Theologies of Creation

Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals

Thomas Jay Oord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415712149
• eBook ISBN: 9781134659562
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Humans have long wondered about the origin of the universe. And such questions are especially alive today as physicists offer metaphysical theories to account for the emergence of creation. Theists have attributed the universe's origin to divine activity, and many have said God created something from absolute nothingness. The venerable doctrine of creatio ex nihilo especially emphasizes God's initial creating activity. Some contributors to this book explore new reasons creatio ex nihilo should continue to be embraced today. But other contributors question the viability of creation from nothing and offer alternative initial creation options in its place. These new alternatives explore a variety of options in light of recent scientific work, new biblical scholarship, and both new and old theological traditions.

1
Myth and Modern Physics

On the Power of Nothing

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

In the Beginning

Traditionally, creation stories have occupied the realm of what we tend to call “religion.” “In the beginning,” the stories will tell us, “there was a vast, unbroken egg,” or an androgynous giant, or an ancient god and goddess, or an undifferentiated material mass. Religious-studies scholars tend to call this part of the story the “primordial scene”: a picture of the world before the world, the stuff out of which all that is is about to emerge. As the story continues, something then happens to this primordial stuff: The egg breaks; the giant is dismembered; the parents fight, reproduce, or both; the material is stirred up, shaped, or breathed on by a divine agent—and out of this moment of rupture, a set of oppositions begins to emerge. Day and night, male and female, earth and sky, here and there, land and sea, us and them. These oppositions give structure to the world-in-formation; they make order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos.

With the world thus established, the story will go on to prescribe a set of values and behaviors for the community: Humans should rule over (or care for) the earth, this class should rule over that class, the gods like us better than them, and we should never (or always) eat this plant, sacrifice that way, or gather on this day. In short, a creation story carries remarkable social power. It says that things must be this way because they have been this way since the dawn of time—that the very order of the universe depends upon our adhering to a particular social configuration. We might think here of that popular objection to same-sex relationships: “God made Adam and Eve; not Adam and Steve.” In the logic of this retort, the pairing of two men or two women is legally and socially inadmissible because it is (allegedly) cosmically inadmissible. The fabric of the cosmos is stitched heterosexually. And so a creation story, or “cosmogony” (from the Greek words kosmos and genesis), is, among other things, a way of reinforcing particular social arrangements and behaviors—usually those that benefit the group telling the story.

Because cosmogony had always been the business of religion (or in other idioms, culture, philosophy, or mythology), modern science spent its first few centuries staying as far away from creation stories as possible. From the time of Copernicus through the first half of Einstein’s life, astronomers and physicists simply assumed that the universe was eternal—that there was no need for anyone or anything to set it in motion because it had always existed. So when a young physicist and priest named Georges Lemaître suggested to Einstein that the universe might have begun—that the whole thing, in fact, might have burst forth once upon a time from a single point—Einstein is said to have replied, “No, not that; that sounds too much like Creation.”¹ In the decades that followed, comparably troubled physicists tried to find alternative models that might save modern cosmology from positing a beginning. But with the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the mid-1960s, the anti-cosmogonists relented, and “the big bang hypothesis” became the unrivaled creation myth of the late twentieth century.²

It may seem strange to call the big bang hypothesis a myth. We modern secularists tend to think of this story as the first properly scientific account of the birth of the cosmos—the account, in fact, that finally delivered cosmogony from the murky realms of religion and established it as truth. For scholars of religion, however, to call a story “myth” is not to call it untrue; it is to mark the story as foundational for a particular community, insofar as it encodes and reflects the values and norms of that community. In this sense, the big bang is “our” creation myth: We learned it as children from communal leaders, it establishes a class of people (namely scientists) as having privileged access to a universal truth, and it reflects collective values. These include observability, cosmic autonomy, and truth itself—after all, this is the story of the way things are.

The big bang does not, therefore, occupy a completely different realm from “religious” cosmogonies. If it did, it would not have caused Einstein and his colleagues such alarm when it was first posited. Not only does the big bang function as a myth, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to a particular myth—that is, the Abrahamic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which first appeared in Christian thought and was later incorporated into Jewish and Muslim theologies.³ Once upon a time, the big bang hypothesis seems to tell us, the whole universe burst forth in a flash of light, from nothing.

Well, maybe not “nothing.” Lemaître himself thought the cosmic starting-point was something more like a hyperdense nugget of space-time (which he called the Primeval Atom), and the decades that followed witnessed intense debates over the somethingness or nothingness of the big bang’s primordial scene. For orthodox theologians, however, the matter was settled; as early as 1951, Pope Pius XII exclaimed that “modern science” had confirmed the church’s doctrine of a light-filled creation from nothing.⁴ Even physicists conceded the remarkable similarities of the two stories. One particularly colorful account comes from the astronomer Robert Jastrow, who describes the frustration and incomprehension physicists experienced when, having struggled for years to climb the final mountain of scientific mystery, they reached the peak only “to be greeted by a band of theologians who had been there for centuries.”⁵ The big bang, Jastrow concedes, was more or less the old “biblical” story with enhanced data.

Now one way to make sense of this remarkable confluence would be to say that the big bang looks like the ex nihilo because they are both true. This might well be the case, but then we would be left without much more to say. In particular, we would not be inclined to investigate how these stories have been produced or why they have been so compelling. Another approach to this confluence, then, would be to bracket both stories’ truth-claims and consider that their resemblance might be the result of their having emerged from common metaphoric-narrative stock. Along this strategy, it would be important to come to terms with the conditions that produced the ex nihilo, and to consider how similar arrangements of power might be replaying themselves in modern cosmology.

Troubling the Waters

Whenever I teach the book of Genesis, I ask my students what the book’s first character creates the world out of. “Nothing,” they dutifully reply. They say this even if they have had no religious upbringing and even if we have just read the Bible’s opening lines aloud in class. These lines say that in the beginning, the spirit of God was breathing over dark, deep, unformed waters, which Genesis 1:2 calls tehom. God, breath, and deep compose the Bible’s primordial scene. Yet my students will consistently overwrite the story, convinced that the “correct” primordial scene must be nothing. What is it about nothing that seems to override everything else?

Contemporary theologians—many of whom have contributed essays to this volume—tend to be deeply divided on the issue of ex nihilo. Some of them uphold it as the only consistent doctrine of creation, whereas others criticize it as misinformed and ethically dangerous. Remarkably, however, nearly all of these scholars agree that ex nihilo isn’t exactly “in the Bible.” Some supporters of the doctrine go to great lengths to point out biblical hints toward it, but others simply admit that it took early Christian theologians a few centuries to figure out the truth, with the help of the Holy Spirit. Critics of ex nihilo counter that far from being a divine revelation, the doctrine is the product of a series of power plays among early church communities vying for dominance over Christian teachings, practice, and posterity.

In Face of the Deep, Catherine Keller offers an unparalleled account of these ecclesiastical power plays. She grounds the saga of the ex nihilo doctrine in the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian myth familiar to the authors of the later biblical narrative.⁶ The story opens with Tiamat and Apsu, “salt water” and “sweet water,” dwelling eternally within one another. The couple produces children and grandchildren, all of whom live peacefully within the precosmic parental waters. Then one day (here comes the rupture), the grandkids are making too much noise, Apsu gets cranky, and a series of plots and counterplots leave Apsu dead. Enraged, Tiamat breeds an army of sea monsters to destroy the offspring who murdered her husband; meanwhile, the grandchildren prepare for war. Their best hope in the face of Tiamat’s oceanic throng seems to be one of their children, Marduk, a radiant boy with four eyes and four ears who vows to annihilate Tiamat, along with her fearsome cadre of dragons, monster-serpents, and sea-hags.

Calling the elements to his side, Marduk wages a lengthy battle against his great-grandmother, eventually sending a torrent of “evil wind” down her throat:

As the fierce winds charged her belly, her body was distended and her mouth was wide open. [Marduk] released the arrow, it cut through [Tiamat’s] insides, splitting the heart. Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life. He cast down her carcass to stand upon it…. With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull.⁷

This type of cosmogony is known as theomachy: creation by divine battle. Marduk, whom the narrative begins to call “the Lord” after his conquest of Tiamat, creates the world by destroying a primal chaos-monster, who happens to be the matriarch of all the gods and goddesses. Having “extinguished” Tiamat (and crushing her skull for good measure), Marduk goes on to split her body laterally, installing half of her “as sky” and the other half as earth and sea.

Biblical scholars have long pointed out the resonance between Marduk’s division of Tiamat and God’s separating “the waters from the waters” in Genesis 1:6. And, as Keller reminds us, the name “Tiamat” is etymologically related to the Hebrew word tehom, the “deep” over which God breathes in Genesis 1:2. Keller’s suggestion is that just as the Enuma Elish establishes the lordship of Marduk (and his lineage) by destroying the primal waters of Tiamat, the early church theologians established the supremacy of God (and his representatives) by annihilating tehom, replacing the “deep” of Genesis 1:2 with the nihil of orthodox creation theology. Especially considering that tehom is a feminine noun, both of these efforts establish the order of the universe and the power of a male creator-God upon the destruction of a feminized chaos.

As a number of this volume’s contributors show, the specific formulation of creatio ex nihilo emerged as the church theologians of the second and third centuries sought to stamp out rival teachings among rival Christian communities in order to locate themselves as the keepers of orthodoxy (“right doctrine”). Early Christians branded as “heretical” are often grouped under the rubric of “Gnosticism,” a highly contested term that has traditionally served more as a form of name-calling than as a positive term of self-identification. So the anti-Gnostic treatises of the church theologians reveal more to us about the authors themselves than about the people they charge with heresy. Chief among the teachings that were particularly troubling to the early church theologians were “Gnostic” cosmogonies. While these stories vary from text to text, most figure the God of Genesis 1 as an inferior, often confused, and occasionally evil subdeity, who thinks he is alone in the universe. From time to time his mother, Sophia, calls down from her higher heaven to remind her son where he came from, but he never quite understands.⁸ Sophia is the source of the material out of which her s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Contributors
• Creatio ex Nihilo: An Introduction
• 1 Myth and Modern Physics: On the Power of Nothing
• 2 Creation ex Nihilo and Intensifying the Vulnerability of God
• 3 “Nothingsomething” on My Mind: Creatio ex Nihilo or ex Profundis?
• 4 The Fecundity of Nothing: A Proposal of Creatio ex Potentia in Conversation with Quantum Cosmologies
• 5 Creation out of Nothing Remodeled
• 6 Creatio a Materia ex Christi
• 7 Creatio ex Deo: Incarnation, Spirituality, Creation
• 8 Creatio ex Nihilo: It’s Not about Nothing
• 9 Creatio ex Amore!
• 10 God Always Creates out of Creation in Love: Creatio ex Creatione a Natura Amoris
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author Index