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Course 8 · Lesson 6.2

Rivals to creation from nothing: eternal matter and emanation

13 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 8 outline

Module 1: Speaking About God

  1. What systematic theology is and what it can claim
  2. Naming God: analogy, negation and the limits of language
  3. Classical theism defined and compared with alternatives
  4. Beyond the world and present in it: transcendence and immanence

Module 2: The Classical Attributes

  1. Divine simplicity: God is not made of parts
  2. Divine immutability: does God change?
  3. Divine eternity: timeless or everlasting?
  4. Divine omniscience and human freedom

Module 3: The Trinity in Scripture and the Early Church

  1. One God: the Shema and the Old Testament background
  2. Father, Son and Spirit in the New Testament
  3. Early Trinitarian language: Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian
  4. Two early errors: modalism and subordinationism

Module 4: Arius, Athanasius and Nicaea

  1. What Arius taught and why it spread
  2. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the word homoousios
  3. The long fight after Nicaea and the role of Athanasius
  4. Constantinople in 381 and the deity of the Holy Spirit

Module 5: The Cappadocians and the Shape of Trinitarian Thought

  1. One ousia, three hypostases: the Cappadocian vocabulary
  2. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa
  3. Augustine and the Western tradition
  4. The filioque and the monarchy of the Father

Module 6: Creation from Nothing

  1. Creation in Scripture
  2. Rivals to creation from nothing: eternal matter and emanation
  3. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo and its development
  4. Creation, the goodness of matter and the Trinity

Module 7: Providence, Sovereignty and Evil

  1. Providence: preservation, concurrence and governance
  2. Divine sovereignty and human freedom across the traditions
  3. The problem of evil: logical and evidential forms
  4. Christian responses: free will, privation and the suffering God
  5. Evaluating the responses and living with what remains unanswered

All courses

Program / Course 8: God, Trinity, and Creation / Lesson 6.2

What you will learn

  • Describe the main rival accounts of the origin of the world that the early church met: eternal matter, dualism and emanation.
  • Explain what the church fathers found wrong with each, in terms their defenders would recognize.
  • Identify modern forms of these views.
  • Understand why the choice between these views affects the doctrine of God.

The big idea

The doctrine of creation from nothing was not first stated in a vacuum. It was argued against rival accounts that educated people of the ancient world found natural. Some said that God shaped a matter that already existed. Some said that the material world was made by a lesser or evil being. Others said that the world flows out of God by necessity, as light from the sun. The church fathers found each of these to limit God, to disparage the world, or to confuse Creator with creature. Seeing the rivals clearly helps explain why the doctrine took the shape it did.

Key terms

Eternal matter
The view that matter has always existed alongside God, who only gives it form.
Demiurge
A Greek word for craftsman. In Plato’s Timaeus, the maker who shapes the world from pre-existing material. In Gnostic systems, a lesser being who makes the material world.
Dualism
A view with two ultimate principles, often one good and one evil, or spirit and matter.
Emanation
The view that the world flows from the divine source necessarily, as light from a lamp, in stages that become less perfect.
Gnosticism
Second-century movements that taught that the material world was the work of a flawed power and that salvation was escape from matter through knowledge.
Neoplatonism
A philosophical school of the third century and later, led by Plotinus, which described all things as flowing from the One.
Ex nihilo
Latin for from nothing. Creation without pre-existing material or divine substance.
Contingent
Dependent for its existence on something else. In this setting, the world’s existence depends on God’s free act.

Background

In the ancient Mediterranean world, most educated people thought it obvious that something does not come from nothing. Greek philosophy, in Parmenides and later Aristotle, held that what is cannot arise from what is not. Plato’s Timaeus told of a divine craftsman who looks to eternal forms and shapes a pre-existing disorder into an ordered world. Aristotle held that the cosmos had no beginning. The Stoics thought of a divine reason pervading all matter. These ideas formed the background against which the Christians preached God as maker of heaven and earth.

Within Christianity itself, a number of movements stood against the Hebrew Bible’s view of creation. Marcion, in the second century, taught that the God of the Old Testament, who made the world, was a lesser and harsh being, different from the Father of Jesus. The Gnostic teacher Valentinus and others taught that the material world came from a fall within the divine fullness and was made by a flawed demiurge. These views disparaged the body and matter, and the fathers, especially Irenaeus, responded by saying that the Creator and the Father of Jesus are one and that matter is good.

In the third century, Plotinus described the One, from which comes Intellect, from which comes Soul, and from which comes the material world as the lowest level. This is emanation, a necessary overflowing. Plotinus was not a Christian, but his philosophy influenced many Christian writers, including Augustine, who found in it a way to think about God’s spiritual nature. Christian thinkers were careful, however, to reject the necessity of emanation and the idea that the world is a lesser part of the divine.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Eternal matter

The first rival says that God made the world from material that was already there. On this view God is a great craftsman, an architect and not a creator in the full sense. Plato’s craftsman was of this kind. Hermogenes, a teacher in Carthage about 200, held that God made the world from eternal matter, and Tertullian wrote a treatise against him. Today a similar view is held by some process theologians, who say God works with a world that has always existed in some form, and by Latter-day Saints, who teach that God organized existing matter.

Christian writers objected for several reasons. If matter is eternal, then it is not made by God and God is not the source of all things. God would depend on it, being limited by what it can and cannot do. The problem of evil seems worse, since evil could be blamed on stubborn matter, which then looks like a rival principle. The Bible’s claim that God alone is Creator (Isaiah 44:24) seems to be weakened. Defenders of the eternal-matter view respond that it protects God from being the author of evil and fits the plain sense of Genesis 1:2. They add that God’s power is not diminished, because God is able to do all that can be done.

Step 2: Dualism and the evil of matter

The second rival says that the material world is the work of a lesser or hostile power, or that matter is evil in itself. Marcion’s followers and Gnostic schools taught versions of this, and Manichaeism, which captured Augustine in his youth, taught that the world is a mixture of good and evil principles. Dualism offers an easy answer to the problem of evil, which is that the evil comes from a bad source.

The fathers objected that this contradicts the verdict of Genesis 1 that creation is good, and makes the body and the world something to be escaped. It also made the Incarnation seem impossible or illusory, since the Son would not take on evil matter. Irenaeus, Tertullian and later Augustine all argued that matter is a gift of the good God. Their strong defense of the goodness of the body lies behind the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body.

Step 3: Emanation

The third rival is emanation. It says the world flows out of God by necessity, like light from the sun, not by a free choice. Its attraction is that it makes the world derive from God without a prior material and keeps the world in an ordered scale of being. Its problems, said the church fathers, are that it makes the world necessary, so that God cannot but create, and that it makes the world a degraded part of the divine. It leaves little room for God’s free love or for a real distinction between God and creatures.

Against this, the Christian writers said that God creates by will and not by necessity. The world is a free gift. It is not part of God’s substance, and it is made from nothing, not from God. The Son and Spirit proceed from the Father by nature, but creatures come into being by God’s will. This is one reason the Nicene creed is careful to say that the Son is begotten, not made: begetting is of the divine nature, making is of the free will. The word made applies to creatures and not to the Son.

Step 4: Modern forms and what is at stake

These ancient options have modern counterparts. Naturalism holds that the universe is all there is and may be eternal or a brute fact. Pantheism holds that the universe is divine and in some versions emanates from a single source. Panentheism, in some forms, holds that the world is part of God. Process thought holds that God and the world co-exist in a process of becoming. Many of the arguments of the fathers are used again in modern discussion.

What is at stake is the doctrine of God. If God is Creator of all things from nothing, God is wholly free, wholly independent and the source of every being. Whatever else exists is dependent. If one of the rivals is true, God is limited by matter, or God shares the world’s nature, or God cannot choose not to create. The church held that only creation from nothing safeguards what Scripture says about the glory and freedom of God. Critics of the doctrine reply that it makes God seem remote and the world’s existence arbitrary. The debate continues.

  1. Which of the rivals is the most natural to the modern mind, and why?
  2. What are the strongest arguments in favor of eternal matter?
  3. How does the goodness of matter relate to the Incarnation?
  4. What difference does it make whether the world exists by necessity or by free gift?
  5. How does this lesson illuminate the phrase begotten, not made?
  6. Which rival do I find myself tempted by when I think about God?

Examples

The craftsman

A carpenter makes a table from wood. He does not make the wood. God as Plato’s craftsman would stand in the same relation to the world. The church held that God not only shaped the world but gave it existence, as an author does not only arrange letters but brings the story into being. Even this comparison is imperfect.

Light from a lamp

A lamp gives light without choosing to. The light is of the same kind as the lamp, though dimmer. Emanation pictures the world as light from God. The church fathers answered that the world is not a dimmer part of God but something other, made by a free act.

The good body

A Gnostic teacher might tell a student that the body is a prison. Irenaeus replied that God made the human being, body and soul, and that the Son took flesh. The hope of the resurrection of the body shows the goodness of matter in Christian faith.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching rejects all these rivals. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 said that God created from the beginning of time both spiritual and corporeal creatures out of nothing. Vatican I repeated it and condemned both pantheism and the idea that the world is an emanation of the divine substance.

Orthodox

Orthodox tradition holds creation from nothing and the goodness of matter. Writers such as John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas insisted that the world is a free creation and that matter can bear the divine. Orthodox thought opposes both dualism and pantheism.

Protestant

Reformation confessions teach creation from nothing, as the Westminster Confession says that God made the world out of nothing. Most Protestants reject eternal matter. Some process theologians and some others in modern Protestantism differ, and a number of evangelical philosophers argue for the traditional view.

Latter-day Saints

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that God organized the world from existing matter and that matter is eternal. Its members hold that this is consistent with the Bible. The historic churches reply that this is a form of the eternal-matter view that the early church rejected.

Philosophical and scientific views

Some philosophers argue that the idea of something from nothing is incoherent, while others reply that creation from nothing does not claim that nothing was the stuff of the world. Cosmologists since the twentieth century have discussed whether the universe had a beginning. The results do not by themselves decide the question of the doctrine.

Why it matters

It is easy to treat creation from nothing as a technical detail. Seeing the rivals shows that it protects several things the Bible says: that God alone is God, that the world is good, that the world is a gift, and that the Creator is free. The same issues return in modern debate, in different words, so a student who knows the ancient options is better equipped to see what is at stake in modern ones.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Creation from nothing means that nothing was a kind of material.

Correction: It means the opposite: there was no material. God did not need any pre-existing stuff. The word nothing is a denial and not the name of a thing.

Misunderstanding: Greek philosophy was uniformly against creation from nothing.

Correction: Most of it was, but Neoplatonism and other schools had ideas of dependence that Christians used. Fathers like Augustine took tools from Plato. They reshaped the tools and rejected the idea of eternal or necessary emanation.

Misunderstanding: Genesis 1 plainly contradicts eternal matter.

Correction: Scholars differ. Some read Genesis 1:2 as describing a pre-existing state. The tradition reads Genesis 1:1 as the act of creating and finds creation from nothing in the whole of Scripture. The question is partly one of interpretation.

Misunderstanding: Christians in the early church all agreed on creation from nothing.

Correction: Not at once. Some second-century writers, such as Justin, spoke in ways that sound like shaping of matter. The clear doctrine emerged in the later second century and was settled by the third and fourth.

Knowledge check

What are the three main rivals to creation from nothing?

Eternal matter, in which God shapes material that already exists. Dualism, in which a lesser or evil power makes the material world or matter is evil. And emanation, in which the world flows out of God necessarily, as light from a lamp. Each limited God or disparaged the world, according to the church fathers.

Why did the fathers reject emanation?

Because it makes the world a necessary overflow of God, so God cannot choose not to create, and because it makes the world a lesser part of the divine substance. They held that God creates freely and from nothing, and that creatures are really distinct from God.

How does the goodness of matter connect with the Incarnation and resurrection?

If matter were evil, the Son could not take flesh, and the resurrection of the body would be undesirable. The fathers taught that the good God made matter and that the Son took a human body, so that the body is to be redeemed. Dualist views rejected this.

Name a modern view that resembles one of the ancient rivals.

Process theology resembles eternal matter in holding that God works with a world that has always existed in some form. Pantheism resembles emanation by identifying the world with God. Latter-day Saint teaching holds that God organized eternal matter. Any of these is an acceptable answer.

Think it through

  1. Which rival would be hardest to give up for a person who values freedom? Which for a person who values order?
  2. How might the doctrine of creation from nothing affect how a person feels about their own existence?
  3. Do you think the modern debate about the origin of the universe bears on this doctrine?

Independent assignment

Three objections

In your own notebook, write about 450 words. For each of the three rivals, write the objection that a church father would raise, and then write the reply that a defender of the rival might give. End with a paragraph saying which objection you find strongest and why. Do not send this to anyone.

Further study