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| The true doctrine. Creation out of nothing, of God's lavish bounty of being. Man created above the rest, but incapable of independent perseverance. Hence the exceptional and supra-natural gift of being in God's Image, with the promise of bliss conditionally upon his perseverance in grace.
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§3. The true doctrine. Creation out of
nothing, of God’s lavish bounty of being. Man created above the
rest, but incapable of independent perseverance. Hence the exceptional
and supra-natural gift of being in God’s Image, with the promise
of bliss conditionally upon his perseverance in grace.
Thus do they vainly speculate. But the godly
teaching and the faith according to Christ brands their foolish
language as godlessness. For it knows that it was not spontaneously,
because forethought is not absent; nor of existing matter, because God
is not weak; but that out of nothing, and without its having any
previous existence, God made the universe to exist through His word, as
He says firstly through Moses: “In198
the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth;” secondly, in the
most edifying book of the Shepherd, “First199
of all believe that God is one, which created and framed all things,
and made them to exist out of nothing.” 2. To which also Paul
refers when he says, “By200
faith we understand
that the worlds have been framed by the Word of God, so that what is
seen hath not been made out of things which do appear.” 3. For
God is good, or rather is essentially the source of goodness: nor201
| 201 c.
Gent. xli. and Plato, Timæus 29 E. | could one that is good be niggardly of
anything: whence, grudging existence to none, He has made all things
out of nothing by His own Word, Jesus Christ our Lord. And among these,
having taken especial pity, above all things on earth, upon the race of
men, and having perceived its inability, by virtue of the condition of
its origin, to continue in one stay, He gave them a further gift, and
He did not barely create man, as He did all the irrational creatures on
the earth, but made them after His own image, giving them a portion
even of the power of His own Word; so that having as it were a kind of
reflexion of the Word, and being made rational, they might be able to
abide ever in blessedness, living the true life which belongs to the
saints in paradise. 4. But knowing once more how the will of man could
sway to either side, in
anticipation He secured the grace given them by a law and by the spot
where He placed them. For He brought them into His own garden, and gave
them a law: so that, if they kept the grace and remained good, they
might still keep the life in paradise without sorrow or pain or care
besides having the promise of incorruption in heaven; but that if they
transgressed and turned back, and became evil, they might know that
they were incurring that corruption in death which was theirs by
nature: no longer to live in paradise, but cast out of it from that
time forth to die and to abide in death and in corruption. 5. Now this
is that of which Holy Writ also gives warning, saying in the Person of
God: “Of every tree202
that is in the
garden, eating thou shalt eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, ye shall not eat of it, but on the day that ye eat, dying ye
shall die.” But by “dying ye shall die,” what else
could be meant than not dying merely, but also abiding ever in the
corruption of death?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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