely at the pleasure of God. That it is there because of God's will, and that it has existence because God made it and God sustains it. So, we're entirely at God's mercy. The Christian teaching about creation puts us entirely at the mercy of our creator, and that creator is the God of Israel, as I said before, the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It also shows, it also implies that God is infinitely greater than we are. It makes Him out to be unapproachable, even remote to us, distant. And taken that way, then, you know, it's not hard to see how people would conclude that in a very definite way the Christian teaching about creation can come across as cold or as you said even harsh. But that's not all we have to say about it. And at this point let me go back to something we talked about before, and that was the place of theology, or dogmatic theology, or our systematic theological reflection; the relationship between that thinking and that kind of speaking and our own witness, especially the proclamation of the Gospel. And when we discussed that before, I made the point that our reflection was for many things, it wasn't an end in itself, but it was especially there to serve the church as it witnesses to our God and about what He has done and also should serve finally the proclamation of the good news; in other words, the Word of forgiveness. And what we need, then, in a sense is a theology which will lead towards that sort of thing as opposed to lead away from it. Or we should at least expect that perhaps our theology will foster the proclamation of the Gospel as opposed to lead away from it. And in a sense, if we are honest, if we say what a thing is, as we have been saying before, about God as creator, it's not unexpected that in a certain way it makes God out to be in the abstract something difficult, something hard to believe in. And that's exactly how it comes across, this doctrine of creation, where we're left at the mercy of God. But note what this truth happens to leave room for. It leaves room for God actually to be merciful. Yes, this truth as it stands shows God is the creator, that God doesn't need us, that God is independent and free of us, that we have no claim in or on ourselves on God, but it leaves room for God to make a claim then on us, for God to come and actually show mercy. And that's exactly what we have left. And in view of the Gospel then, in view of the Word of God's mercy, of God's love, of God's grace, our perspective on this can and should very definitely change. When we see that creation is the will and work of our God, the God who loves us, the God who will preserve us, then we know that our place in the universe is not found in the place that -- the universe or we have the universe with respect to God, but has already been secured and established through Jesus Christ and by way of His word. Now, without God's love, without personally knowing God loves us and that we are His children, without that, then creation really can only be understood as the work of an all powerful unapproachable divine being. But with God's loving approach, with God coming to us already from this perspective, we can see creation as the product of the God who loves us. We are, in this way, able then to see the goodness of God's creative activity and we are able to understand, appreciate the goodness that is the created order, without --