Creation out of nothing

The God who calls into being what is not

The Latin phrase ‘creatio ex nihilo’ says what kind of act creation was. A carpenter builds with wood and a potter shapes clay; God made the material itself. ‘Nothing’ here is not a stuff out of which the world was made; it means that before creation there was nothing at all but God.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Hebrews 11:3

John Wesley glossed ‘by the word’ in this verse as "The sole command of God, without any instrument or preceding matter" Wesley. Even the formless deep of Genesis 1:2, he added, "was created by the divine power; for before it was thus created it had no existence in nature" Wesley. Paul names God as the one "who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not yet exist" (Romans 4:17). John says that "without Him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3), and the psalmist, looking back before the mountains were born, confesses, "from everlasting to everlasting You are God" (Psalm 90:2). Only God is eternal.

The teaching rules out three other pictures: that matter has always existed alongside God; that the world flowed out of God's own being as a part of him; and that good and evil are two first principles locked in an eternal struggle. The world is not God, and it is not a rival to God.

How the church came to say it

Scholars differ over whether Genesis 1:1 is a complete opening sentence or a clause leading into verse 2 (‘When God began to create…’). The church, however, has drawn the teaching from the witness of Scripture as a whole. In the Apocrypha, 2 Maccabees 7:28 says that God did not make heaven and earth out of things that existed; many scholars count this among the early expressions of the idea, though they differ over how strictly it was meant.

The doctrine is usually thought to have been stated in clear terms by Christian writers of the later second century. Against the Platonic view that matter is eternal and a god merely shaped it, and against the Gnostics, who made the material world the work of a lesser god, Irenaeus taught that human makers can only work with what already exists, while God called into being the very material of his creation, which had no prior existence Irenaeus, Against Heresies. From then on Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches alike confessed it. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it this way:

The work of creation is, God's making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 9

Some modern theologies, process theology among them, set the doctrine aside; most churches hold that it guards the sovereignty and the grace of God. God needs nothing, so the world and our lives are pure gift. And as Paul joins the two in a single sentence, the God who calls into being what is not is the God who raises the dead. The doctrine of creation as a whole is taught in the lesson Creation.