Thomas Jay Oord has an interesting take on the doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo.
(Here is my liberationist defense of Creation ex nihilo, taken from an independent study project finished two years ago).
The creation account in the Bible does not give us a detailed, eyewitness report of how everything was brought into being; we, along with the scribes who recorded the canon, can only hope to humble ourselves like Job when he was confronted by the Creator: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.”[1] The creation story gives us an accurate portrayal of who the Creator is and who God intended us to become. Christian tradition confesses that the first person in the Trinity, God the Parent, as the creator god we locate in the stories in Genesis chapter one and two. The Nicene Creed states: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.”[2] The particular Christian understanding that God has always been a Parent means that the Father has never existed without the Son. A father cannot be identified a father without first having a child. The Son exists in relation to God the Father and the Father subsists in relation to God’s Son. In Augustinian terms, the Holy Spirit is the familial love shared between the Father and Son; this is the description of God’s relationship within the Godhead, or the immanent Trinitarian fellowship.[3] The act of creation, therefore, is a sovereign decision by the Triune God to establish a relationship with a creation outside the membership of the Godhead. Moltmann contends:
The federal theological tradition has termed this God’s trinitarian decision to create the world, interpreting it as God’s inner-trinitarian covenant. […] For it is in this eternal covenant of the Trinity, a covenant made for creation and glorification, that the self-determination of the Father, Son, and the Spirit takes place; and this self-determination, as self-limitation, means making room for creation and making possible the liberty of the non-divine image of God in God.[4]
The One True God exists as a God-in-covenant who creates in order to institute relationships with creation. God the Almighty Parent fashions the universe in covenant with the Word (Son) and the Breath (Spirit) of God. Biblical descriptions of God the Parent portray the first person the Trinity as having both maternal and paternal attributes. Leonardo Boff notes that the Council of Toledo declared that “we must believe that the Son is begotten or born from the womb of the Father”; he adds that “the Father in the begetting of the Son and breathing-out (with the Son) of the Holy Spirit, can also be called Mother.”[5] The Genesis accounts of creation describe the labor pains of the Creator. Evans comments, “In fact, a rereading of the Genesis 2:4-7 account of creation suggests a God who breathes the breath of life into the new-born cosmos, clearing the mucous from its air passages and enabling the created order to breathe on its own. This is a womanist trope for the bringing into existence which did not exist before, of giving life, of bonding, of caring.”[6] The relationship between Triune God and God’s creation is free and open because God first decided to freely associate Godself with the world.
African-American Christians affirm God as creator by insisting that God ‘makes a way out of no way.’ The doctrine of creation ex nihilo serves as a description of God’s life-giving omnipotence. Baker Fletcher observes:
God who “makes something out of nothing […] is like the poor mothers of the globe, who with other women in their families or communities pull a scarcity of resources together to produce a context of sustenance for their young. God is like those who survive cities torn apart by hurricanes with nothing but the clothes on their back and a scarcity of resources, if any to begin life anew. The very power of renewing life, individually and collectively, is a divine gift received from a God of courage and grace.”[7]
The fact that God generated all of creation from nothing means that God was impoverished of relationships outside of the immanent Trinitarian covenant. God’s poverty of fellowship with the Other prior to creation points toward a Creator who prefers a special relationship with those whom society deprives of communion–the marginalized and the undesirables of this world. In this way, God’s election of the humiliated occurred before the act of creation; in the lack of relationship between the Triune God and the other, we discover God’s creative intent from the foundation of the world. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians that the Trinity chose the afflicted of this world “before the foundation of the world,” according to the riches of God’s grace in order to gain the inheritance of redemption as God’s own people.[8] Lemuel Haynes recognized the inseparable bond between creation and liberation: “The deliverance of sinners is consistent with the law of God and dignity of divine government.”[9] Divine government in the 19th century New Light Calvinist rhetoric referred to the Creator’s character as God was in the beginning. God the Parent Almighty is also redeemer because the creator god of scripture cares for and provides for the creation.
[1] NRSV, Job 38:4
[2] Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity Volume I, 165.
[3] Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 104-105.
[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 111.
[5] Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, 170.
[6] James Evans, We Have Been Believers, 76.
[7] Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing With God, 71-72.
[8] Ephesians 1:3-4, 11, 14.
[9] Lemuel Haynes “The Prisoner Released.” In The Life and Character of Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 235.
