Theopedia

Creation out of nothing

Definition

Creation out of nothing, or creatio ex nihilo (Latin for “from nothing”), is the doctrine that God brought the universe into being by his word alone, without shaping any material that existed before or alongside him.1 It stands against the ancient philosophical view, held in various forms by Plato and the Stoics, that a divine power merely brought order to an eternally preexisting, formless matter.2 Genesis 1:1-2 is itself grammatically ambiguous between the two readings, which is why the early church spent its first centuries defending, rather than simply assuming, creation from nothing against rival accounts.3

Confessional Witness

The Second Helvetic Confession, the earliest of the Reformed confessions to state the doctrine, says plainly that God “created all things, both visible and invisible, by his co-eternal Word,” and names the ancient errors this rules out: “we condemn the Manichaeans and Marcionites who impiously imagined two substances and natures, one good and the other evil; also two beginnings and two gods contrary to each other.”4 The Westminster Confession states the doctrine in its most explicit form, that it pleased God “in the beginning to create or make of nothing the world, and all things therein.”5 The 1689 London Baptist Confession restates the same chapter in substantially the same words but omits this “of nothing” clause; since the doctrine rests on Scripture’s wider testimony rather than on one phrase, the omission marks no real disagreement between the two confessions.6

Biblical Basis

Scripture states directly that the world was not made from anything already visible: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3). Paul describes God as the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17), and the Psalter describes a mode of creation that leaves no place for material already at hand to work with: “he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps. 33:9).

Genesis’s own opening verses are less immediately decisive. English translations divide over whether Genesis 1:1 reports the world’s absolute beginning or merely introduces an already-existing formless state described in verse 2, a division that turns on where the sentence’s grammar is judged to end.1 The Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad argued that the Hebrew verb “create” (bara) used in Genesis 1:1 favors the first reading, since it is never used elsewhere in the Old Testament of making something out of existing material; the Jewish translators of the Septuagint, by contrast, rendered the same verb with the ordinary Greek word for “to make,” suggesting they saw nothing distinctive in it.3

Historical Development

Justin Martyr and the Platonic inheritance

The mid-second-century apologist Justin Martyr (c. 100-165), writing at Rome, argued that Plato’s account in the Timaeus of God shaping “matter which was shapeless” into the world was itself borrowed from Moses, and read Genesis 1:2’s “invisible and unfurnished” earth as naming that same preexisting matter.7 Scholars disagree about what this shows. Ronald Heine reads Justin’s own statement that God made all things “from formless matter” as a real, if unargued, departure from creation out of nothing.7 Craig Carter argues instead that Justin’s purpose was only to show Plato’s derivative agreement with Moses on the shaping of matter already named in Genesis 1:2, not to deny that this matter itself had a prior origin, and concludes that Justin “did not deny creatio ex nihilo and probably affirmed the concept, even if he did not say it explicitly.”8

Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus

Theophilus, bishop of Antioch in the last quarter of the second century, argued directly against the Platonic view that creation required preexisting material: “What would be remarkable if God made the world out of preexistent matter? Even a human artisan, when he obtains material from someone, makes whatever he wishes out of it. But the power of God is revealed by his making whatever he wishes out of the non-existent.”9 Irenaeus of Lyons made a parallel argument from the same premise a few years later: humans “cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing,” so it is God’s own superiority to humanity that “He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”10

Tertullian against Hermogenes

Early in the third century the North African writer Tertullian wrote an entire treatise against Hermogenes, a Christian teacher who held that matter must be coeternal with God. Hermogenes argued that God must have made the world out of himself (which he judged impossible), out of nothing (which he thought would make God the author of evil), or out of something; having ruled out the first two, he concluded matter itself had to be eternal, reading Genesis 1:1-2’s naming of a formless “earth” as confirming that this matter already existed when God began his work.11 Tertullian answered that Scripture’s silence about any material God worked from is itself the evidence against Hermogenes: had the world been made from something, Scripture would have said so, to prevent readers from imagining either that it was made from nothing or from some inferior substance. “Since, therefore, nothing is said of ‘building material’ in the Genesis account of creation,” he reasoned, “this absence of information suggests that there was none.”12

The fourth-century consensus

By the time of the Council of Nicaea (325), creation out of nothing was treated as settled Christian teaching on every side of the Arian controversy, including by Arius himself.13 Basil the Great distinguished the Christian doctrine from the Manichaean view that “matter came to the Creator from without” by insisting instead that God “created matter in harmony with the form that he wished to give it… creating the essence with the form.”14 Augustine, commenting on Genesis 1:1-2, concluded that no material existed apart from God prior to creation at all: “Apart from yourself nothing existed from which you might make them, O God… and therefore you made heaven and earth out of nothing.”15

Opposing Views

Ancient philosophy offered two rival accounts of the world’s origin against which creation out of nothing was formulated. Aristotle and his followers held that the universe itself had always existed, with no origin to account for at all.2 Plato and, following him, the Stoics held instead that a divine power gave order and form to an eternally preexisting, formless matter; some Jewish authors writing before Christ, including the author of the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo of Alexandria, had already adapted this same Platonic account to describe the God of Genesis.2

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

  • William Lane Craig and Paul Copan, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).

References

  1. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 10, “God the Father,” 105. ↩ ↩2

  2. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 108. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 106. ↩ ↩2

  4. Heinrich Bullinger, The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 7, “Of the Creation of All Things; Of Angels, the Devil, and Man.” ↩

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 12, “The Creation of the World,” Q. 18, quoting the Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. 4, §1. ↩

  6. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” §1. ↩

  7. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 109. ↩ ↩2

  8. Craig A. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 8. ↩

  9. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 109-110, quoting Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.4, trans. Robert M. Grant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 27. ↩

  10. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” quoting Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.10.4, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. ↩

  11. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 111-112. ↩

  12. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 113-114. ↩

  13. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” citing Khaled Anatolios. ↩

  14. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” quoting Basil the Great. ↩

  15. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” quoting Augustine on Genesis 1:1-2. ↩