A great swath of Christendom has, from as early as Augustinus Hipponensis, held that God created the universe ex nihilo, "from/ out of nothing." One of the motivations behind this has been to refute or avoid the ex materia conclusion, which would presuppose that God had to have pre-existent matter out of which to fashion the universe as we now know it.
Another motivation is to avoid a blurring of the distinction between God and his creation which creatio ex deo may suggest, based on certain philosophical starting-points. There are, however, portions of the Bible (such as Colossians 1.16) which explicitly say that the cosmos was made "in God" and whose motion takes place as though a journey "through God" (see Acts 17.28).
It is in this sense that I ask how, in Latin, to express those prepositional relationships between God and the universe. In other words, which of the following would be the correct way to say, in formulations similar to creatio ex nihilo & creatio ex deo:
- "creation [with]in God" or "creation in[side] God"
- "creation through God"
Would they be, respectively:
- creatio intra deo or creatio introrsum deo?
- creatio per deo or creatio per deum,
or perhaps, rather,
creatio trans deo or creation trans deum?
(The above are the results of my GoogleTranslations of the afore-listed expressions but my grammar is nowhere good enough for me to tell if any of these is correct and if so by how much.)