Confessing God the Father....the Maker of Heaven and Earth

By Prof. John T. Pless

Herbert Girgensohn suggests that the Catechism’s explanation of the First Article guards us against two sins: pride and despair. Human beings, by nature, do not want God to be God. God’s almightiness means that I am not omnipotent. We are not self made and we cannot keep ourselves alive. Pride would ignore the Creator and claim to have a right to life apart from Him. Our culture calls this autonomy. Then there is despair. If you see your life as defined by evolutionary chance, then there is no ground for meaning, identity, or purpose in existence. We live, we suffer, and we die. A brief moment of consciousness is embraced within the darkness of eternity. Over and against both pride and despair, we confess creation as gift because we know the Creator. Life is neither our production nor an accident in the blind workings of a mindless universe. Oswald Bayer observes that in confessing the First Article, Luther is confessing justification by faith alone as he reminds us that all that the Father has done and continues to do in creation, “He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.” Luther assumes the truth of Genesis 1-2 in confessing creation; but in the Catechism the focus is on the fact “that God has made me and all creatures.” My life is set within the web of creation where all that I have (body, soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses) comes from the God who is the author and giver of every good and perfect gift. Note the words that Luther uses in describing God’s work: He gives, takes care, richly and daily provides, defends, guards and protects. The response of faith can only be “to thank, praise, serve and obey Him.” That is how we live within the world that belongs to our Father. We thank and praise Him for daily bread. We become then, as Luther says, “daily bread to one another” serving and obeying God within our various callings by serving the neighbor. Prof. John T. Pless is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions and Director of Field Education at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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