Aa detailed and innovative constructive theology of creation

Creation ex amore

by Ted Peters

From Nothing

A Theology of Creation

By Ian A. McFarland

Westminster John Knox

This is a book about nothing. Nothing limits God. Nothing exists apart from God. Creation is grounded in nothing but God. That’s a lot to say about nothing.

Ian McFarland, professor of theology and associate dean of faculty and academic affairs at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, defends the classic Christian teaching that God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing. His defense does not depend on scripture, which is ambiguous on this question. Rather, he contends that creatio ex nihilo makes dogmatic, or doctrinal, sense.

Note the present tense: God creates. Our term creation does not refer to an origin back in the book of Genesis or at the Big Bang. Rather, God’s action of creating the world out of nothing is ongoing, contemporary, continuing (creatio continua). “It seems to me that the Christian doctrine of creation is only marginally concerned with the question of the world’s temporal origin. Far more fundamentally, the doctrine of creation from nothing is a proposal about the character of God’s relationship to the world.”

I refer to this position as a constitutional account of creation out of nothing, rather than a temporal account. In both the temporal and constitutional accounts the same point is made: the created world is totally dependent on God for its existence. Thomas Aquinas, on whom McFarland depends for much of his doctrinal reflection, ascribes the constitutional account to philosophy and the temporal account to scripture. Similarly, McFarland draws most of his argumentation from dogmatic deliberation rather than biblical exegesis.

Our creating God is trinitarian. The Father creates through the Son in the Spirit. God’s internal relationality (perichoresis) is extended beyond the divine life to creatures whom God brings into existence as an act of grace and love. McFarland writes:

Interpreted Christologically, the claim that nothing limits God is not primarily a claim about God’s power over the creature and still less about God’s independence from creation. On the contrary, its focus is God’s freedom to enter into creation in order to bind created life to God from within by making it nothing less than God’s own life.

Like many classical trinitarian theists during the final third of the last century, McFarland places the historical activity of creation within the trinitarian life of God. All of this is well and good. Yet we must attend to a bear market on the theological stock exchange. The price of creation out of nothing is falling. Modern creatures do not like the idea of total dependence on a single all-powerful God, so they are buying stock in assertions of creaturely efficacy, if not co-creatorship with the divine.

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