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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

Creed

Ethics

Politics

20 October 2025

7 min read

The Danish Prime Minister is right - the West needs a spiritual rearmament

Christianity should challenge, not reflect, the cultural zeitgeist

Graham Tomlin

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

Mette Frederiksen gesture as she delivers a speech.

Mette Frederiksen speaking at Aalborg University.

Aalborg University.

For some time, there has been a sense of crisis in Europe. You can feel it. European nations are re-arming themselves as America turns off the financial tap. They are struggling to manage levels of migration. Young people are losing faith in democracy.

Yet this is not primarily an economic crisis, or even a political or ethnic one. It is spiritual. And when you start to look for it, you see the signs of it everywhere.

Take one example. Back in the summer, Mette Frederiksen, the Prime Minister of Denmark announced a national military build-up involving increased defence spending, conscription and so on, all fuelled by the general north European fear of expansionist Russia. While speaking to a group of Aalborg University students soon after, she surprised everyone by saying:

“We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important (as the military one). That is the spiritual one.”

She spoke of the discernment needed to tell the difference between truth and falsehood in a world where they were hard to tell apart - and implied this required spiritual wisdom not more technology. Increasing levels of conscription is one thing, but persuading young Danes to fight and even die for anything is another. The problems are not unique to Denmark. Why would Gen Z fight for an economic system that doesn't seem to be working in their favour, doesn't offer them the prospect of owning a home or a stable job, and offers little to inspire any kind of heroism? John Lennon imagined a world with “nothing to kill or die for.” If there is nothing you would die for, there probably isn’t much to live for either.

Frederiksen’s call is just one sign of the spiritual crisis in Europe. Another is the rise of what is sometimes called ‘Christian nationalism’. Elites may sneer at the flags on lamp posts and the crosses held aloft in populist marches, but these are the visible signs of swathes of people in the UK who feel no-one listens to them, and who regret the loss of the cultural and broadly Christian framework that in the memory of past generations provided the operating system of British life for centuries. Its disappearance since the 1960s and the lack of anything to replace it is a problem. The ‘new atheism’ was an act of cultural vandalism, aiming to destroy faith but with nothing to put in its place. You don't have to believe that Tommy Robinson or even Nigel Farage is the answer to this yearning to recognise the validity of this sense of loss.

Yet another is what has been called the ‘Quiet Revival’ - signs of renewed churchgoing among (especially) young men in the UK. Revivals of religion usually happen when a community feels its identity and survival is under threat. At such times, people go back to their roots, to available sources of wisdom and reassurance. This isn't yet a wholesale turning to the Church, but it is sign of a yearning for some kind of spiritual meaning, for something sacred – something that can't be bought for money and that has a value beyond what we choose to give it.

So - back to Mette Frederiksen’s surprising call for spiritual renewal in her own country. Denmark is one of Europe’s most secular nations, Frederiksen is not known as a regular churchgoer, and her Social Democrat party has generally been lukewarm about religion in recent decades. Yet she was honest enough to recognise the problem. If we have told ourselves for decades that there is no such thing as truth, it's not surprising we find it hard to tell truth from falsehood. When we have confidently proclaimed that the most important voice to listen to is our own desires – ‘you be you’ – it is not surprising that that we don’t have any ideals left to live or die for. Young people might take to the streets over climate change or Palestine, but being willing to lay down their lives for something beautiful, sacred, something transcendent beyond all that - even when it has sustained their civilisation for generations? Probably not. And there is no reason to think that Denmark is any different from any other European country. The same is surely true in Britain, even if our politicians are not as perceptive as Mette Frederiksen in noticing the problem.

So where is an answer to be found? Mette Frederiksen called out to the Church for an answer:

“I believe that people will increasingly seek the Church, because it offers natural fellowship and national grounding… If I were the Church, I would be thinking right now: how can we be both a spiritual and physical framework for what Danes are going through?”

Yet herein lies the problem. The Church of Denmark, one of northern Europe’s Lutheran churches, is not exactly in a great state. 70 per cent of the population may be registered members of the church, but only 2.4 per centof those actually turn up in church on Sundays – which makes for an average of 30 people in any local Danish Lutheran church on Sunday.

In Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church ordained just 13 priests this year. Fifty years ago, 90 per cent of Irish people went to mass every week. Now it’s around 16 per cent. The decline was a self-inflicted disaster as scandals of abuse and cruelty recurred with depressing frequency. The Church of England’s attendance figures are not much more encouraging. And its ability to offer something to live and die for is far from clear. The philosopher John Gray is scathing about the western churches’ captivity to the spirit of the age. He thinks of them as “mirroring the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than offering a coherent alternative to it… this kind of Christianity is a symptom of the disease not a cure for it.”

That may be the problem - but it is also the opportunity. Christianity is the west’s default spiritual tradition. Nothing goes as deep into the European soul as this. Others come and go, but this faith is in our veins, our landscape, our art and our memory. Time and again, from its early centuries, it has inspired countless people to live lives of selfless devotion. It happened when the Byzantine empire emerged from the ruins of the Roman one, when a new medieval Christianised civilisation grew out of the ruins of the barbarian conquests, or in the reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the missionary movements of the nineteenth centuries. Time and time again it has proved a catalyst for wisdom to face the challenges of crisis, for individual self-sacrifice, cultural renewal and a purpose beyond personal fulfilment – something to live - and die - for.

And it still does. You only have to recall the 21 Libyan martyrs – mostly ordinary Coptic Christians from a simple Egyptian village who were captured by ISIS in 2015, and who chose a gruesome death rather than forsake their faith in the love of Christ – to show how Christian faith gives something not to kill – but to die for.

I have no doubt Christianity can provide that again. Not as a reversion to something past, but in a new form that is true to its roots, but in a way that will look new – maybe humbler, simpler, purer.

This is the challenge for such new leaders as Pope Leo and soon-to-be Archbishop Sarah Mullally. And indeed, for all of us who call ourselves Christian. Can we Christians, as John Gray put it, offer a coherent alternative to the confusion of the zeitgeist rather than be a pale reflection of it?

The future, not just of European Christianity, but also of Europe may depend on it.

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