From Nothing

A Theology of Creation

Ian A. McFarland

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780664238193
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645248
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Too often the doctrine of creation has been made to serve limited or pointless ends, like the well-worn arguments between science and faith over the question of human and cosmic origins. Given this history, some might be tempted to ignore the theology of creation, thinking it has nothing new or substantive to say. They would be wrong.

In this stimulating volume, Ian A. McFarland shows that at the heart of the doctrine of creation lies an essential truth about humanity: we are completely dependent on God. Apart from this realization, little else about us makes sense.

McFarland demonstrates that this radical dependence is a consequence of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Taking up the theological consequences of creation--theodicy and Providence--the author provides a detailed and innovative constructive theology of creation. Drawing on the biblical text, classical sources, and contemporary thought, From Nothing proves that a robust theology of creation is a necessary correlate to the Christian confession of redemption in Jesus Christ.

1

Introduction

In about the year 180 a Christian bishop, about whom we know very little, wrote the following to a pagan about whom we know even less: “God brought everything into being out of what does not exist, so that his greatness might be known and understood through his works.”¹ To contemporary eyes, these words of Theophilus of Antioch may seem thoroughly unexceptional as a piece of Christian teaching, but at the time they represented something new: a doctrine of creation from nothing.

In the preface I recognized that while creation stories are found the world over, they typically describe the world’s origins in terms of the reordering of already-existing material, whether through a process of birth, manipulation, emanation, conflict, or chance rearrangement. As the church moved into its second century, it was not self-evident that Christianity would break from this pattern. In the decades before Theophilus wrote, other Christians had been quite happy to endorse Plato’s description of creation as God’s ordering of unformed matter.² Theophilus, however, did not find this position compatible with what he took to be basic Christian convictions regarding God’s sovereignty: “But how is it great, if God made the universe out of pre-existing material? For a human craftsman, too, when he obtains material from someone, makes from it whatever he wishes. But the power of God is made manifest in this: that he makes whatever he wishes out of what does not exist.”³

If God is to be confessed as Lord without qualification, then everything that is not God must depend on God for its existence without qualification. Otherwise, whatever realities existed independently of God would constitute a limit on God’s ability to realize God’s will in creation, in the same way that the properties of wood constrain the creative possibilities open to the carpenter. Because Theophilus refused to acknowledge any such limits, he concluded that creation cannot be thought of as God reshaping some preexisting material in the manner of a human artisan who, in making a pot from clay or bread from flour, creates from something else. Instead, God brings into being the very stuff of which the universe is made. In short, God creates from nothing.

EXEGETICAL DIFFICULTIES

That the doctrine of creation from nothing (ex nihilo) was something of a novelty in late second-century Christian circles may seem surprising. Much more than the Trinity or later teachings about the person of Christ, modern readers tend to take it for granted that creation from nothing is firmly grounded in Scripture. Certainly that was Theophilus’s opinion:

Therefore, in order that God might be known truly through [God’s] works, and that [we should know that] God made the heaven and the earth and all that is in them by his Word, [Moses] says, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” And then, after speaking of their creation, he explains to us, “The earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the waters.” So Holy Scripture teaches this first of all: how the matter, from which God made and shaped the universe, itself came to be and was brought into being by God.⁴

Unfortunately, things are not so simple. Earlier in the second century, the Christian teacher Justin Martyr had commended Plato’s description of creation as God’s shaping of preexisting matter precisely on the grounds that it agreed with Genesis—and even argued that Plato had taken his account from Moses!⁵ Perhaps still more significantly, although Theophilus’s reading of the Bible’s opening verses has carried the day among Christians for most of the last two millennia, many contemporary biblical scholars are more inclined to side with Justin.

Theophilus followed the grammar of the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint (as have most subsequent English translations) and so took the first verse of Genesis as a separate sentence, describing the opening phase of God’s creative activity: the bringing into being of the basic substance of heaven and earth. The second verse, on this reading, offers a more detailed description of the state of the earth at this point in the creative process: a disordered mass surrounded by darkness. While this understanding of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1–2 evidently commended itself to the Jewish translators who produced the Septuagint (as well as to the Masoretes who punctuated the modern Hebrew text⁶), many contemporary exegetes agree with the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi that the first verse of Genesis is better rendered as a dependent clause of a sentence that includes all of 1:1–3. According to this approach, the more accurate translation is: “When God began to create heaven and earth—the world being then a formless waste, with darkness over the deep and only an awesome wind sweeping over the face of the waters—God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”⁷

This reading implies that in creation God works on some sort of already-existing stuff: a watery deep enveloping a formless world. Though this swirling mass is not personified in the narrative, it is hard to avoid the impression that it is in some sense resistant to God’s will; philologists have called attention to the etymological links between the Hebrew word for “deep,” tĕhôm, and Tiamat, the chaos-dragon from whose corpse the world is constructed in the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish. However envisioned, the idea of a “formless waste” already present to God as the raw material for God’s creative activity is clearly more consistent with Justin’s Platonic picture of creation as the shaping of preexisting matter than with Theophilus’s doctrine of creation from nothing.

While there remain many defenders of the more traditional rendering of Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” [KJV]), the unusual grammar of the Hebrew makes the prospect of a definitive judgment on the verse’s meaning unlikely.⁸ Nor do other passages from the Old Testament provide a clear solution to the ambiguity of the Genesis text. On the one hand, there are passages (e.g., Job 26:12–13; Pss. 74:12–14; 89:10–11; Isa. 51:9) that seem to echo the Enuma Elish, with its story of God engaged in a primordial battle with a sea serpent. On the other, texts like Isaiah 45:7 and Psalm 148:4–6 suggest that even the watery powers of chaos were made by God.⁹ The fact is that the work of creation is simply not the subject of much focused reflection in the Old Testament canon. The biblical writers, whether deploying the dramatic language of combat or the more sober imagery of God speaking the cosmos into existence (see Ps. 33:6–9 alongside Gen. 1), clearly wish to affirm God’s sovereignty over the world, but show no particular interest in the metaphysical question of whether absolutely everything has its sole point of origin in God. It should therefore come as no surprise that when Greek thought began to influence Jewish thinking in the intertestamental period, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon had no problem affirming in good Platonist fashion that God had “created the world out of formless matter” (11:17).

There are, however, a small set of passages that appear at first glance to provide firmer biblical ground for the idea of creation from nothing. The oldest of these is found in another intertestamental book, which reports how a Jewish mother encouraged her son to remain faithful in the face of torture by appealing to God’s power to bring even the dead to life: “I beg 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 [ouk ex ontōn]” (2 Macc. 7:28).¹⁰ In the New Testament Paul draws a similar connection between God’s power to bring the dead to life and the doctrine of creation, praising Abraham’s faith in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist [ta mē onta]” (Rom. 4:17). And finally, the author of Hebrews teaches as a matter of faith that “the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible [to mē ek phainomenōn]” (11:3).

Although these three passages all seem to provide support for a biblical doctrine of creation out of nothing, closer examination suggests that such appearances are misleading. Like most of the references to God’s creative work in the Old Testament, these later texts speak of creation only in passing, as part of a broader appeal to divine power and trustworthiness. None of them can be read as part of an explicit theology of creation. Beyond these contextual considerations, moreover, is the question of just what creation “from things that do not exist/are not visible” means in these passages. The grammar and vocabulary are indeed very close to Theophilus’s claim that God creates “whatever he wishes out of what does not exist [ex ouk ontōn].”¹¹ Absent the kind of explicit contrast that Theophilus draws with the Platonist scheme of creation from preexisting matter, however, such language cannot be taken as evidence of belief in creation from nothing, because external evidence suggests that it is a Greek idiom used for the coming into being of anything new (e.g., children from their parents), without any implication for whether or not this new thing is derived from any preexisting substance.¹² Therefore, although these passages are certainly consistent with later language of creation from nothing, they cannot be taken as evidence that the doctrine is explicitly taught in Scripture. Its emergence in the work of Theophilus and others is a response to a set of theological challenges not confronted by the biblical writers.

THE ORIGINS OF THE DOCTRINE

In his detailed study of the emergence of the idea of creation from nothing in the early church, Gerhard May asserts that the “driving motive which underlies the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is the attempt to do justice to the absolute sovereignty and unlimited freedom of the biblical God.”¹³ As already noted, the various biblical references to God’s creative activity are clearly shaped by the desire to affirm God’s omnipotence, but this affirmation did not take the form of an explicit and unambiguous affirmation of creation from nothing. Moreover, when it is borne in mind that the early church was operating in a religious environment deeply shaped by Greek philosophy, for which the principle that “nothing comes from nothing” had long been axiomatic, it seems anything but obvious that Christians should have wanted to insist that the world was created “from nothing.” What led them to make this move?

The evidence suggests that one factor behind the move toward the doctrine of creation from nothing was the emergence in Christian circles of theologies that called into question the goodness of material reality. These theologies are conventionally called “gnostic.” Although they include a wide range of specific teachings, their common suspicion of the material order made the doctrine of creation a problem, and thus a focus of systematic reflection, in a way that it had not been for Christians up to that point. Quite simply, if God is good but the material world around us is not, then it becomes necessary to explain how this world came to be. The gnostic solution was to develop accounts of creation that put as much distance as possible between God and matter. The material world was viewed either as a kind of cosmic accident not directly caused by God or as the deliberate act of an inferior deity different from the true God. In either case the process of creation reflected a fundamental opposition between God and the world that cleared God of responsibility for the evil of material existence.

It would be convenient if it could be shown that the catholic doctrine of creation from nothing emerged as a straightforward vindication of the goodness of the material order in opposition to these world-denying strains of the early Christian movement.¹⁴ Unfortunately, the history of the idea is more complicated. The example of Justin shows that it was possible to be firmly opposed to Gnosticism without feeling the need to argue for creation from nothing; and while Irenaeus of Lyons did direct his doctrine of creation from nothing against gnostic teaching, he seems to have been influenced by Theophilus, who wrote in opposition to pagan philosophy rather than Christian heresy.¹⁵ But the most serious objection to any attempt to trace the doctrine of creation from nothing directly to Christian opposition to Gnosticism is the fact that the first Christian we know of to defend this teaching explicitly, the Alexandrian theologian Basilides, was himself a gnostic.

The details of Basilides’ thought are difficult to ascertain with certainty since his works have survived only as quoted or explained by catholic writers who opposed him. It seems clear, however, that Basilides, writing half a century before Theophilus, developed an original cosmology that was different from that of gnostic writers who either downplayed or denied God’s responsibility for bringing the material world into being.¹⁶ The distinctiveness ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Exitus
• Part 2: Reditus
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index