This is indeed
creatio ex amore, and it is not a one - time matter in the beginning of history.
I affirm Genesis» proposal that creation is a matter of generating order out of chaos, rather than the church's post-biblical proclamation of
creatio ex nihilo.
What we are not justified in doing on the basis of known usage is to read into bara» anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures later metaphysical understandings of the idea of creation, such as
creatio ex nihilo, which is not the sense of Genesis 1:1 f. and is indeed not found in Jewish religious writing until 2 Maccabees 7:28, where there is undoubted Hellenistic influence.
Consistently with its rejection of this doctrine, process theism holds that God necessarily and hence always exists in relation to «others» with their own power, whereas traditional theism's acceptance of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo means that God faced «no prior constraints apart from those of logical consistency.»
This fundamentally affirmative and confident attitude to the creation is reinforced by the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo (Heb 11:3), which, as we noted, was not available to the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, emerging as it does in the intertestamental period.
Although this book is not part of the Protestant Bible, it does show that in a setting in which matter is held to be virtually eternal, the biblical understanding of God as Creator leads naturally to
a creatio ex nihilo position since the alternative compromises the sovereignty of God over nature).
In the previous endnote, we noticed one way in which the creature's power of creativity characterization resembles the divine
creatio ex nihilo.
Some defenders of the traditional doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo hold that cause has a series of analogous meanings, making the divine cause significantly unlike ordinary causes and, thus, not a threat to creaturely freedom.
God is not vulnerable, however, at the level of
creatio ex nihilo, that is, at the level of creativity - esse.
Rather, just as esse is the presupposition of characterization, so
creatio ex nihilo is the presupposition of actualization.
Here the creature has a power that in a slight way resembles, but falls far short of,
creatio ex nihilo.
Because of each actual entity's deep particularity and self - determination, we may say that its exercise of creativity - characterization resembles slightly, but only slightly, God's radical power of
creatio ex nihilo.
I find
creatio ex nihilio difficult too, which is one reason I do not belive in God.
BAdger00, you said, «Personally, I don't find it more preposterous than
creatio ex nihilo.»
But Polkinghorne is a theist who believes in an active God, so he combines
creatio ex nihilo with creatio continua to emphasize God's continuing involvement in nature.
Polkinghorne then turns to orthodox Christian commitments such as a theistic understanding of God and
creatio ex nihilo and defends them against competing positions.
Process theology is, I think, misguided in allowing a preference for creativity to lose the values in
creatio ex nihilo.
What Bultmann is really driving at may perhaps be demonstrated from a further consideration of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihil.
Pure coercive power transforms
creatio ex nihilo into
creatio ex deo, with the world possessing no more independent actuality than an idea in the divine mind would have.
This puzzle is directly related to the problem many theologians have with Hartshorne on account of his explicit denial of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo or «creation out of nothing.»
A process philosopher influenced by substantialist modes of thought and who also affirms the notion of
creatio ex nihilo is Robert C.Neville.
Unlike most process theologians, Gilkey defends the importance of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo.
Whatever theological orthodoxy may have to say about
creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), the Hebrew scriptures see it as bringing order out of chaos.
This is the hiatus which makes of the new creation
a creatio ex nihilo — a hiatus so profound that the identity of the risen Christ with Jesus crucified is the great question of the New Testament.
However,
creatio ex nihilo is totally beyond our conception of creating, says Hartshorne.
Hence, to say literally and meaningfully that God creates, we must exclude the notion of
creatio ex nihilo.
If Hartshorne does want to maintain that God is the source of being then he is going to run into the traditional problem of
creatio ex nihilo (which he explicitly rejects — as we have seen).
Autonomy can only be the property of God who is capable of
creatio ex nihilo.
He expresses this by the old formula
creatio ex nihilo.
We have already seen how defending God's omnipotence required the development of a doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo in Theophilus and Irenaeus, a notion not at all explicit in Genesis 1:2 where, when God began to create, all was «a formless void.»
The main reason that nature lacks intrinsic value is necessarily linked to the orthodox idea of
creatio ex nihilo, a view that essentially makes all created things completely contingent upon divine power.
Not only can such a deity be blamed for not intervening, but also held responsible, by virtue of the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo, for natural defects as well as deficient wills.17
If we understand
creatio ex nihilo, the Incarnation, miracles, and the Last Judgment in orthodox ways, then these doctrines seem to require divine coercion..
The idea of
creatio ex nihilo, or nontemporality, is regarded as noncontradictory by some, and absurd by others.