Explainer

Awe and wonder

Belief

Creed

23 May 2023

6 min read

Creating out of nothing

Considering authorship, Barnabas Aspray unpacks what the creeds mean by ‘creator’ - the source of all reality.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

In my last article, I said that God is not an object in space-time. He is part of the fabric of reality, like the number 2. He is transcendent, as if he inhabited a fourth dimension that we could not see and yet surrounds us, just as a two-dimensional creature could not see or conceive us even if we could see them.

However, many transcendent beings could exist, like many numbers exist. But they would not be what the Nicene Creed means by the word ‘God’. The Creed also states that God is radically unique and that he created everything. To see what that means we need an analogy.

Author of the world

The Harry Potter books were written by J.K. Rowling. In them she describes a fantasy world, where wizards and witches can cast magical spells and perform supernatural feats with their power. The most powerful evil wizard is Lord Voldemort, who is the main bad guy in the whole Harry Potter series.

But is Lord Voldemort more powerful than J.K. Rowling? Could he ever defeat her in a one-on-one battle?

Everyone can see immediately that the answer is ‘no’. But why not? Rowling is just an ordinary person without any magical powers, and Voldemort is one of the most powerful wizards in the Harry Potter world.

The reason Voldemort could never defeat Rowling has to do with the unique kind of relationship they have. It’s not simply that Rowling is more powerful than Voldemort. The truth is more absolute than that. Voldemort doesn’t have any power of his own that Rowling didn’t give him in the first place. Rowling doesn’t really belong to the Harry Potter world at all, even though it belongs to her.

In other words, Rowling has the status of creator in relation to the Harry Potter world. She decides everything about how that world works. She is nowhere to be found in it, yet she is present in a special way to every part of it, and every part of it depends on her for its very existence.

There is one way in which Rowling could enter the Harry Potter world: if she were to write a story in which she herself was one of the characters, walking about and interacting with the others. That character would be both created and uncreated at the same time, in the world yet not belonging to it. This might help us understand how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time.

There are two limits to this analogy. One is that Rowling is not an absolute creator. She uses elements from her own world and ours to create the Harry Potter world: colours, gravity, light, time, space, etc. She did not create ex nihilo (out of nothing). The other limit is that the creatures in Harry Potter do not have free will. They can only ever do what Rowling decides that they do.

The Christian Doctrine of Creation

The above analogy helps make one point clear. To say that God is the creator does not mean that God kickstarted the world and then left it to go its own way. An author of a novel doesn’t only write its first line. The world couldn’t possibly go its own way for a microsecond without God continuing to ‘write’ it. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo has nothing to do with whether evolution occurred, or whether Genesis chapter 1 should be taken ‘literally’. It is far more fundamental than that. It says that there is no particle, no law of physics or nature, no moment in time, that is not 100% dependent on God for its very existence. In other words, the Christian God doesn’t live within our understanding of reality at all. He is the source of reality, the existence behind all other existence, far more concrete and real than anything else – spiritual or physical – ever could be.

This does not count as a proof for God’s existence, but (just like the last article), it does affect how arguments about God’s existence should be made. Nobody should ever think that they need to provide ‘evidence’ that God exists, as if God were an object in space-time who could be measured or observed. It doesn’t make sense to demand evidence for the existence of the source of existence. What would count as evidence? Let’s return to the Harry Potter analogy for a moment. No one could ever find out more about Rowling than she chooses to reveal about herself. If Harry Potter were to find a magic spell that enabled him to talk to her, this would only be because Rowling had created such a spell in the first place. The only thing Harry could ever figure out without Rowling’s help is that he did not create himself or the world he lives in. Either nobody did, or someone else did, who Harry might want to call the ‘unknown God’.

Nor does it make sense to ask who created God, a question that sometimes occurs to children. Either there is an infinite regress of causality, so that every source has another source behind it and so on forever, or there is something we may accurately call the ‘first’ because it is the absolute source of everything. As the previous article showed, there are two kinds of real: (1) contingent objects that may or may not have existed, like you, me, or any object we encounter in the Universe, (2) necessary principles without which we can’t imagine anything, like numbers and logic. For Christians, God belongs in the second category, so he doesn’t need to be created any more than the number 2 needs to be created.

FAQs

Does the Bible really teach creation ex nihilo?

The point of this article is to explain what the writers of the Nicene Creed meant they said that God is the ‘creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible’. Like the Trinity, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not explicit in the Bible (if it was, why bother writing the Creed?). There are some people who interpret the Bible in ways that contradict the Creed, because it is possible to interpret the Bible (like any text) numerous ways, and no interpretation can be proven beyond question. But the writers of the Creed believed that creation ex nihilo arises from prayerful reflection on the implications of the whole Bible’s message. If you’re interested in the biblical case for and against creation ex nihilo, check out the following resources:

Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020);

Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Theologies of Creation: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals (Routledge, 2014);

Nathan J. Chambers, Reconsidering Creation Ex Nihilo in Genesis 1 (Penn State University Press, 2021);

Gary Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds., Creation Ex Nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018);

Janet Soskice, ed. “Creation ‘ex Nihilo’ and Modern Theology.” Special Issue, Modern Theology 29, no. 2 (April 2013).

Susannah Ticciati, ‘Anachronism or Illumination? Genesis 1 and Creation Ex Nihilo’, Anglican Theological Review 99, no. 4 (September 2017): 691–712

What about Satan? Isn’t he the opposite of God?

No, Satan is not the opposite of God, just as Voldemort is not the opposite of J.K. Rowling. Satan is a creature like us, part of the Universe and dependent on God for his existence. The archangel Gabriel might be a more appropriate ‘opposite’ to Satan. The only opposite of God is nothingness, which is the same as saying that nothing is the opposite of God. As to why God continues to give power to Satan knowing he will use it for evil, that is a topic for a future article on the problem of evil. Keep watching this site and you’ll find it soon.

Article

Belief

Culture

Music

25 April 2025

5 min read

How Mumford and friends explore life's instability

Communing on fallibility, fear, grace, and love.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A bassist hauls a double bass of its base as he plays it.

Daniel Boud/x.com/mumfordandsons.

“Serve God, love me, and mend” must rank as one of the more unexpected openings to a hugely popular album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. A quote from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, it introduces us to the potent mix of Shakespearean and Biblical allusion and imagery to be found on Mumford and Sons debut album Sign No More.

Sigh No More, both as song and album, begins with confident assertions of faith then moves into acknowledgement of human fallibility and prevarication summed up in the Shakespearean phrase that “Man is a giddy thing” before asserting that love does not enslave but is freeing, enabling those who know it to become the people they were meant to be. The song ends with a prayer to see the beauty which will come when the protagonist’s heart is truly aligned with love. Throughout the album, the overriding concern is that personal fallibilities and fears – the darkness within – will prevent grace from having its full effect and the beauty of alignment with love from being fully realised.

In many Mumford and Sons songs such personal instability is the problem to be resolved; “Man is a giddy thing”, “Why do I keep falling?”. Their search is often for the relationship or place that will provide stability:

I can't say, "I'm sorry," if I'm always on the run

From the anchor (‘Anchor’)

‘Roll Away Your Stone’ describes the darkness within as a God-shaped hole filled with false gods:

See you told me that I would find a hole

Within the fragile substance of my soul

And I have filled this void with things unreal

And all the while my character it steals

but this is not how life has to be:

It seems that all my bridges have been burned

But, you say that's exactly how this grace thing works

It's not the long walk home

That will change this heart

But the welcome I receive with the restart

Lead singer and songwriter Marcus Mumford knows how this grace thing works because, on the one hand, his parents founded the Vineyard Church UK and Ireland meaning he grew up in the context of grace and, on the other, he seems to have experienced grace personally in relation to the sexual abuse he suffered as a child (which was not experienced in his family or his church). In ‘Grace’ from his self-titled solo album he contrasts grace, flowing like a river, with the experience of acknowledging the abuse he endured and the healing for which he prays.

Such biblical allusions and references abound in the songs of Mumford and Sons, as is also the case with some of those with whom they performed, supported or inspired. The Nu-folk movement of which the Mumford’s were part, began at a club called Bosun’s Locker in Fulham. There, with the likes of Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale, and others, their musical journey commenced. Noah and the Whale’s first album Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down featured philosophical rumination on a par with that of Sigh No More including lines such as:

Oh, there is no endless devotion

That is free from the force of erosion

Oh, if you don't believe in God

How can you believe in love?

Following the closure of Bosun’s Locker, Ben Lovett from Mumford and Sons, with others, set up Communion Records, a network of musicians, songwriters, industry and music fans who all share a common philosophy and set of ideals. Among the artists supported by Communion have been Bear’s Den and Michael Kiwanuka.

Bear’s Den is one of several bands, which also included Dry the River, that have used religious and spiritual symbols in their songs. Andrew Davie from Bear’s Den has said: “I wouldn't say I'm particularly religious, but I was brought up going to church every Sunday, I studied a bit of religion in school and just from going to Sunday school, it's almost that I know the stories so well, that I find it a cool way of telling more modern and more nuanced stories about my own life. As a backdrop to that I find it just constantly helpful and it's quite a powerful way to talk about things. It adds weight to me.” Similarly, Matthew Taylor of Dry the River said of the theological imagery in lead singer Peter Liddle’s songs: “It’s always been a tool for Peter I think, to use the imagery you’re talking about, to add weight to what he’s writing about. It’s rich imagery, and the ideas are ones that people can relate to easily, if there’s that familiarity there.” Both recognise, as do Mumford and Sons, the continuing power of Christian ideas and imagery and their resonance for young people.

Michael Kiwanuka was surprised that his early song about faith ‘I’m Getting Ready’ was enthusiastically released first as the title song of an EP from Communion Records and then by Polydor as a single from his debut album Home Again. Kiwanuka, who is married to Christian singer Charlotte, has consistently expressed aspects of his faith through songs like ‘Love and Hate’, ‘One More Night’, ‘Solid Ground’, and ‘Floating Parade’. Alexis Petridis has noted that Kiwanuka sees more people searching for a belief system: “Having a faith in things now is, I think, a lot more acceptable, whatever faith it is. There’s no dogma, necessarily. We’re connected by the struggles we have and I think that’s what I’m singing about – being a human being and trying to overcome, which is what we’re all doing in a way.”

Whether opening up space for bands to utilise the power of Christian imagery in their songs or enabling singers with a Christian faith to be heard on mainstream labels, Mumford and Sons, by example and support, have created opportunities for faith to be explored and appreciated. The response to their music, its themes, and those of artists with whom they connect, seems to reflect a growing openness to spirituality and faith. As they sang, together with Pharrell Williams, on ‘Good People’, “Welcome to the revelation”.

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