Creation and the God of Abraham

This collection explores the theological implications of creation doctrine across the Abrahamic traditions, examining how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers have understood the relationship between God and the created order. Burrell brings together leading scholars to investigate both historical developments and contemporary philosophical questions surrounding creation ex nihilo and its alternatives.

The volume's central contribution lies in demonstrating how creation theology functions as more than a cosmological claim about origins. Contributors show how the doctrine shapes understandings of divine action, human freedom, providence, and the very nature of God's relationship to temporal reality. The work engages seriously with medieval philosophical theology, particularly the synthesis attempts of Maimonides, Aquinas, and Ibn Sina, while addressing modern challenges from process theology and scientific cosmology.

Several chapters examine the cosmological argument's varied formulations across traditions, revealing both convergences and distinctive emphases. Islamic contributions explore the kalam tradition's sophisticated arguments for temporal creation, while Jewish scholars investigate rabbinic and kabbalistic alternatives to simple ex nihilo accounts. Christian theologians in the volume grapple with how Trinitarian doctrine affects creation theology, particularly regarding the logos doctrine and divine exemplarity.

The prophecy argument receives sustained attention through analyses of how revelation and creation interrelate. Contributors explore whether prophetic discourse about creation constitutes a separate epistemic source from philosophical reasoning, or whether the two must be integrated. This question proves particularly acute in examining scriptural creation narratives and their hermeneutical challenges.

Burrell's editorial framework emphasizes dialogue without collapsing real differences. The volume reveals how each tradition's creation theology emerges from distinct scriptural sources and philosophical inheritances, yet addresses shared questions about contingency, divine freedom, and the problem of evil. Contemporary engagements with scientific cosmology appear throughout, though contributors generally resist simple harmonization schemes.

The work's significance extends beyond comparative theology to fundamental metaphysics. By examining creation doctrine across traditions, the volume illuminates core issues about necessity and contingency, the nature of divine causality, and the metaphysical status of the temporal order. These discussions bear directly on whether cosmological arguments succeed and how revelatory claims about creation should be evaluated. The collection thus provides essential resources for understanding how classical theism's core commitments developed and how they might be defended or revised in contemporary philosophical theology.