John 1:3 - Creatio Ex Materia in the New Testament

As was mentioned at the end of the last post, there are some passages in the New Testament that seem to suggest creatio ex nihilo, though, as they are examined closely, this is merely an artifact of the English translation inadequately reflecting the meaning of the original Greek text.  Let’s take a brief look at these passages.

Romans 4:17:  "even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were." (KJV) This is a case of the King James Translation not conveying the original meaning as well as it could. A better translation would be: "[Abraham] is our father in the presence of God whom he believed—the God who makes the dead alive and summons the things that do not yet exist as though they already do.”

Upon this, Hubler comments: "The verse's 'non-existent' need not be understood in an absolute sense of non-being. μη 'οντα (mē onta) refers to the previous non-existence of those things which are now brought into existence. There is no direct reference to the absence or presence of a material cause.” The Greek text suggests that God has brought about a thing that did not exist as that thing before it was so created. For example, this use of μη 'οντα is logically consistent with the idea that "God called forth the earth when before that the earth did not exist." However, the fact that the earth did not exist as the earth before it was so created does not address the type of material that was used to make it.

Romans 4:17 also uses the negative μη, referring to relative nonbeing and not to absolute nothing, as required by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

Therefore, when it is stated that God called to existence that which does not exist, as in Romans 4:17, it actually assumes a preexisting substrate that God fashioned into a thing that exists by impressing form upon it.

Specific to this verse as well, it is clear that the analogy of God bringing the dead to life in the same way that he creates "things which are not" does not support creatio ex nihilo. Resurrection does not presuppose that the dead do not exist in any way prior to their resurrection, nor does it presuppose that they did not previously have bodies that are reorganized through resurrection. Just as God does not create persons for the first time when he restores them to life through resurrection, so God does not create out of absolute nonbeing.

Moreover, note that Romans 4:17 doesn't expressly address whether things are created out of nothing or from some material substrate. It simply says that God "calls" things into existence that are not. Moreover, such a statement in no way entails or requires creation out of nothing implicitly. If I create a table then I create a table that did not exist before I created it, but it doesn't mean that I create it out of nothing. In this text, the word create is not even used. Rather, what God does is to "call forth" the non-existent. The verb καλεω means to call out loud to something, or to invite. It presupposes something there to be called to or invited. God calls out to the non-existent by his Word, an act described by a verb used elsewhere in Paul's writings (Romans 9:11; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Galatians 5:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:24). Thus, the most natural reading of this text is that the "non-existent" or μη 'οντα refers to a preexisting reality that does not yet exist as God calls it to be. Such a reading has nothing to do with creation out of absolute nothing.

John 1:3.Some also argue that John 1:3, upon which I am currently commenting, supports the idea of creation out of nothing: "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (παντα δι ' α'υτου 'εγενετο, και χωπις α'υτου 'εγενετο ο'υδε εν ο γεγονεν). They argue that this implies that all things (which would include preexistent matter, if that were applicable to the creative process) exist through God's agent, who is the originator of everything.  But this verse says nothing about the creation of "preexistent matter." One must assume beforehand that the word create must mean to create ex nihilo in order to arrive at this conclusion, for this verse says only that if something was made, then it was made through the Word. It doesn't address anything that may not have been made. More important, it doesn't address how those things were made, its point being through whom the creation was made. Anything that was made was made by Christ. Since the translation one reviews is so critical to interpretation, here is another translation: "All things came about through him and without him not one thing came about, which came about."  The question in this case is whether the final phrase which came about is part of this verse or the beginning of the next verse.

Hubler explains:

The punctuation of [John 1:3] becomes critical to its meaning. Proponents of creatio ex materia could easily qualify the creatures of the Word to that "which came about," excluding matter. Proponents of creatio ex nihilo could place a period after "not one thing came about" and leave "which came about" to the next sentence. The absence of a determinate tradition of punctuation in New Testament [Greek] texts leaves room for both interpretations. Neither does creation by word imply ex nihilo as we have seen in Egypt, Philo, and Midrash Rabba, and even in 2 Peter 3:5, where the word functions to organize pre-cosmic matter.

Of course, the reality is that this text doesn't consciously address the issue of creation ex nihilo at all. It states who accomplished the creation, not how it was done.  A person who accepts creation from chaos can easily say that no "thing" came about that is not a result of the Word's bringing it about but agree that there is a chaos in which no "things" exist prior to their creation as such. Those who argue such rest there arguments on the connotations of the word παντα, meaning "all" in an inclusive sense. They argue that because "all" things that come about are brought about by the Word, there is no possibility of an uncreated reality that has not been brought about by God. However, the final phrase, 'εγενετο ο'υδε εν ο γεγονεν, translated "nothing made that was made," limits the scope of the creative power to the order of the created and implies that whatever is not made was not made by him. If it is created, he created it; if it is not, then it is not within the scope of "what is made."   Using the same approach to the verse as they do, one could argue that since God himself was part of all things and is not ‘nothing’ He too must have come about by the Word. 

Hubler's dissertation contains a rigorous exegesis of the relevant biblical passages. He concludes:

Several New Testament texts have been educed as evidence of creatio ex nihilo. None makes a clear statement which would have been required to establish such an unprecedented position, or which we would need as evidence of such a break with tradition. None is decisive and each could easily by accepted by a proponent of creatio ex materia.

Similarly, in his extensive study of the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in Christian thought, Gerhard May explains why he does not believe that the New Testament texts can be taken to refer to creatio ex nihilo.

The passages repeatedly quoted as New Testament witnesses for the idea of creatio ex nihilo are Romans 4:17, where Paul says that God "calls into being the things that are not," and Hebrews 11:3, where it says that "the visible came forth from the invisible." But these formulations fit in with the statements of Hellenistic Judaism . . . about the creation of non-being, or out of non-being, and mean, no more than those, to give expression to creation out of nothing, in the strict sense, as a contradiction in principle of the doctrine of world-formation.

May explains that creatio ex nihilo is a metaphysical doctrine that requires conscious formulation, and that such an approach was completely foreign to any of the biblical writers: "The biblical presentation of the Almighty God who created the world . . . possessed for early Christianity an overwhelming self-evidence and was not perceived as a metaphysical problem. This new question first concerned the theologians of the second century, deeply rooted in philosophical thinking, and wanting consciously to understand the truth of Christianity as the truth of philosophy."

Hubler and May feel that a "rigorous" exegesis is not needed to show that these biblical passages do not address the issue of creatio ex nihilo because it is fairly obvious on the face of such passages that they do not consciously formulate such a metaphysical doctrine. The argument that these texts must assume the doctrine of creation out of nothing simply begs the question—especially where the text does not address the issue and does not engage in the type of philosophical analysis necessary to formulate the doctrine. Asserting that a view is "implicit" in the text without explaining why the implication is necessary to the text amounts to simply reading one's own view into the text. An approach that resists reading creatio ex nihilo into the text unless it is expressly formulated is especially appropriate because, as we shall see, the earliest Christian philosophers assumed that the doctrine of creation from preexisting chaos was the Christian view. The issue had not been addressed or settled prior to the end of the second century, when the adoption of a Middle Platonic view of God and matter as a background assumption of discourse made adoption of creatio ex nihilo the only rational doctrine to adopt.

That sums up the situation pretty well, so I’ll end the discussion at this point.  What will come next is a quick look at the evidence for creatio ex materia in extrabiblical texts.

John 1:2-3 - Creation as Described in the Old and New Testaments

Before examining the New Testament authors on this topic, let’s quickly review the ancient Hebrew creation account.  Genesis 1:1-2 states: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”.  In the Hebrew world view, these waters represented the primordial chaos out of which God created.  These waters were occasionally depicted as a sea monster or the Leviathan of Job, representations of chaos.  We see similarities of this within the Sumerian mythology where the Sumerian gods must subdue the Leviathan (chaos) in order to create.  However, a primary difference between this and the Hebrew mythos was that the Hebrew God did not need to overcome and subdue the chaos.  Creation was not a struggle for the Hebrew God.  He merely walked among the invisible things and organized the chaos as He say fit.  Within the Hebrew world view, they viewed the universe much differently than modern man does, and their view would not coincide with the modern scientific view of the world, and the creation account in Genesis is described in terms of the ancient Hebrew world view. 

The ancient Hebrews viewed the world as flat and it was suspended by four pillars.  The world of the dead was viewed as being literally below the earth.  The earth was covered by an expansive dome, referred to in Genesis as the firmament.  Modern readers often interpret the firmament as the sky, but that wasn’t the original view.  The original understanding of the firmament was that it was a dome that went from one edge of the world to the other, and the sky, the moon, the sun, the stars and all of the creation was underneath this dome.  And on the other side of the dome were the waters of chaos, and the firmament served to keep the waters of chaos separated or divided from the created universe.  It separated that which was created from the uncreated chaos.  And the creation account in Genesis is an example of the creation of order from the chaos.  Noah’s flood was an example of what would happen when the wickedness of the world returned the creation to chaos, and God allowed the firmament to become breached and the waters of chaos rained down upon the earth to wipe away the filth.

Proverbs gives us another reference to the creation from preexisting waters. 

Proverbs 8:26-27: "While as yet he had not made the earth. . . . When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth."

Proverbs expressly states that before God created the earth and thus before there was water anywhere on earth, God "prepared the heavens" and he organized the waters not by "creating" them, but by setting "a compass upon the face of the depth,” and this before he created the earth. 

The waters are never said to be created in Proverbs 8 (or anywhere else in the Old Testament for that matter). Rather, God prepares the already existent waters by organizing them through the process of measuring them and plumbing their depths. The verb used in Proverbs translated as "prepared” indicates a preparation and establishing of something already existent.

We can see these ideas preserved in the New Testament texts that mention the creation.

2 Peter 3:5-6: "They [those who mock] deliberately ignore the fact that long ago there were the heavens and the earth, formed out of water and through water by the Word of God, and that it was through these same factors that the world of those days was destroyed by the floodwaters" (New Jerusalem Bible).

Second Peter 3:5-6 clearly refers back to an Old Testament teaching that God created the heaven and the earth by organizing preexistent chaos.  He mentions the waters, representing the primordial chaos God created the earth from Genesis 1:2.  The text doesn’t indicate that the waters were ever created.  Peter is referring to the creation of heaven and earth out of waters that existed before the heavens and the earth and also that this preexisting chaos provided the water for Noah’s flood. In essence, the flood represents a return of the world to chaos because the people that God had created had not obeyed his commands.  This mirrors the creation from water mentioned in Proverbs.

In addition to this, scholars have identified five points in 2 Peter 3:5 that support the idea that Peter believed everything was organized from a preexisting chaos.  

·         First, the text addresses the formation of "heaven and earth," which is all that is said to be created by God in Genesis 1:1-2. Indeed, the parallel with Genesis 1:1 is unmistakable and clearly signifies that 2 Peter speaks of the same creation spoken of there.

·         Second, the heaven and earth are said in 2 Peter 3:5 to be formed both "out of water" and also "through water." The double reference to water as the material substrate used in creation "out of" and "from" which the heaven and earth are formed appears to be an intentional emphasis.

·         Third, the fact that we are dealing with the entire scope of creation is indicated by reference to God's Word as the power by which the heaven and earth are formed from water. The text is referring to Genesis 1:1-2, which states that God spoke and heaven and earth were created, and also to John 1:3, which mentions that God creates all that there is by the power of his Word.

·         Fourth, the heaven and earth are formed from water, which is recognized in the very next verse as the principle of chaos causing the flood or the deep in Genesis 1:2. The earth was created from water, and it was destroyed by water through the flood because water represents the unformed and chaotic.  The deep is never said to be created in the Genesis account of creation but is presented as already present at the time God undertakes to create the heaven and the earth.

·         Lastly, the verb used in 2 Peter 3:5, (synestōsa), is a form of the verb (synistēmi), meaning to organize by combining together and not by creating out of nothing.

Before going any further, since the New Testament texts were written in Greek, it’s important to understand something about the ancient concept of matter in the Greek-speaking world and the distinction between relative nonbeing (Greek μη 'οντα) and absolute nothing (Greek ο'υκ 'οντως). Platonic philosophy supposed the existence of an eternal substrate that was material but was nevertheless so removed from the material world that it was often said to not have "real" existence. Platonists called pre-existent matter 'the non-existent.” This relative nonexistence is indicated by the Greek negative μη, meaning "not" or "non-," in conjunction with the word for existence or being. When early Christian theologians wrote of a type of creation that denies that there was any material state prior to creation (creatio ex nihilo), however, they used different words to describe the situation, Greek negation ουκ, meaning "not in any way or mode." In Clement's Stromata, for instance,  when describing creation in each case the phrase he employs is ek me ontos not ex ouk ontos; that is to say, it is made not from that which is absolutely non-existent, but from relative non-being or unformed matter, so vague that it cannot be said to have the status of 'being'.  The state of being is imparted to it by the shaping hand of the Creator.  

Edwin Hatch explained that, for Platonists, "God was regarded as being outside the world. The world was in its origin only potential being (το μη 'ον)."

He explains more fully:

The [Platonic] dualistic hypothesis assumed a co-existence of matter and God. The assumption was more frequently tacit than explicit. . . . There was a universal belief that beneath the qualities of all existing things lay a substratum or substance on which they were grafted, and which gave to each thing its unity. But the conception of the nature of this substance varied from that of gross and tangible material to that of empty and formless space. . . . It was sometimes conceived as a vast shapeless but plastic mass, to which the Creator gave form, partly by moulding it as a potter moulds clay, partly by combining various elements as a builder combines his materials in the construction of a house.

Aristotle also stated: "For generation is from non-existence ('εκτου μη 'οντος) into being, and corruption from being back into non-existence (ε'ισ το μη 'ον)."  Generation is the act of a new animal being derived from an existing one, or a plant deriving from an existing plant. It is new life from life. He used the phrase from non-existence in a sense of relative nonbeing, where "things" do not yet exist and there is only a formless substratum that has the potential or capacity to receive definite form. This substratum is not absolutely nothing but is not yet a thing. It is "no-thing."

I’m not addressing this issue to make any sort of claim that I subscribe to the accuracy of Platonic philosophy generally, but to bring emphasis to the fact that the words used by the New Testament authors to describe the acts of creation are the same words used by the philosophers to describe relative non-being.  Had the New Testament authors wished to convey the concept of creation ex nihilo, there was other language in Greek that they would have used to convey this concept.  They did not choose to use this language.  Based upon the language they selected, the creation they described was the creation from pre-existent substance. 

Another way the New Testament authors described the creation was that God created the visible things from invisible things.  Again, the situation described doesn’t reflect creation from nothing but creation from things which are not visible, which doesn’t connote lack of being or existence.  A passage from 2 Enoch illustrates this concept quite clearly.  2 Enoch 25:1-2 illustrates that invisible things are not to be equated with being absolutely nothing.  It reads as follows: "Before anything existed at all, from the very beginning, whatever exists I created from the non-existent, and from the invisible the visible. . . . For, before any visible things had come into existence, I, the ONE, moved around in the invisible things, like the sun, from east to west and from west to east."

Illustrating this point further, the Septuagint (LXX) translates the text of Genesis 1:2 referring to the "desolate and empty" world in its precreation state as 'αορατος και 'ακατασκευαστος—which means "invisible and unformed."

This same word invisible is similar to Hebrews 11:3.  The New Jerusalem Bible translation of the verse is most clear: "It is by faith that we understand that the ages were created by a word from God, so that from the invisible the visible world came to be.” According to the language of the text, God created visible things literally "from" invisible things. But the invisible things are not nothing; they already exist. Hebrews 11:3 says simply that the worlds were "framed by the word of God." It does not claim that they were created out of nothing. In fact, the verb used here is katartizō, which refers to organizing, framing, or putting together what is not yet organized.  The word doesn't mean to create from nothing.  The verb presupposes having materials to frame with.  In Hebrews, just as in LXX Genesis, the unformed and lifeless world that is invisible or unseen is not "absolute nothingness" but chaotic and unformed matter that cannot be seen because it does not yet have form impressed upon it by God.

Romans 1:19-20 KJV further supports the idea that invisible things are already existing reality: "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power." The text clearly states that the invisible things already exist and can be seen through the power of God.

These texts indicate that "invisible things" are not absolute nothing.  Rather, they are things not visible to mortal eyes. That these invisible things already exist in some sense is demonstrated by the fact that God moves among them. As the translator of 2 Enoch, F. I. Andersen, explains: "The impression remains that God was not the only existent being or thing from the very first. . . . God made the existent out of the non-existent, the visible out of the non-visible. So the invisible things coexisted with God before he began to make anything. . . . Vs. 4 is quite explicit on this point: Before any of the visible things had come into existence, God was moving around among the invisible things."  

To conclude, I have briefly discussed some Old and New Testament passages that clearly teach creation ex materia.  However, there are some other passages in the Bible that are used by some to support creatio ex nihilo.  These will be examined and addressed in the next post.