1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 238

196

L. VERDUIN

in all creation the footsteps of the Almighty, in the processional as well as in the irruptional. Because the two are so constantly intertwined therefore the man who is at heart non-believing can always deny the irruptive. There is always enough of the process in evidence to permit him tot deny the irruptive. For this reason he can, and does, deny the whole chain of redemptive acts of God as they center in Jesus Christ. If in that whole chain one single item could b e isolated, if it could for example b e demonstrated that Jesus Christ was virgin-bom or, that H e rose from the dead, then faith would immediately make way for something else and our whole evangelical assignment would b e altered. T h e man whose wise sayings have been preserved for us in the Book of Ecclesiastes sums it all u p by saying: „ H e hath made everything beautiful in his time, H e hath also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the Beginning even to the e n d . . . . Even as thou knowest not w h a t is the way of the wind, nor how the bones wax in the w o m b of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the work of God who doeth all". Belief in creationism will remain an act of faith, possible to him who in Jesus Christ has come to know the Creator. Unbelief in the matter will remain possible for him who has not so come to know Him. T h e position of faith is rendered unduly difficult, if not impossible, b y that ethnic perversion of Christian doctrine which w e have styled deistic creationism. NOTES 1) The language of the Reformed Creeds could, and should, be improved touching this matter. Article XII of the Belgic Confession should be recast in such a way that it will no longer be possible to construe the „of nothing" with ,,all creatures" but only with ,.heaven and earth". As it now stands this Article can be read so as to conflict with Article XIV which tells us that the creature Adam v/as riot created ,,out of nothing". A similar inprovemcnt should be made in Lord's Day IX of the Heidelberg Catechism. 2) The v/ord ,,irruDtion" (from latin in and rumpere) means literally an invasion of a breaking-into. Although we shall be using the word and derivatives from it in the rest of this paper we wish to warn against an erroneous impression that might be made by this word. There is of course no autonomous order of nature which God invades or breaks into. He never works upon His creation from the outside merely; for He is always within it the while. This is but an other way of saying that God's transcendence must not be thought of as something that cancels out His immanence. Both of these must be thought of as different aspects of a single relationship betv/een Creator and creature. We therefore prefer to speak of the irruptional and the processional as two dimensions of the over-all relationship of Creator and creature. The word „ictic" (from latin icere), a word that in former times was

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