Tertullian: God Creates in (by) Wisdom

Early Church Father, Tertullian (c. AD 160–225), whose writings were instrumental in the formation of Christian doctrine, specifically his treatment of the doctrine of Trinity,[1] the hypostatic union, original sin, and Christ’s virgin birth and bodily resurrection, also wrote a treatise defending the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the teaching that God created the cosmos out of nothing.

Up until the second century, “the biblical presentation of the Almighty God who created the world and continued to work in history as creator, possessed for early Christianity an overwhelming self-evidence and was not perceived as a metaphysical problem.”[2] But as the preaching of Christ began to spread through the Hellenistic (and polytheistic) world, the Greek metaphysical and philosophical systems posed a challenge for Christian missionary efforts.

For the early church, and for orthodox Christianity, the doctrine of “creatio ex nihilo is a consequence of monotheism.”[3] The Apologists of the first few centuries (Justin Martyr, Clement, Irenaeus, and Tertullian), in their struggle against Gnosticism, emphatically claimed that “matter is ordered to produce existing things; it is not a second principle alongside God.”[4] This competing belief of the day, that matter was eternal, is called dualism. God and matter eternally coexist together. However, as the Apologists argued, matter is not eternal. There was only one unbegotten being—God, who alone is one and omnipotent.[5]

Tertullian’s treatise was aimed at a heretic named Hermogenes. While he defended ex nihilo, Tertullian’s specific argument was against Hermogenes’ opinion that matter is eternal.[6] And this was grounds for heresy because it places creation at the rank of the Creator (even ontologically so).[7] Hermogenes, writes Tertullian, while he doesn’t “acknowledge any other Christ as Lord , . . he takes from Him everything which is God, since he will not have it that He made all things of nothing.”[8]

In one of Tertullian’s arguments, he connects the phrase, “In the beginning,” (Gen 1:1; John 1:1) with Proverbs 8:22. This chapter in Proverbs (specifically vv. 22–30) is about wisdom, which the author personifies. The NT refers to Christ as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), who John calls the Logos, the Word, in John 1:1. And it is Christ, the Wisdom and power of God who created all things from nothing (John 1:3).

Proverbs 8:22 states, “The Lord acquired me at the beginning of his creation, before his works of long ago.” Heretics, however, use this passage to support the view that Christ, as Wisdom personified, is a created being because it states he was “acquired” by the LORD. Tertullian begins by making the observation that in the beginning only means the initial one. It does not refer to substance but rather inception.[9] In his connecting it to Proverbs 8:22, Tertullian makes the argument:

For since all things were made by the Wisdom of God, it follows that, when God made both the heaven and the earth in principio—that is to say, in the beginning—He made them in His Wisdom. If, indeed, beginning had a material signification, the Scripture would not have informed us that God made so and so in principio, at the beginning, but rather ex principio, of the beginning; for He would not have created in, but of, matter. When Wisdom, however, was referred to, it was quite right to say, in the beginning.[10]

A few chapters earlier, Tertullian writes, “Indeed, as soon as He perceived it to be necessary for His creation of the world, He immediately creates it, and generates it in himself.”[11] The acquiring of Wisdom was not that God at some point was without wisdom and then acquired it (How could God be without his wisdom and be God?); rather, it was “in fact the beginning of his ways: this meditation and arrangement being the primal operation of Wisdom, opening as it does the way to the works by the act of meditation and thought.”[12] God’s creating was done in (by) Wisdom.

In concluding his argument, Tertullian, though not directly stating so, turns to the ways of causality (specifically, material, efficient, and final) to support his position. From Scripture he makes the claim “that whilst it shows me the God who created, and the works He created, it does not in like manner reveal to me the source from which He created.”[13] And then he expounds the principal things of every operation (causality). He writes:

there are three principal things, He who makes, and that which is made, and that of which it is made, there must be three names mentioned in a correct narrative of the operation—the person of the maker, the sort of thing which is made, and the material of which it is formed. If the material is not mentioned, while the work and the maker of the work are both mentioned, it is manifest that He made the work out of nothing.[14]

Case closed! But Tertullian seals it up with the testimony of Scripture. In referring to John 1:1–3, he connects the dots, aligning philosophy to Holy Writ. He notes that the Maker is clearly identified (God), with “all things” being the sort of things made; however, the material is not mentioned. So then, Tertullian asks, wouldn’t Scripture have made it a point to state the source out of which all things were made by God, if matter was eternal? And he concludes:

What, therefore, did not exist, the Scripture was unable to mention; and by not mentioning it, it has given us a clear proof that there was no such thing: for if there had been, the Scripture would have mentioned it.[15]

While I think his argument demonstrating that God created out of nothing is strong, he could have made it stronger. Tertullian actually had all three principal things: Maker, the sort of thing, and the material—the Word. John 1:3 says, “All things were created through him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (emphasis added). Looking to a later figure to help Tertullian, Anselm, refined this idea in order to maintain the logic of ex nihilo, in that when affirming ex nihilo, for him, it meant that God did not create from anything before, other than, or apart from God.[16] It is not from non-being material that God created the world—that is a contradiction. But, in saying that matter was created through God alone, Christ the Logos functions as the medium through which matter comes into being.

Matter doesn’t come into being from no-thing; rather, it comes into being from none other than God “because,” Tertullian writes, “there was present with Him no power, no material, no nature which belonged to any other than Himself.”[17] Following Tertullian’s thought, in a certain sense, in some ineffable way, Christ is the “divine material” of God’s self, whereby (following the vein of Anselm’s thought) the Word from his divine essence, brings into being his ideas (divine material), a likeness or image of a thing into reality—the immutable brings forth the mutable. All along, then, Tertullian (with the help of Anselm) did in fact have all three principle elements of causality, enhancing support for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

—Romans 11:36

___________________________
[1] In fact, he was the first to use the Latin trinitas as the first application of the term trinity to Deity.
[2] Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 29–30.
[3] Eric Osborn, The Emergence of Christian Theology (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 122.
[4] Ibid., 122.
[5] Ibid., 124.
[6] Tertullian, Adv. Herm. In Roberts Alexander, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Cox, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume III: Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 478.
[7] The problem in holding to the view that matter is eternal is that God, by definition, is uncreated. And he is the necessary being. And if matter is eternal, then it too is uncreated, and it must be part of God or is God, thus necessary ‘being’ as well. But matter is physical and is mutable. God is Spirit and perfectly immutable. And Scripture makes it clear that God spoke the world into existence (Gen 1; Ps 33:6, 9; 147:15, 18; 148:5).
[8] Ibid., 1.1, 477.
[9] Ibid., 1.19, 488. While it may sound as if this point conflicts with Tertullian’s argument, the argument is challenging Hermogenes’ view that beginning actually means substance. So, to say “in the beginning,” is to reference matter, from which God created.
[10] Ibid., 1.20, 488.
[11] Ibid., 1.18, 487.
[12] Ibid., 1.20, 489.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] See my post on Anselm: https://brianjorr.blogspot.com/2020/07/anselm-on-gods-act-of-creating.html.
[17] Adv. Herm. 1.17, 487. Emphasis added.

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