Engaging the Doctrine of Creation

Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator

Matthew Levering

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781540966261
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493410286
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Distinguished scholar Matthew Levering examines the doctrine of creation and its contemporary theological implications, critically engaging with classical and modern views in dialogue with Orthodox and Reformed interlocutors, among others. Moving from the Trinity to Christology, Levering takes up a number of themes pertaining to the doctrine of creation and focuses on how creation impacts our understandings of both the immanent and the economic Trinity. He also engages newer trends such as ecological theology.

One
Divine Ideas

And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

Genesis 1:3

Few theologians today discuss the “divine ideas.”1 Yet Psalm 139 underscores that God knows everything about each human being even before he or she comes to be. The psalmist says of God, “Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Ps. 139:16). The psalmist presents God’s “thoughts” as innumerable: “How precious to me are thy thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand” (Ps. 139:17–18).2 Similarly, Job 28:24 teaches that God alone has wisdom, “for he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens.” Consider, too, Jeremiah 1:5, where God commissions Jeremiah as a prophet by telling him that this mission has been given to Jeremiah before he was even conceived in the womb: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus testifies to the extent of God’s knowledge of creatures: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:29–30).3 According to Scripture, then, God knows each and every particular thing in history, and God knows each thing even if it has not yet taken place in history. Indeed, God could not create things ex nihilo if he did not intimately know all that he could create.4 This knowledge, since God is simple, must be profoundly personal. God’s act of creation, of course, is an expression of sheer love, since “God is love” (1 John 4:16).

When reflecting upon the question of why God created, Thomas Aquinas answers that there is no other reason than the generous goodness of God. He states that “as God by one act understands all things in his essence, so by one act he wills all things in his goodness.”5 All things come forth from God’s wisdom and will, without thereby being made of divine being, as Aquinas observes with regard to creation ex nihilo: “If the emanation of the whole universal being [creation] be considered, it is impossible that any being should be presupposed before this emanation. For nothing is the same as no being.”6

In recent discussions of the doctrine of creation, many of which focus upon creation ex nihilo, God’s will and goodness are highlighted. By comparision, God’s wisdom and the divine ideas are generally either neglected or (with respect to the doctrine of the divine ideas) critiqued. In this chapter, then, I focus upon the divine ideas, always in light of the infinite divine love and goodness. The key reason for insisting upon the significance of the divine ideas in the act of creation ex nihilo has been expressed by John Hughes, who remarks that “the divine ideas, understood according to a Trinitarian logic, enabled Christian theologians to articulate creation ex nihilo in terms that avoided both necessary emanation and arbitrary choice.”7

The doctrine of the divine ideas is not easily defended today. In the mid-twentieth century, Marie-Dominique Chenu deemed the doctrine of the divine ideas to be “the real spiritual and scientific home of theology,” because of the way the doctrine both distinguishes and unites creatures and God, and because of its apprehension of creatures in light of their teleological perfection.8 But eminent contemporaries of Chenu such as Étienne Gilson, A. D. Sertillanges, and Robert Henle considered the doctrine of divine ideas to be a misleading holdover from Augustinian (Neoplatonic) theology that Aquinas should have discarded.9 More recently, the two pages of entries on the topic of “God” in the index of the Catechism of the Catholic Church contain no mention of “divine ideas” or “ideas,” showing the general neglect into which this doctrine has fallen.

The key problem is that unlike the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the doctrine of the divine ideas can seem to threaten the freedom of God’s act of creation, by postulating that God merely makes actual an eternal pattern. In a particularly influential way, the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky has argued that the Latin West’s doctrine of divine ideas turns creation into an ontological fall, undermines the significance of history, and impinges upon God’s freedom in the act of creation. Lossky proposes that formulating the divine ideas in terms of the divine energies solves the problems that, in his view, arise from Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’s equation of the divine ideas with the unchanging divine essence.10

In what follows, therefore, I first examine the relative disrepair into which the doctrine of the divine ideas has fallen in recent theologies of creation ex nihilo. With this background in place, I set forth Lossky’s concerns about Aquinas’s doctrine of divine ideas and explore the solution that Lossky offers through the distinction between the divine essence and energies. In light of Lossky’s critique, I investigate Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine ideas, with particular attention to his understanding of eternity and time. At issue is whether his doctrine of divine ideas has the Platonic problems that Lossky identifies, and thereby fails to do justice to the scriptural witness to the free creator of history—in which case it would make sense to defend creation ex nihilo by leaving behind the category of “divine ideas” or, better, by adopting Lossky’s view of them. At stake in this chapter is how we can best affirm, with Vivian Boland, that “each single thing is, in some way, a trace of God” and that “the being and therefore the truth of this world and its history cannot be understood without reference to the wise love of God which originates and sustains it.”11

Creation ex Nihilo and the Divine Ideas

In his influential Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, Gerhard May argues that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is entirely absent from Scripture. For May, one cannot exegetically say that creation is “from nothing” even if the biblical text teaches clearly that “the world came into existence through the sovereign creative act of God, and that it previously was not there.”12 Rather, according to May, the biblical text must explicitly deny that God formed the world “out of eternal matter,” or else the presence of an affirmation of creation ex nihilo cannot be assumed.13 In his study, May directs attention to four main biblical passages that theologians have long used to defend the biblical foundations of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. The first is Genesis 1:1–2: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 can be connected in different ways, due to ambiguities in the Hebrew. For the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, much depends on precisely how the second verse relates to the first. In his commentary on Genesis, Bill Arnold evaluates the evidence and finds that, much as May suggests, “Genesis 1 neither precludes nor defends the possibility” of creation ex nihilo.14 Like Claus Westermann, however, Arnold considers that the concept of creation ex nihilo “is not false to the intent of Genesis 1. Indeed, had we an opportunity to pose the question to the author of this text, we may assume with Westermann . . . that he would ‘certainly have decided in favor of creatio ex nihilo.’”15

The second regularly cited biblical passage is 2 Maccabees 7:28, which belongs to the Catholic and Orthodox canons of Scripture. In 2 Maccabees 7, we read of a mother of seven sons, six of whom have already been executed by Antiochus because of their refusal to renounce the Torah. Urging her last surviving son not to give in to Antiochus’s requirement that he commit idolatry, she reminds him that God gives existence. If we suffer and die now for God, God will give us “everflowing life under God’s covenant” (2 Macc. 7:36). In the relevant passage, she tells her son, “I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed [or: God made them out of things that did not exist]” (2 Macc. 7:28).16 In May’s view, shared by Jonathan Goldstein and other exegetes, this verse does not rule out an eternal substrate of unformed matter, since, given the philosophical background to 2 Maccabees, unformed matter can be thought of as not existing.

The third biblical passage comes from Romans. In the context of a discussion of Abraham’s faith, in light of faith in the resurrection of the dead, Paul states that Abraham trusted in the promise of the God who “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). May considers this verse to have the same limitations as 2 Maccabees 7:28. By contrast, Luke Timothy Johnson, among others, argues that Paul is claiming that God is “the source and sustainer of being itself.”17

The fourth and final commonly cited biblical verse is Hebrews 11:3: “By fai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Divine Ideas
• 2. Divine Simplicity
• 3. Creatures
• 4. Image of God
• 5. Be Fruitful and Multiply
• 6. Original Sin
• 7. Atonement
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover