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Overview
Catholic Dogmatics is the definitive text on the structure of Catholic dogmatics, written by one of the most important authors in the Catholic Church today. The author is highly placed in the Vatican hierarchy. Cardinal Mueller oversaw the collected writings of Pope Benedict. The book will enhance both the scholar's and lay reader's knowledge of dogmatics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780824522384 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublishDrive |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
THEMES AND PERSPECTIVES OF A THEOLOGY OF THE CREATION
1. Creation — A Theological Concept
The Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed begins with the fundamental statement: "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible." (DH 150)
As can be seen from the structure of the sentence, the substance of this belief is not a statement about the world; it states a faith in God as a personal reality (credere in Deum). This is also an expression of faith in him (credere Deo), which is impossible without the belief in his existence and his active sovereignty (credere Deum). In the light of this personal faith in God, man can designate the world, in a universal qualification, as creation. Hence, the doctrine of creation proves to be a transcendental perspective on the world at the level of a personal relationship to God. Due to the Christian understanding of God as a spiritual, free, omniscient and omnipotent personal reality, Christian belief in creation differs in principle from mythical cosmogonies and theogonies, natural philosophic and natural scientific doctrines of how the world originated, but also from the natural theology of metaphysics.
The personal faith-based relationship to God the Creator is rooted in Israel's historical experience of God. This is why the Symbolum identifies the "Father almighty," specifically the God of the Covenant, as the universal Creator of the world. The God who liberated Israel from slavery, the God of the Covenant, the law and the messianic promise, is identical with the Sovereign Creator, Ruler and Consummator of "heaven and earth" (Gen 1:1), the God and Father of all men and peoples. The God of the creation and the Covenant is also identical with the Consummator of the world in the "creation of the new heaven and the new earth" (Isa 65:17), when he brings together Israel with all the peoples for the "revelation of his glory" (Isa 66:19) in the eschatological communion of saints.
The belief in God the Creator does not flow from two completely different sources. Belief in God the Creator and Redeemer is rooted in the one experience of his power in history, in the cosmos and in the life of the individual man. In terms of this fundamental experience of God's powerful presence, the horizon extends to the all-encompassing origin (protology) and the entire and final perfection of the world (eschatology). God reveals himself in the present from the core of the personal experience of God as the transcendent origin and transcendent goal of man and the world. The conceptual rendering of the belief in creation is a contribution to the general historical development of the understanding of God in salvation history. Only in the light of the Christ event does God the Creator reveal his identity as God and as the Father of Jesus Christ.
The belief in creation takes on further aspects: the eternal Word or the eternal Son as the mediator of creation, the trinitarian God as the origin and purpose, the eschatological perfection of the world in light of Christ, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit.
Hence, "creation" designates the universally transcendental relationship between the world and God which shines in the spiritual and free relationship between man and the world and history as both their underlying foundation and consummating goal.
2. Creation: God's Original Self-Revelation
One essential principle of any human speech about God stands out here: God is known through the historical world and its human community, he mediates himself indirectly as its absolute Author through the world's existence, its guidance and perfection as expressed in the totality of its existence and working. "Since the beginning of the world", i.e. coextensively with the existence of the created reality, God reveals his "invisible reality", his "eternal power and divinity" (Rom 1:19 f.), by making himself knowable through the light (intellectus agens) of human reason (intellectus possibilis).
The created world is not an exchangeable medium that God takes up casually for the purpose of revealing himself. The being of the world which lights up man's acquisition of knowledge is how God irrefutably penetrates human reason. Wherever man in his transcendental self-awareness enquires into existential meaning and human purpose, he encounters God at least tangentially and implicitly as the transcendent foundation of finite existence and knowledge. Because in man's experience of himself and the world, God, the free origin of both world and man, of finite existence and finite knowledge, proclaims himself as the divine mystery, the discussion must be explicitly about God's self-revelation. This original knowledge of God as the Creator also goes far beyond any philosophical approach to God as the transcendent first cause of the world, because this original experience of the divine is itself already a salvation-mediating encounter with God.
The Christian concept of creation brings man and the world into a special coordinate system in relation to God's personal transcendence, consequently, to God's personal immanence in the specific history of his self-mediation in the Word and in the Mediator of the Covenant, Jesus Christ:
• God himself is in terms of his essence and being infinitely dissimilar from the world. He possesses himself such that his possession of self and disposition of his personal reality is unlimited.
• Man as a creature is a being of this world and at the same time is the addressee of God's self-revelation as the Creator and Partner in the history of the Covenant.
• The world as the creation is not a part of God or a moment in an intra-divine dialectical process; the world as the creation is the environment of man and a medium of the revelation of the glory and power of God.
• Hence, the theological concept of creation consists of three interwoven reference levels:
1) The act of creation: The creation, as an act of God, coincides with the God's act of being existential act itself through which he autonomously calls into existence the totality of all non-divine existence and lets all individual beings really subsist individually in the specificity of their nature. What is created is essentially distinct from God, but from the divine act establishing reality, God is intimately and deeply present in all creatures in a manner which corresponds to their finite natures. This basic creative relationship to the world unfolds into individual aspects which designate the beginning, the execution and the perfection of the created things of this world. God the Creator is from the beginning (creatio ex nihilo) the unceasing foundation which preserves all things in their existence and form (conservatio mundi). He steers and effects the world's progress for the salvation of creatures through his care and providence (providentia Dei). Man is not guided to his ultimate goal from without but rather by means of and within human freedom as the correspondence of divine and human freedom (concursus divinus).
2) The created world: Creation also means the totality of all things created: "the heavens and earth" (cf. Gen 1:1; the universe, the realm of space, the cosmos or "the world"). Of course, creation is more than merely the sum of what exists. The creation is God's medium of self-revelation and self-communication. This is why God's creative activity culminates in the one creature which, thanks to its intellectual endowment, is capable of self-transcendence. God's creative activity is centered on man because man can transcend the creatureliness of the world and, in the light of his self-knowledge as a creature, can rise to become the personal interlocutor of God's Word. The creation has its inner ultimate purpose in the Covenant of Grace.
3) The order of creation: Both in its existence and in its essence, the order of creation is an indication of God's goodness, sovereignty and wisdom, reflected in the functional structure of matter and in the processuality which preserves and bears life. God reveals his salvific will in the order of the world.
The order of creation includes the enablement of man to bear responsibility actively for:
• Material nature (ecology, environmental ethics);
• Human environment: the political, social and economic management of the habitat (moral theology, social ethics) derived from the reality of creation;
• Personhood: man's realization of the quest for meaning, and man's transcendental reliance on God as the hearer of God's Word and, consequently, religion, faith, community of the Church (philosophy of the revelation).
3. Important Doctrinal Statements on the Creation Doctrine
1. The Synod of Constantinople 543 condemned the doctrine of the "Origenists," that God's power is finite, and he created all that he could comprehend and think (DH 410).
2. Regarding the "Priscillianists" (a Manichaean–Gnostic sect), canons 5–13 of the First Synod of Braga (561) invoke an anathema against all those who defend the following views:
(can. 5): Human souls or angels come from the substance of God (DH 455),
(can. 7): The devil was not first a good angel; he had no Creator but is himself the principle and substance of evil (DH 457);
(can. 8): The devil made some of the creatures in the world, and he damages by his own power the world and man (e.g., by storms; DH 458);
(can. 9): Human souls and bodies are by their fate bound to the stars (DH 459);
(can. 11): Condemnation of human marriage and loathing of the procreation of children (DH 461);
(can. 12): The formation of the human body is the work of the devil, and there is no such thing as the resurrection of the flesh (DH 462);
(can. 13): The creation of all flesh is not the work of God but of bad angels (DH 463).
3. Against the idealistic, Neoplatonic understanding of the creation and the idea of a natural cycle, the Lateran Synod (649) emphasizes the realistic salvation historic orientation of Church doctrine: can. 1: Deus Trinitas est creatrix (Creator) omnium et protectrix (protector): DH 501.
4. In 1208 Pope Innocent III prescribed to the Waldensians (who, like the Albigensians, Catharists and Lombards, taught that matter was evil and that the devil created it from nothing) this profession of faith: The one and threefold God is the creator of all things, corporeal and spiritual, he is the one author of the OT and NT; and is the Creator of all things from nothing (DH 790).
5. The caput Firmiter of the Lateranense IV (1215) completely rejects Catharism: "We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty, and ineffable, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit ... < They are >the one principle of the universe, the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal, who by his almighty power from the beginning of time made at once out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then the human creature, who, as it were, shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body. For the devil and the other demons were indeed created by God naturally good, but they became evil by their own doing. As for man, he sinned at the suggestion of the devil" (DH 800).
6. Pope John XXII criticized (1329) some articles written by Meister Eckhart (whereby what Meister Eckhart meant by these teachings is a matter of dispute). The following teachings are refuted: the eternal co-existence of the world with God; the complete parallelism of the eternal begetting of the Son from the Father with the creation; all creatures are one pure nothing; there is something in the soul that is uncreated and incapable of being created (DH 951–53, 976f.).
7. Against Manichaean dualism the Church taught at the Council of Florence (1442) in the Decree for the Jacobites in the Bull of Union Cantate Domino: "The one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, who when he so willed, out of his bounty, made all creatures, spiritual as well as corporeal. They are good since they were made by him who is the highest good, but they are mutable because they were made out of nothing. ... There is no such thing as a nature of evil, because all nature, as nature, is good. ... One and the same God is the author of the OT and the NT." There are not "two first principles, one of the visible things, the other of invisible things" (DH 1333–36).
8. In response to the Catholic theologians G. Hermes und A. Günther, whose orientation had been too influenced by Kant and Hegel, the Synode der Rheinischen Kirchenprovinz in Köln (1860) takes a position against pantheism, deism and the Hegelian understanding of a "becoming God." Set forth in detail: God is complete in himself. He is immutable. His becoming is not dependent on the becoming of the world. God creates the world, free of any inner compulsion or outer force, in order to convey to it his goodness. God could have created another world. The world was created by God in time. The purposes of the creation are the happiness of man and the revelation of the glory of God as well as his perfections, especially his wisdom, power and goodness. A distinction is drawn between gloria Dei subiectiva (= prayer, gratitude, the worship of God by man) and gloria Dei obiectiva (= God stands revealed in his works), while, in turn, regarding the gloria Dei obiectiva, a distinction is drawn between the gloria Dei interna and the gloria Dei externa (NR 303–313).
9. The Vaticanum I had the same errors in mind when in the constitution Dei Filius (chap. 1, can. 1–5) it teaches:
chap. 1: God is a singular, completely simple and immutable spiritual being. He is really and essentially distinct from the world (re et essentia a mundo distinctus). The definition from the Lateranse IV is repeated as the definition of creation.
Specifically can. 3: "If anyone says that the substance and essence of God and all things is one and the same: let him be anathema."
Can. 4: "If anyone says that finite beings, the corporeal as well as the spiritual ... have emanated from the divine substance, or that the divine essence becomes all things by self-manifestation or self-evolution, or lastly that God is the universal or indefinite being which, by self-determination, constitutes the universality of beings, differentiated in genera, species, and individuals: let him be anathema." (Hence, the being of beings is not God.)
Can. 5: "If anyone refuses to confess that the world and all things contained in it, the spiritual as well as the material, were in their whole substance produced by God out of nothing; or says that God created, not by an act of will free from all necessity, but with the same necessity by which he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was made for the glory of God: let him be anathema." (DH 3001–03; 3021–25)
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface to the American Edition of Dogmatics,
Introduction,
1. Goal and Program of the "Course Book Dogmatics",
2. Dogmatics as a Theological Discipline,
3. The Structure of the Dogmatics,
4. Outline of the Structure of the Dogmatics,
GOD'S SELF-REVELATION AS THE CREATOR OF THE WORLD (THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION),
I. Themes and Perspectives of a Theology of the Creation,
1. Creation — A Theological Concept,
2. Creation: God's Original Self-Revelation,
3. Important Doctrinal Statements on the Creation Doctrine,
4. The Dogma of Creation in Its Constitutive Elements,
5. The Creation Theology within the Structure of Church Dogmatics,
6. The Creation Theology in Distinction to Religious and Scientific Doctrines of the Origin of the World,
II. The Belief in God the Creator in Biblical Testimony,
1. The Creation Belief in the Old Testament,
2. Creation Statements in the New Testament,
III. The Formative Development of the Creation Teaching in the History of Theology,
1. In Patristics,
2. The Creation Theme in the Theology of the Early Middle Ages,
3. The Creation Theology of High Scholasticism,
4. In the Context of the New Worldview of the Natural Sciences and the Foundational Crisis of Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology,
5. The More Recent Catholic and Reform Controversy over Philosophical Theology as a Portal to Historical Revelation,
IV. Systematic Exposition,
1. The Realization of Non-Divine Being through God's Actuality,
2. Creation Realized through Evolution and the History of Human Freedom,
3. God's Self-Revelation as Creator and Redeemer,
4. God's Universal World Government and Active Presence in the World,
5. Creation and Grace, Principles of Created Freedom, or the Secret of Providence,
THE SELF-REVELATION OF THE THREEFOLD GOD IN THE CONSUMMATION OF MAN (ESCHATOLOGY),
I. Horizons and Perspectives of Eschatology,
1. Eschatology and Its Place in Dogmatics,
2. Questions Treated in Eschatology,
3. The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Statements,
4. Important Statements on Eschatology in Church Dogma,
5. Differences from the Orthodox and Reformed Profession of Faith,
6. Christian Eschatology in Association and Contradiction,
7. The Rediscovery of Eschatology as a Fundamental Christian Purpose,
8. Categories of Thinking in Current Eschatology,
II. The Eschatology of God's Self-Revelation in Biblical Testimony,
1. Adventist Eschatology in the Old Testament,
2. The Core of the New Testament's Eschatology in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Jesus,
III. Aspects of the History of Theology,
1. Problems in Patristics,
2. The Resurrection Treatise in Scholastics,
IV. Systematic Presentation of the Eschatology,
1. God Is Love: The Reign of the Father,
2. God Is Our Righteousness: The Reign of the Son,
3. God Is Eternal Life: the Koinonia in the Spirit of the Father and the Son,
ABBREVIATIONS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,