1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 229

TOWARD A THEISTIC CREATIONISM

187

„It snows", or, that „Nature is prodigal with seed", little realizing that this is actually heretical language. The Bible teaches us to say „He calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth" of „He scattereth His hoarfrost like ashes". The less-thanChristian representation of which we are complaining sees, quite correctly, that in „Nature" there is a processional dimension; and, because it thinks that religion is built up primarily on matters that have the irruptional dimension, therefore it gauges a man's orthodoxy by what he has to say in connection with supposedly solely irruptional matters, such as „creation" and „miracle", rather than with what he has to say about that which has the dimension of process upon it. The processional is for this school of thought not directly pertinent for matters of religion; for it the time to confess has come when we are face to face with irruption. This ethnic construction parading in the uniform of Biblical Christianity has wrought frightful damage in the culture of which we are a part. With its derogation of the processional and its exaltation of the irruptional it has paved the way for the rise, by way of recaction, of an atheistic evolutionism that has already grabbed many a promising youth. Goethe, the great German poet, often called the first modern man, was an immanentist who for that reason had an eye only for that which is processional; but Goethe in his development was merely going over to an other paganism. His pantheism was the natural outcome of his revulsion against a Christianity in the signature of the irruptional, an understandable if not a justifiable swing of the pendulum. One does not have to endorse Goethe's cult of the processional as he applauds the great German's fulmination against the contemporary cult of the ictic : „Was war' ein Gott, der nur von auszen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse! Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Inneren zu bewegen, Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen. So dasz, was in ihm lebt und webt und ist Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermiszt!" Goethe seems to have been of the opinion — and this he had learnt from the „orthodoxy" against which he rebelled — that we are dealing here with a matter of entweder-oder, that men must choose between irruption and process, that if we grant the processional we shall have to deny the irruptional and vice versa. The „orthodoxy" in which he had been reared doted on the irruption, on a God who poked at things

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