Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1: Luther on the CreationLuther, Martin
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Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1: Luther on the Creation
Luther, Martin
Bible. Genesis -- Commentaries
But you will say perhaps that these testimonies are too obscure to be
appealed to as proofs of so important an article of faith. I reply,
these divine things were spoken at this time, thus obscurely,
according to the counsel and purpose of God; and for this very reason,
because they were all left to that Great Lord and Teacher, who was to
come; until whose advent the restitution of all things was reserved;
even the restitution of all knowledge and of all revelations. Those
mysteries therefore which "in the beginning" were set before us thus
obscurely, Christ when he came revealed, made known and commanded to
be preached. Nevertheless the holy fathers were in possession of this
knowledge by the Holy Spirit; though not so clearly as we possess it
now, who hear in the New Testament the names of the Father, and of the
Son and of the Holy Ghost plainly declared. For when Christ came it
was necessary that all those seals should be unloosed, and all those
things openly preached, which "in the beginning" had been purposely
delivered to us in obscure words in reverence to the Great Teacher who
was to come. And had not the Holy Spirit deferred this clear knowledge
to the time of the New Testament, Arians would have existed long
before the birth of Christ. Wherefore the Holy Spirit willed that this
sun of knowledge should be opposed to the devil in these "last times,"
that his eyes might be the more intolerably dazzled, that he might the
more virulently envy men such a brightness of knowledge, and be thus
the more terribly tormented.
Thirdly. A whole sea of questions is here agitated as to what that
"image" of God was in which Moses here says man was formed. Augustine
has dwelt largely on the explanation of this passage in his book "On
the Trinity." Those divines in general, who retain the division and
definition of Aristotle, follow Augustine. They consider the image of
God to be those powers of soul, memory, mind or intellect and will.
They affirm that the image of God consists in these three qualities;
which image, they say, is found in all men. And their argument is,
that as in divine things the Word is begotten of the substance of the
Father, and as the Holy Spirit is the complacency or good pleasure of
the Father, so in man from the memory proceeds the word of the heart,
which is the mind of the man; which word being uttered there is
developed the will, which will the mind beholds and with which it is
delighted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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