But, inasmuch as it is impossible to demonstrate without the citation of names that we are not alone in confining the notion of God to unity, I have ventured on an enumeration of opinions. Plato, then, says, “To find out the Maker and Father of this universe is difficult; and, when found, it is impossible to declare Him to all,” conceiving of one uncreated and eternal God. And if he recognises others as well, such as the sun, moon, and stars, yet he recognises them as created: “gods, offspring of gods, of whom I am the Maker, and the Father of works which are indissoluble apart from my will; but whatever is compounded can be dissolved.” If, therefore, Plato is not an atheist for conceiving of one uncreated God, the Framer of the universe, neither are we atheists who acknowledge and firmly hold that He is God who has framed all things by the Logos, and holds them in being by His Spirit.[95]
It is transparent that Athenagoras believed that his views of God as the uncreated creator were the same as Plato’s. He states that, just as Plato believed that one God framed the universe, so Christians also believe that God framed all things through the Logos or Word of God. He expressly states that Plato makes the same distinction between creator and created that Christians do. Yet it is clear that Plato believed that the universe had been created by organizing a preexisting material substrate. Thus, Copan and Craig have failed to read Athenagoras within the context of his own statements about the creator/creature dichotomy and have imposed their own theological agenda on him. Athenagoras is very clear that when he refers to “created things” he means those things that have forms or “patterns”: “for created things are like their patterns; but the uncreated are unlike, being neither produced from any one, nor formed after the pattern of any one.”
It must be recognized that Athenagoras’s doctrine is thoroughly Platonic, notwithstanding the fact that he seeks to defend Christian doctrine. He posits a vast chasm between the created and the creator such that an intermediary is necessary for God to have contact with the world. He presents a thoroughly Middle Platonic view of God. His view of the Logos, in particular, is derived from Stoicism and Platonism. The Logos is the energizing instrument of God through whom the underlying substrate of matter is given form from the Ideas of God:
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But if, in your surpassing intelligence, it occurs to you to inquire what is meant by the Son, I will state briefly that He is the first product of the Father, not as having been brought into existence (for from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind νοῦς], had the Logos in Himself, being from eternity instinct with Logos λογικός]); but inasmuch as He came forth to be the idea and energizing power of all material things, which lay like a nature without attributes, and an inactive earth, the grosser particles being mixed up with the lighter.[96]
Hermogenes.
The writings of Tertullian tell of Hermogenes, another Christian philosopher writing around the end of the second century who believed in creation ex materia. Hermogenes wrote after Tatian and Theophilus had formulated the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. By this time, all parties discussing the issue were working from Middle Platonic assumptions about God and matter. Tertullian tells us that Hermogenes argued for the existence of eternal matter based on the Middle Platonic assumption that matter is evil and therefore cannot be created by a good God:
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But we find evil things made by him, although not by choice or will. Because if they were made by his choice or will, he would have made something inconsistent or unworthy of himself. What he does not make by his choice, must be understood to be made by the fault of another thing: from matter without doubt.[97]
Clement of Alexandria.
Finally, Clement of Alexandria, writing about AD 220, also adopted the view that matter is eternal and that God created by organizing a chaotic substratum. Indeed, Clement used the phrase made out of nothing three times in the Stromata, but each time he used the technical term ἐκ μὴ ὄντος, which shows that he was discussing creation from relative nonbeing rather than creatio ex nihilo.[98] Clement clearly favored creation ex materia in a poem:
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O King . . .
Maker of all, who heaven and heaven's adornment
By the Divine Word alone didst make;
. . . according to a well-ordered plan;
Out of a confused heap who didst create
This ordered sphere, and from the shapeless mass
Of matter didst the universe adorn.[99]
These texts are significant because they show that creation out of matter was still the accepted view. Further, as Young indicates, these texts show that creatio ex nihilo was not an inheritance from either the Jewish or the earliest Christian tradition during the apostolic period. Young’s reasons for rejecting the assumption of a Jewish origin for the doctrine include:
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(i) the sparsity of reference to the doctrine in Jewish texts, and indeed in the earliest Christian material, and the problem of interpreting those references that do exist . . . ;
(ii) the contrary evidence of the Wisdom of Solomon and the works of Philo, and in early Christianity, of Justin, Athenagoras, Hermogenes and Clement of Alexandria. All these authors seem quite happy to adopt without question the Platonic view of an active and passive element, namely God plus matter. The fact that Philo can even so speak of things being created ex ouk ontōn shows that the term could be understood as consistent with the notion of pre-existent matter which he takes for granted elsewhere. Middle Platonism was married with Jewish tradition without any sense of tension;
