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.

Review

Belief

Culture

Film & TV

15 November 2024

4 min read

Heretic: Hugh Grant’s brilliance wrestles this tranquilized take on holy horror

If not original, a dissection of belief needs to be sincere and agile.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Hugh Grant prepares to eviscerate the script.

Halloween night: the perfect setting for a horror film. Religious horror: the perfect horror sub-genre. The supernatural invading the natural, darkness swallowing the light, tension and suspense assaulting the placidity we all crave, and doubt gnawing away at faith. All these reversals of the order we try to live in are on offer in Heretic. This is a ghoulish and ghastly offering from writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are no strangers to the genre. In Heretic they bring the best that horror cinema has to offer: simplicity.

The plot and script are lean enough to effortlessly perform the twists and contortions needed to keep the viewer off-guard and on the edge of their seat. The script is tight, with some wonderful opportunities to soliloquise and dialogue that is deliciously awkward and painful. The camera work is almost cruel in its relentlessness. This is not a film of jump scares. Here the camera lingers, and lingers…and lingers. Tight close ups on frightened faces and sinister smiles. Slow pans round a room, promising a sudden shock of relief that never comes – only more anxiety.

The camera refuses to make the experience easy, but insists on letting the atmosphere and semiotics drive the audience to the point of tears. Such a focused and aggressive camera needs performers who won’t shy away but will grab it and wrestle with it! Thankfully, the performances are superb across the board. It's basically a three-hander, carried by Sophie East, Chloe Thatcher, and the indominable Hugh Grant (more about him later).

East and Thatcher play two young Mormon missionaries – Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes - who spend their days walking the streets of a small American town in the mountains. In between dispiriting attempts to communicate their faith with an apathetic and even derisive public, they wile away the hours discussing their faith, their hopes and dreams, the perception of Mormonism in the popular culture, and the marketing of ‘magnum condoms’. Sister Paxton is earnest and zealous, desperate to prove herself as a missionary by converting at least one person. Sister Barnes is a little more reserved, almost cynical. There is less fervour, a hint of weariness, even the lurking sense of doubt?

The two young ladies end an exhausting day with a visit to an isolated mountain-top cottage where they believe the seemingly kindly and bumbling English gent, Mr. Reed, is a prospective convert. Who else bumbles like Hugh Grant? It’s a joy to watch. What they hope will be a pleasant chat about their faith slowly descends into a horrifying and twisted psychological torture session, where the concepts of faith, doubt, religion, prophesy, and institutional thinking are all examined.

I dare not say much more. This is a film which hides its twists well and uses the mundanities of blueberry pie and Monopoly to chillingly hilarious effect.

However…

Having heaped praise upon praise, I must admit that I left the cinema feeling slightly disappointed. I love horror cinema. I love religion – so much so that I’ve made it my day job. I love them in combination that appears pretty frequently, from the giddy heights of The Exorcist to the drudgery that is The Exorcist: Believer. This means that most of the themes that can be explored have been explored. Originality is nearly impossible, and not really necessary – but exploring the themes with sincerity and agility would be nice. The script might be acrobatic, but the thematic exposition is about as plodding as a tranquilised elephant with a limp.

It is bad.

Again, I don’t want to give the twists and turns away, but quite quickly a dissonance between the brilliance of the dialogue and the turgidity of the theme appears, and it doesn’t…go…away! What is faith and what is doubt? Good. What is belief and what is disbelief? Good. No. Scrap that. ‘RELIGION IS ALL JUST MAN MADE!’ Okay, we could explore that. ‘NO. JESUS IS BASICALLY HORUS.’ Right, but let’s tease out the nuance. ‘NO! RELIGION IS JUST A SYSTEM OF CONTROL!’

Mr Reed suddenly morphs into the most tiresome bore. A cross between the theological illiteracy of Dawkins and the pathological obsession with power of Foucault. It is possible that this is part of the point – that this was intended to be a witty and incisive invective against institutionalism (especially institutionalised misogyny), and the ladies do land some philosophical counterpunches which expose the emptiness of Mr Reed’s rantings – but it just wasn’t done subtly or adeptly enough. What promises to be a thematic exposition of the nature of belief turns into a fairly lumbering and ponderous lecture on how belief full-stop is a ‘system of control’. We get it. We’ve been hearing this for centuries, and at a new fever pitch since the early noughties. Again…originality isn’t essential if the same old theme is explored well. I just didn’t feel it was. I felt it was a chore.

Yet (another twist coming!), Mr Reed is still compelling. However boring the thematic content, I was never bored. Hugh Grant is superlative as the sinister, fanatical, hateful, charming, charismatic, hilarious Mr Reed. He delivers lines filled with acid yet dipped in honey. He smiles that singular smile as both wolf and lamb at once. His eyes twinkle with light that is both warm and yet dead and cold. He delivers laugh out loud speeches with absolute relish. The theme might be being butchered, but when the butcher is Hugh Grant you sort of forgive it all.

I would advise you see this film. It's excellent on every technical level and an almost perfect tension builder. It's not perfect, and those who are genuinely interested in the theme are likely to roll their eyes as the early promise of interesting study devolves into something sub-Sam Harris. But ignore that and just enjoy the twists and turns. Ignore it and focus on Hugh Grant. He’s never been better.

**** Stars.