1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 234

192

L. VERDUIN

be recognized. Recourse to inherent potential quite as surely. When men in the one-sided theology of Rev. Herman Hoeksema begin to speak of the Covenant as being condition-less then they give evidence of a deistic tendency that must be known for what it is, and, rebuked. So one could go on. Everywhere the Bible tells the same story. We have a Kingdom of God that, like the New Jerusalem, descends from God out of heaven — but it is, as it were, extracted out of the historic process quite as surely. Everywhere there is ready exploitation of process. Everywhere there is unhesitating exploitation of inherent potential. It is highly doubtful whether there is a single juncture in the Christian system where we encounter a mere poking-at-things-fromthe-outside, if we may borrow an expression which the immanentists have coined in their desire to make the idea of the irruptive seem ridiculous. Even the doctrine of God's sovereignty can be given a pagan thrust; this stupendous theological item can be, and sometimes is, twisted quite out of shape. If in our view of the decrees God's sovereignty is thought to impinge upon man in precisely the same way in wich it impinges upon a creature of lesser inherent potential — then we are already in serious error. Our Reformed fathers were not trifling when they insisted as they discussed the matter of the decrees that „God does not deal with men as with sticks and with stones". We do well to keep this fact in mind all the while as we deal with the momentous question of the decrees; he who brings it in as an afterthought, just as he is closing the book, has probably until that moment been close, too close, to the ethnic version of the decrees, the version that one encounters in the Koran, a decidedly ethnic volume. The essence of the Koran's surrogate for the Christian doctrine of God's sovereignty is that in it the differential between the potential inherent in man and that inherent in an inanimate object is ignored.

It would seem that the very principle of analogia fidei would lead us to expect the same situation to obtain in the doctrine of Creation. It would seem that if the dimension of process is in evidence in all the rest of the opera Dei then we may expect it to be present also in mediate creation. It would seem that if in all the rest of His dealings with His creature the Lord our God does not hesitate to exploit whatever potential He has made to reside there, then we may expect Him to do the same as He in mediate creation lays a creative hanc^ upon an

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