We’ll look at each of these three shortly, but the crux of the matter and the reason for the change in thought was simply this. For the predominant varieties of Greek philosophical thought at this period in history (Stoic, Platonis, Peripatetic), matter was impure and corrupt, and it imposed this corruptibility upon the physical body. Such thought made the idea of a physical resurrection seem morally offensive. This is the same kind of thought that Paul was combating in his epistle to the Corinthians. However, rather than hearken back to the original teachings of Paul and others, the Christian philosophers shifted their thinking to deal with this apparent philosophical dilemma to redefine matter as a creature of God. By having God create matter out of nothingness, it could then be postulated that God could create matter free of its natural corruptibility and thusly sidestep the philosophical issue.
However, it must be noted that this became possible because the position adopted by Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes, and Clement of Alexandria that God created by organizing matter was inherently unstable within the context of their theology because each of them had espoused a thoroughly Middle Platonic view of God. The early Christians had been accused of being atheists because they did not accept the Greek view of the gods. Instead of responding by defending the Christian view of a God who could reveal himself in flesh, Athenagoras argued that Christians believed in the same God as the Greeks. By trying to reconcile the revealed nature of God passed down to them with the God of Greek philosophy, they gradually painted themselves into a corner and become trapped by that approach.
The adoption of the Middle Platonic notion of God by Christian apologists in the late second century was a major motivating factor behind the invention of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. In particular, God was conceived as being completely beyond and independent of the world. Given the Middle Platonist view of God, creation out of nothing became a logical extension of God's otherness and transcendence.
James Noel Hubler of the University of Pennsylvania writes concerning this:
Creatio ex nihilo appeared suddenly in the latter half of the second century c.e. Not only did creatio ex nihilo lack precedent, it stood in firm opposition to all the philosophical schools of the Greco-Roman world. As we have seen, the doctrine was not forced upon the Christian community by their revealed tradition, either in Biblical texts or the Early Jewish interpretation of them. As we will also see it was not a position attested in the New Testament doctrine or even sub-apostolic writings. It was a position taken by the apologists of the late second century, Tatian and Theophilus, and developed by various ecclesiastical writers thereafter, by Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. Creatio ex nihilo represents an innovation in the interpretive traditions of revelation and cannot be explained merely as a continuation of tradition.
Hubler explores at length why the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo suddenly appears at the end of the second century. The answer is that Christian philosophers accepted two key Middle Platonist doctrines that made creatio ex nihilo the only acceptable position to them. First, they confronted the Middle Platonic view that "matter imposed the natural necessity of corruption upon the body." The doctrine of bodily resurrection seemed offensive to the Greeks because it implied that persons would be eternally embodied in corruptible material forms. The first Christian philosophers to adopt creatio ex nihilo attacked this view of matter by redefining the matter of which the body was made as a creation ex nihilo of God, which he directed to his purpose. Second, these same philosophers also adopted the Middle Platonic view that whatever is eternal is absolutely immutable or unchangeable. They reasoned (fallaciously) that if God is immutable in this sense, then matter cannot be unchanging like God. However, given Platonic and Middle Platonist views that everything that is eternal is immutable and that matter cannot be immutable, it followed that matter must be created ex nihilo.
Reviewing the orthodox line of the development that leads to the formation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, an unambiguous picture emerges. The origin of the world didn’t pose a problem for the primitive Christian thinkers, and they didn’t concern themselves with the thoughts of the Greek philosophers on this point. Even in the early second century, and its attendant Gnostic obsession with cosmology, most Christian authors still stood by the traditional statements about the creation of the world and do not allow themselves to get involved in controversy over the new questions. Simultaneously, philosophically educated teachers like Justin interpret the creation as world-formation and establish a relationship between the "cosmogony of Moses" and the myth of world-creation of the Greeks. This ultimately lead to the world-formation model being overcome and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo being formulated as a counter-proposition, which later became to be regarded as a fundamental tenet of Christian theology.
While Tatian was a student of Justin Martyr, he modified the Middle Platonic view of God espoused by his teacher. The Middle Platonists had adopted a view of God as transcendent and utterly independent while limiting his involvement with the world to creation by matter and the necessities inherent in matter. Tatian created a new view of God, one who is alone in his power and able to create matter out of nothing. Tatian is the first person in history to expressly teach the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. The reason that matter had to be created ex nihilo, according to Tatian, is that otherwise it would be equal to God:
“Neither is matter without cause as is God, nor is it equal in power to God because it is without cause. It was generated and it was not generated by anyone else, but it was expressed only by the demiurge of all. Therefore, we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the consummation of everything, not as the Stoics who dogmatize about cycles of things becoming and the same things becoming again without purpose. When the ages are once completed for us at the end, there will be a resurrection of humans alone for ever for the purpose of judgement.”
Tatian adopted the notion of the necessity of creation of matter to address two problems:
· to avoid the theory of eternal cycles of matter taught by the Stoics
· and to establish the concept of God transcending a world caught in such an eternal cycle of material necessity.
Tatian argued that matter is not an ultimate principle—it is not uncaused—countering the Stoic view that a personal resurrection makes no sense because everything is bound by the necessity of an eternal recurrence in a never-ending cycle. Tatian's rejection of eternal matter as an uncaused principle, like God, removed matter from the eternal cycle of never-ending recurrence and the necessity of the never-ending cycle. Tatian also argued that it is not impossible for God to restore the dead to life through resurrection because he can create individuals out of nothing initially: "God the regent, when he wills, will completely restore the substance which is visible alone to him to its original state.” For Tatian, matter is the sensible expression of the rational Logos, derived from the Middle Platonic doctrine of internal reason that gives form to matter through verbal expression.
In his section on Tatian, Hubler concludes:
“The coincidence of the eternal cycle, the need to defend the resurrection and the Logos theology, conspired to produce an entirely new understanding of the material cosmos and its dependence upon God in Tatian's work. His new vision was seized upon almost immediately by other Christian writers and soon became the new orthodoxy.”
Instead of relying upon the received doctrines handed down to them, the Christian philosophers had hybridized their view of God with Greek philosophy and then followed the hybrid to its logical conclusion within that framework. Tatian never considered the alternative of simply rejecting the Stoic view of eternal recurrence as a necessary property of matter. Yet he could easily have done so without adopting an entirely new doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.
The second person in history to expressly adopt the view of creation ex nihilo was Theophilus, writing shortly after Tatian around AD 180. Theophilus's reasons for adopting this new doctrine went beyond Tatian's. Rather than addressing the Stoics, as Tatian had done, Theophilus argued directly against the Middle Platonists. While the biblical authors had thought of God as unchanging in character and commitment to justice, the Middle Platonists and Theophilus thought of God as unchanging in a metaphysical sense. He argues that the basic premises of the Middle Platonists about matter and led to an anthropomorphic view of God—which Middle Platonists rejected. Both Theophilus and the Middle Platonists had a common nonanthropomorphic concept of God; they differed over a concept of matter that they believed was necessitated by a view of God as absolutely immutable in the Platonic sense. Theophilus argued like a good Greek:
“Plato and those of his school agree that God is ungenerated and the father and maker of all. Then, they suppose matter is divine and ungenerated and they say that it was flourishing with God. If God is ungenerated and all matter is ungenerated, no longer is God the maker of all as the Platonists say, neither is the sovereignty of God shown, by their own account. Further, just as God is changeless because he is ungenerated, so also, if matter is also ungenerated, it is also changeless and equal to God. For that which is generated is mutable and changeable. The unregenerated is immutable and unchangeable.
For how is it great, if God made the cosmos from subject matter? For even the human artisan when he receives matter from someone, can make what he wants from it. The power of God is made manifest in this, that he made what he wanted from the non-existent.”
It is a clear expression of creatio ex nihilo. Theophilus thought that the notion of creatio ex nihilo was necessary to adopt for three reasons.
· First, if God were limited to creating by organizing matter in the same way as humans, then the way in which God manifests his power would not be unique. Such a view of creation was contrary to a principle adopted by Middle Platonists themselves that God is not anthropomorphic. God's mode of creation must be utterly different and unique. Theophilus backed this argument for creatio ex nihilo with another common argument adopted by the Middle Platonists, that God must be self-sufficient:
· Second, Theophilus argued that God would not be the creator of all things if some things existed without God's having created them. Yet if God were not creator of all, then the divine monarchy would not be preserved. Thus God's omnipotence required creation out of absolute nothing.
· Third, Theophilus argued that matter cannot be eternal because what is eternal must be immutable in the Platonic sense, and matter is subject to change. In the Platonic view, what is real and eternal is absolute and unchanging in every respect.
In effect, Theophilus's reasons for adopting the new doctrine of creatio ex nihilo were based on his adoption of the Middle Platonic view of God, which was also a radical innovation in Christianity—a God who is seen as immutable, self-sufficient, and utterly unlike humans in every respect. Anything embodied was not pure and real. Christians had been repeatedly attacked by Platonists for their childish view of a God who could be embodied and could change in this world of crass matter.
Using the work of Tatian and Theophilus as a springboard, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo found its most developed formulation among early Christians of the late second century in the writings of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, but I’m not going to further forward than this. The work of the later philosophers (Irenaeus through Augustine) followed the Greek philosophical premises about God and matter to their natural conclusions within Greek thought. This, of course, led to the contradictions that led to the conferences and development of the creeds, which represented the formalized loss of the old biblical God, who was a father whom one could come to know through sacred experience, to the God of Greek Philosophy that was transcendent, completely other and unknowable, a God who could only be approached and grasped through reason alone. He had become a God far removed from the one spoken of in John 17:3.
Hubler summarized the difference between the transcendent God of the Middle Platonists and the original Christian God of faith:
“From the earliest Christian teaching, indeed, the conception of the transcendence of God is absent. God is near to men and speaks to them: He is angry with them and punishes them: He is merciful to them and pardons them. He does all this through His angels and prophets, and last of all through His Son. There was no taste for metaphysical discussion: there was possibly no appreciation of metaphysical conceptions.”
Conclusion
The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo appears suddenly about AD 180 in the writings of Tatian and Theophilus. It arose as a philosophical consequence of their acceptance of a Middle Platonic concept of God. In late second century texts we see Platonic philosophy infiltrating Christian thought and serving as a driving force for major innovations in doctrine. The personal God of the Bible, known through revelation and personal encounter, is suddenly too far removed from the mere humans to be involved in such things as interactions with men. The notion that we are created in the image and likeness of God was abandoned and reinterpreted to fit the Platonic view that God is utterly unique and entirely unlike humans. God's mode of creation, therefore, must be completely different from any human mode of creation. By accepting the philosophical assumptions adopted by the late second century Christian apologists, creatio ex nihilo becomes the only logical conclusion. It apparently never occurred to them to reject these Platonist assumptions as had there predecessors.
Next, I will be examining whether the early Christian view of creatio ex materia is consistent with the Old and New Testaments and with other extrabiblical Jewish sources.
For more detailed information on this topic, check with evangelical scholars Bruce K. Waltke and William R. Lane.
For more detailed information on this topic, check with evangelical scholars Bruce K. Waltke and William R. Lane.
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