QUOTES - WORK OF CREATION
First of all, believe that God is one, who created all things and set them in order, and made out of what did not exist everything that is (Shepherd of Hermas).
To say that creation had a beginning is to point out that it came into being out of nothing. First it did not exist, and then it did. It was not, and then it was. The cause of that coming to be was God (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics).
Meanwhile let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater (John Calvin, Institutes).
When a certain shameless fellow mockingly asked a pious old man what God had done before the creation of the world, the latter aptly countered that he had been building hell for the curious (John Calvin, Institutes).
One's beliefs concerning origins will inevitably condition his beliefs concerning intrinsic meanings and ultimate destinies (Henry Morris, Evolution and the Modern Christian).
The simple fact is that the evolutionary philosophy is both totally false and almost totally successful (Henry Morris, Evolution and the Modern Christian).
Both the Old and the New Testaments deliberately root themselves back into the early chapters of Genesis, insisting that they are a record of historical events (Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time).
Everything which has being, except God himself, rests upon the fact that God willed and brought it into creation (Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time).
Everything at each of the various levels of creation fulfills the purpose of its creation (Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time).
The God who created the world out of nothing can revoke it into nothingness . . . It is what and how God wills it to be, it exists so long as God permits it to exist. What we call laws of nature are so many formulae pointing to the Will of the divine Creator and Preserver (Brunner, Eternal Hope, 194-5).
We may define the doctrine of creation as follows: God created the entire universe out of nothing; it was originally very good; and he created it to glorify himself (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology).
Creation is distinct from God yet always dependent on God (God is both transcendent and immanent) (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology).
Scripture in its entirety regards the Genesis account of man’s early beginnings and doings as reliable history (Robert Reymond, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith).
The problem in these chapters for modern men and women, influenced as they are by modern scientism’s unfounded dogmatic dictum of cosmic and biological evolution, is the distinctly supernatural character of the events which they report—namely, the creation of the universe ex nihilo and the creation of man by the direct act of God (Robert Reymond, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith).
By creation we mean the work of God in bringing into being, without the use of any preexisting materials, everything that is (Millard Erickson, Christian Theology).
The Bible speaks in Genesis 1 and 2 of events which lie outside of our historical knowledge. But it speaks upon the basis of knowledge, which is related to history. In fact, the wonderful thing about the biblical creation narratives is that they stand in strict connexion with the history of Israel and so with the story of God's action in the covenant with man (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline).
Creaturely reality means reality on the basis of a creatio ex nihilo, a creation out of nothing. Where nothing exists—and not a kind of primal matter—there through God there has come into existence that which is distinct from Him (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline).
And if we inquire into the goal of creation, the object of the whole, the object of heaven and earth and all creation, I can only say that it is to be the theatre of His glory (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline).
Apparently the initial confession Christians make about the God they worship is that He is the Creator of the entire universe (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
The idea that God is the Creator of all things is the indispensable foundation on which the other beliefs of the Christian faith are based (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
Nevertheless, the history of ideas in Western culture clearly shows that science itself could have developed only in a cultural environment which understood that the world and all that it contains was created by the will and the wisdom of God (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
The theological idea of creation is first of all an answer to the religious question of the meaning and destiny of man's historical life (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
In the case of our subject, therefore, while the knowledge that God created the world is a response to divine revelation, the early account in Genesis of how it was done has no status as "revealed truth" even though it was the form in which the revelation was enshrined by the Hebrew mind (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
Thus to discuss the religious content of the myth of creation is on the one hand to be concerned with the valid and the significant content of scriptural revelation, and also to be disassociated from scientific questions of origins (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
Only monotheism satisfies the one criterion that is basic to all science and human experience, namely the law of cause and effect (Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science).
How could random, nonintelligent primeval particles evolve themselves into orderly, intelligible systems? (Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science).
There are multitudes of professing Christian people who think they can believe both the Bible and evolution—that evolution is merely God's method of creation. One can only say that anyone who believes this (as the writer once did himself) simply does not understand either evolution or the Bible or both (Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science).
If these first eleven chapters are not historical, then our entire Biblical foundation has been removed (Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science).
The Christian Faith does not “posit” the idea of Creation, but accepts it as “posited” by God; this is a fact which we cannot grasp in thought, nor can we evolve it out of our own needs, but we have to accept it, through the Divine revelation as “posited” (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption).
We can only speak of Creation on the basis of Revelation (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption).
The purpose, and therefore the fundamental meaning of the Creation is the kingdom of God (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption).
Therefore, divine revelation is required if we are ever really to know anything about the Creation—its date, its duration, its methods, its order, or anything else about it (Henry Morris, A Symposium on Creation).
The combined stories set forth the personal activity of a Person who is above Nature, a Person who will control it through all the successive generations of men until His purpose is accomplished and His will is fully done (H. Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament).
No interpretation dare be employed which undermines the certainty that the text is in every word the Word of God, or which is out of harmony with the confessions of the church (Paul A. Zimmerman, A Symposium on Creation).
In other words, once the premise of evolution is granted that matter interacts with itself and under the guidance of the process of natural selection, there is no need of God (Paul A. Zimmerman, A Symposium on Creation).
It would be tragic if we were to permit scientific theories, scientific philosophies, to dictate our theology either explicitly or implicitly (Paul A. Zimmerman, A Symposium on Creation).
The position which I wish to present must sound to many a bit radical. It is that evolution with its time perspective is neither fact nor theory but is basically a system of values (R. Clyde McCone, A Symposium on Creation).
It is an ethic that requires the acceptance of the authority of specialists but the rejection of any absolute authority (R. Clyde McCone, A Symposium on Creation).
The ontological transcendence of God in the mode of His being is an absolutely basic requirement of our thought about God if He is to be understood as the Creator, and if we are to trust our life to Him and Him alone (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth).
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