Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

by Catherine Keller

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.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Feminism, Christianity, Biblical Studies

328 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2002

About the author

Catherine Keller practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. As the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. She has all along mobilized, within and beyond Christian conversation, the transdisciplinary potential of feminist, philosophical and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her most recent books invite at once contemplative and social embodiments of our entangled difference: Cloud of the Impossible: *Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement* (2014), *Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology* (2017), and *Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public* (2018).

Since the start of the millennium she has served as executive director of the annual Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. These events have yielded 12 anthologies, mostly published by Fordham University Press; they include *Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and the New Materialisms* (coedited with Mary Jane Rubenstein); *Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation* (coedited with Laurel Schneider); *Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology* (coedited with Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Elías Ortega-Aponte); and *Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discourse.*

Twitter: @Prof_Keller

Reviews

[Kelli Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. By Catherine Keller. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013/307 pages. $27.28 (P)
A New Theology for a New Ecological Perspective:

Catherine Keller’s book Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming meticulously teases apart the significance behind the accepted Christian doctrine that creation’s genesis came out of nothing, a creatio ex nihilo. Keller argues that instead of nothing, there was the tehom, a creatio ex profundis somehow lost in translation, and over the passage of time, tainted by homophobia and gynophobia. Some of the major key words her theology is written around are the Hebrew tehom, ruach, Elohim, tohu vabohu, and bereshit. She meditates on Augustine’s tears and Job’s despair, pondering paternalism and maternalism. She wonders over the violent death of the Babylonian goddess Tia-mat, and the elusiveness of Melville’s Leviathan as she sorts through the roots of Christian Western civilization’s obsessive love-hate relationship with femininity. Keller explores the minds of theologians and philosophers like Karl Barth, Jacques Derrida, and Rashi as she and they struggle to define God, beginning, chaos, and creation. She moves through history, language, philosophy, and science as though she is taking her readers on a pilgrimage with her, offering a new interpretation for Genesis that proposes a profoundly fresh relationship with nature and the feminine through “the equality of male and female that designates the imago dei” (Keller, 137).

Her theological exploration hinges upon the first few lines from the Bible, Genesis 1:1-1:2, succeeding in bringing attention to the power of those opening lines with a fierce command of not only the English language, but also Hebrew and Latin, as she laboriously waxes linguistically through history and literature, from one philosophical quandary to another. At each turn of the page, Keller poetically explores her topic in depth, intelligently, and oftentimes obscurely, bringing forth her concepts and arguments from the abyss. One needs to be prepared to understand that this book is not light reading, nor are its central messages easily discernible for someone without an extensive background in theology and philosophy, or at the very least, the time and patience to do a lot of internet and soul searching. Keller breaks her tehomic theology into four parts, each part organized into smaller sub-sections allowing the reader time to catch their breath and to of course attempt to catch up with her revelations.

Understanding the reasons why the Christian Church has overwhelmingly accepted the “patristic construction of the creatio ex nihilo” doctrine reveals “a hardening theological anthropomorphism” that was “tending to reduce nonhuman nature to a background effect” (Keller, 136). The tehom, is often translated from Hebrew as the feminine-gendered deep, or the ocean, metaphor for the female womb, which is important in understanding humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Keller’s Derridian deconstruction of creatio ex nihilo offers insight into the perverse ways that current Western Christian theology has demonized and subjugated the feminine, where tehomophobia and gynophobia are inexplicably connected to each other. The “lasting correlation between tehomophobia and gynophobia” that Keller advances are also the roots of the dominion thesis and its connection with the exploitation of women, the earth, and nonhuman creatures, which has contributed to the current anthropogenic climate change and extinction events we live through at present.

Tehomic theology offers a new, hopeful theo-(eco-)-logical perspective on mankind’s relationship with nature, and the management of anthropogenic-caused climate change, species extinction, and the way natural resources are consumed. Genesis 1:26 reveals that on the sixth day of creation God gave humans the command to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”, a verse used “to justify ecological exploitation” (Keller, 137). However, Keller points out that the rest of verse one is ignored, which gives humankind “a vegetarian dominion” (Keller, 137). Here Keller reminds us that God has distributed earth’s bounty equally among all of His living creations, an idea that defies the tehomophobic “hoard of CEOs and fundamentalists” who use Genesis 1:26 to profit from the destruction of what God has created and proclaimed “good” (Keller, 137). When God gave humankind dominion, He gave us an “imagery of kingship”, but when we “mistake dominion for dominance, we fail in our responsibility as caretakers for the earth” and no longer reflect the imago dei (Keller, 138). In order to “see God is to see the creation (sic)” (Keller, 139).

Ignoring the tehom is the catalyst for the need to subjugate and control the feminine in all its forms, but above all, it divorces the feminine from the Creation and nature itself. Nature is the “visible body” of God from whence “spills forth so chaotically, so creatively, so procreatively from ‘the womb’ (sic)”, a theology of the deeply feminine (Keller, 139). New life springs forth from the female womb, a dark, wet, and perhaps chaotic place that has been relegated to that which is farthest from God, and has become synonymous to the natural world. Nature and the natural order has been separated from the masculine in a theology that begins with a creatio ex nihilo. It has divided and alienated us from our natural selves, and given permission to exploit and dominate anything deemed feminine.

Tehom is the primordial soup from whence all life begins, the “unformed matter” from which God called forth all of creation (Keller, xvi). What could be closest to tehom than the amniotic waters of the womb? Why should the feminine be any farther from God than the masculine? The erasure of the feminine in creation and its subsequent embodiment in nature deserves further theological, philosophical, and ecological explorations in order to better understand our relationship to each other and the natural world. Keller offers a starting point in her tehomic theology, addressing the connections between the tehomophobic and gynophobic roots of the dominion thesis, and insight into how we may have strayed from a beginning where we and the rest of creation have all been called forth, in our turns, from the feminine deep rather than from nothing. From the tehom, we are all gloriously connected, having been proclaimed naturally “good” by God.

Kelli J. Waesche
February 2018

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

lol
Preface
What if beginning does not lie back, like an origin, but rather opens out?
“What terrifies you?” asks Irigaray of her masculine interlocutor. “That lack of closure,” she surmises. “From which springs your struggle against in-finity.” What might happen if we ceased to fight, if we let the undertow draw us toward the depths?
The darksome deep wears so many denigrated faces: formless monsters, maternal hysteria, pagan temptation, dark hoards, caves of terror, contaminating hybrids, miscegenation and sexual confusion. Queer theories, groundless relativisms, narcissistic mysticisms. The collapse of difference. Excess, madness, evil. Death. Amidst the aura of a badness that shades into nothingness, how can we rethink the darkness of beginnings? This book is about that depth, its darkness, its face and its spirit. What kind of a subject-matter is that?
This is a theological topic, indeed the first, the doctrinal topos of the creation.
Yet so often theology shuns the depths of creation. Christian theology creates ex nihilo at the cost of its own depth. It systematically and symbolically sought to erase the chaos of creation. This has doomed it to a vicious circle: the nothingness invariably returns with the face of the feared chaos–to be nihilated all the more violently.
This is a hermeneutical topic
The author of Genesis, like virtually the entire ancient world, assumed that the universe was created from a primal chaos: something uncreated, something Other, something that a creator could mold, form, or call to order. But the Christian theology that early came to dominate the church could not tolerate this constraint upon God’s power: for why should “He” have had to reckon with an Other?
The prevenient chaos cramped the growing Christian imaginary of mastery–what we may call its dominology, its logos of lordship. I will argue that by the third century theological orthodoxy had defined itself by an unprecedented nihil. Classical theism created itself in the space of the erased chaos.
This is constructive theology
Lets creation itself emerge from the topos of the Deep.
Theology has come to presume linear time with terminus: Origin→salvation history→ end of time itself
I mark the beginning, instead, as beginning-in-process, an unoriginated and endless process of becoming: genesis. This heals desiccating hope
Tradition-wise? James Joyce said it best: semi-semitic serendipitist, europasianised Afferyank. Others whisper dark secrets of our own complexity.
Feminist, of course. But this feminism, like the religious identity, lacks purity.
Hidden from the glare of Christendom’s triumphs, tucked inside of the margins of a text at once Jewish and Christian, might we write a new beginning upon the face of tehom?
Depth is not undifferentiated chaos but chaos from which difference unfolds a cosmos.
by and large God does not work de novo or ex nihilo, but ex voce and per collaborationi.
This work is reclaiming, not faithful: I do not pretend to construct its opening as it ever was, but as it might yet be
[SUMMARY of OUTLINE]
Part 1: Creation Now and Then Ch 1: Mystery of the Missing Chaos
Billowing deep, bellowing word
Theology of becoming begins here, at the edges of a long silence, daring to ask if tohu vavohu really means nothing (Abrahamic faiths, solidified in orthodoxy, dare not let you ask) Indeed, one finds nowhere a full-fldged theology of creation from the deep.
SURVEY OF THE FIELD: EITHER PRESUME NOTHING OR JETTISON THE DEEP.
Whitehead’s process theology might be the exception. Here, creation from chaos is explored, but as though in passing, and not as a theology of creation, attending to Genesis. most feminist and ecological theologies jettison, with process theology, the omnipotent He-Creator and His linear salvation history. And they similarly move swiftly past this backwards- looking question.
Most other theologies, even liberal and liberation sorts, presume, as we shall see, the creation from nothing. Creatio ex nihilo has reigned largely uncontested in the language of the church.
In fact though, the Bible knows not creatio ex nihilo but ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing comes nothing).
I want us to “hear into its own speech” the muted utterance of that next verse, the verse of chaos. But a theology of becoming can hardly go “back to the Bible,” competing for the changeless authority of origin. It may, however, solicit the chaotic multiplicity of biblical writings, genres, voices and potentials. SHES NOT LOOKING FOR SINGLE ANSWER FROM BIBLE: To affirm rather than cover up its hermeneutical multiplicity is to hold a sacred space for all the multiples of which the trembling web of the creation is woven.
What she wants is defamiliarization of the first two verses.
We’re gonna have to
Deal with CREATION
NOT universe, cosmos, or nature. But creation.
What she wants is to decolonialize the space of the creation.
Deal with DOGMA
There’s foundational authority, even if it has false pretenses.
Name a difference between NEHIL and TEHOM
Here we want chance for creativity, not control.
Grammatology of beginning
In between v 1 and 2 is an interstitial darkness
The form of the rare Hebrew bereshit– “in beginning”–fashions the first verse as a subordinate clause, not as a summary announcement; the second verse as an elaborate parenthesis; and only the third, where God speaks, as the independent clause.
1. NIHILISM READING: Rashi has it: “At the beginning of the Creation of heaven and earth when the earth was without form and void and there was darkness . . . God said Let there be . . .”
Here, the chaos precedes the work of creation
Rashi intentionally disputes nay sense that the days signified linear sequence “you should be ashamed of yourself” for reading it chronologically
Rashi’s “provocative statement” against chronological order invokes, according to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, “the gaps, the unexplained, the need to examine and reexamine the apparently lucid text, with its account of a harmonious, coherent cosmology.
2. EX NIHILISM READING: NOTHING BUT GOD (traditional theology stance): Theologies have tried to draw the line at “God,” to say that, whenever the creation starts, it is preceded by absolutely nothing–nothing but the pure and simple presence of God the Creator. Certainly this “nothing but” of a nonnegotiable starting-line lends a useful sense of foundation. It offers protection from the tidal waves of a chaos for which we are never prepared
3. Is there a third way? Spurred on by the more recent grammatology of Derrida’s beginnings, we need no longer derive these swarming, fluttering, bifurcating multiples from the undifferentiated Origin of a simple Creator. Difference marks an originative and originated beginning. the attempt to discover the true origin is doomed. It only brings us to the boundary of our own language, to originating conditions that have themselves originated: an infinite regress, that which Derrida calls the “bottomless,” opens abysmally at the beginning. Derrida, as we shall later investigate, denies the “bottomless play of the signifier” any depth at all.26 Still we might wonder: might not this bottomlessness–on the face of it–signify the Deep itself?
This third space of beginning is neither pure origin not nihilist flux but difference. THERE IS NEITHER BEING NOR NONBEING. This is the topos of the deep. that tehom as primal chaos precedes and gives rise to the generative tensions of order and disorder, form and formlessness? Might tehom henceforth suggest the chaoid (so not necessarily chaotic) multidimensionality of a bottomless Deep: the matrix in which the creation becomes? In which the strange inter-fluencies of creatures–in ecology, predation, genetics, cultures–crisscross the abyss of difference?
Lubricitous conjunctions
Joycean use of language that is not nonsense but excess of sense. Idk she’s talking about Finnegan Wake’s “chaosmos”
Theology, however, cannot long linger within the style of a Joycean “polyhedron of scripture,” the “collideoscope,” or the “meanderthale”31–certainly no more than it can sustain positivist scientific or political discourse. Religious language meanders along the borders between proposition and invocation, theory and literature; there it generates an open order, a changing text; its scriptural polyhedron refracts the colliding hopes of a history that threatens closure, but has not ceased to begin.
Negative theology suggests the iconoclasm of the infinite shatters any claim of the finite to fix, name, or enclose an ultimate meaning.33 That knowing ignorance seems almost to anticipate the third space of postcolonial theory–at least as articulated in Trinh Minh-ha’s spiritually resourced “critical non-knowingness.”
We’re doing negative theology not as an open infinity of relational signs but of signifying relations
We’re in the khora, what Derrida calls “nonsynonymous substitution” for differenace and trace—his strategic alternatives to ontotheology, or the amalgam of platonic metaphysics and classical theism dominant according to Heidegger in western thought.
TEHOM AS CHORA
“Khora reaches us, and as the name. And when a name comes, it immediately says more than the name: the other of the name and quite simply the other, whose irruption the name announces.”38 As triton genon, third genus, “neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’,” “the name of khora seems to defy that ‘logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers’ . . . that logic ‘of binarity, of the yes or no.’” Khora signifies “the opening of a place ‘in’ which everything would, at the same time, come to take place and be reflected (for these are images which are inscribed there).” Analogously, tehom at once opens a place of all becoming and reflects upon its “face.”
As to the femininity of the platonic “third kind”–receptacle, nurse, mat(t)er: Derrida has begun to dislodge her from her passive function within the “holy family” of intelligible forms/khora/sensible things (Caputo). Her quasi-feminity, like that of the womb-watery tehom, will not in the present context be wasted by an anti-essentialist irritation. LOVE THAT!!!!!
Even as place itself, she does not define the “place of women.” She may, however, wash out its boundaries. These topical tropes are “moving and changing every part of the time.” For a theology of becoming, they ripple metonymically through the topos of the deep. In its archaic “scriptural polyhedron” we are reconsidering the difference creation makes.
The unfathomable body
[SURVEYS OF THE DEEP] Myths of creation from a chaos, or from a primal ocean charged with the signifiers of birth, had provided common cosmogonic currency.
Sometimes the chaos is oceanic, sometimes dry, sometimes female-associated, sometimes neutral. The causal lines of its amalgamated metaphoricity cannot be fixed in any linear path of transmission.
The shift toward a chaos-negative view develops lately and slowly
Doctrine ex nihilo
Until the late second century, Jewish and Christian interpreters seem to have assumed that the Creator formed the creation from some depersonalized version of this primordial stuff.
For a while, creation was world-formation. The presumption here is not ex nihilo but a Creatoe effecting “in the beginning” irreducibly new and contingent reality. A formation of formlessness first.
But this rubs against an omnipotent God: how can the omnipotent Creator of all things depend upon some preexistent material from which to form the universe?
Ex nihilo is formulated as counterproposition around 3C.
Augustine, thanks! He has two-stage creation that solves it all
A good platonic God can’t make a non-Good world! Yet nothing can exist that God does not first create (except God). THE PROBLEM: The chaos cannot be eternally with God; but neither can it be part of God.
His solution: God must have nonetheless created the primal matter first, like a clay from which to fashion the rest. Yet the text itself refuses to deliver the proper message. THE DEEP was made by God out of nothing, and therefore is not coeternal with him, although this narrative may omit to state when those things were made”
A feminist disruption
What if we begin instead to read the Word from the vantage point of its own fecund multiplicity, its flux into flesh, its overflow? As “the mystery of a word that seeks its incarnation . . . In excess of every existing language”?68 Inversely to Barth’s logocentric doctrine of the creation, a tehomic theology derives the incarnation from the chaosmic width of the creation. A chaosmic Christ would represent the flow of a word that was always already materialized, more and less and endlessly, a flow that unblocks the hope of an incarnation, in which all flesh takes part. But this new creation will not come forth de novo ex nihilo. It takes place within the shared, spatiotemporal body of all creatures.
Liberation dis/orders
However justly gendered, theology does not come down to “boys vs. girls.” Or girls vs. boys, more recently. The question is whether the theology of creation keeps the future wide and opening.
Certainly the Genesis narrative emanates from a historical context not anticipating that of the colonized and oppressed poor of Latin America today. But I wonder whether precisely the Genesis tehom–which implies neither pure evil nor total victimization but something more like the matrix of possibilities in which liberation struggles unfold–would not serve the current context better than the orthodox ex nihilo.
Living waters
McFague’s God as relation
Indecent Theology
Altahus-Re’d divine chaos
2. “Floods of Truth”: Sex, love and loathing of the deep
SUMMARY In order to open an interpretive forcefield in which tehomic meanings of “the creation” may be affirmed, this chapter articulates the difference between tehomo- phobic and tehomophilic registers within scripture itself. It sets the biblical difference in the context of the ancient slaughter of the sea-she-monster as well as of a recent feminization of the flux. Finally it draws the question and the difference of the Deep back into the framework of a constructive enquiry: does the icon of the marine chaos convey a theologically meaningful depth–such as that which we will sound in the tehomic hermeneutics of Augustine’s Confessions?
1. Leviathanic sightings
Again, scripture only knows the formation of something new from something else– something yet unthinged, unformed, some sort of marine chaos not identical with the literal sea but not separable from it.
Yet we can’t generalize the biblical attitude toward that chaoid something.
TWO ATTITUDES
1. TEMOPHOBIA.
E.G Ps 74 remembers God crushing the Leviathan
The Near Eastern prototype of theomachy resides in the Enuma Elish, in which the lord Marduk slaughters his grandmother Tiamat, the oceanic chaos
NOT SIMPLE FEAR Phobia does not mean a simple fear, which has an object–such as the real, historical threats to which the psalmist alludes. Fear transmutes into phobia when it obsessively repeats itself, coding its dread and loathing in a symbolism that may in fact make it more difficult to face real threats.
2. TEMOPHILIA
E.G Ps 104, Hashem had formed the Leviathan to sport with him. Leviathan is not a stand in for evil.
NOT LOVE. To love the sea monsters and their chaos-matrix is consonant with affirming their “goodness” within the context of the whole. It doesn’t make them safe or cute. They also get poetically “rebuked,” i.e. bounded, held back, so that the orders of creation may emerge; so that any creative work may be wrested, as it must be in all our creations, from chaos. But this tradition cannot be reconciled with the identification of chaos and its wild creatures as evil.
The heart of the monster
The face of the deep was first–as far as we can remember–a woman’s. Tiamat, “salt water, primal chaos,” lay in primordial bliss with Apsu, “sweet water,” “abyss.” From their mingling waters precipitated a beginning. Tiamat migrates into Hebrew as tehom.
Marduk emerges as the great hero who will slaughter her, and thus save his generation and all future ones from terror: he has his mission and his moment. “It is only a female thing you fear,” he sneers. In exchange for getting to be Lord of the universe, he offers to cure their tehomophobia.
Whatever her function in the Enuma Elish–nostalgia for the womb, safety valve in the shift to slave state, warning to insubordinate women and their men–the trace of a positive chaos has not been erased within the epic or its biblical iteration.
A question has haunted me through decades: does Genesis’ allusion to the theomachy reinscribe, subvert or simply side-step the warrior matricide?
What these traces might have meant (to “P,” the so-called “Priestly writer” to whom this strand of scripture is attributed) has gone down the discursive drain; the fluid chaos was long ago flushed out of the basin of cultural assumptions that hold water. What they might yet mean remains–promisingly–open. This much can be asserted: Genesis 1 betrays no fear of the dark, no demonization of the deep, of the sea, its she and its dragons. No trace of divine warrior or cultural misogyny appears on the face of the text of the first chapter
Floods of female
The Bible is not tehomophobic, yet this imaginary is what we inherit. It is inscribed upon the seascape of modern sex.
Two places that seascape appears
1.The tehomophobic phantasm, the water woman. in his catalogue of fin de siècle fantasies of feminine evil, Bram Dijkstra demonstrates a voluminous output in painting and literature inspired by the specter of the whirling, dissipative, watery femininity. Freud meanwhile was disciplining the individualized drop of oedipal ego to resist its “oceanic feeling,” a concept that fails to differentiate between undifferentiated narcissism and any feminizable, fluid experience of relatedness
2. Homophobia as self-loathing: Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues: “What would ‘down there’ wear?” “It would wear a big sign: ‘Closed Due to Flooding.’ ” A grandmotherly hysteric has unconsciously somatized the slaughter of the grandmother Tiamat.
Re/monstrating feminism
Not so long ago, we began to recognize amidst the misogynist graffiti of western theology our appropriated energies, our “stolen goddess power,” our “elemental passions,” our defaced bodies. Feminism set out with mythic energy to “reverse the reversals.” We began “in the beginning.” The dismembered corpse of Tiamat was exhumed. “I am a monster,” we chanted. “And I am proud.”
A later feminism has been wont to dismiss the prior wave, in its embarrassing over-generalizations, as “essentialist.” I have argued that a certain neo-apocalypticism better describes such radical oppositionalism (in femi

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're into Hebrew and process theology you'll go nuts over this. An amazing writer and thinker.

[KA · Rating 3 out of 5]

This beautifully (but densely) written and mystical theology is an extended meditation on the first two verses of the Bible, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth . . ." More specifically, it is a meditation on the Hebrew word tehom, deeps, depth, and a refutation of ex nihilo theology. Lost me when she began to kowtow to deconstructionist antipathy to the concept of depth. Still worth reading, though.

[Nick B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keller's language is challenging, but only because of how beautiful it is and how intimate it strives to become with the "mystery" of divinity. Keller plays linguistic fetch with whatever unknowable divine is our there, going further and further to challenge and dismantle human notions of divinity and authority, utilizing a technique which would be defined in later years as the hermeneutic of multiplicity.

Revolutionary work, stunning ideas and implications.

[Hannah Scanlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two verses of the Hebrew Bible serve as Catherine Keller’s interpretive framework for her two-pronged project in Face of the deep: a theology of becoming. The first prong of her project is deconstructive. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” represents the doctrine of creato ex nihlo. She argues that Christian orthodoxy has relied on this doctrine to preserve a dualistic logic that underscores various binaries: good or evil, corporeal or incorporeal, eternal or temporal, almighty or powerless, propertied or inferior (49). She asserts that such binaries undergird notions of God that support ideologies which have come under significant critique in the 21st century - some of which include patriarchy, imperialism, and nationalism.
The second prong of her argument is devoted to on her constructive task, framed by the second verse of the Hebrew Bible: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Keller contends that theology has hope for reversing the destructive effects the legacy of ex nihilo bequeathed to Christian tradition by attending to the underdeveloped possibilities represented in the less popular doctrine of creato ex profundis. Reflecting on the motif of tehom (deep), she offers a sweeping panentheistic proposal – what she calls a theology of becoming, or a “tehomic” hermeneutic for Western Christian tradition. She does this by providing a deep and attentive reading of 12th and 13th century mystical texts of the Kabbalah tradition, as well as the contributions from postmodern philosophy, poststructuralism, feminist theory and theology, literary theory, queer theory, and process philosophy and theology. She even inserts what can be understood as a tehomic praxis, giving her own tehomic (re)readings of Christian theological tradition.
Keller offers a rereading of Christian tradition that demonstrates God’s intimate engagement with the world; a stark alternative to the transcendent, “other-worldly,” and disengaged Father God that is the primary representative in Christian tradition.

[Matthew Butler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University's Graduate Division of Religion, is an occultist. Or maybe she is a pagan. Perhaps she is a radical feminist Christian -- I'm not sure. In "Face of the Deep", Keller reads Genesis and its Greek translations of "formless and void", and "deep" as expressions of female sexuality. This project seems related, if not part of, neoclassical theology and imagines a universe full of gods who are potentialities rather than powerful father figures. This is not dissimilar (by my read) to the Victorian fascination with Plotinus, though her conception of "creation" is more informed by chaotic networks than the Eye of Providence. There is a fair bit of insight to take from her work, but at the end of the day it's just more fiction. This is fine, but I'm left with no more explanatory power for creatio ex nihilo than when I started.

[Ethan Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly profound book by a sublimely eruditious author. Contrary to a few of the other reviews, I think she wrote in a rather accessible manner, considering the dense subject matter at hand. She provides an amazing synthesis of many different disciplines and paints a compelling image. It's not easy to read. That's not what I'm saying. But, she presents ideas that are very complex in simple and effective ways.

Dont try to read this book if you aren't very familiar with both philosophy and theology, at the least.

[Walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of excellent ideas, criticism, and theology stuck behind unnecessarily difficult language. For anyone willing to get through several layers of abstraction, the actual analysis of creation stories and their social contexts and effects is quite interesting and useful to creating a constructive religious worldview.

[Paul Sundberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

challenging, poetic, brilliant

[Beatrice Marovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book of theology by my soon-to-be advisor.

[Sarah Frankie · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting but inaccessible