ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an area where early Christianity did develop an understanding of the world which was self-consciously in confrontation with ancient culture. The Jewish sense of God's sovereignty and almighty power does figure in the tradition from which the 'orthodox' stream of Christianity began when confronted with the questions of the Second Century, and in that context the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo became the natural implicate. The development of the distinctively Christian doctrine of creation is a clear sign that Christian intellectuals were not 'captured' by Greek philosophy. Theophilus indicates that resistance to an anthropomorphic picture became highly significant in the process of differentiation from Platonism, a process which provides the context in which we first find the explicit doctrine ex ouk onto-n. The thrust of early Christianity is in the direction of a 'new creation' being born out of the old, and cosmogony was not at the forefront.
