MW said:
If you could summarise or make a quotation, that would simplify discussion.
I found the lectures overall helpful. I will summarize by quotations. The stuff I skip in "..."'s are just stutters, repetition, things that only make sense while speaking, e.g., "Does this make sense? See what I'm saying?" I have put in brackets [inaudible] when I could not make out a word from the audio, and I put in brackets the remainder of the quotation from Bavinck at the end, since Dolezal stops quoting just before the brackets begin. To make the transcript easier to read, I bolded Dolezal's quotations of Bavinck and Turretin (Turretin's quotation is from 5.1.12).
In Dolezal's words, he is responding to the claim that (what follows is a transcription from the lecture), "God cannot create or bring about temporal effects without ontologically participating in the temporality of his creation. Whether that means dumping his eternity, the way Craig thinks of it, or as never having even been eternal, the way Wolterstorff thinks of it, or as augmenting his eternity, the way Lister, Frame, and Oliphint think of it--all of them agree that creation is an insuperable problem. God as eternal cannot be the Creator because Creator has to be something new in God."
In response to this claim, Dolezal continues on by saying (another transcription from the lecture), "If Creator is something temporal that God becomes, it seems to follow that his actions in and towards the world as Creator are not properly actions of God as divine... If Creator is part of the covenantal package or the new temporal properties, well then, Creatorhood itself is now not actually identical with the divinity of God. This is the strange implication. This means the Creatorhood itself begins to be. In other words, Creatorhood itself is finite, temporal, mutable...creature. Now the Creatorhood of God is a creaturely feature of God.... A Creatorhood that begins to be cannot be regarded as properly an aspect of God's divinity as such....
Does God create eternally? I want to answer: yes. For the eternalist, God's activity toward the world as its Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer cannot be divorced from what he is in and of himself. Bavnick actually argues that God cannot have a sort of intermmediary set of properties, what Lister calls God's acting in time and what Oliphint calls covenantal properties. Bavnick says there can't be something that mediates between God and the world. That's neoplatonism. That's a demiurge. Bavnick says this, "It is God who posits the creature, eternity which posits time, immensity which posits space, being which posits becoming, immutability which posits change." And then, this is Bavnick's language. "There is nothing intermediate between these two classes of categories." There is no intermediating set of properties that God has to sort of take on in order to pull off his relationship to the world. That's what we're being offered by Frame and by Lister and by Oliphint.
We also, secondly, would say that while we name God as Creator from the effects of Creation, the act of Creation itself is not temporal. In other words, God didn't go to bed early the night before Creation because tomorrow was a big day. You see what I'm saying? It's nothing like that. There's not God saying, "Tomorrow I become...what I never was: Creator."
So how is God eternally Creator? The reason we say that God is eternally Creator is because God's act of creation is really nothing other than his act of willing to create. God's act of Creation just is his decree to create. So in a human planner, let's say I'm building a house, I might first plan or decree...purpose to build a house...but there's a real distinction between my planning or my willing to build a house, and my actually getting out there and swinging the hammer and driving in the nails. The actual building follows the intention. What we're saying is, that for God, the intention is the act of building. My will to create needs to be supplemented by something in addition to my will. I could wish all day long to build a house but until I actually get out there and start using my motor faculties and swinging hammers and driving nails, my will is just going to be an unrealized dream. See what I'm saying? But with God, his will is not just a plan that then requires some other action in addition to his will in order to accomplish the plan. We are saying that God's will is itself the effective act of creation. God creates sheerly by willing it. That's the act of Creation, not something God began to do after for a long time he didn't do it.
Turretin says that, "
In creating, no new will enters into him, but only a new external work proceeds from his efficacious and omnipotent will." That is to say, my will is not efficacious and omnipotent. I can plan and...a lot of my plans never do come to fruition because it takes a little more than planning for me to pull off the plan. But for God, God does not need to supplement his planning with some subsequent activity in order to pull it off. The planning, the purposing, just is the act of creating, and insofar as God eternally purposes and wills the world, he is as such eternally, actively the agent of Creation, and therefore, eternally Creator.
Turretin goes on, "
By the same practical volition"--practical volition means not hypothetical, but actually, working volition--"
which he had from eternity, he created the world in time--produced it actually in the beginning of time." But that act in God was not something God began to do whereas before he didn't. It was nothing but the eternal act of his will. The question then is, does God create the world as eternal, or does he need to take on a temporal package of actuality in order to pull off Creation and Redemption and relate to [inaudible]....
I close with the words of Bavinck. Bavinck says, "
On the one hand, it is certain that God is the eternal one. In him there is neither past nor future, neither becoming nor change. All that he is, is eternal:"--Frame and Lister and Oliphint, do not believe that--"
his thought, his will, his decree. Eternal in him is the idea of the world that he thinks and utters in the sun. Eternal in him is also the decision to create the world. Eternal in him is the will that created the world in time. Eternal is also the act of creating as an act of God:"--because that's nothing but the act of the will--"
an action both internal and imminent."--that is to say, in God. Now, Bavinck says this, "
For God did not become Creator, so that first for a long time he did not create, and then afterward, he did create. Rather, he is the eternal creator. And as Creator he was the eternal one. And as the eternal one he created. The creation therefore brought about no change in God[; it did not emanate from him and is no part of his being. He is unchangeably the same eternal God.]" God didn't begin to be what he wasn't. That which he created began to be, but his creating did not begin."
