The Difference Nothing Makes: Creation, Christ, Contemplation

INTRODUCTION

AN ASTONISHING CLAIM

Christian theology makes an astonishing claim about our world: creation did not have to be, and yet it is—from nothing. As challenging as it may be for us to imagine, the world we typically take for granted, the only world we actually know, is wholly gratuitous, without necessary existence, and utterly dependent upon an unfathomable God for its very being. While this claim has achieved a formal status in Christian theology—as articulated by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or creation from nothing—the scope of its significance for Christian imagination and practice is not sufficiently understood.

The central question this book asks is this: What difference does nothing make? What does the sheer gratuity of creation mean for our understanding of God? What does it imply about God’s intention for creation, for creaturely flourishing amid the impermanence and interdependence of all things? How did this understanding of creation arise within the Christian tradition in the first place, and what role does scriptural testimony play in its subsequent theological development? What does creatio ex nihilo imply for our understanding of human-divine interaction? Is it primarily about cosmic origins, or does it also suggest a certain manner of social critique and communal aspiration? How might creation from nothing be relevant for addressing the late-modern mood of nihilism, or the sense that nothing matters? And, finally, how might this doctrine become a practical and contemplative insight that we can skillfully embody in everyday life?

The basic argument developed in this book is that creatio ex nihilo is not a speculative doctrine referring to cosmic origins but a foundational insight into the very nature of the God-world relation, one whose implications extend throughout the full spectrum of Christian imagination and practice. In this sense it serves a grammatical role: it gives orientation and scope to all Christian speech about the God-world relation. It does this by, among other things, characterizing that relationship in noncontrastive terms. God and world do not compete with each other within a spectrum of being. Rather, God is the source and ground of creation’s contingent being, its inmost possibility and animating impulse. Creation comes to be precisely in and through God’s gratuitous act, which means that the more creation truly is, the more it reflects its ontological dependence on the Creator.

This is how the privative from nothing basically functions. It does not refer to nothing as a special kind of something, as though God creates out of a prior potentiality or cocreative principle. It does not refer to a source alongside God, a numinous force, or some kind of lack in God that creation appears to fulfill. Such speculative approaches, sometimes found in the tradition, may arouse a certain fascination or sense of drama around God’s creative act, but usually by attributing some kind of mysterious quality or minimal content to nothing, when in fact the doctrine denies even this. To this extent, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo functions as a piece of negative theology, not because it means to be obscure, but because it means to remove any concept, intuition, or principle that might mediate between something and nothing. No extradivine necessity is at work in God’s creative act, no outside condition is met, no primeval chaos is overcome, no ontological scarcity or unconscious striving in God is satisfied in bringing all things to be. The difference between there being anything at all, rather than nothing, is absolute—traversable only by the gratuitous act of the Absolute God.

While this noncontrastive relationship can be stated in formal terms, the main burden of the book is to explore the positive content of this relationship, its dynamism and living texture, as well as its more radical implications. Within a Christian theological context, this exploration will be christological in shape, in the sense that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection concretely display the God-creation relationship with maximal clarity and salvific import. It is maximally clear because in Christ the creaturely and the divine are united hypostatically, in one person. It is salvific because it unveils and transforms the deep-seated ways the God-creation relation has become misconstrued or disordered on account of human sin. Human desire, which is originally good and participative of divine life, is susceptible to rivalry, conflict, and violence, and this susceptibility can lead us to cast the God-world relation in contrastive, even agonistic terms. God is thus seen as over against the world, or perhaps associated with a sacral violence underwriting conflict in human relations.

Among the most remarkable features of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is that precisely in the midst of a human failing—a brutal execution—God is revealed as having nothing to do with our violence. But more, God is revealed as the One whose self-emptying love enters into the depths of rivalry, conflict, and violence in order to overcome them. This overcoming is not the deployment of an even greater force but, paradoxically, the victory of an inexhaustible and efficacious vulnerability that exposes the roots of conflict and violence. This exposure is simultaneous with the communication of a pacific, pardoning, and divinizing presence. From the perspective of the risen victim, which is one way to characterize the peculiar density of the Easter event, we can begin to envision creation anew, as though for the first time, and perceive with unprecedented clarity that creation is originally given to be out of unconditioned goodness and love. Its origin is agapeic, not conflictual, and the God-world relation, so far from a matter of competition or rivalry, is the very site of communion. Creatio ex nihilo, or our coming into existence from nothing, is in fact a relation of sheer intimacy with God, and thus our sense of contingency and creaturely poverty, rather than a matter of threat and defensive posturing, can be welcomed and embraced as pure gift, as that which we may freely accept, share with others, and ultimately cherish.

There is a contemplative dimension to this welcoming and embracing of our shared creatureliness. Creation does not have to be, and yet is—gratuitously, freely, wondrously. God summons all things to be out of divine freedom, not for God’s sake but for the sake of creation itself, without any mediating obstacle or ulterior motive. Creation is given. But more, it is loved into being. It comes from God. God summons that which is other than God into existence as an expression of God’s own fullness of being and love. Creaturely being is thus primordially received by us. We can never get to something prior to this original gift. We can never get to its back side, so to speak, for it is who and what we are. Our being thus depends upon God, and this ontological dependence is original and without any other ground. This sense of creation’s essential gratuity, if deeply lived into rather than merely thought about, can begin to transform the felt sense of our contingency from one of anxiety-tinged precarity to the welcoming of finitude and our mutual dependence in loving communion. Contemplative practice invites us to let go of our defenses and live into our creaturely contingency with progressive freedom and deepest acceptance. This acceptance is truly liberating, for rather than struggling to achieve our identity through reactivity, competition, and acquisitiveness, the contemplative way allows us to recognize that with God—and God alone—we do not have to negotiate our existence with a rival; we can wholly trust and live from the One who loves all things into being ex nihilo. In characteristically paradoxical fashion, the Christian contemplative path is one of purgation unto union, kenosis unto theosis, nothingness unto fullness.

This paradoxical dynamic achieves its greatest realization in the incarnation, and as I hope to make clear in the unfolding of this book, it is in light of the incarnation that creatio ex nihilo gains its fullest content. To give some indication of this, we must first recognize that creation from nothing, while issuing a certain kind of denial, already implies a positive theological affirmation of enormous consequence. Creation is an act of divine self-bestowal. Creation is not just any other, it turns out, but precisely that other whose inmost ground and eschatological horizon is God. While in no way annulling the genuine integrity of the created other, the very nature of this difference is such that God imparts God’s self in establishing it. Creation is just that which comes to be when divine life, illimitable in itself, is rendered participable. Because our creatureliness is an act of divine self-donation, our difference from God is in fact the source of our deepest intimacy with God—the event and idiom of God’s kenotic outpouring as well as the event and idiom of our ecstatic openness to God. The God-creation relation is therefore not static or thinglike but dynamic and reverberative, a living betweenness. In being constituted by God, creation in all its diversity and emergent possibilities exhibits a vital capacity for God. Creation is the unfolding of this relation.

What we call the incarnation, formally speaking, is that event in which God’s self-communication coincides utterly with the creaturely capacity to respond in freedom and love. God’s kenotic outpouring and creaturely self-transcendence: when these two movements converge in a definitive and unsurpassable way, the very reason for creation—its inner dynamism and eschatological goal—is realized. God’s self-communication, already constitutive of creation itself, reaches its climax in creation through the incarnation. The Word became flesh. God became human. Without ceasing to be God, God became creaturely not in order to expand divine life—as though this were possible—but in order to shepherd creaturely reality into its fullest fruition. This fruition is not something done passively to the creature. Though wholly gracious, it is also the fullest actualization of the creature. The difference between God and creation is not eliminated in the Christ-event but preserved and brought into maximal unity-in-difference. It is this unity-in-difference that all creation is destined to share, yet it is in Christ that this eschatological promise of creation, issued from the beginning, achieves decisive momentum and irrevocable form. The Christ-event reveals the beating heart of the God-creation relation, its systole-diastole movement, and thus the inmost content of creatio ex nihilo really comes to this: we are created in Christ (Eph. 2:10). We are created to participate in divine life. God became human so that we might become God, so the patristic axiom goes. Creation and incarnation, though a differentiated historical process, are two aspects of one self-communicating act. Seen retrospectively from the Christ-event, we can say: This is why we were made. This is why we have come to be. This is how things shall be. This is the difference nothing makes.

PLAN OF THE BOOK

The present book is organized into three main parts, with each part composed of two chapters. Ideally read in sequence, the three parts are relatively self-standing, thematically speaking. While there is an overall progression of argumentation and thematic development from one to the next chapter, each of the book’s three parts represents a renewed take on creation, Christ, and contemplation. Accordingly, part 1 is more foundational in character and focuses on scriptural resources, philosophical disputation, doctrinal development, and the role of contemplation in theological practice. Part 2 is more christological in bearing as it attempts to show how Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection display the inner content of the God-creation relation. Part 3 chiastically corresponds with part 1 in key respects, but now as amplified by the christological focus of part 2. It is also in part 3 that the purgation-union motif of the entire book reaches its greatest pitch.

Part One: Grammar and Contemplation

Chapter 1 takes the form of disputatio. It lays out several of the book’s main themes by taking up several objections to creatio ex nihilo and defending the doctrine as providing crucial insights into the gifted character of creation. Working through biblical, patristic, and philosophical perspectives, and dealing with select postmodern considerations of power and violence, the chapter articulates a noncompetitive account of the God-world relation, which claims that God’s unconditioned transcendence is the inmost factor of all created reality. Not only are the divine and creaturely not in rivalry, but the more truly a creature is, the more expressive it is of divine reality. Such is the christological shape of the God-world relation. The chapter concludes by insisting that creatio ex nihilo is not only about cosmic or human origins but also a doctrine that grounds Christian hope in the face of all that diminishes creation. It is eschatological as much as it is protological.

While presuming the narrative and conceptual content of Christian doctrine, chapter 2 underscores (along with Sebastian Moore, Sarah Coakley, Teresa of Avila, Martin Laird, and William Desmond) the contemplative dimensions of a theological inquiry that proceeds by way of unknowing. Given that creatio ex nihilo refers us to our creaturely contingency (i.e., the fact that we do not have to exist, and yet we do), it also invites a patient discovery of the nothingness from which we subsist. Contemplation is a way of relaxing into this indefinable, ungraspable mystery, and to this extent it allows us to embrace and even love our contingency rather than deny it or regard it as inimical to human flourishing. It also allows us to resist treating God as a kind of object that competes with or displaces the world. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the inherent goodness of our creatureliness and therefore of the need to grow in our capacities for receiving, deepening, and communicating that goodness with others by way of loving communion.

Part Two: Christ as Concentrated Creation

Part 2 focuses on Christology as concentrated creation, a phrase taken from Edward Schillebeeckx to name God’s eschatological intention for creation. Both chapters draw from the field of mimetic theory in order to explore the creative and destructive potential of human desire. Christology is accounted for here in terms of the pedagogy of human desire, as well as the revelation of the true character of the God-creation relation. Part 2 is the pivot to the book’s overall chiastic structure.

Drawing upon the seminal insights of René Girard, along with several of his theological interlocutors, chapter 3 develops a phenomenology of redemption by showing how Jesus’s life and ministry display the nonrivalrous relationship between God and creation. Focusing on issues of human desire, human conflict, and our propensity toward exclusionary violence, the chapter examines how Jesus’s sayings and deeds go to the root of human desire in order to free it from its self-defensive, other-reifying tendencies.

Chapter 4 focuses on Jesus’s death and resurrection as the gracious inbreaking of God’s love that subverts the mechanisms of power and exclusionary violence from within, revealing once and for all God’s noncomplicity in human violence. It develops the Christus Victor motif in Christian theology while criticizing certain strains within the Christian tradition that support some version of penal substitution. It also develops the theopolitical significance of this subversion, as it affirms creation in terms of original peace rather than foundational conflict.

Part Three: Purgation and Union

Chapter 5 draws upon the Christian contemplative tradition in order to show how the dark night of faith is a spiritually patient and discerning way to engage the sense of divine absence that many experience in our post-religious, postsecular age. Drawing upon figures such as John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, but also more contemporary voices including John Chapman, Charles Taylor, Michael Buckley, and Tomáš Halík, the chapter maintains that the Christian contemplative tradition, along with its understanding of creation from nothing, must incorporate atheistic critique as part of its mystagogical itinerary. It ultimately goes beyond atheism, even radicalizing it in the contemplative journey into divine mystery.

The final chapter of the book highlights creatio ex nihilo as an expression of divine love—God’s love for finitude, for manifestation, for relationship. Taking seriously the purgative-unitive dynamic of Christian faith, it emphasizes that on the other side of self-emptying and negation lies a return to fullness and affirmation. In extended dialogue with Karl Rahner, Sergius Bulgakov, and other theological exemplars who explore the richly ontological implications of divine self-communication—implications that expressly affirm the cosmicity of the incarnation—chapter 6 brings the book full circle by insisting that God’s act of creation is always already ordered toward the incarnation and thus an expression of God’s eternal essence as Love. God’s love is for the entire community of creation, not just human beings, inasmuch as any contemporary theology of creation must address the ecological dimensions of divine-creaturely communion. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the recovery of our spiritual senses as essential to a faith whose love of God and neighbor is internally related to love of the earth.

PART 1

Grammar and Contemplation

CHAPTER ONE

The Difference Nothing Makes

OBJECTIONS TO NOTHING

The history of theology is by no means just the history of the progress of doctrine, but also a history of forgetting.¹ So wrote Karl Rahner in his landmark essay, Chalcedon: End or Beginning? (1951). Written for the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Chalcedon, the essay brilliantly charts a path for overcoming the inadequacies of neo-scholastic theology regnant at the time, especially within Catholic circles. Treating magisterial pronouncements as fully accomplished propositions that have only to be expounded, such theology largely failed to grasp the historical character of human understanding, as though by repeating hallowed formulae over time, and with sufficient confidence, we might be assured of their meaning.

But this is exactly what human understanding is not. "For history is precisely not an atomized beginning-ever-anew; it is rather (the more spiritual it is) a becoming-new which preserves the old, and preserves it all the more as old, the more spiritual this history is."² This phrasing may have a certain Hegelian ring to it, but it is a basic hermeneutical claim: dogmatic formulations of the past may indeed be certain kinds of achievements, indispensable attainments that elicit our admiration and fidelity, but they can only be regarded as such to the extent that their meaning is constantly won, discovered again and again through the hard work of remembering and reconstruction, approached both as ends and beginnings. This is why historical theology and the history of doctrine are crucial for any constructive theology today. "What was once given in history and is ever made present anew does not primarily form a set of premises from which we can draw new conclusions which have never been thought of before. It is the object which, while it is always retained, must ever be acquired anew, by us, that is, we who are just such as no one else can ever be in all history."³

Rahner’s programmatic essay focuses primarily on the christological formulae of Chalcedon, but the same could be said of any doctrinal formulation achieving some normative status in the Christian tradition, including the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Although creation from nothing was never formally promulgated by the Church in discrete form—owing, no doubt, to the rapidity with which it became a default assumption in Christian theology—there is good reason to conclude that the basic grammar it establishes for speaking of the God-creation relation had much to do with orienting the christological formulae that would eventually lay claim to orthodoxy.⁴ We are right to suspect an even deeper relation than this, a mutual influence and inner correspondence in which further reflection upon the total meaning and significance of Christ, his resurrection from the dead and qualitatively new presence in the Spirit, put creative pressures on what the earliest Christians imagined creation itself to be—from the beginning. That is, the very content of creation, as well as the horizon within which it might be imagined, symbolized, and theorized by Christians, took on the distinctive shape and texture it did precisely because of the Christ-event. As Saint Paul puts it in suitably concentrated form:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven (Col. 1:15–19)

As all-encompassing as this testimony is, it is not quite possible to draw a straight line from its several references to the beginning to the affirmation that God creates all things from nothing. Multiple mediating factors must be traced before uncovering the peculiar significance of this latter phrase. But it is no less evident that were we to succeed in better understanding the depth and range of significance that creatio ex nihilo has for Christian theology, it will require us to unpack the highly concentrated way creation and Christ are envisioned in a passage like this. Such effort would seem a key part of not forgetting in theology.

But what if the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo entails its own kind of forgetting? Might it be that when the majority of Christian theologians in the second and third centuries converged upon what can only be described as a strong consensus—as strong a consensus as anyone will find in the early centuries of Christian theology—we have the telltale signs of an eclipse? What if, upon further inspection, the philosophical and theological disputations of the second and third centuries, during which the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was forged, resulted in something like a cover-up, perhaps a misremembering of the biblical sources that the doctrine purported to defend and elucidate? If, in the transition from biblical narrative to doctrinal reflection, we suspect something like a departure, perhaps this will be judged as more or less innocuous, merely a shift from one to another kind of discursive register, one involving little alteration of content, implying no obvious mischief, and mattering little in the end. But if our suspicions are more easily stirred, and if we are inclined to view the inclusion of metaphysics in Christian theology as a kind of a betrayal, as a freezing or conceptual reification of textual traditions that are inherently ambiguous and fluid, then we might conclude that the affirmation of creation from nothing, along with its emphasis on divine sovereignty and creaturely dependence, is an overreaching piece of ideology. Perhaps the swift convergence around creatio ex nihilo in the second and third centuries is less a matter of theological elucidation than it is a lamentable act of metaphysical capture.

The suspicion that creatio ex nihilo represents just this kind of betrayal has gained traction in recent years. Noting as a matter of historical record that its formal development comes subsequent to the biblical tradition, such critics argue that while ostensibly designed to affirm the sovereignty of God and the goodness of matter in the mid-second century disputes with Middle Platonism and gnosticism, creation from nothing represents a capitulation to a metaphysical view of God in which power, or omnipotence, serves as its governing predicate. The consequences of this metaphysical turn in theology turn out to be disastrous.

In his The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), John D. Caputo makes precisely this charge. Working in close company with Catherine Keller and Jacques Derrida, among others, Caputo maintains that creatio ex nihilo represents the dream of metaphysical theology enthralled by the idea of God’s absolute dominion over creation and nonbeing, and thus a God who excludes and expels all that evinces liminality, ambiguity, and process—that is, the chaos of the deep. With deconstructive sensibilities aroused, Caputo interrogates the scriptural narratives to retrieve disruptive nuances and creative possibilities he believes have long been suppressed in the theological tradition. The work of theopoetics, as he describes his project, eschews the metaphysics of power and opts instead for envisioning God as a weak force: a God who, rather than bringing all things into being from literally nothing, creates by eliciting life from the preexistent deep (tehom) of the waters, from the fathomless potentiality of the void (tohu wa-bohu). Whereas the doctrine of creation ex nihilo would suppress indeterminacy in the interests of affirming an ultimate and simple origin to things—with God serving as the ultimate power policing creation’s boundaries—this alternative, more biblical view embraces the messiness of creation as a beautiful risk.

A related concern for Caputo is that an omnipotent God is simply not credible in the face of suffering and evil. With occasional appeal to process philosophy and theology, Caputo alerts us to the horns of our dilemma: a God who creates from nothing is responsible for all the world’s contingencies, including its many unspeakable horrors, and thus cannot be affirmed as wholly good. The only way we may continue to affirm God’s unqualified goodness is if we abandon all strong theologies preoccupied with divine omnipotence. God is not simply weak on the basis of willed restraint; God is weak, or, is a weak force capable only of luring contingent creation through the event of invitation. If stirring within the deep is the creative potential for beauty and harmony, so too may tehomic energies fragment and destroy. Creation unleashed is an ongoing process that we, along with God, cocreate, enjoy, and endure in hope. The promise of creation is a promise that keeps its fingers crossed.⁵

The argumentative burden of this chapter is to show that Caputo’s characterization of creatio ex nihilo is deeply misleading. Though I wish to affirm much of what appeals to Caputo in his theopoetics, not least a view of God as noncoercive love, a God whose creation exhibits genuine contingency and open-endedness, I do not believe he demonstrates that the classical affirmations of creatio ex nihilo and divine omnipotence are responsible for all he heaps upon them. On the contrary, these affirmations are precisely what enable us more richly and consistently to envision creation as gift. The constructive purpose of engaging Caputo’s work in this nexus of issues is that it affords us an opportunity to appreciate the point of creatio ex nihilo, which, when taken as an isolated matter of abstract reflection, runs the risk of losing its rich significance within the ecology of Christian discourse. We can engage Caputo’s intervention, gratefully but ultimately critically, as a spur for opening up fresh perspectives upon a doctrine that might otherwise go unnoticed. Such is the potential gain of disputatio.

I shall proceed in two major steps: first, by showing that creatio ex nihilo affirms God’s unconditioned transcendence in a way that expressly avoids construing the God-world relationship in competitive (or contrastive) terms. It reflects a basic grammar for speaking of God and creation in a way that names their radical, qualitative difference—a difference that in fact allows us to affirm divine transcendence precisely as God’s unfathomable nearness. This difference nothing makes can also help us appreciate what divine omnipotence might actually mean. It does not mean domination, which is the way Caputo tendentiously frames his analysis of power, and which forces him to set up an untenable dichotomy between strong and weak theologies. Caputo tends to reverse the terms he opposes, without appreciating that it is just this dichotomy that the affirmations of divine transcendence and creatio ex nihilo mean to subvert.

Second, I wish to show the internal consistency of creatio ex nihilo with the central affirmation of the New Testament—Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. This is crucial for the kind of remembering Rahner commends in his essay. The event of Easter, itself an eschatological transfiguration of memory, opened up for Christians a perspective upon God’s creativity in a significantly new light. The theology of creation from nothing is logically coherent with, and in Christian theology historically dependent upon, a view of a God who raises to life what has succumbed to the nihil of death. A post-Easter imagination, not unmoored metaphysical speculation, underwrites its discovery. By raising Jesus from the dead—this is the definitive manifestation of divine power from a Christian point of view—what is revealed is a God of forgiving hospitality, a God whose boundless generativity is not agonistic or contrastive with creation but pacific, pardoning, and self-diffusive.

Such a view, it must be admitted, will not do much to theoretically explain evil and suffering, which, along with Caputo, I am wont to avoid; but it does constitute the Christian hope that evil, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Indeed, despite Caputo’s intention to avoid theodicy, his claim that divine omnipotence must be rejected should we wish honestly to face the mystery of suffering does more to explain that mystery than most classical approaches, and without any obvious advantage in motivating us for its practical overcoming.

A SPECTRUM OF POSITIONS

To begin, it will be useful to identify three broad positions one might take in assessing the status of creatio ex nihilo and its relationship to the biblical traditions. The first is that creatio ex nihilo, as it gained a formal character in the second and third centuries, represents an innovation that imposes something new and largely foreign upon the biblical traditions thought to support it. The genealogies accounting for the historical and ideological factors leading to this imposition may vary in their details, but the basic contention such critics share is that its ascendancy is emblematic of a failure and an eclipse, an ill-fated fall into a metaphysical picture that retrojects a set of considerations about God and cosmic origins that the biblical narratives do not raise and cannot be legitimately enlisted for support.

A second position recognizes the innovative character of creatio ex nihilo but views its normative status as consistent with, and elucidatory of, the biblical traditions. The development might be compared to the emergence of the christological dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon. If one can grant that the interaction between scriptural traditions and Greek philosophy led to creative syntheses exhibiting both novelty and fidelity in christological reflection—and in fact one sees this interaction already occurring in the New Testament itself—then, similarly, the considerations entailed in the doctrine of creation from nothing need not be thought of as merely late, or fabrications of dubious eisegesis, but providing an interpretive framework that helps us better to understand those scriptural traditions as new questions and insights arise. Even if many of the accounts of creation in scripture remain unclear as to whether God creates ex nihilo in any strict sense, once the question of unoriginate matter became live, for example, it became incumbent upon theologians to clarify the point. The doctrine, as formally articulated by Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian, draws the appropriate conclusion once the issue was posed.

The third (and perhaps most traditional) position is that the postbiblical theologies of creatio ex nihilo are not innovative at all but fully continuous with the content of those biblical traditions clearly supporting it. Even if a more technical conceptuality is at work in its later elaboration, the content is the essentially same. The biblical traditions reveal little ambiguity; any fair-minded analysis will show their intent to narrate the act of creation as not dependent upon some prior potentiality or raw material that God fortuitously discovers and against which God must eternally contend. If some of the early church fathers, such as Justin Martyr, taught that God created the world from preexistent, unformed matter, this will be viewed as, say, an uncritical reception of Plato’s cosmological speculations in the Timaeus, not a valid inference from scripture.

Caputo (and Keller) clearly opt for the first position, whereas my own view accords with the second, at least in outline.⁶ Recent attempts have been made to argue the third, though I shall not consider them here.⁷ In taking the second position, it is not essential to my argument that the doctrine’s unambiguous affirmation be traced back throughout all the various strata of the biblical canon. Indeed, it is instructive to appreciate its historical emergence, especially as it intertwines with parallel developments in eschatology. As we shall see, protology and eschatology in Christian theology are mutually informative and find in creatio ex nihilo a logical meeting place.

Before examining this interaction between protology and eschatology in the biblical traditions, however, we must first deal with some formal considerations of creatio ex nihilo as they relate to objections to classical affirmations of divine transcendence and omnipotence. At issue here is the sort of grammar (or rules of speech) operative in such affirmations. My central contention is that if creatio ex nihilo is elaborated according to a competitive logic, or as Kathryn Tanner alternatively puts it, a contrastive logic, then its meaning will become irretrievably distorted, with the result that its explicit rejection or modification in favor of presumed alternatives may amount to a subtle acceptance of onto-theological terms, that is, that God and world coexist within a continuum, on the same plane, on a competitive basis, and so on.⁸ A more adequate understanding of creatio ex nihilo, at least initially, is one that sees in it a systematic denial. Far from making the origin and ground of creation accessible to full comprehension, the statement requires the work of an apophatic discourse that opens up human understanding to the utter gratuity of creation. Formally speaking, nothing is necessary about creation at all.⁹ It derives wholly from the incomprehensible mystery of God, whose relationship to creation remains one of loving freedom and fidelity. Rather than implying an agonistic picture that situates God and creation in a relationship of rivalry—such a picture only underwrites the serialization of binary and hierarchically arranged terms (e.g., power/weakness, higher/lower, spirit/body, male/female, active/passive)—creatio ex nihilo in fact ruptures such a picture as it emphatically denies that God is part of any continuum whatsoever.

According to Caputo, however, creatio ex nihilo represents a disfigurement of the biblical narratives, one that has turned a more Hebraic vision of creation into the tale of a pure, simple, clean act of power carried out on high by a timeless and supersensible being, a very Hellenic story that also goes along with a top-down social structure of imperial power flowing down from on high.¹⁰ Caputo would have us take notice of the metaphysician’s selective memory that conceals the fragments and unnerving indeterminacies of the creation narratives in their extant form. We ever-suspicious sacred anarchists, we who have a strong affection for weak theology, suspect foul play.¹¹ Who is this we, and how did it ever come to be that they buried the bodies?

It is difficult not to notice that Caputo relishes the role of the gadfly, as an exile from a kingdom of orthodoxy that denies him credentials for admission. One might view the constant refrain of we anarchists throughout The Weakness of God as the seriously playful work of the ironist, since what frequently passes as acceptably orthodox seems decidedly unplayful, far too confident in its ability to trace origins, establish historical continuities, and monitor boundaries. Yet there is a risk that such self-identification makes the work of the ironist more acutely so—that is, not in the way intended—since the rhetoric might only deepen the very us and them polarization so passionately decried. I point out