HistoricalChristian.Faith

“My Father works hitherto” as proof that God creates each soul afresh

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the verse establishes that the Father has never stopped working, which no party to the quarrel denied. It does not say what that continuing work is, and its own setting — a sabbath controversy in which Jesus defends a healing by claiming the Father's own prerogative — points the “work” at God's unbroken governance of everything He made, which is how the commentators who actually expounded the verse took it. A traducianist affirms that governance too, so the text does not select between the rivals; it is consistent with creationism without being evidence for it. The conclusion may well be true — this verse does not carry it. · advanced by Jerome and Pope Anastasius II

The claim

… are they daily created by God and sent into bodies, according to what is written in the gospel, My Father works hitherto, and I work?

— Jerome, Letter 126 (to Marcellinus and Anapsychia), §1, source. The claim weighed here is that John 5:17 supplies scriptural warrant for creationism — that the “work” the Father is still doing includes, and is evidenced by, the making of a new soul for each person conceived.¹

Who advances it

Jerome names the verse as the marker of the creationist branch in his own five-way taxonomy of 410–412, and it is his standing proof: in Against John of Jerusalem he puts it beside the assertion that God is daily making souls, “He, with whom to will is to do, and who never ceases to be a Creator.”² Ninety years later Anastasius II, writing to the bishops of Gaul against traducianists there, reaches for the same verse and the same inference — that the action by Him “who did this in the beginning, has not ceased even today, just as He Himself said: My Father works up to this time, and I work.” From Jerome through that letter the argument becomes the standard Latin scriptural handle on the question, which is why it is worth weighing on its own rather than folding it into either page.³

The evidence for

The verse does assert unceasing divine activity, and against a real opponent. The natural objection to creationism in the fourth century was not from traducianists but from the plain sense of Genesis 2:2: God rested on the seventh day and finished His works, so what is He making now? John 5:17 is precisely the text that blocks that objection, and the fathers read it that way — Augustine sets the two passages side by side as the puzzle to be solved, and answers that God “rested from establishing different kinds of creatures, because he did not now establish any new kinds any more,” while continuing “to operate the management of the things that were then set in place.” So the verse genuinely licenses the general claim that creative or quasi-creative divine action did not stop at the end of the sixth day. If creationism is true, this verse is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to find, and Genesis 2:2 is no longer an obstacle.⁴

And the creationist reading is not a strained one. Nobody has to torture the Greek to get it. “My Father works until now” is open-ended: it names no particular work, so any particular work God is in fact doing falls under it. If God does make souls one at a time, then the making of souls is part of what the verse covers. As a demonstration that creationism is compatible with the text — and, with Genesis 2:2 neutralized, compatible with the scriptural picture of creation as a whole — the appeal succeeds.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. That God's working did not cease with the sabbath of Genesis 2; that this verse says so; and that creationism is therefore not embarrassed by the completion of the six days. Everything in the paragraphs above stands. The trouble begins one step later.

An open-ended premise cannot yield a specific conclusion. “My Father works until now” is a statement about the fact of continuing divine action, not about its content. To get creationism out of it one must supply the content from somewhere else — and once it is supplied from elsewhere, the verse is doing no work in the argument. The inference has the shape: God is still working; therefore the work God is still doing is the manufacture of individual souls. The conclusion is one candidate filling of a blank the text leaves blank.

The commentators who actually expounded the verse fill that blank differently, and unanimously. This is the decisive point, because these are not opponents of creationism; they are simply reading John 5. Asked “how does the Father work, who ceased on the seventh day from all His works?”, Chrysostom answers: “He careth for, He holdeth together all that hath been made,” and points to the sun rising, the moon in her path, the lakes and fountains and rivers and rains, and the course of nature in the seeds. Cyril of Alexandria gives the same content — God “ordereth the creation on the sabbath day also, so that the sun riseth, rain-giving fountains are let loose, and fruits spring from the earth.” Augustine again: the power without which the things established “would immediately have collapsed into nothingness.” The continuing work is providential conservation and governance. None of the three so much as mentions the making of souls, though all three knew the controversy existed.⁶

The immediate argument of the passage is Christological, not cosmological at all. Jesus is answering a charge of sabbath-breaking, and the point of the sentence is the second clause: and I work. As Chrysostom puts it, when defending the disciples He appealed to David, “their fellow-servant,” but when defending Himself “He betook Himself to the Father, showing in two ways His Equality.” John's own next verse says the hearers understood it so, and that this — not any doctrine of ongoing creation — is why they sought to kill Him. A verse whose burden is that the Son shares the Father's sabbath-transcending prerogative is being asked, in this argument, to answer a question it is not addressing.⁷

It does not divide the disputants. This is the fatal defect for a proof-text. A traducianist affirms every word of John 5:17 and of Chrysostom's gloss on it: God upholds all things, governs the seasons, and gives the increase in the seed — including, on his account, the seed from which soul and body come together. Tertullian makes God's ordinance the ground of the whole process, quoting “Be fruitful, and multiply” at the very moment he states the traducianist thesis. Nothing in the verse distinguishes making a soul from without from sustaining the process by which a soul is propagated. A text that both sides can affirm in full settles nothing between them.⁸

What the interpretation would need instead. A text that predicates of God the individuating act — and the creationists did reach for such texts. Zechariah 12:1 (“the Lord… formeth the spirit of man within him”), Ecclesiastes 12:7 (“the spirit shall return unto God who gave it”), Psalm 33:15 (“he fashioneth their hearts alike”), and above all Hebrews 12:9 (“the Father of spirits”), which is Cassian's ground, are all stronger candidates than John 5:17, because each at least concerns the soul or spirit rather than divine activity in general. That they are stronger does not make them sufficient — Augustine considered them and was not persuaded, complaining that he still sought “some plain passages of Scripture bearing on the point” — but it shows that the weakness diagnosed here is specific to this verse, not a verdict on creationism.⁹

Assessment

Weak. Not false, and not foolish: John 5:17 does what Jerome first needs it to do, which is to clear away the objection from God's sabbath rest, and it is fully compatible with the conclusion drawn from it. But a proof-text has to do more than be compatible with the thesis it is cited for. This one names no work in particular; the tradition that expounded it filled in providential conservation, not soul-making; its own argument is about the Son's equality with the Father in a sabbath dispute; and a traducianist can affirm every word of it. It is therefore evidence that creationism is not ruled out, not evidence that it is true. The judgment falls on the proof-text, not on the doctrine: creationism has better grounds elsewhere — Hebrews 12:9, and the metaphysical argument Aquinas would eventually prefer to any verse — and the Latin tradition arguably came to rest on it for those reasons rather than this one.¹⁰

Sources