Jürgen Moltmann’s Trinitarian Theology and Creatio Ex Nihilo

by Thomas Jay Oord

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is a best-selling and award-winning author, having written or edited more than twenty-five books. A twelve-time Faculty Award-winning professor, Oord teaches at institutions around the globe, and is the director of the Center for Open and Relational Theology. To find out more about him or view more of his works, visit his website or the Center for Open and Relational Theology.

Delivered at the Wesleyan Theological Society Conference, March, 2000.


SUMMARY

This essay addresses the implications of creatio ex nihilo for how Jürgen Moltmann conceives Trinitarian relations and divine love in Moltmann’s classic work The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God.  In the introductory segment, I identify principal Trinitarian issues pertaining to love as an element of the divine essence.  In the second segment, I consider implications creatio ex nihilo has for equating the essential and economic Trinities.  My conclusion is that Moltmann cannot coherently equate the immanent and economic Trinities, because he espouses the classic Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.


Love and Trinitarian Relations

Theologians in traditions alleging that love provides the central or foremost divine attribute encounter an apparent conundrum. The puzzlement is this: Given that love requires relations, how can one claim that love is the central, or even an essential, attribute of deity if, as the dominant Christian tradition has insisted since Irenaeus,[1] the world was created ex nihilo? To say it another way, if, before the world’s creation, God was alone, i.e., unrelated, how can love constitute the divine essence (haecceity)? If God’s relations with the world are voluntary rather than necessary, how can we say, “God is love” and mean, “love is essential to divinity?” By “essential,” I mean necessarily so; i.e., love is an essential property of God if and only if there are no possible circumstances in which God exists and lacks love.

Before going further, let me be specific about what I mean by “creatio ex nihilo.” I understand this ancient doctrine to mean that God voluntarily created the universe out of absolute nothingness; I am not referring to creation out of chaos, creation out of Godself, or creation from something else. One reason some Christians affirm creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine’s implication that nothing exists that essentially frustrates divine omnipotence. Another reason some affirm the doctrine is that creatio ex nihilo implies that God exists essentially independent from the created order.[2]

Jürgen Moltmann addresses the conundrum of how love can be essential to deity and yet the world be created ex nihilo in The Trinity and the Kingdom. Moltmann begins by expressing well the argument that God must be essentially related if love can be convincingly deemed an element of the divine essence. He acknowledges, “love cannot be consummated by a solitary subject. An individuality cannot communicate itself: individuality is ineffable, unutterable.”[3] This implies, says Moltmann, “if God is love, then he neither will, nor can, be without the one who is his beloved.”[4] Furthermore, because love relations imply some degree of need, God cannot be, in all ways, self-sufficient: “If God is love, then he does not merely emanate, flow out of himself; he also expects and needs love.”[5] Using “suffering” in its classical sense, which means to be affected by another, Moltmann argues that, “if God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of love.”[6]

Moltmann’s observations regarding the necessity of relations for divine love correspond with what humans experience as the structures required for loving. Because of this correspondence, a crucial base is secured for speaking analogously about divine love and nondivine love. This also means that, because analogies between creatures and divinity can be drawn, creaturely emulation of the divine is conceivable.

Subsequent to arguing that relations are necessary for expressions of divine love, Moltmann offers his solution to the question of how one can claim that love is an essential attribute of deity despite God’s not having always been related to some world or another. His solution is his claim that relations for divine love have always been present in Godself. In Trinity, says Moltmann, God “is at once the lover, the beloved, and the love itself.”[7] This intraTrinitarian love is illustrated by the fact that, “in eternity and out of the very necessity of his being, the Father loves the only begotten Son. . . . In eternity and out of the very necessity of his being, the Son responds to the Father’s love through his obedience and his surrender to the Father.”[8] Three notions together – divine persons, divine relations, and change in divine relations -- provide the basis for conceiving of intraTrinitarian love.[9] Because love has everlastingly been expressed through intraTrinitarian relations, then, love can be considered an essential attribute of God.[10] Christian philosophers and theologians in traditions that insist upon the primacy of love for divinity have been attracted to Moltmann’s Trinitarian hypothesis.

Implications of Creatio Ex Nihilo for Trinitarian Theology

An option other than Moltmann’s intraTrinitarian one is available to theists who want to affirm that love is essential to God because God has always been related to others. This option entails the claim that God has always been related to some realm of nondivine actualities or another, and God has always loved this realm. Charles Hartshorne and some process theists call this option “panentheism.”[11] Hartshorne’s doctrine of panentheism entails the claim that God is essentially related to the finite order, but God does not require this particular finite order, i.e., this particular order is not everlasting. God is distinct from, and not fully governed by, finite relations, but God has always been related to a world. To say it another way, panentheism affirms both God’s essential immanence and essential transcendence, because divine internal and external relations with creation are essential. God is essentially immanent in the world, because God is necessarily influenced by all; God is essentially transcendent, because God’s decisions about how to react to the world are not fully determined by the world. These divine reactions are felt by the world as proactions as God directly influences the world in a moment-by-moment open adventure in relationship.

The panentheist doctrine, however, is not widely accepted by contemporary Trinitarian theologians like Jürgen Moltmann. For one thing, panentheism contradicts the time-honored Church doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which is undoubtedly one reason panentheism is often not taken seriously by theologians who wish to remain “orthodox.” But should Christians prefer creatio ex nihilo to panentheism if the former undermines a coherent Christian notion of the Trinity? I believe that few have taken this question seriously, and, therefore, I address this question in the remainder of this essay.

Creatio ex nihilo’s ramifications for Trinitarian theology are profound. To put the present concern bluntly, creatio ex nihilo shatters Rahner’s rule. This rule, that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and vice versa,” as Karl Rahner puts it, does not apply if God created the universe ex nihilo.[12] It does not apply because, if there were a time when nothing existed external to God, nothing would have existed for God to economize. If the members of the Trinity subsist in sinless perfection, divine activity to secure salvation prior to the creation of the world is superfluous. The economic Trinity is ultimately dispensable.

This conclusion is profoundly illustrated in its effects upon Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s basic hypothesis in God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. How can God essentially be for us, if, at one time, there did not exist an “us” for whom to be? Or, to use her more technical language, how can oikonomia essentially be identified with theologia -- such that the economy of salvation essentially expresses the life and work of God -- if there was a time in which no one existed to be saved? If creatio ex nihilo is affirmed, “God for us” is merely accidental, not essential, to what it means to be God. Opera trinitatis ad intra is necessary to divinity; opera trinitatis ad extra is unnecessary. Such a conclusion effectively dulls LaCugna’s ostensibly razor-sharp Trinitarian thesis.[13]

How does Moltmann handle the problem one faces when affirming both creatio ex nihilo and the essential identification of the immanent and economic Trinities? At least three options avail themselves. Moltmann could

(A) conclude that God’s relations with the world are accidental while Trinitarian relations are essential,

(B) conclude that God’s relations with the world are essential and that Trinitarian relations are essential,

or (C) conclude that God’s relations to the world are accidental and that Trinitarian relations are accidental.

The first option (A) shatters Rahner’s rule, thereby undermining the attempt to identify essentially the economic and immanent Trinities. The second option (B) leaves Rahner’s rule intact, but denies the ancient Church doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. This option supports the pan-en-theist doctrine of the divine-world relation, because it entails the hypothesis that God necessarily relates to some realm of nondivine actualities or another. The third option (C) supports creatio ex nihilo, but it inevitably denies both Rahner’s rule and the notion that the immanent Trinity is essential to divinity.

Moltmann chooses the first option (A): the hypothesis that God’s relations with the world are accidental while Trinitarian relations are essential. IntraTrinitarian love is necessary love; God’s love for the created order, however, is unnecessary for divinity and, therefore, voluntary. There could have been circumstances in which God existed and yet God did not love a created order.

The first option (A) is illustrated when Moltmann speaks of divine creative and responsive love: “God is love. That means he is engendering and creative love. . . . That [also] means he is responsive love, both in essence and freely.”[14] Moltmann’s dominant hypothesis is that the theopathic element of divine love is essential only in eternal Trinitarian relations; theopathy is accidental when speaking of God’s relations with the world. This does not imply that God loves the world any less genuinely or completely; the issue is not one of degree or purity. What it indicates, however, is the different modes of these loving relations. God’s love is necessarily responsive in Trinitarian relations, but divine love is merely accidental in response to nondivines – because the world itself is merely accidental.

Having seen that Moltmann chooses an option that entails accidental divine love for the world, it would seem to follow that his hypothesis also breaks Rahner’s rule, i.e., it fails to equate essentially the economic and immanent Trinities. Moltmann seems to recognize the implications his preferred option has for what can be said coherently about the essential Trinity. He also realizes that a doctrine of creation is required that can do justice to the essential relationship between the immanent and economic Trinities.[15]

Moltmann entertains several hypotheses in The Trinity and the Kingdom for conceiving the correlation between the creation of the world and the Trinity. Sometimes he speaks of God creating from chaos; other times of God creating from nothing. He even places these apparently contradictory notions alongside each other; he speaks of divine creating as “creation out of chaos and creatio ex nihilo.”[16] He claims that “creation [is] God’s act in Nothingness and . . . God’s order in chaos.”[17] However, the evidence from his statements about God’s love for the world being voluntary while the love between the Father and Son is necessary leads one to conclude that Moltmann ultimately affirms creatio ex nihilo, rather than creation from chaos.[18]

The creation hypothesis Moltmann proposes most vigorously, however, is based soundly upon intraTrinitarian suppositions: “If we proceed from the inner-trinitarian relationships of the Persons in the Trinity, then it becomes clear that the Father creates the one who is his Other by virtue of his love for the Son.”[19] Moltmann notes that the letter to the Ephesians speaks of Christ as the foundation of creation from all eternity. He concludes, “from eternity God has desired not only himself but the world too, for he did not merely want to communicate himself to himself; he wanted to communicate himself to the one who is other than himself as well.”[20] Because of this desire to communicate to nondivine individuals, it was “through the eternal Son/Logos [that] the Father creates the world.”[21]

The claim that the Father creates the world “through the eternal Son/Logos” provides at least two possible solutions to the dilemma at the base of questions pertaining to how, as Rahner would say, “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and vice versa.” One solution is that God has eternally economized the world through the Son, because the world was created out of God’s own “substance.” This would imply, however, that the world essentially is God and that there has always been something in the Son in need of economizing. Although sometimes Moltmann speaks of “the creation of the world out of God”[22] and claims, “God acts on himself when he acts creatively,”[23] this alternative is not the one he embraces most vigorously. He denies that, because the Father creates the world out of the Son, the world is God; Moltmann deplores pantheistic theories that equate God with the world.[24]

Moltmann’s best and, as far as I know, novel attempt to overcome the problems arising when one affirms both a Trinitarian love theology and creatio ex nihilo is his claim that “the idea of the world is inherent in the nature of God himself from eternity.”[25] This means that “the idea of the world is already inherent in the Father’s love of the Son.”[26] Because God creates the world in his love for the Son and creates through the Son, the Son “is the divinely immanent archetype of the idea of the world.”[27] The solution to how God and the world are related, then, is to suppose that the idea of the world has been eternally present to deity in the Son.

Does this hypothesis, however, overcome the dilemmas generated for Trinitarian theologians who affirm creatio ex nihilo? I suggest that it does not. First, with regard to the economic Trinity, it is difficult to imagine how an idea can be “economized” or be graced with salvation. Actual subjects may be transformed, ideas may not. Indeed, Moltmann argues that there was a “time” in which theologia was not oikonomia when claiming that “‘creation in the beginning’ . . . means the history that precedes salvation history. . . . God’s history with his world therefore begins with creation.”[28] In short, this “idea theory” fails to provide a basis for equating the economic and immanent Trinities.

Second, with regard to God’s essential love for the world, it is difficult to image how an idea can either receive love or respond lovingly. Actual subjects may receive or respond in love, ideas may not. Ideas, being abstract and not actual, may be necessary for love to be expressed, but they can neither act or be acted upon.

Third, with regard to the creation of the world, it is difficult to imagine how an idea can be material for constructive activity. Although ideas are necessary for the work of creating, actualities serve as resource materials for construction; ideas, having no physicality, are not such materials. Ideas are not constructive materials; they are forms by which materials become congruent. At best, Moltmann’s hypothesis provides justification for speaking of accidental divine potentialities; but such potentialities fail to provide sufficient justification for speaking of God’s essential activity. Potentialities do not provide justification for essentially identifying the immanent and economic Trinities.

But what about panentheism? Can Moltmann retain his desire to equate the economic and essential Trinities were he to espouse a form of panentheism? Although I will not spell out the specific features of such a Trinitarian theology, I will suggest that the affirmation of panentheism would solve the problem that arises when identifying the Trinity as essentially economic as well as immanent. For the God who has always been related to some world or another may have always had reason for oikonomia. For such a God, both opera trinitatis ad intra and opera trinitatis ad extra would be essential; i.e., there would be no circumstances in which the Trinity exists and Trinity not be both immanent and economic. Furthermore, the love God has for Godself in Trinity and the love God has for the world would be essential, rather than accidental, to divinity. Trinitarian theologians of Moltmann’s ilk should consider the virtues of a panentheistic understanding of the God-world relationship in order to promote a coherent and adequate Trinitarian theology.

Conclusion

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo carries conceptual baggage for Christians wishing to maintain, as John Wesley did, that love is the “darling” divine attribute. Moltmann’s attempt to uphold the centrality of divine love by speaking of divine love as essential in Trinity, by equating the essential and economic Trinities, and by attempting alternative creation hypothesis is valiant but finally unconvincing. The sticking point, which prevents him from offering a coherent and adequate theological scheme, is his affirmation of creatio ex nihilo. Were Moltmann and other contemporary Trinitarian theologians to espouse panentheism, however, it would be possible for them to identify the immanent and economic Trinities as essential to divinity, while also affirming coherently that love is essential to God.

Notes

  1. Ironically, while it may be true that Church, largely influenced by Irenaeus, eventually adopted the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo partly to combat the Gnostic notion that the world was inherently evil, a Gnostic originally formulated the doctrine. The Gnostic Basilides is the originator of the doctrine. Basilides found that the doctrine fit well with Greek philosophy’s denial that a temporal God acts in history. Philo, Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, and John Scotus Erigena were among many early Christian theologians and philosophers who found no good reason to affirm the creation out of nothing hypothesis. For perhaps the definitive work on the origination and church adoption of creatio ex nihilo, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Thought, (trans. A. S. Worrall [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994]).

  2. I should not that, while both of these reasons are tied to explicit philosophical or theological concerns, neither enjoys explicit support in the Bible. However, both reasons (potential or actual sovereignty and essential divine independence) have profound implications for drawing genuine analogies between human and divine love and, therefore, for how we can comprehend that “God is love.” For a brief discussion of this, see my chapter entitled “A Process Wesleyan Theodicy: Freedom, Embodiment, and the Almighty God” in Thy Name and Thy Nature is Love: Wesleyan and Process Theologies in Dialogue (Nashville: Kingswood, forthcoming) chapter eight.

  3. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 57.

  4. Ibid., 58.

  5. Ibid., 99.

  6. Ibid., 23.

  7. Ibid., 57.

  8. Ibid., 58. See also, 106.

  9. Ibid., 174.

  10. I have chosen to ignore, in my text, the important debate regarding how it can be that love is exchanged between members of the Trinity and this not imply tri-theism. Lewis Ford states the problem well when responding to Clark H. Pinnock’s conception of the social Trinity:

    If there is a perfect harmony of will among the Persons, such that they cannot possibly conflict, then we may wonder whether there can be any genuine “other love.” At least there cannot be any I-Thou encounters between them, as Martin Buber conceived them, for in such encounters one (or both) parties are enriched by the values of the other. There can be no enrichment if both already share those values fully. In that case “other love” degenerates into self-love. On the other hand, if there is genuine “other-love” among the Trinitarian members, we may wonder whether this is not really tri-theism after all (Lewis Ford, “Evangelical Appraisals of Process Theism,” Christian Scholars Review 20:2 [December 1990]: 158).

    This criticism is also offered by Barry L. Whitney in his essay “Divine Immutability in Process Philosophy and Contemporary Thomism” (Horizons 7 [1980]: 67).

    Moltmann does not easily, if at all, escape the tri-theistic criticism. He says, for instance, that “the unity of the divine tri-unity lies in the union of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, not in their numerical unity. It lies in their fellowship, not in the identity of a single subject” (The Trinity and the Kingdom, 95; see also 157).

  11. 11 Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 499-514; Charles Hartshorne, “Whitehead’s Idea of God,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 2nd ed. (New York: Tudor, 1951), 549-50.

  12. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 22

  13. LaCugna is aware of many issues surrounding the affirmation of creatio ex nihilo and God’s economia. Her solution is to propose a doctrine of creatio ex amore, which is a solution I greatly appreciate, when considering a doctrine of creation. However, she does not provide a hypothesis for conceiving the “nuts and bolts” of her notion of creatio ex amore and appeals, instead, to mystery: “the reason for creation lies entirely in the unfathomable mystery of God” (LaCugna, God for Us, 355).

  14. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 59 (emphasis his).

  15. Ibid., 97-114.

  16. Ibid., 109, 110; see also 113.

  17. Ibid., 109.

  18. Jon D. Levenson has argued that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not present in the Old Testament. We must face the implication of the affirmation that God, as the creator of the world, confronts forces that oppose divine creation, he contends. To say that creation is directed against something should be taken as a denial of the venerable doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that is, if one defines “nothing” as “absolutely nothing.” The conception of “nothing” in the Old Testament, however, is usually identified with things like disorder, injustice, subjugation, disease, and death. “To them,” writes Levenson, “‘nothing’ was something -- something negative. . . . When order emerges where disorder had reigned unchallenged, when justice replaces oppression, when disease and death yield to vitality and longevity, this is indeed the creation of something out of nothing” (Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994; New York: Harper & Row, 1987], xix-xxi).

  19. Ibid., 112.

  20. Ibid., 108.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid., 111.

  23. Ibid., 110.

  24. Ibid., 113.

  25. Ibid., 106.

  26. Ibid., 108.

  27. Ibid., 112.

  28. Ibid., 100.