From Natural Theology to Creation and Man
The basic difference between natural theological antecedents to our doctrines of creation and man, as opposed to our doctrine of God, is that here, there is a more indirect relationship been the natural knowledge of God and our knowledge of the immediate subject matter. We could consider two kinds of reasoning in this respect.
First, we may extend a demonstration already made about God to some further consequence regarding the creation. That is what I meant by these other doctrines exhibiting an indirect relationship to natural theology’s demonstrations. Additional premises are added to a longer line of reasoning.
Second, we often move from matters in our doctrinal loci (e.g., creation and man) to God. This then provides overarching principles to bear in mind as we move back into those subordinate loci.
We can even sketch out the most basic form of both kinds of reasoning in a way that possesses clear implications for other doctrines. I will offer such an example for each of these two kinds.
As an example of the first kind,
Premise 1. There must be a purely actual Being, moved by no other.1
Premise 2. There must be an essence of Love, loved for nothing greater.2
Premise 3. He who is purely actual and the essence of love is one God.
Premise 4. All love that is in God is of Himself (a se).
Premise 5. All creatures loved are loved for the sake of another.
Conclusion 1. No love (or loveliness) in the creature actualizes God’s love for the creature.
Conclusion 2. No love (or loveliness) in the creature necessitates that God loves all creatures equally.
We might observe that this line of reasoning operates from the conclusions of two distinct natural theological arguments—premises 1 and 2. Several objections may also be imagined, requiring additional premises to meet their challenge. Nevertheless, the only purpose here is to show how such a line of reasoning moves from a demonstration of natural theology, through theology proper, to conclude in knowledge about creation and man.
As an example of the second kind,
Premise 1. Some men are righteous.3
Premise 2. No created thing is righteous in itself.
Premise 3. All created righteousness is contingent on essential righteousness.
Premise 4. All essential righteousness is in God.
Premise 5. All men called righteous are either morally or forensically so.4
Conclusion. All men who are righteous are so in the righteousness of God.
Note that the first premise suggests an inductive element by which one comes to learn about human righteousness by reading the Scriptures and other works of theology. The knowledge is acquired by many examples. It comes to form a principle that is categorical, yet not universal of all in its class (men). Three universal affirmatives and one universal negative make up the rest of the premises. However the knowledge of them may be derived, the point is only to show that their content is a combination of truths derived from the nature of things and truths explicitly taught in Scripture.
We could call the first way a deductive starting point and the second way an inductive starting point. I would not call the whole second argument “inductive” since most of its premises will have long been conclusions held and so function deductively in themselves. Moreover, those premises will be arrived at through contemplation of what is sometimes called participatory ontology. This refers to the way in which individual substances, or even the predicates and properties of substances, reflect or conform to some ultimate state of existence of that same kind. In a Christian theistic framework, we would simply speak of participation in God.
A Deductive Starting Point to Creation and Man
One straightforward area that such reasoning has been used is with regard to the nature of necessity. In his third way, Thomas differentiates between contingent things and necessary things, as well as between things necessary in another and those necessary in themselves. This latter distinction comes back in his section on the incarnation. The question there was whether the incarnation was necessary. Considering the necessity of God in Himself, the problem with the necessity of the incarnation becomes obvious enough, as it would seem to add something to Him in one way or another. But Thomas replies that,
A thing is said to be necessary for a certain end in two ways. First, when the end cannot be without it; as food is necessary for the preservation of human life. Second, when the end is attained better and more conveniently, as a horse is necessary for a journey. In the first way it was not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. For God with His omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. But in the second way it was necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature.5
As to necessity itself, there is an absolute necessity and a consequent necessity, the former of which is necessary in itself, the latter of which is necessary in another. The second meaning that Thomas explains here, using the example of a horse fulfilling the necessity of convenience, is an application of that “necessary in another” from the fourth way in his section on natural theology. God alone is necessary in Himself. The incarnation was consequently necessary—that is, necessary to achieve an end which God was free in Himself not to pursue; yet decreeing to pursue the salvation of man, it was necessary to fit means to the end which would neither contradict His character, nor leave man without representation. This classification of necessities, exemplified in a wide range of things outside of Scripture is a portion of natural theology.
Jonathan Edwards comes to the same from a different starting point. He follows reasoning that borders on an ontological argument by concluding:
“Therefore, the only way that any thing that is to come to pass hereafter, is or can be necessary, is by a connection with something that is necessary in its own nature, or something that already is, or has been.”6
Consequently, everything that comes to pass is a contingent thing. Given that such contingency finally rests in God, one common property to each of these things is the God-caused, the God-explained, or the God-directed. While the statement by Edwards may have followed his ontological reasoning, the same attribute of contingency has reference to first cause, sufficient reason, and end cause. This may not seem monumental for theology, until, that is, we encounter any number of doctrinal systems that treat created things as autonomous. No explicit denial that such things are God-caused, God-explained, or God-directed may be offered, yet the creaturely things are treated as if they are sufficient in themselves.
As another example, Turretin presupposes natural theological reasoning in order to reject any God-world composition:
“But as God rejects all composition in himself, so his simplicity hinders him also from being compounded with any created things so as to hold the relation of some part either of matter or form (against the opinion of the Platonists who supposed God to be the soul of the world; and of the Manicheans who held that all creatures were propagated from the essence of God).”7
Recall that composition as such—not merely bodily composition—is seen to be opposed to simplicity not by any explicit biblical statement. If one wants to make a case that certain premises may be gathered from biblical statements so as to contribute to the inference, this would still allow that other premises are derived from natural knowledge. Turretin’s application of divine simplicity to the creation implies that certain things cannot be the case about created things. For example, they cannot compose God: not one thing in God can be caused by the creature.
Induction Plus Participatory Ontology
In one sense, the movement from a natural theological demonstration, through theology proper, to the subsequent doctrine is the more straightforward way. However, that might not have been the case in the premodern context. An inductive starting point from supernaturally revealed data could then be combined with premises from reasoning more generally about the nature of things. One resource for such reasoning was participation ontology. Participation in being was a standard application of philosophy to theology.8 A more specific application of participatory ontology was that the predicates of creatures (not merely the creatures taken as a whole) participated, or conformed to, more or less, some uncreated essence. Therefore it would be natural to think about creaturely predicates as if they only made sense in light of the perfection of that same predicate in God. The creaturely is analogous, by way of eminence, to the Creator. This is to think about creation and man metaphysically, but it is also rooted in the natural knowledge of God, as our knowledge of such creaturely predicates comes by many extra-biblical paths.
The first important point in this method is to understand that the analogy moves in one direction, with God as ultimate referent. Andrew Davison writes that,
To say that “the world participates in God” both relates the world to God and stresses that God is utterly distinct from all that exists in creation, since the cause of all things cannot be another thing among things. God is not a thing, and a creature’s relation to God is therefore not like one creature’s relation to another. Neither is God’s relation to creation like creation’s relation to God. There is radical asymmetry. The creature is constituted by its relation to God, but God is not constituted by relation to creatures.9
The second thing to grasp is that this is an entailment of realism, as the predicates in view which participate are particular in relation to that being with is universal. The relationship of creaturely predicates to ultimate being is not of a set of incidental individuals with predicates having only equivocal meaning. Hans Boersma explains that, “because creation is a sharing in the being of God, our connection with God is a participatory, or real, connection – not just an external, or nominal, connection.”10 In this statement, Boersma perceives that the opposite of participatory ontology would leave all created phenomena with no predicates or properties that have commonality with any real essence above and beyond the substance.
In his section on the names of God in the Summa theologiae, Thomas also gives a foundation to a metaphysical doctrine of creation:
Now it has been shown above (Q. IV. A. 2) that God prepossesses in Himself all the perfections of creatures, being Himself simply and universally perfect. Hence every creature represents Him, and is like Him so far as it possesses some perfection: yet it represents Him not as something of the same species or genus, but as the excelling principle of whose form the effects fall short, although they derive some kind of likeness thereto, even as the forms of inferior bodies represent the power of the sun.11
Two things are of note here. In the first place, Thomas makes dependence on a portion of theology proper is explicit from Q. IV. A. 2., though one must do the work themselves to trace the antecedent to this truth back to the fourth way in Q. II. A. 3. The conclusion there was: “Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”12 That the “creature represents Him” is a representation that is known, at least partly, through nature, and so forms an antecedent to the doctrine of creation and man.
In showing what I mean by reasoning from creaturely predicates to universals in divine attributes, I will cite two examples: goodness and holiness. Recall that I define a theological universal as a common predicate in two or more objects of systematic theological reflection, having its exemplar cause in an idea or attribute of God. We must also recall that our knowledge of such universals is an instance of natural theology because they were known through the particulars in nature. Therefore, in the examples of goodness and holiness, we will note how the diversity of things called “good” and things called “holy” find their unified meaning in that goodness and holiness which is immutable and immaterial and so forth. Things called “good” and “holy” in other doctrines of systematic theology will be seen to be such in light of what they are in God. A theologian less aware of this relationship will conceive of such lesser examples of goodness or holiness as self-referential. Ironically, apart from this metaphysical ordering, such a theologian’s conception of those things will be of an autonomous creaturely goodness and holiness. We now turn to each of those two universals.
Beginning with goodness, Matthew Barrett remarks, “Unlike nominalism, Platonism’s belief that universals are real (hence, realism) ensured the goodness of this world, for example, was not left to material, mechanical processes but participates in the Good, which transcends the limitations of finitude.”13 With respect to the image of God, Bavinck said, “God is the archetype, the exemplar, the original.”14 Augustine explained the goodness and justice of human nature and action by means of the immutable essence of goodness and justice in God, and ties both to man’s participation in the being of God.
Because He is good, we are; and in so far as we are, we are good. Moreover, since He is just, we are not wicked without punishment; and in so far as we are evil, to that extent our being lessened. For He is the highest and first being who is altogether immutable and who could say with fullest significance, “I am who am,” and “Say to them, ‘He who is, hath sent me to you.” In this way other things which are cannot be unless they take their existence from Him, and they are good only in so far as He grants them existence.15
Setting aside his use of Exodus 3:14, it is enough to observe that Augustine thought in these terms, and accordingly viewed predication of creaturely nature and creaturely acts as a participation in the being of that corresponding universal (whether goodness or justice, etc.). We also might note that this in how universal goodness is required to ground Augustine’s doctrine of ordered loves. The simplest way to structure these loves is between God and everything else. God alone is to be loved in Himself.16 Augustine wrote that, “Not everything which is to be used is to be loved, but only those things which either by a certain association pertain to God, like a man or an angel, or pertain to us and require the favor of God through us, like the body.”17 There is a hierarchy, then, of the ultimate end (Good) in God, subordinate ends (goods) in man, and those things which are merely means by comparison.
Another angle into the same structure is his analysis of self-love. There is a good kind and a bad kind, and the difference marks a law of nature. He says, “However much a man departs from the truth, there remains in him the love of himself and of his body”;18 and he makes passing reference to how Paul argues this way from nature in Ephesians 5:28-29 as a ground for the husband analogously loving his wife.19 Augustine saw it as a species of the principle that the good self-love, among other things, loves the good of his body (its intended nature) over the corruption of it. The good of it is a reflection of its use toward the greater enjoyment of God. Contemplation of this divine attribute as a universal tends to ensure that we define as “good” only that which conforms to divine goodness, and trains us to detect attributions of good that become detached from that essence.
Unlike goodness, we do not tend to think about holiness as one of the divine attributes considered within the domain of natural theology, but Charnock makes three arguments that it ought to be. (1) “Heathens have owned it. Proclus calls him the undefiled governor … of the world.” (2) “The most absurd heretics have owned it.” He cites both the Manichees and Marcionites in support of this point. (3) “The nature of God cannot rationally be conceived without it.”20 He further argues for this attribute according to the evident nature of things.
The notion of a God cannot be entertained without separating from him whatsoever is impure and besotting, both in essence and actions. We may conceive him infinite in majesty, infinite in essence, eternal in duration, mighty in power, wise and immutable in his counsels, merciful in his proceedings with men, and whatsoever other perfections may dignify so sovereign a being. Yet if we conceive him destitute of this excellent perfection and imagine him possessed with the least contagion of evil, we make him but an infinite monster and defile all those perfections we ascribed to him before. We would then characterize him a devil rather than a god. It is a contradiction to be God and to be darkness or to have one mote of darkness mixed with his light.21
What follows about creatures in general and man in particular is that they cannot be considered intrinsically pure. Purity and impurity are displayed in nature. The clean naturally becomes dirty; the dirty does not naturally become unclean. Light chases away darkness, not vice versa. As to how this functions to unify the diversity of objects in Scripture called “holy,” Barrett gives an excellent summary:
Or consider the universal ‘holiness.’ Holiness can describe and define a variety of objects and persons in this world. A priest is holy, set apart for the Lord. A sanctuary is holy, the place where God's presence descends. A tree and the ground under it can be holy, as Moses discovered when God asked him to take off his sandals. Yet holiness is not limited or circumscribed by a priest or a sanctuary or a tree. Holiness is a Form or Idea that transcends any object or person, that archetype in which all copies participate for their likeness. Each particular participates in its Form or Idea, even though the Form or Idea itself is not dependent on a particular, existing in an independent realm.22
In the cases of goodness and holiness, we have theological universals. These serve as modifying adjectives over a great class of things in Scripture, and they derive their whole meaning from the goodness and holiness of God. If there is no eternal and immutable essence that is good and holy, then neither can anything else in the world be actually good or holy; and we know many of the ways that this is the case through analogies in the created order, antecedent to supernatural revelation.
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1. This is a restatement of the second of Thomas’s five ways: Summa theologiae, Ia.3.2
2. This is an implication of the fourth of Thomas’s five ways: Summa theologiae, Ia..3.2
3. I am leaving aside here all matters of the states of man’s nature and the Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone. If we grant that there is a prelapsarian original righteousness in Adam, as well as a completed work of redemption which hinges upon justification by faith alone, then it follows that at least “Some men” may be called righteous.
4. Premise 5 was not strictly necessary to make my point. However, I did want to avoid a needless distraction. By my choice of terms, “essential righteousness,” in the third and fourth premise, I am not suggesting anything like the doctrine of Andreas Osiander, which Calvin refuted (Institutes, III.11.5-12), such that the Christian’s righteousness is only of divine righteousness, apart from the mediatorial accomplishment of righteousness by the humanity of Christ. The division in Premise 5 encompasses both senses of righteousness, both of which are still a participation in the being of that righteousness which is of God’s essence alone: eternal, immutable, and so forth.
5. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III.1.2
6. Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 2005), 21.
7. Francis Turretin, Institutes, I.3.7.6.
8. Girolamo Zanchi, in agreement with Aquinas, argued that “all things can be said to exist from God by participation in the divine essence.” cf. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, III:240.
9. Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 28-29.
10. Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 24.
11. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia.13.2.
12. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia.2.3.
13. Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2023), 207.
14. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Volume One: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 40.
15. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.32.35 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 27.
16. cf. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.3.3 [9]; I.5.5 [10].
17. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.22.21 [19].
18. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.23.22 [20].
19. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.24.24 [20].
20. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, II:1047-1048.
21. Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, II:1048.
22. Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal, 209.
