Thunder and lightning

Use in the book

The weather chapter begins from acknowledged scriptural language: God thunders, sends lightning, brings clouds, and causes rain. The author complains that the learned nevertheless assign the greater part to secondary causes and nature without being able to explain what those causes or nature actually are. The criticism concerns an inadequately defined agent and an excessive transfer of power from God.

Job 38 then supplies the imagery of allotted downpour and the path of thunder and lightning. Psalms 18 and 148 make vapour, fire, snow, hail, and storm winds acts or servants fulfilling God’s Word. The author argues that Scripture gives no particular subordinate creative command placing these events under an autonomous natural ruler. The distinction from ordinary propagation under particular commands is central.

This reserved government has an ethical consequence. If true storms and weather are God’s wondrous works, they cannot be created by the Devil or witches. The thunder-and-lightning discussion therefore prepares the explicit rejection of demonic weather power that follows. It is not an isolated physical digression.

The account is qualified by the author’s preservation of elemental operations through the universal Word and stellar concordance. He does not deny every process within created nature. Rather, he distinguishes an asserted efficient cause from a condition, a concordance, or an operation grounded in God’s Word. The reader should not turn his polemic against excessive secondary causation into a blanket refusal of all differentiated relations.⁴⁹

Places to read

1. Part II · II.085.2Lightning, rain, and the common watery origin of the elements.
2. Part II · II.094.2The criticism of excessive attribution to secondary causes.
3. Part II · II.099.1; II.100.12Job and the Psalms on divine government and the fulfilment of the Word.
4. Part II · II.100.2; II.103.12The consequence for witchcraft and the qualification preserving elemental operation.

Translation

Blitz is “lightning,” Donner “thunder.” Causæ secundæ remains “secondary causes,” a technical causal category rather than a vague synonym for circumstances.

“Blessed rain” preserves the devotional adjective in the cited elemental comparison. It does not mean rainwater has received the particular blessing and command that the book elsewhere expressly denies it.

Connections

Elements and Sulphur philosophical explain the fire-water argument. Efficient cause and Blessing and command explain the weather argument.

Weather and witchcraft develops the denial of demonic power. Comets and Earthquakes apply neighbouring causal judgments to other phenomena gathered under meteors.

Cautions

Do not substitute a modern account of electricity for the author’s claimed common elemental origin.

A devotional adjective for rain is not the technical particular blessing discussed in the creation argument.

Donner / Blitz / und Regen

Donner / Blitz / und Regen — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.094.2.

causas secundas

causas secundas — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.094.2.

dem Blitz und dem Regen einen Ursprung

dem Blitz und dem Regen einen Ursprung — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.085.2.