Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

The doctrine of creation denies that God created out of something—be it chaos or a sea dragon or primordial ooze—but it does not deny that God, having created, then continues to work in and with all sorts of created things. God’s initial act of creation is ex nihilo, but this does not preclude God working also with and through that which God has made. So, the doctrine of creation may well coexist happily with contemporary evolutionary biology or cosmological theories, but it cannot exist alongside idolatry. Christian thought has no inherent problem with scientific theories about creation, but it cannot bear the idolatry of scientism, which would reduce reality to what can be seen and measured. A world that God created from nothing cannot be a world of bare materialism, one bereft of divine reality. A world that God created from nothing cannot be the world of deism, in which God holds back, distant and standoffish, from what God has made. A world ex nihilo is, instead, a world full of God’s presence and power.