Excerpts from a writing project so far, God with Ten Words
__________________________God created the world out of nothing. Most Christians throughout the centuries have believed this idea. The belief became clear in second hundred years of Christianity when there were some Christian thinkers who believed the physical world was evil. We find an allusion to these “Gnostics” (as they were known) in 1 John 4:2, where we hear of “antichrists” who did not believe Jesus came “in the flesh.”
The Gnostics of John’s world could not believe Jesus took on flesh (cf. John 1:14) because they thought that would have made him evil. There was actually a Christian thinker named Marcion about the year 150 who concluded that the creator of Genesis must be a different being than the God of the New Testament. He came to this conclusion because he believed the creation was evil, so its creator must be evil.
These controversies made it crystal clear to most Christians that God must not only have shaped the world into what it is out of a watery chaos but that God actually created the material of the world itself ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” Accordingly, in one of the early creeds, Christians confessed that God was the creator of both “what is seen and unseen” (Nicene Creed).
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