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.
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