Creation Ex Materia and "Nothingness" in the Bible

In his excellent article, Out of Nothing: A History of Creation ex Nihilo in Early Christian Thought, Blake Ostler demonstrated that, for early Christians, “formlessness” and even “nothingness” was not “nothingness” in the sense necessitated by creation ex nihilo; instead, “shapeless matter” that still has ontological existence. For instance, in his First Apology, Justin Martyr wrote the following, affirming creation ex materia:

But we have received by tradition that God does not need the material offerings which men can give, seeing, indeed, that He Himself is the provider of all things. And we have been taught, and are convinced, and do believe, that He accepts those only who imitate the excellences which reside in Him, temperance, and justice, and philanthropy, and as many virtues as are peculiar to a God who is called by no proper name. And we have been taught that He in the beginning did of His goodness, for man's sake, create all things out of unformed matter; and if men by their works show themselves worthy of this His design, they are deemed worthy, and so we have received--of reigning in company with Him, being delivered from corruption and suffering. For as in the beginning He created us when we were not, so do we consider that, in like manner, those who choose what is pleasing to Him are, on account of their choice, deemed worthy of incorruption and of fellowship with Him. For the coming into being at first was not in our own power; and in order that we may follow those things which please Him, choosing them by means of the rational faculties He has Himself endowed us with, He both persuades us and leads us to faith. And we think it for the advantage of all men that they are not restrained from learning these. (First Apology X [ANF: 1:165], emphasis added)

The underlying Greek is εξ αμορφου υλης, and refers to matter (which pre-exists the act of divine creation) without form. Justin is an early witness to the doctrine of creation being out of pre-existing material, not ex nihilo.

Sean McDonough, in an essay addressing "nothingness" in the book of Revelation, in an anthology of essays defending the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo, wrote the following which actually supports creation ex nihilo, at least on this point:

. . . Ad Nihilum?

We have argued that John consciously portrays God decreating the world in a counterpoint in his creation of the world in the beginning. We must now ask the further question: Does this decreation amount to nothing? Does God annihilate the world in order to make way for a completely new one? A prima facie reading of Revelation 20-21 argues for an affirmative answer: the disappearance of the first heaven and first earth is about as definitive a sign of annihilation as one could imagine.

But things are not so simple. We must first recognize that John is reporting a vision, and thus we must mind the aforementioned distinction between the things he sees and that they are (or perhaps in this case, what they are not). Such a cautious approach is rewarded when we look more carefully at the details of Revelation 20-21. Note, for instance, the New Jerusalem—which descends from heaven in 21:2—bears the name of the tribes of Israel on its gates, and the names of the twelve apostles on its foundation stones. This indicates that the New Jerusalem serves at one level as a symbol of the people of God. For our purposes, however, it demonstrates that God’s city did not in fact fall full-formed from heaven into nothingness: it is rather the culmination of the work and witness of (at least) the patriarchs and apostles in history. We must likeness recognize that the “nations” and the “kings of the earth” streaming into the city have not suddenly sprouted into being in the eschaton—they are the same characters who have been playing a far more sinister role in the proceedings of the Apocalypse up to this point. How this radical transformation is effected lies outside our purview; we only emphasize again the strong element of continuity with previous parts of the vision and the eschatological denouement in the New Jerusalem.

John, then, sees continuity between the current world order and the coming world order, and he hardly commits to the literal obliteration of all matter. Does this imply that the language of nothingness has then lost all utility for explicating the Apocalypse. Not at all. We have seen that John has woven subtle meditations on being and nothingness throughout his text, all the while surrounding it with hardly subtle portraits of the world as we know it falling to ruins. Even if a strict obliteration of matter is not in view, we may rightly speak of an effective nothingness in the Apocalypse. The narrative disappearance of the first heaven and first earth in Revelation 20 maintains its force as a depiction of one aspect of eschatological reality: the ultimate collapse of the current corrupt world system when confronted with the unveiled God. Athanasius in the passage above said that creatures are “on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again” (John suggests that under the leadership of the dragon the cosmos in some sense reaches that unhappy destination.

In this John sits very much in the mainstream of the biblical tradition. Like virtually all the writers of the New Testament, John felt particularly attracted to the latter chapters of Isaiah, and thus the use there of “nothingness” is of special interest. Consider Isaiah 40:17: “All the nations are as nothing [kě’ayin] before him; they are accounted to him as less than nothing and emptiness [tohû].” Throughout the latter chapters of Isaiah the nothingness of the nations and their idols is regularly contrasted with affirmations of God’s creative power (cf. v. 28: “The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth”), so the use of tohû here catches the eye. Perhaps even more interesting is Isaiah 45:6-7: “I am the Lord, and there is no other [‘ȇyin ‘od].  Form light and create darkness, I make weal and creation woe; I the LORD do all these thing.”

Other writings in the New Testament could equally use the language of “not-being” to describe states of affairs other than the absolute absence of matter. The language of nonexistence, for example, is critical in two pertinent Pauline texts. Toward the end of 1 Corinthians 1, Paul reminds his puffed-up Corinthian congregation of their lowly place in the social hierarchy: “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth”; nonetheless, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that one might boast in the presence of God” (vv. 26-29; emphasis added). God’s ability to overturn. (Sean M. McDonough, “Being and Nothingness in the Book of Revelation,” in Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds., Creation ex nihilo: Origins. Development, Contemporary Challenges [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018], 77-98, here, pp. 86-88, italics in original, emphasis in bold added)

McDonough continues to appeal to Rom 4:17 (“(As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.”) as possible implicit support for creation out of nothing, but such is eisegesis of the text (see: Romans 4:17 and John 1:3 and creation ex materia vs. ex nihilio). Notwithstanding, the above shows that “nothingness” and similar concepts does not denote “non-existence” (e.g., the nations Yahweh is polemical towards in Isa 40 and 45, discussed by McDonough above, clearly have ontological existence; they are just “nothing” in comparison to him) as required by creation out of nothing; instead, when read in context, supports something more akin to creation ex materia, similar to that of Latter-day Saint theology.