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

Character

Creed

Leading

Politics

20 May 2025

5 min read

World leaders can learn a lot from Pope Leo

Graham Tomlin was at the Pope's inauguration in Rome. This is what he noticed.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A VIP couple stand and talk with the Pope.

Usha and J.D. Vance meet the Pope after his inauguration.

Vatican Media.

On Sunday morning, along with a host of bishops, patriarchs, priests and assorted others, I was led around the back of Peter's Basilica in Rome, into the cavernous spaces of that extraordinary building.

As we walked through the echoing church with the sunlight slanting through the windows like shafts of light from an angelic realm, our small group of Anglicans waited for our turn to walk out into the blinding sunshine. The names of the churches were ticked off like a game of ecclesiastical bingo: “Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria? OK.” Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch? – This way please. “Armenian Apostolic Church – just wait a minute…”

As we moved through the front doors of the Church, the first thing we saw was a crowd of 200,000 people stretching as far as the eye can see. Behind us was the imposing face of St Peter’s, that great monument to Catholic supremacy and authority. The world’s media looked down from the balconies above us. Opposite our seats were the rich red velvet chairs ready for President Zelensky, J.D. Vance, and the heads of state of numerous countries across Europe and beyond.

As we walked out, I turned to a friend in our group, and instinctively said to him, “you'd need to be someone of remarkable humility not to let all this go to your head.”

I couldn't help thinking of Robert Prevost, who was about to walk through these doors, a man who was made a bishop in 2015 - only became a cardinal two years ago, and was now to find himself the focus of rapt attention by this vast crowd and millions of others on TV, as the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, catapulted from relative obscurity to being the most famous man in the world within a couple of weeks.

St Peter’s is designed to impress. The piazza in front of the church is surrounded by imposing statues of apostles, saints, martyrs, and fathers of the church, all looking down on proceedings below. It was this church that inadvertently triggered the Reformation, as a fund-raising scheme for its construction involved selling some indulgences in Germany that raised Martin Luther’s fury. The frontage, with its soaring pillars, grand windows, sumptuous balconies and rich tapestries, is meant to overawe you. Inside, the space is huge, with vast windows letting in the light, stunning works of art everywhere. This was a display of the Renaissance papacy, leading into the Counter-Reformation, the confident Baroque spirit that announced the triumph of the Church over all its enemies.

A Pope with a streak of vanity would be a dangerous thing. Everything points to the power of this position – the successor of Peter, the one on whom the rock of the Church was to be built; the leader of the largest body of Christians in the world; someone instantly recognisable across the globe, to whom world leaders have to come, cap in hand. No wonder some popes in the past have become political manipulators, vying with emperors and kings over who has more power.

Yet these days, the Catholic Church sounds a humbler note. Pope Francis started the church down a line of ‘synodality’, inviting other voices into the church’s deliberations rather than just male priests. Pope Leo seems to want to continue down that line.

Referring to his election he said:

“I was chosen, without any merit of my own, and now, with fear and trembling, I come to you as a brother, who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of God’s love.”

The tone was not of self-aggrandisement, asserting the power of the position. There was no strategy to dynamically change the church and the world. No grand design to use the levers of power to shape society according to his vision. Instead, this was about unleashing a more elusive and uncontrolled force: the power of self-denying compassion.

As Pope Leo put it:

“The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda, or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did.”

Now that’s different from the way popes have sometimes spoken in the past. The Church has no power other than the power of love – the kind of self-sacrifice seen in the life of Christ. If the pope ‘presides’, as Presidents do, he ‘presides in charity’. A little different from some other Presidents I can think of.

Admittedly we don’t know much about him yet, But Bob Prevost strikes you as a humble man. Someone who can turn down a place at Harvard Law School to go instead to serve the poorest communities in Peru for 20 years, sleeping on the floor of huts, travelling by donkey to remote villages, unnoticed and obscure, suggests a distinct lack of self-importance. You don’t canvas to become pope, announcing your candidacy, working your way up the ranks, arguing your merits to the electorate. Instead, you get on with what you do, and if the call comes, you follow it.

As Pope Leo, he will need that humility as he takes on this role for the rest of his life. He will need it to resist the subtle lure of the deference others offer him, the adulation he will receive wherever he goes, the buildings he lives in, the magnificence of the popes who went before him, the way people will hang on his very word. The temptation to think that Bob Prevost is, after all, a mighty big fish, someone whose talents have got him to this point will be strong.

But if he gives in to that temptation, he will slip back into the run of the mill way of the world, lording it over those he oversees. He seems aware of the slippery nature of such a position. Whoever was called to be the successor of St Peter, he said, needed to exercise oversight “without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him. On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them."

It was Jesus who said:

“Among the nations, their rulers lord it over them. But it is not so among you. Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant.”

Other Presidents, prime ministers and patriarchs could take a leaf out of that book.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Join With Us