Creation and the God of Abraham ed. by David Burrell, Janet Soskice, and Others (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 490 Creation and the God of Abraham. Edited by DAVID BURRELL, JANET SOSKICE, AND OTHERS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 286. $95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-521-51868-0. Creation and the God of Abraham is an excellent collection of articles resulting from the gathering of Jewish, Christian, and Muslims scholars at Castel Gandolfo in July 2006 around the theme “Creatio ex Nihilo Today.” To judge by the fourteen scholarly contributions from around the world, the workshop was an outstanding success, and the book promises to become an important resource on this topic for years to come. At the core of the workshop was the question whether the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo has anything to say within the context of modern scientific theories of the origin of the universe. In response, each of the articles takes up a particular expression of the doctrine within the three religious traditions and concludes with a reflection on its potential compatibility with the theory of the Big Bang. The result is a fascinating presentation of an array of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers whose work sheds light on this important topic. The book is roughly divided into three sections beginning with the earliest Jewish and Christian formulations of creation ex nihilo (Ernan McMullin) as well as medieval expositions of the doctrine (Janet Soskice, David Burrell, Alexander Broadie, Daniel Davies). A second grouping deals with Muslim conceptions (Rahim Acar, Pirooz Fatoorchi, Ibrahim Kalin). The third group includes various topics such as the Trinity, motion, and creation ex nihilo (Simon Oliver), an argument for the complementarity of creation ex nihilo and the Big Bang theory (William Stoeger), the issue of double agency (James Pambrun), God’s creative activity and the activity of created things (Thomas Tracy), and, finally, the contribution of Aquinas’s theology of knowledge (Eugene Rogers). The editors must be commended for their organization of these wide-ranging articles. The resulting book is clear and coherent, carrying the reader forward both historically and thematically. In his introductory remarks, Carlo Cogliati notes that Aristotle and the Greeks would have found the concept of creation ex nihilo incoherent, since “from nothing, nothing comes.” For the Greeks, beginning with a conception of the universe as everlasting, “God” was an Intelligence unable to be concerned about or aware of the created world. Cogliati states that “Creatio ex nihilo was the product of the confluence of biblical teaching and Hellenistic Judaism, and was the means by which theologians of the early Church defended the God they saw to be revealed in Scripture: loving, living and active” (7). Muslims followed this understanding, recognizing its compatibility with the Qur’an. Creatio ex nihilo thus becomes the foundation on which answers to all later questions of God’s relationship to creation, freedom and predestination, grace, revelation, and a host of others are built. Space limitations only allow us to draw out a few of the important points made in the collection. The first of these is that although the question of creation BOOK REVIEWS 491 ex nihilo does not seem to have been a concern for the biblical writers, the early Church found the parameters of the doctrine in Scripture as soon as she began to reflect on the challenges posed first by the limits Gnostic dualism placed upon on God, and then by Neo-Platonism. In response, second- and third-century Jews and Christians rejected the notion that there had been any ungenerated principle over and against God at the time of creation that could be held responsible for disorder and evil. The demands of biblical monotheism, accordingly, require a God who creates everything intentionally without pre-existing matter. A significant moment in the formulation of creation ex nihilo comes when Augustine, building on the Stoic idea of spermatikos logos, proposes the notion that seed-like principles, rationes seminales, come to fruition in the proper conditions posterior to the event of creation. Although the idea owes more to Stoic and Neo-Platonic than biblical sources, Augustine made it possible to conceive of creation ex nihilo, while still allowing for potentialities that exist from the beginning to mature and develop in time. This opens the door for...