ABSTRACT
What is gained by claiming a creatio ex nihilo in Christian theology? How does a myth of creation out of nothing by One, True, Creator God shape epistemology and ontology? What has become the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was far from created out of nothing. In fact, one could say it was created out of heated debates between groups of humans and their understandings of the “more than human world.” “In the beginning” there was a group of people in the Ancient Near East trying to maintain a cohesive identity and some cohesive understanding about the world in which they lived. This chapter explores those contested and debated beginnings and argues that “ex nihilo” backgrounds these contested beginnings and becomes a foundation for a colonial narrative and mindset toward “others” (both human and non) outside of the Christian, Roman world.3 This chapter is broken into two different parts, each of which deals with a facet of “the logic of domination” that I am arguing ex nihilo supports. The fi rst section examines the context of the Ancient Near East (ANE), out of which Christian understandings of creation emerge. This section pays particular attention to the rise of monotheism among the Ancient Israelites in the ANE as a theoretical and historicalcontextual precursor to the understanding of creation as creatio ex nihilo. The development of monotheism encourages the type of center-periphery thinking that becomes “central” to the logic of domination supported by ex nihilo.4 The second section gives specifi c attention to the genealogy of ex nihilo within Christian thought in the 3rd century of the Common Era.5 I argue that the development of ex nihilo, more than anything, was the
result of rhetorical battles for orthodoxy against the Gnostics and other heretics. In analyzing this rhetoric, I highlight how “ex nihilic” thinking is an epistemological precursor to what becomes known as “philosophical foundationalism” and essentialist identity formation, both important developments for the logic of domination.6
