The Face of the Deep : A Theology of Becoming

This is a groundbreaking, highly original work of postmodern feminist theology from one of the most important authors in the field. The Face of the Deep deconstructs the Christian doctrine of creation which claims that a transcendent Lord unilaterally created the universe out of nothing. Catherine Keller's impassioned, graceful meditation develops an alternative representation of the cosmic creative process, drawing upon Hebrew myths of creation, from chaos, and engaging with the political and the mystical, the literary and the scientific, the sexual and the racial.As a landmark work of immense significance for Jewish and Christian theology, gender studies, literature, philosophy and ecology, The Face of the Deep takes our originary story to a new horizon, rewriting the starting point for Western spiritual discourse. Preliminaries......Page 1 CONTENTS......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 12 Pre face......Page 16 1 Mystery of the missing chaos......Page 24 2 Floods of truth sex love and loathing of the deep......Page 46 3 Tears of Achamoth the fathers ex nihilo......Page 64 4 Mother most dear Augustine’s dark secrets......Page 86 5 Sterile waters Barth’s nothingness that is......Page 105 6 Sea of heteroglossia return of the biblical chaos......Page 124 7 Recesses of the deep Job’s comi cosmic epiphany......Page 145 8 Leviathanic revelations Melville’s hermenautical journey......Page 162 9 Bottomless surface when beginning bereshit......Page 178 10 The pluri singularity of creation created God bara elohim......Page 193 11 Strange attractions formless and void tohu vabohu......Page 204 12 Docta ignorantia darkness on the face pne choshekh......Page 221 13 Ocean of divinity deep tehom......Page 234 14 Pneumatic foam spirit vibrating ruach elohim merahephet......Page 250 Notes......Page 260 Index......Page 320 "Face of the Deep is the full theology of creation from the primal chaos. It proposes a creation ex profundis - creation out of the watery depths - both as an alternative to the orthodox power-discourse of creation from nothingness, and as a figure of the bottomless process of becoming." "From within a dangerous and crowded postmodernity, Catherine Keller's impassioned, graceful meditation opens up an ultimately hopeful space within the magnetic depths of cosmic origin. As a landmark work of immense significance for Jewish and Christian theology, gender studies, literature, philosophy and ecology, Face of the Deep stretches our originary story to profound new horizons, rewriting the starting point for western spiritual discourse." Keller's tehomic theology (from the Hebrew tehom, which suggests the depth of the ocean) draws from Whitehead, Joyce, and Melville. She retrieves the suppressed force of primordial chaos in the hope of putting it to a feminist end without jettisoning the structure of Christian theology The Face of the Deep is more than a provocative challenge to the abstract orthodoxies. It seeks to relate the swirling maternal floods of the biblical chaos to the complex interdependencies of our embodied, material beings. Catherine Keller. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 239-298) And Index.