dogmatics 49 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. ******** >> It it's explanation of the creed, the small catechism doesn't talk about creation in the beginning at all. Why is that and what is the catechism highlighting about God's creation? >> Paul, when Luther composed the catechisms, the small and the large catechisms, the issue of God as creator wasn't being disputed. It wasn't being challenged that God created the heavens and the earth. And so it really isn't surprising that the small catechism doesn't mention it. It was something that basically could be taken for granted. It might be worth mentioning that the large catechism does actually bring this up, but only in a very elementary way. Luther at the beginning to his explanation of the first article says that if you were to ask a young child: My dear, what kind of God do you have? What do you know about Him? He or she could say: First, my God is the Father who made heaven and earth. Aside from this one alone, I regard nothing as God for there is no one else who could create heaven and earth. And then Luther says that's enough for the simple, for the children. And then for the more highly educated he says, and for the somewhat more well informed, then we can treat this in more detail. But, that shows that it was taken for granted as basic, as undisputed, that God was the creator of all things, that in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. The catechism, then, while it doesn't highlight God as the creator from the beginning, does stress that God is my creator. He stresses that God is your creator. It's fair to say, in other words, that the catechism highlights that God made me, and that God continues to watch over and preserve and govern me and my life and all things for me and connected with me. As we learned to say, I believe that God has made me and all creatures, that He has given me my eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses and still preserves them, and then goes to talk about things such as clothing and shoes. So the catechism, first of all, stresses that we are God's creatures. And it does so in a way that emphasizes that my very existence, my health, my surroundings, everything connected me and the world are His gifts. Second, the catechism stresses that God's ongoing activity as creator is something that He does graciously. The notion of God's ongoing activity as creator, by the way, is called continual creation or Providence. This is God's work of governing. This is God's work of guiding and preserving all things. And then third, the small catechism stresses that God does all these things freely and He does these things out of His divine goodness and mercy. He doesn't do these things on the basis of something that you are or that I am, but purely and surely out of His goodness and His love. And so this also is consistent with what we were talking about earlier, why did God create? One might be able to say that He created to show goodness, to show love. These things are the highlights, these things are the main accents of the small catechism's teaching --