In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

(p.14) All things came into being through him,

and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life,

and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overcome it. (1: 1–5)

Notice that in John’s view, although God and His Word (logos in the Greek) simply were in the beginning (v. 1), everything else is said to have come into being through Him (v. 3). The Greek word John uses in v. 3 is ginomai, which means ‘to become’ or ‘to originate’. It serves to contrast everything else with God and His Word, which had no origination but were ‘in the beginning’ (a phrase borrowed from Gen. 1: 1). John thus implies that there are no eternal entities apart from God, for everything other than God has come into being.

The verb ginomai also has the meaning ‘to be created’ or ‘to be made’. This meaning of the verb comes to the fore by John’s indicating the agent who was responsible for all things’ coming into being. John speaks of God’s Word as the one ‘through whom’ all things came into being. In the Greek, the preposition dia (‘through’) + the genitive case of the noun or pronoun indicates the agency by means of which some result is produced. So John is saying that all things were created through God’s Word. John thus implies not only that there are no eternal beings apart from God; there are also no uncreated beings apart from God.

At face value, then, John’s prologue is pregnant with metaphysical implications, for it implies that God alone exists eternally and a se. There are no co-eternal, uncreated things alongside God.

Platonists who would be biblically faithful Christians must therefore say that John is not really talking

about everything when he says ‘all things’, any more than we are when we say, for example, ‘Everyone came to the office party’ or ‘There’s nothing in the refrigerator’. In making such statements, we obviously don’t mean that Nelson Mandela came to the office party or that the refrigerator has no shelves and no air inside! Rather, in each case we are speaking relative to a certain class of things, for example, people who work in the office or things that are good to eat.

Logicians call a statement which says something, not merely about some members of a class, but about all the members of the class, a universally quantified statement. Universally quantified statements may be

either affirmative, in which case we typically use words like (p.15) ‘all’, ‘every’, ‘each’, ‘any’, and so forth,

or negative, in which case we usually employ words like ‘no’, ‘none’, ‘nothing’, ‘no one’, and so forth, with respect to the class of things we are talking about. Logicians call the relevant class of things the domain of quantification. Now the third verse of John’s prologue is a universally quantified statement: ‘All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’ The first part of v. 3 is an affirmative, universally quantified statement, while the second part of the verse is a negative, universally quantified statement. The question is: does John intend the class of things he is talking about to be unrestricted or is he talking merely about a restricted class of things? Would-be Christian Platonists must maintain that John’s domain of quantification is restricted in such a way that abstract objects escape his universally quantified statements.

Now obviously the class of things John is talking about is not wholly unrestricted. For John clearly excludes God Himself and His Word from being in the class of things he is talking about, since they have already been said in v. 1 simply to exist in the beginning. God and His Word are not the subjects of temporal becoming, as are other things. They did not come into being, but simply were there ‘in the beginning’. So in saying that ‘all things came into being through him’, John obviously does not mean to include God Himself in the domain of quantification. The Platonist must say, however, that John’s domain of quantification is even more restricted than in this obvious way.

Now it is important that we understand clearly the question before us, since it is so often misunderstood. The question is not: did John have abstract objects explicitly in mind when he said ‘all things came into being through him’? I doubt that John explicitly took abstract objects to be part of God’s creation, either because he had never thought about abstract objects or else because, if he had, he did not ascribe to them extra-mental existence, as I shall explain below.

Perhaps John had never thought about abstract objects; but by the same token, neither had John thought about quarks, galaxies, and black holes; yet, he would doubtless take such things and countless other things, were he informed about them, to have been created by God and to be in the class of things he is talking about. If John would not have taken these sorts of unknown things to be uncreated, were he informed about them, why think that he would have exempted Platonic abstract objects?

(p.16) Recall that for the heavyweight Platonist, abstract objects and ordinary physical objects are on an ontological par. Platonist philosopher Mark Steiner emphasizes that ‘the natural numbers…are objects in the same sense that molecules are objects’.1 As the eminent Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine colourfully put it, ‘numbers of all sorts, functions, and much else…are as integral to the physical theory that uses them as are the atoms, the electrons, the sticks, for that matter, and the stones’.2 Abstract entities may be even more remote from direct sense perception than micro-entities, but they are, according to Platonism, just as real, so that if subatomic entities lie in the domain of John’s quantifiers, so do numbers.3 So if abstract objects exist, as the Platonist thinks, it would seem arbitrary to exempt them from the domain of John’s quantifiers.

The question, then, is not what John thought lay in the domain of his quantifiers; rather, the question is whether John intends his domain of quantification, once God is exempted, to be unrestricted. Did he think that apart from God everything else that exists has been created by God? Did he believe that God is the only uncreated reality? It is more than probable that he did. For God’s status as the only eternal, uncreated being is an earmark of first-century Judaism, which is the backdrop against which the New Testament was written.

In his influential work on the character of ancient Jewish monotheism, Richard Bauckham identifies two characteristics that uniquely mark off Israel’s God from all others, namely that ‘he is Creator of all things and sovereign Ruler of all things’.4 There is in the (p.17) Judaism of John’s day a bright dividing line which separates God ontologically from everything else, a bifurcation which Bauckham attempts to capture by the term ‘transcendent uniqueness’. Bauckham observes that so-called intermediate figures in Judaism fall into one of two categories: (1) beings which are supernatural but nonetheless created, like angels, and (2) personifications of aspects of God Himself which have no independent existence, such as God’s Word and God’s Wisdom. God’s status as the sole ultimate reality comes to practical expression in the Jewish restriction of worship as properly directed towards God alone. According to Bauckham, this restriction ‘most clearly signaled the distinction between God and all other reality’.5

It is interesting that, like John, Bauckham makes no explicit mention of abstract objects. As a biblical scholar rather than a philosopher, he may be completely unaware of such objects. Nevertheless, it is obvious that he reads the Jewish texts he cites as unrestricted in their domain of quantification (once God is exempted). For example, he writes:

This God of Israel is the one and only Creator of all things and sovereign Lord over all things. Among the many other things that late Second Temple period Jews said about the uniqueness of their God, these two aspects of his unique relationship to all other reality were the most commonly cited, repeatedly used to put YHWH in an absolutely unique category.6

Bauckham takes these Jewish texts to distinguish God from all the rest of reality, and the majority of scholars have concurred in Bauckham’s exegesis of these texts.

The crucial point here is that the unrestrictedness of the domain of quantification is based, not in what kinds of objects were thought to lie in the domain, but rather in the Jewish doctrine of God as the only being which exists eternally and a se. It is who or what God is that requires that the domain of quantification be unrestricted, whatever beings might be discovered to lie in the domain.

(p.18) John himself identifies the Word (logos) alone as existing with God and being God in the beginning. The creation of everything else through the divine Logos then follows. Bauckham calls such a view ‘Christological monotheism’: the divine Logos is on God’s side of the dividing line between God and the rest of reality. He is therefore not an additional uncreated entity existing apart from God.

So while I think that John probably did not have in mind abstract objects when he asserted that all things came into being through the Logos, there is no reason to doubt that he believed that every existing thing apart from God had come into being through the Logos. If a modern philosopher were to sit down with John and explain to him what an abstract object is supposed to be, giving him examples like numbers, propositions, and possible worlds, and tell him that many twenty-first-century Platonists believe that such things are mind-independent objects which exist just as robustly as familiar physical objects, John would doubtless have responded that, if there really are such things, then they, too, must have been created by the divine Logos. To postulate an infinite plenitude of beings as real as planets existing independently of God, so that the realm of concrete objects brought into being by God is literally infinitesimal by comparison, would be to betray Jewish monotheism and to trivialize the doctrine of creation. So I think that it is clear that John did intend his domain of quantification to include everything apart from God, whatever idea he may have had concerning what objects lay in the domain.

But was John, in fact, unaware of abstract objects, as we have assumed? This is anything but obvious. For by John’s day, classical Platonism had evolved into so-called Middle Platonism, and Hellenistic Judaism bears its imprint. The doctrine of the divine creative Logos found in John’s prologue, far from being original to John, was widespread in Middle Platonism. It is attested as early as Antiochus of Ascalon (125–68 BC) and Eudorus (first century BC), two of the earliest Middle Platonists. Hellenistic Jews, notably Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–AD 50), adapted the Logos doctrine to Jewish monotheism. The similarities between Philo’s Logos doctrine and John’s Logos doctrine are

striking and numerous. In a careful review of the roles of the Logos as found in Philo and John, the German scholar Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer summarizes the most important similarities:

both use the Logos in a way similar to that of the Wisdom literature; both describe the Logos as temporally prior to creation (Op. 17; 24; Jn (p.19) 1.1–2). Insofar as they go beyond the Wisdom tradition, they call him ‘God’ (Som. 1.228–230; Jn 1.1). Both connect the operation of the Logos with the beginning of the world (Conf. 146; Jn 1.1–2) and see the world as created ‘through’ (διά) the Logos (Cher. 127; Jn 1.3). Both connect the Logos with light (Som. 1.75; Op. 33; Conf. 60–63; Jn 1.4–5, 9) and see in the Logos the way for people to become God’s children

(Conf. 145–146; Jn 1.12). Both make a clear distinction between the Logos with God and the Logos in creation, whereby not only the prologue to John but both bring the statements of Genesis to bear on the Logos with God.7

There is much here that deserves comment; but I want to draw special attention to the role of the divine Logos in creation. Both Philo and John connect the Logos with the beginning of the cosmos. John says that the Logos existed in the beginning and that the cosmos came to be through him (1: 3, 10). Philo, citing Genesis 1: 1: ‘In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth’, also connects the Logos with the beginning of the world (On the Creation of the World 26–7). They both understand the Logos to be the agent of creation, through whom the world was made. The use of the preposition dia + genitive to express instrumental creation is not derived from Jewish Wisdom literature, but is rather an earmark of Middle Platonism; indeed, so much so that scholars of this movement like to

speak of its ‘prepositional metaphysics’, whereby various prepositional phrases are employed to express causal categories:8

Philo identifies Aristotle’s four kinds of causes by these prepositional phrases, stating that ‘through which’ (to di’ hou) represents creation (p.20) by the Logos (On the Cherubim 124–7). Philo frequently refers to the Logos as the instrumental cause of creation.9 Although some commentators on John’s Gospel have rightly insisted that John is not interested primarily in metaphysics, but in salvation, we cannot ignore his explicitly metaphysical affirmations that all things came into being through the Logos (di’ autou) and that the world (kosmos) came into being through him (di’ autou) (1: 3, 10).

The similarities between Philo and John’s doctrines of the Logos are so numerous and so close that most Johannine scholars, while not willing to affirm John’s direct dependence on Philo, do recognize that the author of the prologue

of John’s Gospel shares with Philo a common intellectual tradition of a Middle Platonic interpretation of Genesis 1.10

Now, interested as he is in the incarnation of the divine Logos, John does not pause to reflect on the role of the Logos ‘in the beginning’, causally prior to creation. But this pre-creation role does feature prominently in Philo’s doctrine of the Logos. According to David Runia, a cornerstone of Middle Platonism was the division of reality into the intelligible and the sensible realms.11 The perceived division is genuine, but it is somewhat misleading, I think, to draw the distinction in such terms.12 The fundamental distinction here, originally to be found in Plato, is between the realm of static being and the realm of temporal becoming. The former realm is grasped by the intellect, while the latter is perceived by the senses. The realm of becoming comprised primarily physical objects, while the static

realm (p.21) of being comprised what we would today call abstract objects. For Middle Platonists, as for Plato, the intelligible world served as a model for the creation of the sensible world. As a Jewish monotheist, Philo does not think that this intelligible realm exists independently of God, but rather as the contents of His mind.

This view was not original to Philo, however. The interpretation of the Platonic Ideas as thoughts in the mind of God was characteristic of Middle Platonism and became widespread throughout the ancient world.13 For example, Nicomachus of Gerasa (c.AD 60–120), who flourished in Roman Syria adjacent to Judaea, held that, of the four

subjects of the classical quadrivium,

arithmetic…existed before all the others in the mind of the creating God like some universal and exemplary plan, relying upon which as a design and archetypal example, the Creator of the universe sets in order his material creations and makes them attain their proper ends.…

All that has by nature with systematic method been arranged in the universe seems both in part and as a whole to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of him that created all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the domination of number preëxistent in the mind of the world-creating God, number conceptual only and immaterial in every way, but at the same time the true and the eternal essence, so that with reference to it, as to an artistic plan, should be created all these things, time, motion, the heavens, the stars, all sorts of revolutions.14

Philo concurred. The intelligible world (kosmos noētos), he maintains, may be thought of as either formed by the divine Logos or, more reductively, as the Logos itself as God is engaged in creating.

(p.22) Although references to this role of the Logos are frequent in Philo,15 the fullest exposition of his doctrine comes in his On the Creation of the World according to Moses:

God, because He is God, understood in advance that a fair copy would not come into existence apart from a fair model, and that none of the objects of sense-perception would be without fault, unless it was modeled on the archetypal and intelligible idea. When he had decided to construct this visible cosmos, he first marked out the intelligible cosmos, so that he could use it as an incorporeal and most god-like paradigm and so produce the corporeal cosmos, a younger likeness of an older model, which would contain as many sense-perceptible kinds as there were intelligible kinds in that other one.

To declare or suppose that the cosmos composed of the ideas exists in some place is not permissible. How it has been constituted we will understand if we pay careful attention to an image drawn from our own world. When a city is founded, in accordance with the high ambition of a king or a ruler who has laid claim to supreme power and, because he is at the same time magnificent in his conception, adds further adornment to his good fortune, it can happen that a trained architect comes forward. Having observed both the favourable climate and location of the site, he first designs in his mind a plan of virtually all the parts of the city that is to be completed—temples, gymnasia, public offices, market-places, harbours, shipyards, streets, construction of walls, the establishment of other buildings both private and public. Then, taking up the imprints of each object in his own soul like in wax, he carries around the intelligible city as an image in his head. Summoning up the images by means of his innate power of memory and engraving their features even more distinctly in his mind, he begins, like a good builder, to construct the city out of stones and timber, looking at the model and ensuring that the corporeal objects correspond to each of the incorporeal ideas.

The conception we have concerning God must be similar to this, namely that when he had decided to found the great cosmic city, he first conceived its outlines. Out of these he composed the intelligible cosmos, which served him as a model when he also completed the sense-perceptible cosmos. Just as the city that was marked out beforehand in the architect had no location outside, but had been engraved in the soul of the craftsman, in the same way the cosmos composed of the (p.23) ideas would have no other place than the divine Logos who gives these (ideas) their ordered disposition. After all, what other place would there be for his powers sufficient to receive and contain, I do not speak about all of them, but just a single one of them in its unmixed state? If you would wish to use a formulation that has been stripped down to essentials, you might say that the intelligible cosmos is nothing else than the Logos of God as He is actually engaged in making the cosmos. For the intelligible city too is nothing else than the reasoning of the architect as he is actually engaged in planning the foundation of the city (On the Creation of the World 16–20, 24). Especially noteworthy is Philo’s insistence that the world of ideas cannot exist anywhere but in the divine Logos.

Just as the ideal architectural plan of a city exists only in the mind of the architect, so the world of ideas exists solely in the mind of God.

In Philo’s view, then, there is no realm of independently existing abstract objects. As Runia states, the intelligible world, while not part of the created realm, ‘must be considered dependent for its existence on God’.16

Given the close similarity of the Logos doctrine of John’s prologue to Philo’s doctrine, it is not at all impossible that the author of the prologue was aware of the relation of the Logos to the realm of ideas. It is striking how verbs of being dominate vv. 1–2 of John’s prologue, while verbs of becoming dominate vv. 3–5.17 It may well be that the

prologue’s author thought that only concrete objects had been created by God because the intelligible realm exists only in the mind of God. The intelligible realm has no reality outside the divine Logos.

I think it not at all improbable that the prologue’s author, if not the evangelist himself, held to the Middle Platonic view of God and abstract objects. But whether or not he did, it is clear that the author of John’s Gospel conceives of

God as the Creator of everything apart (p.24) from Himself through His Word. There are no uncreated, independently existing, eternal objects, for God exists uniquely a se.

Paul’s Letters

We turn now to what Paul has to say in his various letters about God’s status as the sole ultimate reality. The same Hellenistic Judaism, epitomized in Philo, that forms the background of John’s prologue shapes the traditions that Paul hands on. Consider the following Pauline texts:

there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor. 8: 6 NRSV)

For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God. (1 Cor. 11: 12 NRSV)

For from him and through him and to him are all things. (Rom. 11: 36 NRSV)

He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation; for by him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. (Col. 1: 15–16 NRSV)

Paul, like John, ascribes the origin of ‘all things’ to God. A faithful Jew, Paul held to the traditional monotheistic understanding that God is the source of everything other than Himself.

Notice Paul’s use of prepositional phrases like ‘from him’, ‘through him’, and ‘to him’. Douglas Moo comments on Romans 11: 36, ‘The concept of God as the source (ek), sustainer (dia), and goal (eis) of all things is particularly strong among the Greek Stoic philosophers. Hellenistic Jews picked up this language and applied it to Yahweh; and it is probably, therefore, from the synagogue that Paul borrows this formula.’18 Yes, but Stoic thought is the more

distant progenitor; more immediately what we see here are variations on the prepositional metaphysics of Middle Platonism that shaped Hellenistic Judaism.

(p.25) Richard Horsley observes how unusual such prepositional formulations are for Paul and argues that the provenance of Paul’s expressions is to be found in Philo. Noting that ‘numerous passages in Philo’s writings provide an analogy for nearly every aspect of the Corinthians’ religious language and viewpoint’,19 Horsley comments,

I Cor. 8.6 is an adaptation of the traditional Hellenistic Jewish form of predication regarding the respective creative and soteriological roles of God and Sophia/Logos, which Philo or his predecessors had adapted from a Platonic philosophical formula concerning the primal principles of the universe. What was already a fundamental tenet of the Hellenistic Jewish religion expressed in the book of Wisdom appears in more philosophical formulation in Philo; that God is the ultimate Creator and final Cause of the universe, and that Sophia/Logos is agent (and paradigm) of

creation or the instrumental (and formal) cause.20

Notice Horsley’s comment that, whereas God is regarded as the efficient and final cause of the universe of created things, Sophia/Logos (Wisdom/Word) is the instrumental cause and the formal cause (or paradigm) of creation. This latter role makes Sophia/Logos specifically the source or ground of the kosmos noētos or intelligible world. Paul’s innovation is that he substitutes Christ for Sophia/Logos, having ‘Christ take over what were the functions of Sophia, according to the gnosis of the Corinthians.’21

In the same way, Paul in his letter to the Colossians seems to have adapted traditional Hellenistic Jewish hymnic material about Sophia/Logos to make Christ the agent of creation. Peter O’Brien comments:

while there are points of linguistic contact with Stoicism especially, and thus the language of the hymn may well have served as a bridge for those from such a background (cf. the similar function of λόγος in John 1), nevertheless Pauline thought is different from the pantheistically conceived world-soul of Stoicism.…the parallels from Hellenistic Judaism, especially the LXX, are much closer.22

For example, we read in Wisdom (or Sirach) 43: 26 that ‘through his word all things hold together’. The parallels become even closer if the majority of commentators are correct that the original material (p.26)adapted by Paul spoke of the cosmos rather than the church as the body of which Sophia/Logos is the head.23

It is interesting that whereas in Colossians 1: 15–16 and 1 Corinthians 8: 6, Paul names Christ as the instrumental cause of creation, in Romans 11: 36 Paul declares the Father to be the source, sustainer, and goal of all things.

Romans 11: 36 is thus, in Moo’s words, ‘a declaration of God’s ultimacy’.24 James D. G. Dunn concurs: ‘Where the

focus is so exclusively on the supreme majesty and self-sufficiency of God, the Stoic type formula provides a fitting climax: he is the source, medium, and goal of everything, the beginning, middle, and end of all that is.’25

Again, the would-be Christian Platonist must maintain that the domain over which Paul quantifies in saying ‘all things’ is restricted in such a way that abstract objects, if they exist, escape his quantifiers. But the unrestrictedness of the domain of Paul’s quantifiers is evident from the fact that the expression ‘the heavens and the earth’ (Col. 1: 15–16) is a typical Jewish merism or totalizing idiom comprising everything other than God.26 Paul’s characterization of the created realm as ‘all things in heaven and on earth’ was not, in the mind of a first-century Jew, any sort of restriction. Moreover, Paul characterizes the Son as the creator of ‘all things visible and invisible’ (Col. 1: 15–16), a characterization which is collectively exhaustive: Christ has created everything, whether it be A or not-A. Indeed, Paul’s thinking in Colossians is expansive: he moves from speaking of all things in heaven and on earth, to all things visible and invisible, and finally to all things simpliciter. His intention is that the domain of his quantifiers be unrestricted.

The unrestrictedness of Paul’s domain of quantification is not compromised by the fact that only concrete things in fact inhabit the domain. As we have seen, in Hellenistic Judaism, the kosmos noētos was not taken to be part of the created world, but to exist in (p.27) the mind of the Logos and to serve as the pattern for God’s creation of the concrete world. Ideal objects are not part of creation or the world, but are rather God’s ideas. They have no existence outside the divine mind. So in ascribing to Christ the role of the Logos in creating the world, Paul is affirming that everything apart from God has been created by God through Christ. The domain of Paul’s quantifiers is unlimited: everything other than God has been created by God.

Perhaps biblical authors like John and Paul followed the lead of Hellenistic Judaism in locating mathematical objects and their kin in the mind of the Logos; perhaps they had never considered the subject. We do not know. But just as the discovery of extraterrestrial planets would not have led them to think that these objects somehow escaped Christ’s creation, so the discovery that there are mind-independent abstract objects would not lead them to think that such objects are uncreated. Leftow is surely correct when he says, ‘they meant “all things” to cover things

known and unknown: they could not have believed that they knew everything “all things” ranged over. But once grant this point, and it is hard to see why we should limit its scope to the concrete.’27 Thus, ‘Biblical authors who came to believe in abstracta would want to hold God responsible for them all. Their idea surely is not that God has

done enough to deserve praise and so on (that is, made a bigpart of reality), but there are realms of reality for which He does not deserve praise and so on.’28 Rather, God and Christ deserve praise for everything that exists because everything finds its source in God.

Two Theological Questions

Before we leave the biblical authors, there are two further questions about the biblical doctrine that deserve attention. I noted that the biblical writers’ affirmation that all things other than God have been created by God doubtlessly looks back to the creation account in Genesis 1. The form of John 1: 1 mirrors Genesis 1: 1, and the consistent use of past-tense verbs for creation—for example, ‘All things came into being through him’ (John 1: 3) and ‘For by him all things in heaven and on earth were created’ (Col. 1: 15)—indicates that some event in the past is in view. But what about things that were (p.28) not created in God’s original act of creation, but have only lately arrived on the scene? In what sense can they be said to have been created by God? This is a question which the biblical authors themselves might have pondered. For they were aware that new living organisms are born every day through apparently natural processes and that human beings produce new artefacts through natural causes on a daily basis. In what sense can the Logos be said by John or Paul to have brought these things into being?

Leftow calls the creation of such things ‘late creation’ and offers several models of it.29

1. (i) God created out of nothing the fundamental particles (‘atoms’) which compose material things. If there are no fundamental particles, then at some level God created out of nothing the composite stuff of which material things consist. Composite objects therefore owe their existence to God.

2. (ii) God not only created the stuff out of which material things are made, but also established deterministic causal systems primed to produce certain effects at later times. God can be said to create these later effects by setting up the causal chains leading to them according to his intention. One can supplement this model

   by including free agents among the things God intends to be produced, as well as the artefacts He then leads them to produce or knew they would freely produce. On this model, God is the remote cause and creatures the proximate causes of things’ coming into being.

3. (iii) God could will and cause an entire causal sequence of events terminating in the production of some creature. On this model, God causes, not merely the first member of a causal sequence, but the entire sequence. Nevertheless, each member of the sequence has causal antecedents in the sequence. Again, this model can be enhanced by making some of the creaturely causes free agents, whose choices produce effects intended by God.

4. (iv) Model (iii) can be extended by adding that God conserves objects in being moment by moment by willing that they persist from one time until a later time. Thus, at every moment of their existence they are being created out of nothing, in the (p.29) sense that God wills that they persist in being rather than be annihilated. On this model, late creation is a matter of God’s conserving the world in being.

Obviously, not all of these models would be applicable to God’s creation of immaterial entities like angels, souls, or abstract objects. But late creation either does not come into view for most of these things or is unproblematic.

Angels may have been created once only, perhaps at the moment of creation and never again. Souls could be created immediately by God throughout history at the various appropriate times. Abstract objects come in such diverse types that no one model applies.30 Since our concern here is with biblical, not systematic theology, let us leave aside for

the moment God’s creation of abstract objects, since these do not come explicitly into view in the biblical text.

While the systematic theologian will typically want to affirm a doctrine of divine conservation in line with option (iv), it is doubtful that John and Paul had such a model in mind in the passages we have examined, given their use of past-tense verbs of creation.31 They probably looked rather to God’s initial act of creation ‘in the beginning’. Given that they were not natural law theorists, they probably had something like option (i) in mind rather than (ii) or (iii), though perhaps supplemented by God’s providential intentions that later things should come to be. I do not mean to suggest that John and (p.30) Paul were atomists, but merely that they believed that, in addition to angels and souls, God created the stuff out of which physical things are made, and so He can be said to be the Creator of all things, including things which have only lately been configured. Nor am I ascribing to the biblical writers some sort of mereological nihilism, the view that there are no composite objects. For they could consistently believe and no doubt

did believe that things like bricks and swords and horses do exist as bona fide things, even if they are composed of parts. Finite agents are artificers who shape stuff into things like knives and bricks or beget progeny via material stuff like semen. They are thus, as option (ii) affirms, proximate causes of what exists. God remains the ultimate Creator in that He is the source of the stuff of which every material thing is made, as well as the Creator of angels and souls.

Now to our second question. Shall we take aseity to be an essential attribute of God or merely a property that God happens to possess contingently? While the biblical writers do not address this question, Leftow rightly argues:

the more central and prominent an attribute is in the Biblical picture of God, the stronger the case for taking it to be necessary to being God, ceteris paribus: this is the only reason philosophers usually treat being omniscient or omnipotent as thus necessary.…If creating everything is prominent and central in the Biblical account, and this is

our only sort of reason for taking accepted necessary conditions of deity as necessary conditions, we have as good a reason to take creating everything as a requisite as we do in any other case.32

We have seen that God’s being the sole ultimate reality lay at the very heart of Jewish monotheism. It is unthinkable that biblical writers might have considered aseity to be a property which God merely happened to have but might have lacked, so that God could have been dependent for His existence upon something else. Anything so dependent would not deserve to be called God. Furthermore, the fact that God alone exists a sewould not seem to be a contingent matter. If God is the sole ultimate reality in the actual world, it is hard to imagine why He would not be so in any possible world in which He exists. To suggest that in some other possible world God finds Himself confronted with some independently existing, contingent (p.31) being, uncreated by Him, would impugn God’s power and majesty. Thus, we should take God’s being the sole ultimate reality as belonging to God’s nature.

At any rate, even if we must rely upon prominence and centrality as our sole guides when doing biblical theology, nevertheless, when we do systematic theology, in particular, perfect being theology, then the conception of God as the greatest conceivable being comes crucially into play, as we shall see. Thomas Morris observes that it is ‘a fairly uncontroversial judgment among perfect-being theologians’ that aseity is a great-making property or ingredient of

perfection.33 God must therefore exist a se. When we couple the attribute of divine aseity with God’s attribute of

metaphysical necessity, we are well on our way towards a truly great conception of God which is worthy of the biblical God.

Teaching of the Church Fathers

The early Church Fathers, frequently citing John and Paul, understood God to be the sole ultimate reality. That conviction attained credal status in 325 at the Council of Nicaea. The Nicene Creed affirms:

I believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible;

And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all things came into being.

The phrase ‘Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible’ derives from Paul, and the expression ‘through whom all things came into being’ from the prologue to John’s Gospel. The Council affirms that everything other than God was created by God through the Son, so that God alone is uncreated. Once again, the (p.32) would- be Christian Platonist, if he is to hold to Nicene orthodoxy, must regard the Fathers’ domain of quantification to be tacitly restricted in such way that abstract objects escape the creed’s universal quantifiers.

The Sole Agenētos

We have, however, convincing evidence that the Church Fathers took the domain of quantification, once God is exempted, to be unrestricted in its scope. At the heart of the theological controversy which led up to the Council of Nicaea lay a pair of terminological distinctions: agenētos/genētos and agennētos/gennētos.34 The word

pair agenētos/genētos derives from the Greek verb ginomai, which means to become or to come into

being. Agenētos means unoriginated or uncreated, in contrast to genētos, that which is created or originated. The second word pair agennētos/gennētos derives from a different verb gennaō, which means to beget. That which is agennētos is unbegotten, while that which is gennētos is begotten. Most of us are familiar with the famous ‘i’

which marked the difference between the orthodox confession that Christ is homoousios (same in essence) with the Father and the Arian confession that Christ is homoiousios (similar in essence) with the Father, so that the difference between orthodoxy and heresy could rightly be said to hang on a single iota. But a similar world of difference lay in the single ‘n’, by means of which Christ could be said to be uncreated (agenētos) but begotten (gennētos), in contrast to the Father, who is both uncreated (agenētos) and unbegotten (agennētos).

Athanasius, the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy in the years following the Council, explains that Arians had borrowed the term agenētos from Greek philosophy and applied it exclusively to God the Father (Defense of the Nicene Definition 7: ‘On the Arian symbol “Agenētos”’; cf. Discourses against the Arians 1.9.30; On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia 46–7). The relevant meaning of the term, he notes, is ‘what exists but was neither originated nor had origin of being, but is everlasting and indestructible’. He complains with obvious indignation that the Arian strategy was to ask the unsuspecting (p.33) layman whether there exists one uncreated being or two. When the person replied that there is only one uncreated being, the Arians would spring the trap by exclaiming, ‘Then the Son is created!’ and therefore a creature. Not surprisingly, then, Athanasius says that he prefers to use the term ‘Father’ rather than agenētos, though he recognizes that the latter term has a proper and religious use (Defense 7.31– 2; Discourses 1.9.33–4).

The ante-Nicene and Nicene Church Fathers, as well as the Arians themselves, all agreed that there are no agenēta apart from God alone. Consider these representative texts:

there is not a plurality of uncreated beings: for if there were some difference between them, you would not discover the cause of the difference, though you searched for it; but after letting the mind ever wander to infinity, you would at length, wearied out, stop at one uncreated being, and say that this is the Cause of all things. (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew 5)

it is impossible for two uncreated beings to exist together (Methodius, On Free Will 5)

in all things God has the pre-eminence, who alone is uncreated, the first of all things, and the primary cause of the existence of all, while all other things remain under God’s subjection (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.3)

For before all things God was alone, himself his own world and location and everything—alone, however, because there was nothing external beside him (Tertullian, Against Praxeas 5.13–15).

We have never heard that there are two unbegotten beings, nor that one has been divided into two…; but we affirm that the unbegotten is one. (Letter of Eusebius of Nicomedia to Paulinus of Tyre, in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.5)

God, subsisting alone, and having nothing contemporaneous with Himself, determined to create the world. And conceiving the world in mind, and willing and uttering the Word, He made it; and straightaway it appeared formed as it had pleased Him. For us, then, it is sufficient simply to know that there was nothing contemporaneous with God. Beside Him there was nothing. (Hippolytus, Against Noetus 10.1; cf. Refutation of All Heresies 10.28)

the Father is the one uncreated being (Epiphanius, Panarion 33.7.6)

It would be simply flawed exegesis, I think, to suggest that the domain over which the Fathers’ quantifiers range in these statements is not intended to be unrestricted.

(p.34) Agenētos is thus the word which the Church Fathers used to denote the Jewish idea of what Bauckham calls God’s ‘transcendent uniqueness’. Prestige explains:

Since transcendence, though a characteristically Hebrew idea, is nowhere philosophically expounded in the Bible, a term had to be adopted to express its definition. This was found in the word agenetos, ‘uncreated’. The idea of creation was therein contrasted with that of self-grounded existence. To call God uncreated was tantamount to calling Him infinite perfection, independent reality, and the source of all finite being: He alone is absolute; all else is

dependent and contingent.35

The Church Fathers took this property to be unique to God: ‘the emphasis…on God being uncreated (ἀγένητος) implies that He is the sole originator of all things that are, the source and ground of existence; and the conception is taken as a positive criterion of deity’.36 According to the patristics scholar Harry Austryn Wolfson,37 the Church Fathers all accepted the following three principles:

1. 1. God alone is uncreated.

2. 2. Nothing is co-eternal with God.

3. 3. Eternality implies deity.

Each of these principles implies that there are no agenēta apart from God alone.

Properties and Numbers

But lest it be suggested that abstract objects were somehow exempted from these principles, we should note that the ante-Nicene Church Fathers explicitly rejected the view that entities such as properties and numbers are agenēta.

The Fathers were familiar with the metaphysical world views of Plato and Pythagoras and agreed with them that there is one agenētos from which all reality derives; but the Fathers identified this agenētos, not with an impersonal form or number, but with the Hebrew God, who has created all things (other than Himself) ex nihilo.

(p.35) Consider first properties. Although the Fathers’ primary target in their defence of creatio ex nihilo was the doctrine of the independence and eternality of matter, they did not countenance the idea that, although matter might be originated, properties might nonetheless be beginningless and uncreated. Athenagoras characterizes Christians as those who ‘distinguish and separate the uncreated and the created’ (Plea for the Christians 15). Although Athenagoras assumed that the created realm was the material world (including material spirits), that is not because he considered properties to be uncreated. Rather, he considered properties to lack any existence independent of concrete objects. His conviction is evident in his comment on how Satan is opposed to God’s goodness:

to the good that is in God, which belongs of necessity to Him and co-exists with Him, as colour with body, without which it has no existence (not as being part of it, but as an attendant property co-existing with it, united and blended, just as it is natural for fire to be yellow and the ether dark blue)—to the good that is in God, I say, the spirit which is about matter…is opposed. (Plea 24; my emphasis)

Athenagoras here clearly rejects the idea that properties have some sort of independent existence apart from concrete objects.

His fellow Apologist Tatian affirms that God alone is without beginning and attributes to Him the creation of both matter and form:

Our God did not begin to be in time; He alone is without beginning, and He Himself is the beginning of all things. God is a Spirit, not pervading matter, but the Maker of material spirits and of the forms (schematōn) that are in matter; He is invisible, impalpable, being Himself the Father of both sensible and invisible things. (Address to the Greeks 4.10–14)

Tatian rejected the notion that there is besides God any eternal, uncreated thing, even pure forms. Instantiated forms he would presumably take to belong to the realm of things invisible.

Origen, who was trained in neo-Platonic philosophy, repudiated the identification of the realm of Platonic ideas with the biblical heavenly realm whence Christ came, commenting,

It is difficult for us to explain this other world; and for this reason, that if we did so, there would be a risk of giving some men the impression that we were affirming the existence of certain imaginary forms which the (p.36) Greeks call ‘ideas’. For it is certainly foreign to our mode of reasoning to speak of an incorporeal world that exists solely in the mind’s fancy or the unsubstantial region of thought; and how men could affirm that the Saviour came from thence or that the saints will go thither I do not see. (On First Principles 2.3.6)

Like Philo, Origen believed that the forms of worldly things pre-existed as ideas in the second person of the Trinity, biblically identified as the Wisdom or Logos of God.38 He wrote:

God the Father always existed, and…he always had an only-begotten Son, who at the same time…is called Wisdom. This is that Wisdom in whom God delighted when the world was finished.…In this Wisdom, therefore, who ever existed with the Father, the Creation was always present in form and outline, and there was never a time when the pre-figuration of those things which hereafter were to be did not exist in Wisdom. (On First Principles 1.4.439)

The genera and species of all things have therefore always existed, being contained in God’s Wisdom (On First Principles 1.2.2–3, 1.4.5). Origen contrasts the way in which things pre-exist in Wisdom with their later substantial existence: ‘Since Wisdom has always existed, there have (p.37) always existed in Wisdom, by a pre-figuration and pre-formation, those things which afterwards have received substantial existence’ (On First Principles 1.4.5). We see here a pointed contrast between the substantial existence enjoyed by concrete objects and the unsubstantial and even imaginary existence that ideas are said to have, even in the Logos.

Methodius, in his dialogue On Free Will,40 after declaring that there cannot be two agenēta, defends creatio ex

nihilo by having Orthodoxus say to Valentinian: ORTHODOXUS.

• Do you say then, that there co-exists with God matter without qualities out of which He formed the beginning of this world?

  VALENTINIAN.

  
  
  

• So I think. ORTHODOXUS.

  
  
  

• If, then, matter had no qualities, and the world were produced by God, and qualities exist in the world, then God is the maker of qualities?

  VALENTINIAN.

  
  
  

• It is so. ORTHODOXUS.

  
  
  

• Now, as I heard you say some time ago that it is impossible for anything to come into being out of that which has no existence, answer my question: Do you think that the qualities of the world were not produced out of any existing qualities?

  VALENTINIAN.

  
  
  

• I do. ORTHODOXUS.

  
  
  

• And that they are something distinct from substances?

  VALENTINIAN.

  
  
  

• Yes. ORTHODOXUS.

  
  
  

• If, then, qualities were neither made by God out of any ready at hand, nor derive their existence from substances, because they are not substances, we must say that they were produced by God out of what had no existence. Wherefore I thought you spoke extravagantly in saying that it was impossible to suppose that anything was produced by God out of what did not exist.

Here Orthodoxus, who obviously speaks for the orthodox faith, will not allow that even properties are uncreated by God. For God alone is uncreated.

(p.38) Nor did the Church Fathers think that numbers exist independently of God as agenēta. Thus, Hippolytus traces the heresy of Valentinian Gnosticism to the systems of Plato and Pythagoras, and ultimately to the Egyptians (Refutation 6.16). The latter asserted that ultimate reality is an agennētos unit and that the other numbers are generated from it (Refutation 4.43). ‘Pythagoras, then, declared the originating principle of the universe to be the unbegotten monad, and the generated duad, and the rest of the numbers’ (Refutation6.18). The material world was thought to be in turn generated from these incorporeal principles. ‘There are, then, according to Pythagoras, two worlds: one intelligible, which has the monad for an originating principle; and the other sensible.…Nothing, he says, of intelligibles can be known to us from sense. For he says neither has eye seen, nor ear heard, nor whatsoever any of the senses known that (which is cognized by mind)’ (Refutation 6.19; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5.14). Hippolytus then makes the connection with Valentinus: ‘And from this (system), not from the Gospels, Valentinus…has collected the (materials of) heresy—and may (therefore) justly be reckoned a Pythagorean and Platonist, not a Christian’ (Refutation 6.24). Hippolytus charges that ‘Valentinus…and the entire school of these (heretics), as disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, (and) following these guides, have laid down as the fundamental principle of their doctrine the arithmetical system. For, likewise, according to these (Valentinians), the originating cause of the universe is a Monad, agennētos, imperishable, incomprehensible, inconceivable, productive, and a cause of the generation of all existent things’ (Refutation 6.24).

Logos Christology

The Church Fathers turned to the Logos doctrine of the early Greek Apologists as the means of grounding the intelligible realm in God rather than in some independent realm of self-subsisting entities like numbers or

forms.41 Combining the Gospel of John’s presentation of Christ as the pre-existent Logos, who in the beginning was

with (p.39) God and was God and through whom all things came into being (John 1: 1–3), with Philo of Alexandria’s conception of the Logos as the mind of God in which the Platonic realm of ideas subsists, Tatian offers one of the earliest Christian expositions of this doctrine:

God was in the beginning; but the beginning, we have been taught, is the power of the Logos. For the Lord of the universe, who is Himself the necessary ground of all being, inasmuch as no creature was yet in existence, was alone; but inasmuch as He was all power, Himself the necessary ground of things visible and invisible, with Him were all things; with Him by Logos-power, the Logos himself also, who was in Him, subsists. And by His simple will, the

Logos springs forth; and the Logos, not coming forth in vain, becomes the first-begotten work of the Father. Him (the Logos) we know to be the beginning of the world. (Address to the Greeks 5.1–9)42

The invisible, intelligible realm of exemplar ideas exists in the immanent Logos, who, proceeding out from God the Father (whether eternally or at the moment of creation), is begotten as God the Son. He then creates the sensible world of things that we experience.

Hippolytus, in language that would later echo at Nicaea, exults in the fact that even the opponents of orthodoxy must finally concede that there is but one agenētos which is the source of all reality:

God, subsisting alone, and having nothing contemporaneous with Himself, determined to create the world. And conceiving the world in mind, and willing and uttering the Word, He made it; and straightaway it appeared, formed as it has pleased Him. For us, then, it is sufficient simply to know that there was nothing contemporaneous with God. Beside Him there was nothing; but He, while existing alone, yet existed in plurality. For He was neither without reason, nor wisdom, nor power, nor counsel. And all things were in Him, and He was the All.…He begat the Word;…and thus there appeared another beside Himself. But when I say another, I do not mean that there are two

Gods, but that it is only as light of light.…Who then adduces a multitude of gods (p.40) brought in, time after time? For all are shut up, however unwillingly, to admit this fact, that the all runs up into One. If, then, all things run up into One, even according to Valentinus, and Marcion, and Cerinthus, and all their fooleries, they are also reduced, however unwillingly, to this position, that they must acknowledge that the One is the cause of all things. Thus, then, these too, though they wish it not, fall in with the truth, and admit that one God made all things according to His good pleasure. (Against Noetus 10–11; cf. Refutation 10.28–9)

It is ironic, in view of the contemporary debate among Christian philosophers over God and abstract objects, that even the heretics against whom the Church Fathers contended did not think to postulate a plurality of agenēta.

Whether Gnostic, Arian, or Christian, all were committed to there being a single agenētos.43 The challenge facing

the framers of Nicaea was how to preserve the deity and distinctness of the Son without admitting a plurality of agenēta.

Returning to the Nicene formula, we can see in light of its historical background that when God the Father is said to be the Maker of all things visible and invisible, the domain of quantification is intended to be unlimited. There is a state of affairs in the actual world which consists of God existing in absolute solitude. Even numbers and properties do not exist outside Him, much less independently of Him, for He is the ground of all being, and nothing is co- eternal with Him. The Logos Christology of the Greek Apologists comes to expression in the Nicene affirmation that the Son of God is begotten, not made. He is said to be the one through whom all things came to be. Since he himself is unmade and everything else is genētos, the Son must be agenētos and is therefore God, even though as the Son he is begotten (gennētos) of the Father.

If confronted by a modern-day Platonist defending an ontology which includes causally effete objects which

are agenēta and so co-eternal with God, the Church Fathers would have rejected such an account as blasphemous, since such an account would deny God’s being the source of all things. The Fathers could not and did not exempt such objects from God’s creative power, since He is the sole and all-originating agenētos.

(p.41) Perfect Being Theology

Figure 2. The set theoretical hierarchy, starting at zero and proceeding up through the natural numbers to transfinite numbers. (Adapted from A. W. Moore, The Infinite [London: Routledge, 1990], 157.)

In addition to the biblical and patristic witness to God’s status as the sole ultimate reality, the requirements of sound systematic theology include the affirmation that God is the source of all things apart from Himself. For divine aseity is a fundamental requirement of perfect being theology. As a perfect being, the greatest conceivable being, God must be the self-existent source of all reality apart from Himself. For being the cause of existence of other things is plausibly a great-making property, and the maximal degree of this property is to be the cause of everything else that

exists.44 God would be diminished in His greatness if He were the cause of only some of the other things that exist.

If abstract entities such as mathematical objects were real existents independent of God, then God would be the source of merely an infinitesimal part of what exists. For Platonism posits infinite realms of being which are

metaphysically necessary and uncreated by God. The physical universe which has been created by God would be an infinitesimal triviality utterly dwarfed by the unspeakable quantity of uncreated beings. To appreciate in some measure the vastness of the realms of uncreated being postulated by Platonism, consider the set theoretical hierarchy alone, as displayed in Figure 2.

Of course, the existence of any entities whatsoever independent of God is incompatible with God’s being the Creator of all things, but the profligacy of Platonism in this respect truly takes away one’s breath. God’s status as the greatest conceivable being requires that He be the source of existence of all things apart from Himself. Not only so, but God’s greatness would be even further augmented if it were impossible that anything exist independent of His creative power. Thus, in any possible world, God, as the greatest conceivable being, is the source of all things, if any, apart from Himself.

Seen in this light, divine aseity is a corollary of God’s omnipotence, which belongs indisputably to maximal greatness.45 For if any being exists independently of God, then God lacks the power either to annihilate it or to create it. An omnipotent being can give and take existence as He sees fit with respect to other beings. God’s power would thus be attenuated by the existence of independently existing abstract objects. (p.42)

(p.43) Moreover, there is a powerful philosophico-theological argument against the existence of uncreated, Platonic properties.46 Consider the cluster of divine attributes which go to make up God’s nature. Call that nature deity. On Platonism, deity is an abstract object existing independently of God, to which God stands in the relation of

exemplification or instantiation. Moreover, it is in virtue of standing in relation to this object that God is divine. He is God because He exemplifies deity. Thus, on Platonism, God does not really exist a seat all. For God depends upon this abstract object for His existence. Platonism does not simply postulate some object existing independently of God—a serious enough compromise of God’s sole ultimacy—but makes God dependent upon this object, thus denying divine aseity. The implication? ‘So deity/the Platonic realm, not God, is the ultimate reality.’47

Worse, if possible: since aseity, like omnipotence, is one of the essential attributes of God included in deity, it turns out that God does not exemplify deity after all. Since aseity is essential to deity and God, on Platonism, does not exist a se, it turns out that God does not exist! On Platonism, there may a demiurge, such as is featured in

Plato’s Timaeus, but the God of classical theism does not exist. Theism is thus undone by Platonism.

Conclusion

It seems to me, therefore, that we have very strong reasons both biblically and theologically for standing with the historic Christian tradition in affirming that God is the sole ultimate reality, that He exists a se and is the source of all things apart from Himself. This conclusion entails that the orthodox Christian cannot be a (metaphysically heavyweight) Platonist, for Platonism affirms that there are abstract objects which exist necessarily, eternally, and a se, in contradiction to the Christian affirmation that God is the sole ultimate reality. The challenge posed by Platonism to orthodox theology is therefore serious and must be squarely confronted.

Notes:

1. Mark Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge, Contemporary Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 87; cf. 127.

   
   
   

2. W. V. O. Quine, ‘Responses’, in Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 182.

   
   
   

3. For the Platonist, as Quine reminds us, there is no distinction between the ‘there are’ of ‘there are universals’ and the ‘there are’ of ‘there are unicorns’, the ‘there are hippopotami’, and the ‘there are’ of ‘(∃x) (x)’ (‘there are entities x such that’). W. V.

   O. Quine, ‘Logic and the Reification of Universals’, in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 105. If we are to understand Platonism, we must resist the temptation to think that abstract objects exist in some ghostly, diminished sense. Indeed, for ancient Platonists, the ideal world was actually more real than the world of concrete objects.

   
   
   

4. Richard Bauckham, ‘God Crucified’, in Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 8. Citing Bauckham’s work, Chris Tilling reports that the majority of scholars find in early Judaism a strict monotheism that ‘draws a sharp line between God and everything else’. Chris Tilling, ‘Problems with Ehrman’s Interpretive Categories’, in Michael F. Bird (ed.), How God Became Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 129.

   
   
   

5. Bauckham, ‘God Crucified’, 11.

6. Richard Bauckham, ‘Biblical Theology and the Problems of Monotheism’, in Jesus and the God of Israel, 83–4. YHWH is the abbreviation for the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh, or the LORD.

   
   
   

7. Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer, ‘Der Logos und die Schöpfung: Streiflichter bei Philo (Op 20–25) und im Johannesprolog (Joh 1, 1– 18)’, in Jörg Frey und Udo Schnelle (eds), Kontexte des Johannesevangeliums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 318. The abbreviations indicate the Latin titles of Philo’s De opificio mundi (On the Creation of the World), De somniis (On Dreams), De confusione linguarum (On the Confusion of Tongues), and De cherubim (On the Cherubim).

   
   
   

8. D. T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the ‘Timaeus’ of Plato (Amsterdam: Free University of Amsterdam, 1983), 140–3; Gregory E. Sterling, ‘“Day One”: Platonizing Exegetical Traditions of Genesis 1: 1–5 in John and Jewish Authors’, paper presented at the Philo section of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Antonio, TX, 20–3 Nov. 2004.

   
   
   

9. Runia’s list is helpful: Allegorical Interpretation 3.9; On the Cherubim 28; On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 8; On the Unchangeableness of God 57; On the Confusion of Tongues 62; On the Migration of Abraham 6; On Flight and Finding 12; 95; On Dreams 2.45; The Special Laws 1.81.

   
   
   

10. So Leonhardt-Balzer, ‘Der Logos und die Schöpfung’, 309–10, with citations of extensive literature; cf. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), i. 346–7.

    
    
    

11. Runia, Philo and the ‘Timaeus’, 68. The locus classicus of the distinction was Plato’s Timaeus 27d5–28a4, which is in turn cited by Apuleius, De Platone et eius dogmate 193; Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic 1.2.1; Numenius fr. 7; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 3.5; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 7.142.

    
    
    

12. The distinction at issue is not really intelligible vs sensible; rather, it is being vs becoming. The problem with the former characterization of the distinction is that it seems to leave no place for immaterial concrete objects like angels or souls. Given that the intelligible realm exists in the mind of God, such beings cannot be classed as part of the intelligible realm. They must be part of the sensible realm, which is thus more accurately described as the realm of concrete objects subject to temporal becoming.

    
    
    

13. See Audrey N. M. Rich, ‘The Platonic Ideas as the Thoughts of God’, Mnemosyne, 7/2 (1954): 123–33. Rich observes, ‘Though Plato speaks of the transcendent Idea as existing “alone and by itself” and never “in anything else” [Sympos[ium] 211A], the tendency among many of his interpreters [e.g., Albinus, Plutarch, Philo, Galen, Atticus, Origen, Stobaeus, Hippolytus, Theodoret] seems to have been to make the Idea dependent upon God as a thought resident in his mind’ (123). R. M. Jones says that the doctrine of the Platonic Ideas as God’s thoughts was so well known by Philo’s time that Philo could employ it without hesitation: ‘The Ideas as the Thoughts of God’, Classical Philology, 21 (1926): 317–26.

    
    
    

14. Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic 1.4, 6, tr. Martin Luther D’Ooge (New York: Macmillan Co., 1926), 187, 189.

    
    
    

15. E.g. Allegorical Interpretation 3.96; On the Migration of Abraham 6; On Flight and Finding 12; On Dreams 1.75; 2.45; Special Laws 1.81; On the Confusion of Tongues 60–3, 172.

    
    
    

16. Runia, Philo and the ‘Timaeus’, 138. Philo interpreted Gen. 1: 1–5 to relate the creation, not of the concrete world, but of the ideal world in the mind of God, which then served as His model for the concrete world. Philo thereby underlines the fact that ideal objects do not exist a se.

    
    
    

17. According to Sterling, ‘Platonizing Exegetical Traditions’, this verbal contrast ‘became a standard way for later Platonists to distinguish between the eternal world of the ideas and the sense perceptible world in which we live. I suggest that the author of the [Johannine] hymn understood the shift from ἦν to ἐγένετο in Genesis 1 as a textual warrant for a Platonic understanding.’ The point is especially strong if we include the phrase ho gegonen in v. 3 rather than in v. 4.

    
    
    

18. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 743. James D. G. Dunn conveniently provides excerpts of parallel texts in his commentary Romans 9–16 (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1988), 702.

    
    
    

19. Richard A. Horsley, ‘Gnosis in Corinth: I Corinthians 8.1–6’, New Testament Studies, 27/1 (1980): 43.

(20) Ibid., 46.

(21) Ibid., 51.

1. Peter T. O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 47.

2. O’Brien rejects the majority view because ‘body’ is typically used by Paul of the church, but never of the world. But this objection is not very powerful, even if O’Brien’s scepticism about attempts to recover the original wording is justified. For Paul’s view of the church as Christ’s body might motivate Paul to adapt such material to fit his theology.

   
   
   

3. Moo, Epistle to the Romans, 740.

   
   
   

4. Dunn, Romans 9–16, 704.

   
   
   

5. See Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 43.

   
   
   

6. Brian Leftow, God and Necessity (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 63 (my emphasis).

   
   
   

7. Ibid., 64 (my emphasis). (29) Ibid., 15–20.

1. Many, like numbers, are plausibly timeless, if they exist at all, and so, properly speaking, can be neither created nor conserved in being by God, since these are both temporal activities. So late creation does not even come into view for them. At most, they could be said to be sustained (tenselessly) by God (see Copan and Craig, Creation out of Nothing, 164). On the other hand, if we are talking about temporal abstract objects, then some of them, like the Equator or the centre of mass of the solar system, could either be brought into being immediately by God when the material stuff is appropriately arranged or else be late- created along the lines of models (ii), (iii), or (iv). Similarly, the same models could account for the late creation of abstract objects which are the products of free agents, like literary and musical compositions. Unfortunately, some temporal abstract objects, like properties, would exist from eternity past and so would elude being created. At most, they are conserved in being by God. Thus, the Platonist is stuck with an infinitude of uncreated objects, both temporal and atemporal.

   
   
   

2. Although present-tense verbs appear in 1 Cor. 8: 6, 11: 12, Rom. 11: 36, these seem to look back to God’s initial creation via the Logos. Passages like Col. 1: 17b; Heb. 1: 3b might be more plausibly construed in terms of God’s conservation of the world in being. For more on the biblical witness to God’s initial act of creating everything, see Copan and Craig, Creation out of Nothing, chs 1–2.

   
   
   

3. Leftow, God and Necessity, 412–13.

   
   
   

4. Thomas V. Morris, ‘Metaphysical Dependence, Independence, and Perfection’, in Scott MacDonald (ed.), Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 287.

   
   
   

5. In Greek, ἀγένητος/γενητός and ἀγέννητος/γεννητός.

   
   
   

6. George L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1964), p. xx.

   
   
   

7. Ibid., 5.

   
   
   

8. Harry A. Wolfson, ‘Plato’s Pre-existent Matter in Patristic Philosophy’, in Luitpold Wallach (ed.), The Classical Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 414.

   
   
   

9. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Origen regards Christ, insofar as he is God’s Wisdom, as the beginning or source of all things, including their forms:

   
   
   

   For Christ is, in a manner, the demiurge, to whom the Father says, ‘Let there be light,’ and ‘Let there be a firmament.’ But Christ is demiurge as a beginning (archē), inasmuch as he is Wisdom. It is in virtue of his being Wisdom that he is called archē.…Consider, however, if we are at liberty to take this meaning of archē for our text: ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ so as to obtain the meaning that all things came into being according to Wisdom and according to the models of the system which are present in his thoughts. For I consider that as a house or a ship is built and fashioned in accordance with the sketches of the builder or designer, the house or the ship having their beginning (archē) in the sketches and reckonings in his mind, so all things came into being in accordance with the designs of what was to be, clearly laid down by God in Wisdom. And we should add that having created, so to speak, ensouled Wisdom, he left her to hand over, from the types which were in her, to things existing and to matter, the actual emergence of them, their moulding and their forms. But I consider, if it be permitted to say this, that the beginning (archē) of real existence was the Son of God, saying: ‘I am the beginning and the end, the Α and Ω, the first and the last’ (1.22).

10. Sections 3–5 of ch. 4, which contain this passage, are not included in the old edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers edited by Roberts and Donaldson in 1885, but are included, on the basis of the reconstructed text by Koetschau, in Butterworth’s more recent translation (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973).

    
    
    

11. Patristics scholar Mark Edwards informs me that On Free Will is not universally assigned to Methodius. Some ascribe it to Origen, some to an otherwise unknown Maximus.

    
    
    

12. For a discussion of texts taken from pseudo-Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, i. Faith, Trinity, and Incarnation, 3rd edn rev. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), ch. 13: ‘The Logos and the Platonic Ideas’. According to Wolfson, every Church Father who addressed the issue rejected the view that the ideas were self-subsisting entities, but instead located the intelligible world in the Logos and, hence, in the mind of God.

    
    
    

13. Similarly, Athenagoras declares that ‘our doctrine acknowledges one God, the Maker of this universe, who is Himself uncreated…but has made all things by the Logos which is from Him’ (Plea for the Christians 4). The patterns after which all created things are made (8) are to be found in the Logos, who is the mind of the Father: ‘The Son of God is the Logos of the Father, in idea and in operation; for after the pattern of him and by him were all things made, the Father and the Son being one. And the Son being in the Father and the Father in the Son…, the understanding and reason of the Father is the Son of God’ (10; cf. Theophilus, To Autolycus 2.22; Eusebius, Demonstratio evangelica 4.13).

    
    
    

14. Certain Marcionite advocates of metaphysical dualism were the exception that proved the rule.

    
    
    

15. A point made by Leftow, God and Necessity, 22.

(45) Ibid., 22.

(46) Ibid., 234.

(47) Ibid., 235. Leftow offers a second argument as well for this conclusion. See also Leftow, ‘Is God an Abstract Object?’, Noûs, 24/4 (1990): 581–98, where he presents a bootstrapping objection against God’s creating His own nature, which, barring divine simplicity, leaves God dependent upon His nature for His existence.