God creates out of nothing: Creatio ex nihilo

Source: Robert Schneider

The Greeks held that the cosmos had always existed, that there has always been matter out of which the world has come into its present form. Aristotle (384-322 BC), the foremost natural philosopher of his day, had developed a philosophical argument for the eternity of the world (Physics, I, 9; On the Heavens, I, 3). Philosophers of other schools such as the Stoics and the Epicureans also agreed that the world or its underlying reality is eternal. All these thinkers were led to this conclusion because they observed that “nothing can come out of nothing,” and so there always has to be a “something” that other things can come from, however one understands the processes of coming into being and passing away.

Against this notion of an eternal cosmos, the church fathers reasserted the biblical doctrine of creation, and in doing so they emphasized not only the transcendent otherness of God but also the astonishing immensity of God’s power.

God did not form the world out of a pre-existent matter, but spoke into being (“Let there be!”) that which literally did not exist before.

This doctrine of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) is not a teaching dependent upon particular biblical passages, though thinkers have cited 2 Maccabees 7:28 and Rom. 4:19, both of which speak of God bringing things into existence from non-existence. Yet these verses exerted less influence than the declarations of God’s creative power found throughout the Bible.

Creation out of nothing is central to the theology of one of the most important early Christian thinkers, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. ca. 202). Rejecting Greek notions about the world in his treatise Against the Heresies, Irenaeus declared: “God, in the exercise of his will and pleasure, formed all things…out of what did not previously exist” (II.x.2: Irenaeus 370). The concept, adopted by other patristic theologians, perhaps finds its mature form in the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who in his Confessions declares that through his Wisdom God creates all things, not out of himself or any other thing, but literally out of nothing (XII, 7; Pine-Coffin 284).

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo illustrates a very important feature of creation theology: it is a principle drawn from an interpretation of biblical revelation, not a conclusion drawn from scientific observation.

“Creatio ex nihilo is a principle drawn from an interpretation of biblical revelation, not a conclusion drawn from scientific observation.”

It is not dependent upon any scientific model of the cosmos for its validity, and that means that it also will be consonant with any scientific model that does not insist on the world’s eternity. Over the centuries, science has given us its best understanding of the way the world works and what it is like; and with each major increase in knowledge and understanding new theories and models of the world have emerged. But Christian theology has always declared that, whatever understandings and theories about the universe science may attain, the Source of everything that exists for science to study is the God who creates them. Finite existence derives solely from the will of God.