Creation

Start with the admission, because a course that hides it has already taught you the wrong habit. Genesis 1:1 does not unambiguously state creation out of nothing. It is the verse the doctrine is named for and the verse most often cited for it, and taken by itself it will not carry the weight. The honest sequence is to say that first, then to show where the weight is actually carried, which is what the rest of this section and the next one do.

The ambiguity is grammatical and it is old. The first word of the Hebrew, bereshit, is the noun for beginning with a prefixed preposition, and it lacks the definite article. Hebrew nouns in the construct state also lack the article, which opens a second construal: instead of an independent sentence, 'In the beginning God created', the phrase can be a temporal clause, 'When God began to create'. On that reading verse 2 is a circumstantial parenthesis describing the state of things, and the main clause arrives at verse 3, where God says let there be light. This is not a modern skeptical invention. Rashi, the eleventh-century Jewish commentator whose work sits in the margin of nearly every traditional Hebrew Bible, argued for the dependent construal on grammatical grounds and said explicitly that the verse is not teaching the order in which things were made. The New Jewish Publication Society version renders it as a temporal clause of that kind. The New Revised Standard Version renders the verse in its text as a temporal clause describing when God created the heavens and the earth, with the independent reading in a footnote. Other translations go the other way and footnote the alternative. A word about the Bible this course quotes: the BSB prints the independent sentence and carries no footnote at Genesis 1:1 at all, so a student reading only the BSB is not told there is a question. That is a translator's choice, and a defensible one, since the independent reading is the traditional one. But it means the question has to be raised here. Open Genesis 1:1 on Bible Hub or Bible Gateway, both free, set several translations side by side, and see which ones signal the alternative in a footnote and which do not. Most readers have never noticed that the translators disagree.

There is a third possibility that cuts across both, and serious commentators hold it: that verse 1 is a summary heading for the whole account, a title over the chapter, with the narration of events beginning at verse 2 or 3. That reading is compatible with either grammar. Bruce Waltke has argued for a version of it; Gordon Wenham's Genesis commentary in the Word series and Claus Westermann's large German commentary survey the options and come down differently from each other. Umberto Cassuto defended the traditional independent clause on grammatical grounds against the temporal construal, so there is no simple line here between traditional and critical readers.

Now notice what none of the three construals does. None of them asserts that matter existed before God acted. The temporal reading raises the question of where the unformed earth, the deep and the darkness of verse 2 came from; it does not answer that question, and it certainly does not say that they were uncreated. Equally, the independent reading does not by itself exclude the possibility that 'created the heavens and the earth' is a summary of the organising work that follows. This is a case where a great deal of confident preaching runs well ahead of the evidence in both directions. Someone who tells you Genesis 1:1 proves creation out of nothing is overclaiming. Someone who tells you the verse teaches that God shaped pre-existing chaos is overclaiming in the other direction, and Hebrews will have something to say to him in a moment.

There is one further piece of data worth having before we move on. The chapter is arranged around a problem it states in verse 2: the earth is tohu wavohu, formless and void, and dark, and watery. Days one to three supply form by separating light from darkness, waters above from waters below, and sea from dry land. Days four to six fill what has been formed, with lights, with fish and birds, and with animals and humanity. Form answers formless, filling answers void, and the structure is too neat to be accidental. Whatever you conclude about verse 1, the chapter itself is manifestly interested in the ordering of the world, and a doctrine of origins built only from Genesis 1 will be a doctrine about ordering. That is precisely why the church did not build it only from Genesis 1.

The doctrine rests on a convergence, not a proof text, and the convergence is strong. Hebrews 11:3 is the closest thing to an explicit statement: 'By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.' Read that sentence carefully and notice both what it gives and what a determined critic can still ask. One note on the BSB's wording: the Greek behind 'command' is rhema, which means 'word' or 'utterance', and many translations read 'by the word of God'. The BSB's 'command' is a reasonable rendering, and the point the lesson draws, a denial that the visible world was assembled from visible stock, stands in either wording. It gives you a denial that the visible world was assembled from visible stock. The critic can reply that it says nothing about invisible stock, which is a fair grammatical point and was made in antiquity by readers who believed in pre-existent formless matter. Hold both. This is the strongest single text and it is not by itself airtight.

Around it sit others. Romans 4:17 describes the God Abraham believed as the one 'the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not yet exist'. John 1:3 closes every loophole it can reach: 'Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.' Psalm 33:6 and 33:9 make the word the instrument and the whole mechanism: 'By the word of the LORD the heavens were made', and 'For He spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm.' Revelation 4:11 grounds existence itself in the divine will: 'You created all things; by Your will they exist and were created.' Acts 17:25 denies that God is 'served by human hands, as if He needed anything'. Colossians 1:16 extends the scope past the visible world to 'thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities'. Put the list together and the picture is of a God who is the sole and sufficient origin of absolutely everything other than himself, who uses no raw material and no assistant, and who is under no necessity. That is what creatio ex nihilo means. It is an inference, it is a good one, and calling it an inference is not a concession that weakens it.

A text from the Apocrypha belongs here, and how much it is worth depends on where you stand, which is exactly the sort of thing this course tells you rather than hides. 2 Maccabees 7:28 has a mother urging her son under torture to look at heaven and earth and everything in them that God did not make them out of things that existed. For Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox readers this is scripture and the doctrine has a canonical statement. For Protestant readers it is an important second-century BC Jewish witness to how the God of Israel was understood before the church began, which is still evidence of real value. The Greek phrase is ouk ex onton, and a technical caution is in order: some scholars argue that in its own context the phrase carries the looser sense of making out of what was unformed rather than the strict philosophical sense, so the verse is pressed by both sides. The Hermeneutics track taught you to check the footnote before you build on a phrase, and this is a place to do it.

Then the history, because it tells you what the doctrine was for. In the second century the church met a cultured alternative. Middle Platonism held that a divine craftsman shaped the world out of pre-existent formless matter, which is the picture in Plato's Timaeus. Various gnostic teachers went further, making matter itself the product of a fall or a blunder inside the divine realm. Against both, Theophilus of Antioch, in his work addressed to Autolycus around 180, argued that a God who merely arranges existing material is no greater than a human craftsman, and that God's uniqueness requires that he brought the material itself into being. Irenaeus argued the same in Against Heresies, and Tertullian devoted a treatise to it against the teacher Hermogenes, who held that matter was eternal. Gerhard May's study Creatio ex Nihilo, published in German in 1978 and in English in 1994, argues that the doctrine in its strict philosophical form was formulated in this second-century controversy rather than simply read off the Old Testament, and that is a serious historical thesis rather than an attack. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig replied at length in Creation out of Nothing in 2004, arguing that the biblical and Second Temple Jewish material already commits its writers to the substance of the doctrine and that May underrates it. A reader can accept May's history and still hold the doctrine, on the ground that the church often states explicitly, under pressure, what it had believed implicitly all along. That is an argument, and it needs making rather than assuming.

The church then said it formally, and said it in a way that binds most of the world's Christians. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, in the constitution known from its first word as Firmiter, confessed one God 'who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures, that is to say angelic and earthly'. The First Vatican Council in 1870, in Dei Filius, repeated it and attached canons condemning the view that the world emanated from the divine substance and the view that God and the world are one. On the Protestant side the Westminster Confession 4.1 says that it pleased God 'to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good'. The Orthodox tradition holds the same, characteristically framed through the distinction between God's unknowable essence and his energies: the world is made by the energies and is genuinely other than God, never an extension of his being. Four communions, four idioms, one claim.

Module 2 taught you aseity, the doctrine that God has his being from himself and depends on nothing. Creation is where aseity becomes load-bearing. If God needed the world, then the world is part of what makes God God, and God is no longer a se. Paul says the opposite in the plainest terms at Athens: God 'does not live in temples made by human hands', nor is He 'served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else' (Acts 17:24-25). Job 41:11 and Romans 11:35 press the same point as a question nobody can answer: who has first given to God, that God should repay him? Creation adds nothing to God. If it did, it would not be creation.

So why is there anything? The tradition's answer is short and it is a refusal as much as an answer: because God willed it, and his willing it was free. Revelation 4:11 says that by His will they exist and were created. The Latin schoolmen put it as a distinction: God's will is necessary with respect to himself, since he cannot fail to love his own goodness, and free with respect to everything else. Aquinas argues this directly in the Summa Theologiae, holding that God wills himself of necessity and wills other things only as ordered to himself, and therefore not of necessity. Eastern writers make the same point with a different instrument. Maximus the Confessor and, in the fourteenth century, Gregory Palamas, distinguish God's essence from his energies and from his will, so that generation, which is how the Son is from the Father, is by nature, while creation, which is how the world is from God, is by will. Those are two different relations and the whole doctrine turns on not confusing them.

There is a real pressure point here and it is worth feeling. The old maxim that goodness is by nature self-diffusing, bonum diffusivum sui, came into Christian theology from Dionysius the Areopagite and was used by Bonaventure and others to explain why a good God creates. Press it hard and it threatens to make creation necessary: if goodness must overflow, then God must create, and the freedom is gone. Aquinas uses the maxim but qualifies it so that the self-diffusion is the free act of a will, not an automatic outflow. Jonathan Edwards, in his Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, argues that God creates for the communication of his own fullness and the display of his glory, and his critics have asked whether this makes God's glory dependent on an audience. Edwards's defenders answer that the fullness is already complete in the Trinity and its communication adds nothing to it. You should notice that the same question keeps returning in different vocabularies, and that no account of why God created has ever satisfied everybody. A teacher who says confidently that God was lonely has left orthodox ground; a teacher who says that God's motive is simply unknowable has said something safe and has also stopped short of what Ephesians 1:5-6 and Revelation 4:11 are willing to say.

What follows from freedom is not abstract. If the world is freely made, it is a gift, and the right response to a gift is thanks rather than analysis. If it is freely made, it is genuinely other than God, so a tree is a real tree and not a piece of God in disguise, and you can love it without worshipping it. If it is freely made, then God could have not made it, which means that your own existence is not an entailment of anything but a decision. Augustine's line in the Confessions that God made us for himself and our heart is restless until it rests in him is the pastoral form of this doctrine, and it only works if the making was free.

The Old Testament says God created. The New Testament, without retracting a word of that, says something more specific, and it says it in three independent places with no sign of controversy, which suggests it was already common property in the churches. John 1:3: 'Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.' Colossians 1:16: 'For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible', and then 'All things were created through Him and for Him', with verse 17 adding that 'in Him all things hold together'. Hebrews 1:2 says God has spoken by his Son, 'whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe', and 1:3 that the Son is 'upholding all things by His powerful word'. 1 Corinthians 8:6 puts the Shema itself into a Trinitarian shape: one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist.

The Spirit is there too, though the texts are fewer and one of them is disputed. Genesis 1:2 says the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters, and you should know that the Hebrew ruach elohim can be rendered 'a mighty wind' and is so rendered by some translations, which is why this verse cannot be made to do heavy lifting alone. The BSB capitalises Spirit and has no footnote offering the wind reading, so it takes the personal-Spirit side without saying so. The Hebrew has no capitals, and ruach can mean wind, breath or spirit. The other reading is a serious one, since elohim can serve as an intensifier, and it is why the verse is held lightly here. Psalm 104:30 is less ambiguous: 'When You send Your Spirit, they are created, and You renew the face of the earth.' Job 33:4 has the Spirit of God making the speaker. Irenaeus gave the church the image that stuck, in Against Heresies: the Father makes all things by his two hands, the Son and the Spirit. It is a picture rather than an argument, and it has the advantage of refusing to make either hand an instrument external to God.

Two controls from module 2 apply here and you should apply them. First, the works of the Trinity outside God are undivided: the Father does not do one part of creating while the Son does another, because the three share one will and one power. Second, appropriation: scripture and the tradition nevertheless assign the one act to the persons in a pattern that reflects how they are eternally related. The Father is the source from whom, the Son is the one through whom, the Spirit is the one in whom the work is brought to completion, which is why the prepositions in 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Romans 11:36 are not interchangeable. The Nicene Creed keeps both rules at once: the Father is maker of heaven and earth, and the Son is the one 'through whom all things were made', which the council chose precisely because the Greek preposition dia states a real distinction of manner without demoting the Son to a creature.

That last point is where the doctrine stopped being decorative. Arius could grant that the Son made the world; his claim was that the Son was himself the first and highest thing made, God's instrument for the rest. Against that, the argument from creation runs: John 1:3 says that without him nothing was made that has been made, so he stands on the maker's side of the line, not the creature's side. If everything that is not God is made through the Son, then the Son is not among the things that are made. Athanasius pressed exactly this, and it is worth seeing that the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the Trinity are load-bearing walls in the same building. Pull out creation from nothing and the argument for the Son's deity loses a structural member, because there is no longer a clean line between maker and made for him to stand on the right side of.

Six times in Genesis 1 God looks at what he has made and the text says it was good, and at the end of the sixth day the verdict is upgraded: 'And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.' Paul says the same thing as a rule for church life in 1 Timothy 4:4, against teachers who forbade marriage and certain foods: 'For every creation of God is good, and nothing that is received with thanksgiving should be rejected.' The claim is not that the world is currently undamaged. It is that the material world is not the damage. Matter is not the problem; sin is, and sin is a spiritual condition with material effects, not a consequence of having a body.

This mattered enormously against the gnostic alternatives, and it is worth stating what those actually were rather than using the word as an insult. The systems grouped under that name in the second century typically held that the visible world was made by a lesser and often ignorant power, a demiurge, frequently identified with the God of the Old Testament, while the true and unknown God was beyond him. Salvation, on these accounts, was the escape of a divine spark from the body and the material order by means of secret knowledge, gnosis. Marcion, who is a related but distinct case, kept the Old Testament creator as a real but inferior just god and set the good and previously unknown Father of Jesus against him, and cut his canon down accordingly. Valentinus produced an elaborate scheme in which the material world arises from a disorder within the divine fullness. Irenaeus wrote five books against these systems and Tertullian wrote against Marcion, and the counter-argument in every case runs through creation: one God made everything, deliberately, and called it good, so the body is not a prison and the God of Israel is not a blunderer.

Two Christian facts are unintelligible without this. The incarnation: the Word became flesh, and stayed flesh, and John writes his letter against people who will not say that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. And the resurrection of the body, which the creeds confess and 1 Corinthians 15 argues at length, and which is not the survival of a soul but the redemption of a body. Colossians 1:20 has God reconciling to himself all things through Christ, whether things on earth or things in heaven. If matter were the problem, the solution would be escape, and the New Testament's solution is resurrection. Notice how much of Christian practice follows: sacraments that use water, bread and wine; a sexual ethic that takes bodies seriously rather than treating them as irrelevant; and a hope that includes the earth rather than evacuating it.

Now the four exclusions, each with its ancient form and its modern one, because a doctrine is often clearest in what it denies. First, eternal matter. Plato's Timaeus has the craftsman shaping a chaos he did not make; Aristotle held the cosmos eternal; Hermogenes argued it to Tertullian. The modern form is not usually a theory of matter but a stopping point: the claim that the universe, or the multiverse, or the quantum vacuum, or the laws themselves simply exist and need no further account. That is a genuine philosophical option and it is honestly held. What the Christian doctrine says is that whatever exists without being made is God, and that if you are going to terminate the series somewhere, the question is what sort of thing can be its own explanation.

Second, emanation. Plotinus, in the third century, described reality as flowing out from the One by necessity in descending levels, the way light comes off a source without the source deciding anything. The picture is attractive because it explains the world's relation to God without arbitrariness, and it is incompatible with creation because it makes the world necessary and makes it, at the top end, continuous with the divine being. Its modern descendants turn up wherever the world is described as God's self-expression in a way that leaves God no option. Third, pantheism: God and the world are one thing, stated with great rigour by Spinoza in the Ethics and condemned by name at Vatican I. Its popular modern form is the claim that everything is divine and the sense of self is the illusion. Here a distinction has to be made carefully rather than swung as a club: panentheism, the view that the world is in God while God exceeds it, is not the same as pantheism, and it is held by serious Christian theologians. Some versions of it stay within creation out of nothing and some do not, and which it is depends on whether the world is still freely made and genuinely other. The question to ask any such proposal is simple: could God have not created?

Fourth, dualism: two ultimate principles, one good and one evil, matched against each other from the start. Manichaeism taught this and Augustine belonged to it for nine years before he came to hold that evil has no substance of its own, which is the argument module 3 will come back to in the last lesson. Creation out of nothing kills dualism at the root, because if there is only one uncreated being, evil cannot be a rival eternal power; it can only be a good thing gone wrong. Finally, a boundary that matters for the next lesson: the doctrine is a claim about dependence, not a datable report. Aquinas held that the world in fact began in time, that scripture teaches this, and that philosophical arguments purporting to demonstrate a temporal beginning do not work, so the beginning is known by faith. Bonaventure disagreed and thought it could be demonstrated. Two thirteenth-century masters, both orthodox, differing on whether reason can reach the beginning. Keep that distinction in your hand when you turn the page, because the next lesson is about what happens when a claim of dependence meets a question of dating.