Creation ex amore

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.”