1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 231

TOWARD A THEISTIC CREATIONISM

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So too with the miracles of Jesus. In them the ictic dimension is plainly in the foreground. But that does not mean that they were built on a deistic last. It does not mean that they were examples of sheer transcendence. In them there is likewise a concession to the processional dimension. When the wine is in short supply at Cana in Galilee then He of whom it is said that in the primeval moment „all things were made by Him" invokes the supernatural in order to relieve the embarrassment. And what does He do? Snap His fingers in ex nihilo fashion and command the butlers to pour? No, this is no time for pure irruption, no time for naked transcendence. And so with a kindly nod at process He bids men fill the vessels, fill them with water, the element that plays such an important role in the production of wine whenever and wherever. The deistically slanted mind, the man that thinks that religion feeds solely upon the ictic, would have preferred a nakedly irruptive flip of the wrist, and, presto! But the genuine theist will see here again a special precaution on the part of the Scriptures, taken to keep us from doing violence to the theistic formula. Or take the miracle of the feeding. Hungry crowds all about Him, with nary a bread truck in sight. He who is sensitive to men's needs, also their bodily needs, decides to make provision for these needs. Does He of whom it is said that „without Him was nothing made that hath been made" resort to pure transcendence? Surely He of whom it is said that „He calls the things that are not so that they become" could have resorted to ex nihilo techniques! Why not a sovereign „Let there be bread. ."? But He does not want the irruptive dimension of this „mighty act" to eclipse the processional. That would be a denial of the theistic cause about which the Bible is so much concerned. And so a hasty inventoiy is taken to determine what and how much of creaturedom there is on hand, the creaturedom to which hungry men are wont to turn. A lad with a few barley buns and a dried fish or two. Taking these in a concession to process He expends upon them the kind of power only the Creator wields — and all are fed and then some. Could the inspired record contain a more manifest rebuke for the deist who as he dotes on the ictic searches high and low for pure irruption? To prefer the story without the feature in which a concession is made to the non-irruptional is to betray an ethnic trait in one's soul, a vestige of his pre-Christian past, or, an atavistic return to a pagan construction wliich the Bible is at pains to obviate. We spend considerable time on this matter because we wish to show that in a genuinely theistic creationism there likewise will not be

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