Researched by the Ignaria Editorial Team · Updated 2026-06-10
Genesis 1:1–2 sits at the center of a long-running debate. Verse 1 declares that God created the heavens and the earth; verse 2 describes the earth as formless and void, with darkness over the deep. Modern readers often ask whether God is shaping material that was already there. Contemporary biblical study often reads Genesis as God bringing order to primordial chaos rather than calling the universe into being from absolute nothing. The Christian tradition, from the second century through the Reformation, answered differently: God created from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). But the tradition's actual position is a third reading, easy to miss — God originated all substance, and the formless deep of verse 2 is the first stage of that creative act, not chaos that pre-existed God.
Three positions, not two, frame the dispute.
Three Ways to Read Genesis 1:1–2
The question is usually posed as a binary. Three distinct readings are in play.
Creatio ex nihilo — God brought into existence everything that is not God, including the substance of the material world. Nothing coeternal with the Creator stands alongside him.
Creatio ex materia — Eternal or pre-existent matter existed independently of God. Creation means imposing form on a substrate God did not originate. Tertullian attacked this view in Hermogenes and the materialist heretics.
Created from nothing, then ordered — The position most patristic and Reformation readers actually held. God created from nothing, but the opening moment of that creation included unformed material — "earth invisible and without form" — which God then shaped across the days that follow. On this reading, something was "already there" in verse 2, but only because God had just put it there.
Many contemporary interpreters who deny that Genesis teaches ex nihilo treat the third element as evidence for the second. The tradition typically treated it as part of the first.
Why Many Readers Today See Shaping, Not Originating
The case for a shaping reading begins with Genesis 1:2. Before God speaks light into being, the earth is already "without form, and void," and darkness covers the deep (tehom — the primordial waters). Contemporary biblical study often compares this language to ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, where a deity brings order to primordial waters rather than originating matter from nothing. On this reading, Genesis describes God mastering inert or chaotic material — imposing form and direction — rather than calling the universe into being from absolute nothing. Many modern interpreters also note that the text does not explicitly state where matter came from; the author's concern appears to be God's sovereignty over the cosmos, not a technical account of whether substance itself had a prior existence.
A further strand in current scholarship holds that creatio ex nihilo is a later theological development — articulated clearly in the second and third centuries as Jewish and Christian thinkers engaged Greek philosophy and rival cosmologies — rather than the plain sense of Genesis 1 on its own terms. Some modern translations reinforce the shaping reading: renderings of verse 1 as "when God began to create" treat it as a setting for the action in verse 2, not an independent declaration of absolute origin.
This contemporary reading is widespread in academic and popular biblical study. It does not settle what the church fathers and Reformers later concluded — but it explains why the question remains live. The patristic and Reformation sources below read the same verses with a different conclusion.
What the Church Fathers Taught Against Eternal Matter
From the second century onward, Christian writers forged the doctrine of creation from nothing in direct opposition to teachers who held that matter was eternal and independent of God. The debate was theological, not merely grammatical.
Tertullian records Hermogenes' argument: the formless earth of Genesis 1:2 and the ordered earth we inhabit are different things — one received form from God, but the substrate was a separate, eternal entity. Tertullian rejects this. Scripture does not portray God as "merely appearing and approaching Matter." The prophets describe making, not rearranging what was always there.
Justin Martyr draws the contrast with human craft: men make only from matter already existing; God "called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence." Augustine prays in the Confessions that God "didst in the Beginning... create something, and that out of nothing" — there was nothing besides God from which heaven and earth could be made.
The stakes were high. If matter is eternal and independent, God is not the sole origin of reality. Evil can be lodged in material existence itself — a door Gnostic and dualist systems walked through. Creation becomes God's limited act of ordering, not the sovereign calling-forth of being. Against these systems, the fathers insisted that the God of Israel made all things, visible and invisible, and that nothing stood alongside him from eternity.
The Tradition's Synthesis: Created from Nothing, Then Ordered
Affirming ex nihilo did not require denying that Genesis 1:2 describes something unformed. The tradition's synthesis holds both truths together.
Augustine reads "the earth invisible and without form" as a primitive formless state from which God brought ordered creation — both the formed heaven and the formless earth were created "in the Beginning," before the narrative days unfold. Luther agrees: God created the heavens and the earth "out of nothing," but created them "in a rude shapeless mass, not formed and beautified as they now are." On the first day God made the mass of earth and water "like undeveloped seed," then shed light upon it. Matthew Henry states the balance plainly: "God created it, that is, made it out of nothing" — and "a chaos was the first matter." Hugh of St. Victor coordinates the picture further: at the first beginning of time, the matter of visible things and the essence of angelic nature began simultaneously — both in measure formed and in measure without form.
Medieval and Reformed teachers extended the same logic. Aquinas appealed to Moses's opening words to show that all bodies were created immediately by God. Charles Hodge read Genesis 1:1 as teaching that "the heavens and the earth include all things out of God" — leaving no room for an eternal material principle alongside the Creator.
The confusion modern readers feel comes from collapsing two different questions.
Was there unformed material in Genesis 1:2? The tradition often said yes.
Did that material exist independently of God, before God acted? The tradition said no.
For Augustine, Luther, Henry, and the broader credal consensus, to ask whether God shaped what was already there is the wrong question — unless "already there" means already there by God's own prior creative act. Formless matter is not eternal chaos. It is the opening frame of a world God originated and then ordered.
What the primary sources show
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." — The two verses at the center of the dispute: an opening declaration of divine creation, followed immediately by a formless, dark, watery state awaiting God's ordering word.
"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." — Language the tradition consistently read as supporting creation from no visible pre-existing material.
"But it is not thus that the prophets and the apostles have told us that the world was made by God merely appearing and approaching Matter." — Tertullian's rejection of creation as divine encounter with eternal pre-existent matter: Scripture describes making, not rearranging.
"While men, indeed, cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point pre-eminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence." — The contrast between human making and divine creation.
"Thou... didst in the Beginning... create something, and that out of nothing." — Augustine's affirmation that there was nothing besides God from which heaven and earth could be made.
"The earth invisible and without form" may be understood as formless first matter from which visible things "were made and arranged during those 'days'" — Augustine holds ex nihilo and a formless initial state together: the unformed earth is part of God's creative work, not pre-existent chaos.
"Therefore, in order to show that all bodies were created immediately by God, Moses said: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth.'" — Aquinas reads Genesis 1:1 as establishing that God alone originates material existence.
"When the world began it so began that the heavens and the earth were created by God out of nothing; but created in a rude shapeless mass, not formed and beautified as they now are." — Luther's synthesis: absolute beginning, ex nihilo, and an unformed first state awaiting divine ordering.
"God created it, that is, made it out of nothing." / "A chaos was the first matter." — Henry states both sides of the tradition's synthesis in two sentences: creation from nothing, with chaos as the first product of that act.
"In the first beginning of time... there also began simultaneously the matter of all visible things, and at exactly the same moment the essence of the invisible things in the angelic nature: both in a measure in form, and both in a measure without form." — Formlessness as an initial condition within creation, not a pre-creation rival to God.
"The Scriptural doctrine on this subject is expressed in the first words of the Bible: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' The heavens and the earth include all things out of God." — Hodge reads the merism of heaven and earth as encompassing the entire created order, excluding any eternal material principle alongside God.