1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 228

186

L. VERDUIN

to God's creative activity. The reason for this revulsion against the ascription of the dimension of process to the concept of creation is that in this theology religion is thought to feed not so much on the dimension of process as on the dimension of the non-processional, the irruptive, or the ictic (2). Because in America orthodoxy has been largely a matter of insisting upon the ictic aspects of God's redemptive dealings with men, and unorthodoxy, conversely, largely a matter of denying the ictic, therefore the controversy over evolutionism (a system of thought that „processizes" eveiything) has been unusually bitter (3). The theology which we are just now rebuking tries frantically to keep at least some terrain free from the dimension of process; the area known as the locus de creatione seemed to be such terrain; and for this reason this would-be orthodoxy is greatly perturbed whenever the dimension of process is predicated of the area of this locus. Because this less-than-Christian theology proceeds upon the assumption that true religion starves unless fed a diet of ictic materials therefore it imagines that to grant that creation has a processional dimension is to yield a last bastion to the enemy. The Bible however places no such premium upon the irruptional. The Good Book sets its face as a flint against any representation that would tend to make the processional less contributory to true religion than is the ictic. Not that it does not know the formula which we are rebuking. It knows it only too well — in the hearts of men who have not had the benefit of special revelation. It brings us face to face with the classic formula of icticism — on the lips of Pharaoh's sorcerers who were quite composed in the presence of the „signs" of Moses and Aaron as long as they saw, or thought they saw, the dimension of process in them, but cried out in rapture when they thought they detected the irruptive, saying in ecstasy, „This is the hand of God!" How far this less-than-Christian devaluation of the processive on Chi'istian soil, and this equally less-than-Christian glorification of the irruptive, has departed from the thought habits of the Christ, who ran away from the miracle-chasers of His day with their maudlin thirst for the ictic and who pointed to the falling of a sparrow from the housetop the rather as revelatory of „the finger of God", and to the lilies, matters in which the processional is prominent enough! (4). Closely related to this devaluation of the processional in comparison with the irruptional the school of theology which we are just now repudiating has gone far in depersonalizing the process, so rendering it secular. With the non-Christian world they say that „It rains", that

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