Ex Nihilo: Sic et non

Did God create from nothing? Yes and No. Yes, the formless-and-void “earth” was made from nothing (Genesis 1:1-2). After that, the creation account is an account of Yahweh working with the stuff, sometimes telling the stuff (soil and water) to produce new things and new configurations of existing things. Adam was not made from nothing but from the dust of the ground.

So what? Much in every way.

First, skepticism about the historicity of Genesis 1 in the modern period has reduced creation to ex-nihilo and nothing-but-ex-nihilo. It’s a single *BLAP* rather than a history, a liturgy.

That means, second, that creation and history are detached. If creation is a timeless big bang, history is what happens after creation, against the backdrop of creation, within the order of creation. But if “in six days God made the heavens and the earth,” then creation itself – God’s making – has a history. The line between “created order” and “history” blurs.

That means, of course, that the line between creation and providence becomes blurry too. Concerns about “continuing creation” assume that creation is an instantaneous blip. But if creation itself takes story-form, then the concerns about continuing creation evaporate. God “continually creates” in the same way He created during Week 1 of world history – that is, continually creates by telling soil to bring forth grass and fruit trees, by knitting new humans inside their mothers.

I suspect, without exactly being able to put my finger on how, that this also has some significant implications for political theology and ethics. Put it this way: If we try to work out a creational ethics or politics, we must ask, What is the “order of creation” to which humans must conform? Is it the order of Day 2? Day 5? Day 6? Is the “order of creation” the order of things at the end of creation week? But then, various institutions and “orders” appear later; at the end of creation week, there’s marriage but no parentage; is parenting part of the order of creation?

If creation is/has a history, does “order of creation” perhaps refer to the sequence, rather than to a fixed arrangement? Is the order of creation a rhythm of time rather than an arrangement of space?