Talk:Ex nihilo creation
From “Tota Scriptura”, Joey Day’s personal Scripture topic index wiki
Contents
Who denies creatio ex nihilo?
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Gnosticism
- Stoicism
- Hinduism
- Mormonism
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Process theology
- Molinism?
- Open theism?
- ?
Practical implications
Practical implications of creatio ex nihilo:
- The universe is not an extension or emanation of God (thus we deny Greek Platonic dualism, monism/pantheism, panentheism, secular humanism, etc., in one stroke)
- Creation, the physical world, is real in its essence and fundamentally good, not evil or worthless
- God is both transcendent and immanent
- God is omnipotent, omniscient, and sovereign, and meticulous providence is affirmed
- The universe is finite and contingent, and therefore not a proper object of worship—all worship, adoration, and glory belongs properly to God, not to created things
- The universe is not self-existent, self-sufficient, self-explanatory, or self-sustaining—it is not ultimate
- God does not depend in any way upon creation, but the opposite, the creator/creature distinction is affirmed
- Everything is of grace! We can’t earn anything from God because we already owe him everything we have life and strength to give. (“The distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant [WCF 7.1].”)
External Links
Here are several articles that talk about practical implications of creatio ex nihilo:
- Creation Ex Nihilo by Kenneth R. Samples ‹ Reasons to Believe
- Implications of Ex Nihilo Creation by Ken Schenck ‹ Common Denominator
- The Meaning and Value of Creation Ex Nihilo by Daniel Jepsen ‹ Internet Monk
- The Difference Nothing Makes: Creatio Ex Nihilo, Resurrection, and Divine Gratuity by Brian D. Robinette
- The Theological Significance of Creatio Ex Nihilo by Michael Stephen Hahn
- Creatio ex nihilo: A Critique of the Mormon Doctrine of Creation by William Lane Craig
- Philosophical and Scientific Pointers to Creatio Ex Nihilo by William Lane Craig
And here’s an interesting forum discussion:
2 Maccabees 7:28
I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being. —2 Maccabees 7:28 NRSV
Additional potential content
Ex nihilo creation
Ps 102:25–27; Pr 3:19; Ac 17:28; 2Co 4:6; Heb 1:10–12 (cites Ps 102:25–27)
Difference between and implications of various Hebrew words
- בָּרָא (bara)
- to shape, create
- עָשָׂה (asah)
- to do, make
- יָצַר (yatsar)
- to form, fashion
In the case of bara, the subject is always and only God. Man is sometimes the subject of both asah and yatsar, and sometimes God is the subject of them. So God evidently carries out all these types of creation, but man never carries out bara creation.
Bara cannot mean simply ex nihilo creation, since it is used in situations where God is creating things from pre-existing materials, such as when he creates man from the dust in Genesis 1:27.
Although bara cannot be mapped strictly onto ex nihilo creation, the fact it is only and always used with God as the subject says something about the uniqueness of God’s creative activities. God alone creates in this way. I think ex nihilo creation is at least implied in bara even if there isn’t a one-to-one relation between the two. — 
Joey 05:11, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Ex nihilo creation came out of early trinitarian debates
More fatefully, he [Origen] conjectured that God’s eternal sovereignty, mediated by the preexistent Word and Wisdom, implied the existence from eternity of the creation over which he is sovereign. This line of reasoning seemed to indicate an intrinsic link between the eternal generation of the Word from the Father and the everlasting existence of the creation. As Origen’s speculation about the everlasting existence of creation came under severe critique, most notably in the later part of the third century by Methodius of Olympus, the doctrine of creation from nothing was brought to the foreground of theological reflection.
—Khaled Anatolios (2011). Retrieving Nicaea. Kindle Location 652.
Blake Ostler on creatio ex nihilo
Ostler claims creatio ex nihilo developed toward the end of the second century:
The Hebrew Bible does not support the ontological cosmological distinction between creator and creature that arose only with the development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo toward the end of the second century after Christ.[1]
But Torrance disagrees:
The first recorded testimony in Jewish writings explicitly mentioning creation out of nothing is attributed to a Maccabean mother: ‘I beseech you, my son, lift up your eyes to the heaven and the earth, and see everything in them, and recognise that God made them of things that were not, and that mankind came into being in the same way.’ By New Testament times belief in God’s creation of the universe out of nothing was already established and taken for granted, but the earliest explicit statement concerning it in Christian literature is found only at the end of the first century in The Shepherd of Hermas, in a passage that had a considerable impact upon the development of Christian thought. ‘First of all believe that God is one, who created all things and arranged them and brought them into existence out of the non-existent; and he bounds all things but he alone is unbounded.’ It seems clear that belief in God’s creation of all things out of nothing had already become a recognised article in the ‘rule of faith’.[2]