1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 233

TOWARD A THEISTIC CREATIONISM

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and lay low was an attempt to deny the genuine recourse to creaturehood implied in the authentic Christology. Docetism, whether early or late, denied that Jesus Christ was actually come in the flesh because it was embarrassed, pagan that it was, by the idea that Jesus Christ actually stood in the historic process. Too much can of course be said of Mary the mother of Jesus and Mariolatry is a great evil; but one can also have too little to say about Mary. He does this when he makes the Christ so exclusively irruptional as to betray a serious defection from true-blue theism. All the items in the Christian creed are construed on a theistic last. None must be viewed in the light of sheer transcendence, none in the light of pure immanence. None is construed on the purely irruptive line, none on the nakedly processional. All the deeds of God toward and with the children of men are done not with lofty disdain for the potential He has caused to reside there. Take the theological item of regeneration. Theologians who have a predilection for the ictic have insisted that regeneration is immediate, i.e., that it has nothing to do with process and the processional. Happily Reformed theology has refused to go wholly in this direction. While granting that regeneration has a genuinely irruptive dimension and that in it we encounter a divine activity the end result of which is a human being who is like the wind of which we know neither the whence nor the whither, yet authentic Reformed thought has just as certainly kept its eye open for the processional dimension in which exploitation of potential inherent in creaturality was not ruled out. This shows a fine theistic intuition on the part of Reformed thinkers. The same theism has, happily, kept men in the Reformed tradition when they discussed the question of the origin of the human soul, from declaring either for Creationism or Traducianism. They who have a penchant for the irruptive dimension will be inclined to lean toward Creationism and they who are inclined to stress the processional dimension will favor Traducianism. But in the interest of consistent theism it is best to refuse to make this a matter of either-or. It is best to say that also at this point we must keep the track for both the irruptive and the processional. Doubtlessly there is here also something like exploitation of inherent potential. The same general situation confronts us in regard to the doctrine of the Covenant. Reformed thinkers have very soon picked up the line of transcendence; but they have traditionally been quite as sensitive to the processional dimension. Here too the processional dimension must

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