“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being.” (Jn 1:1–3)
By opening his Gospel, the Apostle John places strong emphasis on the Word — the Logos. In doing so, he refers back to the Book of Genesis, where God creates through His word. This word possesses creative power: everything that God speaks comes into existence immediately. However, John also understands this Word in a personal sense — as Jesus Christ: “All things came into being through Him” (Jn 1:3).
The Book of Genesis, when describing God’s creative activity, uses the verb bara’, which means “to create something out of nothing.” This verb is reserved exclusively for the Creator. Deutero-Isaiah uses the same term in reference to salvation — a new creation. This signifies that human beings are capable only of shaping or transforming what already exists, whereas God alone possesses the effective power to bring into existence something that did not exist before.¹ The Bible confirms this truth and speaks extensively about God’s creation out of nothing. An example can be found in 2 Maccabees 7:28, where a mother, pointing to the majesty of the world, urges her son to recognize that God created it out of nothing.
Church councils such as the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Florence (1442), and the First Vatican Council (1870) upheld this teaching by affirming that God does not require any pre-existing reality in order to create. For this reason, they consistently used the formulation “created, made out of nothing.” If the opposite were true, we would be forced to ask about the origin of creation and determine who its true creator is — who stands behind the existence of the world, what its origin is, and how it came into being. Such a view would undermine God’s omnipotence and His status as an absolute being, compelling us to search for another, higher being. Therefore, creation “out of nothing” means that the world does not possess any primordial matter² that God could have used as building material. This reality is best expressed by the term ex nihilo, which means “creation out of nothing,”³ thereby confirming God’s omnipotence and absolute being.
This issue was particularly significant for the first Christians due to the dominance of Greek philosophy in the culture of that time. This applies especially to Plato, who claimed that God created an imperfect world because He worked with imperfect, pre-existing matter. Particularly misleading for early theologians was dualism, embraced for example by Marcion, who believed in the existence of two gods: one good God who was the savior, and another, Old Testament god who was an evil creator, allegedly forming the world out of an evil, eternal matter.⁴ Such a perspective rejected the positive value of the world and led its proponents toward excessive asceticism.
Creation out of nothing also stood in contrast to Eastern — especially Greek — beliefs, according to which the world came into being through the ordering of chaos. In Eastern cosmogonies, chaos is a form of matter with which the gods must struggle and which influences the corrupted quality of the world. In the Genesis account of creation, however, there is no mention of external factors influencing God’s action or His creation. Creatio ex nihilo means that creation was a pure act: God acts without any obstacles, and everything He creates is good.
It should also be added that the world created out of nothing is not God, nor was it created from His substance, nor is God identical with the world. The Creator is not the sum of created things, and the world is not divine by nature. Although God fills the entire world and is present within it, and although the world reveals the majesty of the Creator, the world itself is not a part of God. Moreover, God does not need the world in order to manifest Himself as God. It is we who need the world, just as we need God. God, however, exists of Himself.
Over the course of time, the world has developed and evolved. As Pope Benedict XVI explains, for this to occur the world must first “be.”⁵ This means that the world had to pass from nothingness into existence. Creation, therefore, can originate only from a Being whose existence depends on nothing else, because He Himself is existence. This suggests that there must have been an initial act of initiation that subsequently influenced further development. The American astronomer Edwin Hubble (†1953) made a discovery in which he observed that the universe is expanding at an astonishing rate⁶ and that its origin lies in a central point where an explosion most likely occurred. For scientists, a major mystery remains: what could have initiated this immense explosion of energy, and where did it come from?
Furthermore, the physicist Walter Thirring (2004) observed that if this primordial explosion had been too weak, everything would have collapsed; if it had been too strong, the universe would have dispersed too rapidly and nothing would have existed. If such a precisely balanced beginning were merely a random event, then the very existence of the world would be illogical. The primordial explosion would have no cause or meaning, and the entire theory would become internally contradictory.
It can therefore be observed that even physicists themselves acknowledge that explaining the origins of the world exclusively through natural theories does not resolve all difficulties. As Benedict XVI argues, faith in creation does not stand in contradiction to the empirical sciences. While science, using theories such as the Big Bang, analyzes the earliest states of energy and matter, the question of the causal origin of the transition from non-being to being remains open. The answer of faith, expressed in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, points to God as a transcendent and personal cause, who is not merely one element within the chain of causes but its ultimate foundation.
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- Józef Wawrzaszek, Man in the Presence of God and Amid Creation (Warsaw: 2005), p. xx.
- Józef Wawrzaszek, Man in the Presence of God and Amid Creation (Warsaw: 2005), p. xx.
- Józef Wawrzaszek, Man in the Presence of God and Amid Creation (Warsaw: 2005), p. xx.
- Józef Wawrzaszek, Man in the Presence of God and Amid Creation (Warsaw: 2005), p. xx.
- Benedict XVI, Address to the Participants of the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, L’Osservatore Romano, no. 1 (2009), pp. 40–41.
- Józef Warzeszak, The Dispute over the Origin of the World and Humanity in the Thought of Benedict XVI (Warsaw: year), p. xx.
Writtren by: Logos Ex Nihilo