July-August 1999 Question
Did God create ex nihilo (out of nothing)?
Dr. Cobb's Response
In traditional theology
God may be recognized as active in the world at all times, but the word "creation" is usually reserved
for a single act,
the one in which the world is brought into being out of nothing.
Mr. Foxwell
presuspposes this view and asks whether process thought rejects
it. The answer is a qualified Yes.
The rejection is unqualified at one point.
For process theology God is
creatively at work at all times and places. God is continuously
bringing
new entities into being and calling them into novel self-actualization.
To
deny that this is true creation seems wrong to process theologians.
We
think the Bible is on our side.
The rejection is qualified in that contemporary
scientific theories seem
to a call for a "singularity" that initiates the only
world about which we
have any knowledge whatsoever. Whether this is strictly "out
of nothing"
is not clear, and I would judge that the answer is "probably
not." But the
event in which our universe arose certainly seems to be markedly
different
from all the subsequent events.
Whitehead knew nothing of the "Big Bang"
and thought instead of cosmic
epochs evolving out of earlier cosmic epochs with no singularities
involved. Process theology followed him. Hence until recently,
the answer
would have been unqualified here, too. But process theology is
committed
to adapting itself to the most reliable scientific knowledge,
and that
means that it must adapt itself to the idea of the Big Bang.
Was God's act in the Big Bang radically different
from God's act in the
initiation of every subsequent event? We don't know, but we cannot
exclude
that possibility. Whitehead speaks of one divine decision untrammeled
by
the influence of any other decision. This decision he calls primordial,
which means nontemporal. Today it may be that we will need to
associate it
quite directly with a datable event. That would seem to bring
us closer to
the tradition.
However, Mr. Foxwell implies that the difference
between the two ways
of thinking about God are more fundamental than this. That is
correct. Even if we agree that God's act in initiating our universe was
quite
different from God's subsequent ways of acting, this will not,
for us,
change much of religious importance. We will continue to affirm
that God
is in the world and the world is in God. For Mr. Foxwell, on the
other
hand, the implication of the doctrine of creation is that God
is quite
external to the world and the world is quite external to God.
For this
reason the qualification of the rejection that I have introduced
may not be
very relevant to this discussion.
There can be no denial that much of the tradition
is on the side of
Mr. Foxwell. Nevertheless, process theology claims deep rootage
in the
religious sensibility of the Bible. The God in whom we live and
move and
have our being, the God whom Jesus called "abba" seems
better understood in the process way. If we affirm with orthodoxy
that what Paul calls Christ
is divine, then his insistence that Christ is in us and we are
in Christ
strongly supports the process view. That what happens in the world
matters
deeply to God is a continuing biblical theme.
From the perspective of process theology, the
church has suffered from the
exclusive emphasis on divine transcendence encouraged by the doctrine
of ex nihilo. It has suffered from locating God in utterly unique acts
instead
of in the midst of the ordinary world. It has suffered from failing
to
affirm clearly God's genuine empathy will all the creatures.
Process theology does not attempt to conceal
its divergences from much of
the dominant tradition in these respects. Of course, we also find
many
points of contact within it. And we believe that we can help to
vivify
elements in the biblical vision that have been obscured by the
Hellenization of Christianity that has shaped so much of the tradition.
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