The Beginning
The God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of resurrection. From the very outset, the world stands under the auspices of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Indeed, precisely because we know about the resurrection we also know about God’s creation in the beginning, about God’s creation out of nothing. The dead Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected Lord of Easter Sunday: That is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning. That Christ was indeed dead was not the possibility of his resurrection, but its impossibility; it was nothingness itself, the nihil negativism. There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ other than God’s own freedom to create in the beginning God’s work out of nothing. If it were possible yet to intensify this nihil negativum, then here, concerning the resurrection, one would have to say that with Christ’s death on the cross the nihil negativum broke its way into God’s own being-“Oh, woe so great: God, God is dead”- and yet God, who is the beginning, lives, destroys the nothing, and creates the new creation in Christ’s resurrection. It is through his resurrection that we know about creation, for if he were not resurrected, the Creator would be dead, and he would not bear witness to himself. From God’s creation, on the other hand, we know about God’s power to rise up again, we know God remains the Lord [over nonbeing].
(From a lecture on Genesis 1:1-2, Berlin University, Winter Semester 1932/1933)
Excerpted from: Meditations on the Cross by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Join us tomorrow at NRN as Pastor Rick begins a new three part teaching series about the claims of Christ - WHO HE IS.....
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