(Ir)religiosity

This is part three in an ongoing series on systematic (de)constructive theology. See part one for a longer introduction and please keep in mind that the following is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. In other words, it is truly theology not a dogmatics. I look forward to the dialogue.

In the beginning God began creating not out of nothing but out of something, ordering the already present chaos, and sparking a process of creativity that continues to the present and into the future, a process in which all of creation is participating. God’s providence, far from being tainted with power and intervention is a statement about present reality, a statement that rings from the powerless cry of Jesus on the cross into the future against suffering, injustice and oppression.

In keeping with our quasi-panentheistic notion of God with a certain postmodern flavoring, it should come as no surprise that creation and providence will be treated and reified in stark contrast to more modern and traditional theologies.  To being with, we should note that any concept of God which makes its home outside of Western metaphysics, understanding God as that signification, that event which is wholly otherwise than being will surely be incompatible with the long-standing doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.  In this first place, one can argue, quite convincingly in fact, that the doctrine is itself unbiblical.  As John Caputo¹ and Catherine Keller² have observed Genesis does not state that God created the cosmos from nothing, it simply states that “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1).³ To but it bluntly, ‘in the beginning’ “things had already begun,” in some sense, and God simply brought things to life, indeed “[brought] being to life.”⁴ According to this creation narrative, God’s action is more like ordering some already existing chaos than it is creating matter from nothing.  On this reading “creation is not a movement from non-being to being…but from being to beyond being”⁵ in which God, Elohim in the Hebrew text, far from an arrogant display of power and omnipotence simply brings order to that which was already there, bringing life to the being that is already present.  Odds are the Hebrew writers who penned this beautiful mythopoetic narrative had no problems with this messy, risky view of creation.  The problem, as Caputo points out, is when Greek metaphysics re-appropriated the story:

Metaphysical theology has turned this Hebrew narrative into the tale of a pure, simple, clean act of power carried out on high by a timeless and supersensible being, a very Hellenic story that also goes along with a top-down social structure of imperial power flowing down from on high.  There is order and majesty here no doubt, but the story is, upon closer reading, “must messier,” as Keller says, more complicated—not creatio ex nihilo but “creatio ex profundis,” not a single clean power acting ex nihilo, but a concert of forces, one active and formative and the other more open-ended, free-floating, fluid, and unformed.  A poetics of creation from primal, untamed, unwieldy, water elements, as wily as the wind and as slippery as water, elements that tend to resist fixed order.⁶

Fixed order is inherent in creatio ex nihilo.  Indeed, one of the main reasons the doctrine is necessary within a metaphysical theology is to differentiate between God qua substance and creation qua substance, to distinguish between Creator and creation.  But as we have already seen, God is not a substance among others or a kind among others — God is that which is beyond both substance and kind.⁷ This so-called divide between God and creation becomes much more porous in a panentheistic view wherein creation is not seen as that which is separate or apart from God but rather that which is in God.  Recognizing the limitations of anthropomorphic analogies (and all analogies really), we might say that the world is God’s body, that God is always already incarnate in the world.  This is not, to be sure, simple reductionistic pantheism, which mundanely holds the creation is God and God is creation.  Creation is more than the sum of its parts.  This more, this beyond is what we might call God; contra Aristotle, God is not the Unmoved Mover, but the most-moved mover, as everything is in God.  As Moltmann rightly notes, “everything that is, and lives, manifests the presence of [the] divine wellspring” as “everything exists, lives, and moves in others, in one another, with one another, for one another in the cosmic interrelations of the divine spirit.”⁸ As this quote suggests, another problem with creatio ex nihilo is its lack of a Trinitarian focus, relegating the act of creation to the first person of the Trinity as some sort of divine monarch, but through our postmodern panentheistic optic we can affirm, along with Catherine Keller, a much more dynamic process of creation that “breaks the Trinity out of its doctrinal self-enclosure in the metaphysics of substance.”⁹  Here the inherent interrelatedness of God Godself is inscribed into creation itself “signify[ing] not only the immanent Trinitarian relations, but also an economic interdependence of creator and creation, and as such the interrelation of all creatures.”¹⁰  Moreover, creation on this account is not so much an instantaneous act of power as in creatio ex nihilo, but an ongoing, ever-unfolding act of creativity guided by the Spirit and in which creation and creatures participate.  Such a view is not only compatible with modern physics and evolutionary biology but with scripture itself as some translations of Genesis 1:1 render the verb not in the past tense (created) but in a progressive manner (began creating/began to create) which suggests an ongoing and continuing act of creation which began sometime in the past, continues in the present and into the future.  Perhaps then a more faithful doctrine of creation might be creatio continua, which implies continued creative activity on the part of God the Triune God as well as creation itself into the future.

What, then, is to become of God’s alleged providence and sovereignty in our appropriation?  Having already dealt with the issue of God’s powerlessness as made incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ in an above section, let us rephrase the question:  how and in what way(s) does God act in the world?  Too often God’s sovereignty, and especially God’s providence, when cast in metaphysical terms and inscribed unto a Supreme, omnipotent, all-knowing, Mega-Being only really serve as a foil for Transcendental Meaning.  In other words, God is commonly said to be all powerful, guiding the course of events in history as some sort of quasi-interventionalist — a close cousin to deus ex machina, by the way, and not at all the God of kenotic pathos revealed in Jesus! — not because God actually is those things but because those attributes, when projected onto God qua Being provide persons with a sense of certainty about the order of the universe and the meaning of things, however small or mundane.  But as our discussion of above indicates, no such God exists.  That God, the God of modern onto-theology, the God who Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Feuerbach railed against is dead.  In the aftermath of that death we are left with the God of Jesus Christ, a God of the event and eschatological possibility that is present and suffering in and with all of creation as that which is otherwise than being.  This is exactly what Slavoj Žižek, in his Neo-Hegelian Lacanian register, refers to when he says that the “Big other,” the guarantor of Universal Meaning, does not exist.¹¹ There is no universal and totalizing Transcendental Signified¹² ensuring us that, in a horrible misuse of Romans 8:28, “it will all work out in the end” regardless of our actions, that God is in control whilst horrible evil and grotesque tragedies are being committed.  To be sure, this does not mean that meaning does not exist nor does it simply acquiesce to boring nihilism.  Caputo picks up where Žižek leaves off reiterating that,

The weak force of God is embodied in the broken body of the cross, which has thereby been broken loose from being and broken out on the open plane of the powerlessness of God.  The power of God is not pagan violence, brute power, or vulgar magic; it is the power of the powerlessness, the power of the call, the power of protest that rises up from innocent suffering and calls out against it, the power that says no to unjust suffering, and finally, the power to suffer-with (sym-pathos) innocent suffering, which is perhaps the central Christian symbol. […] God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not as deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time.  God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.¹³

More will be said about the ecclesiological implications of this in a later section.  For now it will suffice to say that the God of powerlessness, the God of the event who is revealed in the broken and tortured body of Jesus, far from precluding persons to solidarity as a Big other might, demands that the community called according to God’s name — that is, the community called ecclesia, the church — stand and indentify with the oppressed and the victims on the underside of worldly power.  Here meaning is created and assigned under the guidance and inspiration of the Spirit as the sacred text is performed in community.  Recalling Richard Kearney’s aforementioned neologism the God-Who-May-Be, God is palpably present when the community called church is realizing the eschatological possibility harbored by the name, rupturing predictable possibility and giving way to what Derrida calls the im/possible, which pushes mere possibility to its very limits and beyond.  God acts in the world when God’s people answer the call and respond to the event by following the way of the cross, standing alongside and identifying with the marginalized and powerless of the world.

God’s providence, then, is not to be equated with God’s controlling the future through brute power or intervention, as James Cone points out, “only oppressors can make such a claim.”¹⁴ Rather, providence is instead a tangible “statement about present reality—the reality of the liberation of the oppressed.”¹⁵ If the God revealed in Jesus is any indication, then the providence of God does not involve intervention or power at all, but rather the kenotic self-emptying of one for the sake of the other.  God in Jesus indentifies with all the victims, all the suffering, and all the oppressed as one of them.  God providential answer to the evils of the world, then, is the powerlessness of Jesus on the cross, unmasking the violence of the world, and protesting against all the atrocities of the ages.

1. Caputo, The Weakness of God, passim. [↩]
2. Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep:  A Theology of Becoming (New York, New York:  Routledge, 2003), passim. [↩]
3. All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. [↩]
4. Caputo, 58. [↩]
5. Ibid., 58-59. [↩]
6. Ibid., 59. [↩]
7. Kathryn Tanner, “God Beyond Kinds and Creation,” Essentials of Christian Theology, ed. William C. Placher (Louisville, Kentucky:  Westminster John Knox, 2003), 119ff. [↩]
8. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 1993), 9. [↩]
9. Keller, 232. [↩]
10. Ibid. [↩]
11. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf:  The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), passim and The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts:  MIT Press, 2006), passim. [↩]
12. Or as Morpheus put it in The Matrix (1999) to Neo: “Do not try to bend the spoon — that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.”  Any attempt to appeal to or manipulate the Big other is impossible because the Big other does not exist. [↩]
13. Caputo, 43-44. [↩]
14. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (New York, New York:  Orbis Books, 1990), 80. [↩]
15. Ibid., 81. [↩]