Miracles of Completion
Why We Will Walk on Water
Creation is not finished. It is incomplete, imperfect. In moments of despair, I wonder if it will ever be done, for it will take a miracle to finish up the job. As the psalmist says, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3).
Some may object that I take an unbiblical and much too negative a view toward creation. The book of Genesis describes it as complete, finished:
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:1–3)
God, according to the creation narrative, finished his work, such that he rested from it. Who says creation is not finished? Who says it will take a miracle to finish up the job?
Let me backpedal a bit: In some sense, creation is, indeed, finished. The biblical language is too unequivocal simply to deny it. Creation, as Genesis 1 depicts it, is a finished whole that causes God to rest.
Yet, while stating that God rested on the seventh day—the result of creation being finished or complete—Scripture also affirms the opposite. When Jesus heals a man on the weekly day of rest, the Jews seek to kill him for it—at which point “Jesus answered them, my Father is working still, and I am working” (John 5:17). So, which is it: Did God rest on the Sabbath, or does he work on the Sabbath?
Augustine’s Resolution
Church fathers East and West puzzled over the apparent incongruity of these two biblical passages. In the early 400s, Augustine resolved the problem by insisting that what God completed or finished in Genesis 1 was merely the creation of the various kinds of creatures—their species and genera; seminal principles (rationes seminales) Augustine calls them. The six days offer a description, according to Augustine, of how God set these principles of creation in motion:
God can . . . be understood to have rested from establishing different kinds of creatures, because he did not now establish any new kinds any more. But he rested like this in such a way as to continue from then on up till now to operate the management of the things that were then set in place, not as though at least on that seventh day his power was withheld from the government of heaven and earth and of all the things he had established; if that had been done, they would forthwith have collapsed into nothingness. (Gn. litt 4.12.22)
Genesis 1, then, on Augustine’s reading, describes not the creation of the world as we know it, a world teeming with rocks and minerals, flowers and coral reefs, trout and goldfinches, elephants and crocodiles. This chapter describes, rather, the creation of what lies behind these sensible objects—their intelligible origins. As intelligible or rational, these principles give rationality or intelligibility to the created world. We should not, therefore, confuse them with physical seeds. And as “seminal,” they contain the potentiality or the seed, we might say, of the future unfolding of creation. They exist “seminally” in the sense they have a “power” or “potency” for the development of actual creatures.
God, so thought Augustine, made these sensible principles once for all, in a single moment of time, in line with the Old Latin version of Sirach 18:1—“He who lives forever created all things simultaneously.” Having created the intelligible species and genera, God finished this work; it was complete, no additional manufacture required. The biblical text concludes therefore, that God rested from all his work.
Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Professor in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.
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