"The Difference Nothing Makes" Excerpt by Notre Dame Press

The Difference Nothing Makes Creation, Christ, Contemplation

BRIAN D. ROBINETTE

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947716 ISBN: 978-0-268-20352-8 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-20351-1 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-20573-7 (Epub) This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at undpress@nd.edu

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PA RT 1

Grammar and Contemplation

one t wo

The Difference Nothing Makes Undergoing Something from Nothing

PA RT 2

Christ as Concentrated Creation

three four

Jesus and the Non-Other Strange Victory

PA RT 3

Purgation and Union

five six

On the Contemplative Consummation of Atheism Return to Love

Notes Bibliography Index

3 41

81 125

175 211

267 297 309

Introduction

An Astonishing Claim

Christian theology makes an astonishing claim about our world: creation did not have to be, and yet it is—from nothing. As challenging as it may be for us to imagine, the world we typically take for granted, the only world we actually know, is wholly gratuitous, without necessary existence, and utterly dependent upon an unfathomable God for its very being. While this claim has achieved a formal status in Christian theology—as articulated by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or “creation from nothing”—the scope of its significance for Christian imagination and practice is not sufficiently understood. The central question this book asks is this: What difference does “nothing” make? What does the sheer gratuity of creation mean for our understanding of God? What does it imply about God’s intention for creation, for creaturely flourishing amid the impermanence and interdependence of all things? How did this understanding of creation arise within the Christian tradition in the first place, and what role does scriptural testimony play in its subsequent theological development? What does creatio ex nihilo imply for our understanding of human- divine interaction? Is it primarily about cosmic origins, or does it also suggest a certain manner of social critique and communal aspiration? How might “creation from nothing” be relevant for addressing the late-modern mood of nihilism, or the sense that “nothing matters”? And, finally, how might this doctrine become a practical and contemplative insight that we can skillfully embody in everyday life? xi

xii

Introduction

The basic argument developed in this book is that creatio ex nihilo is not a speculative doctrine referring to cosmic origins but a foundational insight into the very nature of the God-world relation, one whose implications extend throughout the full spectrum of Christian imagination and practice. In this sense it serves a grammatical role: it gives orientation and scope to all Christian speech about the God- world relation. It does this by, among other things, characterizing that relationship in noncontrastive terms. God and world do not compete with each other within a spectrum of being. Rather, God is the source and ground of creation’s contingent being, its inmost possibility and animating impulse. Creation comes “to be” precisely in and through God’s gratuitous act, which means that the more creation truly is, the more it reflects its ontological dependence on the Creator. This is how the privative “from nothing” basically functions. It does not refer to “nothing” as a special kind of “something,” as though God creates out of a prior potentiality or cocreative prin ciple. It does not refer to a source alongside God, a numinous force, or some kind of lack in God that creation appears to fulfill. Such speculative approaches, sometimes found in the tradition, may arouse a certain fascination or sense of drama around God’s creative act, but usually by attributing some kind of mysterious quality or minimal content to “nothing,” when in fact the doctrine denies even this. To this extent, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo functions as a piece of negative theology, not because it means to be obscure, but because it means to remove any concept, intuition, or principle that might mediate between “something” and “nothing.” No extradivine necessity is at work in God’s creative act, no outside condition is met, no primeval chaos is overcome, no ontological scarcity or unconscious striving in God is satisfied in bringing all things “to be.” The difference between there being anything at all, rather than nothing, is absolute—traversable only by the gratuitous act of the Absolute God. While this noncontrastive relationship can be stated in formal terms, the main burden of the book is to explore the positive content of this relationship, its dynamism and living texture, as well as its more radical implications. Within a Christian theological context, this exploration will be christological in shape, in the sense that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection concretely display the God-creation

Introduction

xiii

relationship with maximal clarity and salvific import. It is maximally clear because in Christ the creaturely and the divine are united “hypostatically,” in one person. It is salvific because it unveils and transforms the deep-seated ways the God-creation relation has become misconstrued or disordered on account of human sin. Human desire, which is originally good and participative of divine life, is susceptible to rivalry, conflict, and violence, and this susceptibility can lead us to cast the God-world relation in contrastive, even agonistic terms. God is thus seen as over against the world, or perhaps associated with a sacral violence underwriting conflict in human relations. Among the most remarkable features of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is that precisely in the midst of a human failing—a brutal execution—God is revealed as having nothing to do with our violence. But more, God is revealed as the One whose self-emptying love enters into the depths of rivalry, conflict, and violence in order to overcome them. This overcoming is not the deployment of an even greater force but, paradoxically, the victory of an inexhaustible and efficacious vulnerability that exposes the roots of conflict and violence. This exposure is simultaneous with the communication of a pacific, pardoning, and divinizing presence. From the perspective of the risen victim, which is one way to characterize the peculiar density of the Easter event, we can begin to envision creation anew, as though for the first time, and perceive with unprecedented clarity that creation is originally given “to be” out of unconditioned goodness and love. Its origin is agapeic, not conflictual, and the God-world relation, so far from a matter of competition or rivalry, is the very site of communion. Cre atio ex nihilo, or our coming into existence “from nothing,” is in fact a relation of sheer intimacy with God, and thus our sense of contingency and creaturely poverty, rather than a matter of threat and defensive posturing, can be welcomed and embraced as pure gift, as that which we may freely accept, share with others, and ultimately cherish. There is a contemplative dimension to this welcoming and embracing of our shared creatureliness. Creation does not have to be, and yet is—gratuitously, freely, wondrously. God summons all things “to be” out of divine freedom, not for God’s sake but for the sake of creation itself, without any mediating obstacle or ulterior motive. Creation is given. But more, it is loved into being. It comes from

xiv

Introduction

God. God summons that which is other than God into existence as an expression of God’s own fullness of being and love. Creaturely being is thus primordially received by us. We can never get to something prior to this original gift. We can never get to its back side, so to speak, for it is who and what we are. Our being thus depends upon God, and this ontological dependence is original and without any other ground. This sense of creation’s essential gratuity, if deeply lived into rather than merely thought about, can begin to transform the felt sense of our contingency from one of anxiety-tinged precarity to the welcoming of finitude and our mutual dependence in loving communion. Contemplative practice invites us to “let go” of our defenses and “live into” our creaturely contingency with progressive freedom and deepest acceptance. This acceptance is truly liberating, for rather than struggling to achieve our identity through reactivity, competition, and acquisitiveness, the contemplative way allows us to recognize that with God—and God alone—we do not have to negotiate our existence with a rival; we can wholly trust and live from the One who loves all things into being ex nihilo. In characteristically paradoxical fashion, the Christian contemplative path is one of purgation unto union, kenosis unto theosis, nothingness unto fullness. This paradoxical dynamic achieves its greatest realization in the incarnation, and as I hope to make clear in the unfolding of this book, it is in light of the incarnation that creatio ex nihilo gains its fullest content. To give some indication of this, we must first recognize that creation “from nothing,” while issuing a certain kind of denial, already implies a positive theological affirmation of enormous consequence. Creation is an act of divine self-bestowal. Creation is not just any other, it turns out, but precisely that “other” whose inmost ground and eschatological horizon is God. While in no way annulling the genu ine integrity of the created other, the very nature of this difference is such that God imparts God’s self in establishing it. Creation is just that which comes “to be” when divine life, illimitable in itself, is rendered participable. Because our creatureliness is an act of divine self- donation, our difference from God is in fact the source of our deepest intimacy with God—the event and idiom of God’s kenotic outpouring as well as the event and idiom of our ecstatic openness to God. The God-creation relation is therefore not static or thinglike but dynamic

Introduction

and reverberative, a living “betweenness.” In being constituted by God, creation in all its diversity and emergent possibilities exhibits a vital capacity for God. Creation is the unfolding of this relation. What we call the incarnation, formally speaking, is that event in which God’s self-communication coincides utterly with the creaturely capacity to respond in freedom and love. God’s kenotic outpouring and creaturely self-transcendence: when these two movements converge in a definitive and unsurpassable way, the very reason for crea tion—its inner dynamism and eschatological goal—is realized. God’s self-communication, already constitutive of creation itself, reaches its climax in creation through the incarnation. The Word became flesh. God became human. Without ceasing to be God, God became crea turely not in order to expand divine life—as though this were possible—but in order to shepherd creaturely reality into its fullest fruition. This fruition is not something done passively to the creature. Though wholly gracious, it is also the fullest actualization of the creature. The difference between God and creation is not eliminated in the Christ- event but preserved and brought into maximal unity-in-difference. It is this unity-in-difference that all creation is destined to share, yet it is in Christ that this eschatological promise of creation, issued from “the beginning,” achieves decisive momentum and irrevocable form. The Christ-event reveals the beating heart of the God-creation relation, its systole-diastole movement, and thus the inmost content of creatio ex nihilo really comes to this: we are created in Christ (Eph. 2:10). We are created to participate in divine life. God became human so that we might become God, so the patristic axiom goes. Creation and incarnation, though a differentiated historical process, are two aspects of one self-communicating act. Seen retrospectively from the Christ-event, we can say: This is why we were made. This is why we have come “to be.” This is how things “shall be.” This is the difference nothing makes.

Plan of the Book

The present book is organized into three main parts, with each part composed of two chapters. Ideally read in sequence, the three parts are relatively self-standing, thematically speaking. While there is an

xvi

Introduction

overall progression of argumentation and thematic development from one to the next chapter, each of the book’s three parts represents a renewed “take” on creation, Christ, and contemplation. Accordingly, part 1 is more foundational in character and focuses on scriptural resources, philosophical disputation, doctrinal development, and the role of contemplation in theological practice. Part 2 is more christological in bearing as it attempts to show how Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection display the inner content of the God-creation relation. Part 3 chiastically corresponds with part 1 in key respects, but now as amplified by the christological focus of part 2. It is also in part 3 that the purgation-union motif of the entire book reaches its greatest pitch. Part One: Grammar and Contemplation

Chapter 1 takes the form of disputatio. It lays out several of the book’s main themes by taking up several objections to creatio ex nihilo and defending the doctrine as providing crucial insights into the gifted character of creation. Working through biblical, patristic, and philosophical perspectives, and dealing with select postmodern considera tions of power and violence, the chapter articulates a noncompetitive account of the God-world relation, which claims that God’s unconditioned transcendence is the inmost factor of all created reality. Not only are the divine and creaturely not in rivalry, but the more truly a creature is, the more expressive it is of divine reality. Such is the christological “shape” of the God-world relation. The chapter concludes by insisting that creatio ex nihilo is not only about cosmic or human origins but also a doctrine that grounds Christian hope in the face of all that diminishes creation. It is eschatological as much as it is protological. While presuming the narrative and conceptual content of Christian doctrine, chapter 2 underscores (along with Sebastian Moore, Sarah Coakley, Teresa of Avila, Martin Laird, and William Desmond) the contemplative dimensions of a theological inquiry that proceeds by way of “unknowing.” Given that creatio ex nihilo refers us to our creaturely contingency (i.e., the fact that we do not have to exist, and yet we do), it also invites a patient discovery of the “nothingness”

Introduction

xvii

from which we subsist. Contemplation is a way of relaxing into this indefinable, ungraspable mystery, and to this extent it allows us to embrace and even love our contingency rather than deny it or regard it as inimical to human flourishing. It also allows us to resist treating God as a kind of object that competes with or displaces the world. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the inherent goodness of our creatureliness and therefore of the need to grow in our capacities for receiving, deepening, and communicating that goodness with others by way of loving communion. Part Two: Christ as Concentrated Creation

Part 2 focuses on Christology as “concentrated creation,” a phrase taken from Edward Schillebeeckx to name God’s eschatological intention for creation. Both chapters draw from the field of mimetic theory in order to explore the creative and destructive potential of human desire. Christology is accounted for here in terms of the peda gogy of human desire, as well as the revelation of the true character of the God-creation relation. Part 2 is the pivot to the book’s overall chiastic structure. Drawing upon the seminal insights of René Girard, along with several of his theological interlocutors, chapter 3 develops a “phenomenology of redemption” by showing how Jesus’s life and ministry display the nonrivalrous relationship between God and creation. Focusing on issues of human desire, human conflict, and our propensity toward exclusionary violence, the chapter examines how Jesus’s sayings and deeds go to the root of human desire in order to free it from its self-defensive, other-reifying tendencies. Chapter 4 focuses on Jesus’s death and resurrection as the gracious inbreaking of God’s love that subverts the mechanisms of power and exclusionary violence from within, revealing once and for all God’s noncomplicity in human violence. It develops the Chris tus Victor motif in Christian theology while criticizing certain strains within the Christian tradition that support some version of penal substitution. It also develops the theopolitical significance of this subversion, as it affirms creation in terms of original peace rather than foundational conflict.

xviii

Introduction

Part Three: Purgation and Union

Chapter 5 draws upon the Christian contemplative tradition in order to show how the “dark night of faith” is a spiritually patient and discerning way to engage the sense of divine absence that many experience in our post-religious, postsecular age. Drawing upon figures such as John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, but also more contemporary voices including John Chapman, Charles Taylor, Michael Buckley, and Tomáš Halík, the chapter maintains that the Christian contemplative tradition, along with its understanding of creation from nothing, must incorporate atheistic critique as part of its mysta gogical itinerary. It ultimately goes beyond atheism, even radicalizing it in the contemplative journey into divine mystery. The final chapter of the book highlights creatio ex nihilo as an expression of divine love—God’s love for finitude, for manifestation, for relationship. Taking seriously the purgative-unitive dynamic of Christian faith, it emphasizes that on the other side of self-emptying and negation lies a return to fullness and affirmation. In extended dialogue with Karl Rahner, Sergius Bulgakov, and other theological exemplars who explore the richly ontological implications of divine self-communication—implications that expressly affirm the cosmicity of the incarnation—chapter 6 brings the book full circle by insisting that God’s act of creation is always already ordered toward the incarnation and thus an expression of God’s eternal essence as Love. God’s love is for the entire community of creation, not just human beings, inasmuch as any contemporary theology of creation must address the ecological dimensions of divine-creaturely communion. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the recovery of our spiritual senses as essential to a faith whose love of God and neighbor is internally related to love of the earth.

PA RT 1

Grammar and Contemplation

Chapter one

The Difference Nothing Makes

Objections to Nothing

“The history of theology is by no means just the history of the progress of doctrine, but also a history of forgetting.”1 So wrote Karl Rahner in his landmark essay, “Chalcedon: End or Beginning?” (1951). Written for the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Chalcedon, the essay brilliantly charts a path for overcoming the inadequacies of neo-scholastic theology regnant at the time, especially within Catholic circles. Treating magisterial pronouncements as fully accomplished propositions that have only to be expounded, such theology largely failed to grasp the historical character of human understanding, as though by repeating hallowed formulae over time, and with sufficient confidence, we might be assured of their meaning. But this is exactly what human understanding is not. “For history is precisely not an atomized beginning-ever-anew; it is rather (the more spiritual it is) a becoming-new which preserves the old, and preserves it all the more as old, the more spiritual this history is.”2 This phrasing may have a certain Hegelian ring to it, but it is a basic hermeneutical claim: dogmatic formulations of the past may indeed be certain kinds of achievements, indispensable attainments that elicit our admiration and fidelity, but they can only be regarded as such to the extent that their meaning is constantly won, discovered again and again through the hard work of remembering and 3

Grammar and Contemplation

reconstruction, approached both as ends and beginnings. This is why historical theology and the history of doctrine are crucial for any constructive theology today. “What was once given in history and is ever made present anew does not primarily form a set of premises from which we can draw new conclusions which have never been thought of before. It is the object which, while it is always retained, must ever be acquired anew, by us, that is, we who are just such as no one else can ever be in all history.”3 Rahner’s programmatic essay focuses primarily on the christological formulae of Chalcedon, but the same could be said of any doctrinal formulation achieving some normative status in the Christian tradition, including the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Although “creation from nothing” was never formally promulgated by the Church in discrete form—owing, no doubt, to the rapidity with which it became a default assumption in Christian theology—there is good reason to conclude that the basic grammar it establishes for speaking of the God-creation relation had much to do with orienting the christological formulae that would eventually lay claim to orthodoxy.4 We are right to suspect an even deeper relation than this, a mutual influence and inner correspondence in which further reflection upon the total meaning and significance of Christ, his resurrection from the dead and qualitatively new presence in the Spirit, put creative pressures on what the earliest Christians imagined creation itself to be— from “the beginning.” That is, the very content of creation, as well as the horizon within which it might be imagined, symbolized, and theorized by Christians, took on the distinctive shape and texture it did precisely because of the Christ-event. As Saint Paul puts it in suitably concentrated form: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through

The Difference Nothing Makes

him to reconcile to all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven (Col. 1:15–19) As all-encompassing as this testimony is, it is not quite possible to draw a straight line from its several references to “the beginning” to the affirmation that God creates all things “from nothing.” Multiple mediating factors must be traced before uncovering the peculiar significance of this latter phrase. But it is no less evident that were we to succeed in better understanding the depth and range of significance that creatio ex nihilo has for Christian theology, it will require us to unpack the highly concentrated way creation and Christ are envisioned in a passage like this. Such effort would seem a key part of not forgetting in theology. But what if the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo entails its own kind of forgetting? Might it be that when the majority of Christian theologians in the second and third centuries converged upon what can only be described as a strong consensus—as strong a consensus as anyone will find in the early centuries of Christian theology—we have the telltale signs of an eclipse? What if, upon further inspection, the philosophical and theological disputations of the second and third centuries, during which the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was forged, resulted in something like a cover-up, perhaps a misremembering of the biblical sources that the doctrine purported to defend and elucidate? If, in the transition from biblical narrative to doctrinal reflection, we suspect something like a departure, perhaps this will be judged as more or less innocuous, merely a shift from one to another kind of discursive register, one involving little alteration of content, implying no obvious mischief, and mattering little in the end. But if our suspicions are more easily stirred, and if we are inclined to view the inclusion of metaphysics in Christian theology as a kind of a betrayal, as a freezing or conceptual reification of textual traditions that are inherently ambiguous and fluid, then we might conclude that the affirmation of “creation from nothing,” along with its emphasis on divine sovereignty and creaturely dependence, is an overreaching piece of ideology. Perhaps the swift convergence around creatio ex nihilo in the second and third centuries is less a matter of theological elucidation than it is a lamentable act of metaphysical capture.

Grammar and Contemplation

The suspicion that creatio ex nihilo represents just this kind of betrayal has gained traction in recent years. Noting as a matter of historical record that its formal development comes subsequent to the biblical tradition, such critics argue that while ostensibly designed to affirm the sovereignty of God and the goodness of matter in the mid-second century disputes with Middle Platonism and gnosticism, “creation from nothing” represents a capitulation to a metaphysical view of God in which power, or omnipotence, serves as its governing predicate. The consequences of this “metaphysical turn” in theology turn out to be disastrous. In his The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), John D. Caputo makes precisely this charge. Working in close company with Catherine Keller and Jacques Derrida, among others, Caputo maintains that creatio ex nihilo represents the “dream of metaphysical theology” enthralled by the idea of God’s absolute dominion over creation and nonbeing, and thus a God who excludes and expels all that evinces liminality, ambiguity, and process—that is, the “chaos” of the deep. With deconstructive sensibilities aroused, Caputo interrogates the scriptural narratives to retrieve disruptive nuances and creative possibilities he believes have long been suppressed in the theo logical tradition. The work of theopoetics, as he describes his project, eschews the metaphysics of power and opts instead for envisioning God as a “weak force”: a God who, rather than bringing all things into being from literally “nothing,” creates by eliciting life from the preexistent deep (tehom) of the waters, from the fathomless potentiality of the void (tohu wa-bohu). Whereas the doctrine of creation ex nihilo would suppress indeterminacy in the interests of affirming an ultimate and simple origin to things—with “God” serving as the ultimate power policing creation’s boundaries—this alternative, more biblical view embraces the messiness of creation as a “beautiful risk.” A related concern for Caputo is that an omnipotent God is simply not credible in the face of suffering and evil. With occasional appeal to process philosophy and theology, Caputo alerts us to the horns of our dilemma: a God who creates from nothing is responsible for all the world’s contingencies, including its many unspeakable horrors, and thus cannot be affirmed as wholly good. The only way we may continue to affirm God’s unqualified goodness is if we abandon

The Difference Nothing Makes

all “strong theologies” preoccupied with divine omnipotence. God is not simply weak on the basis of willed restraint; God is weak, or, is a “weak force” capable only of luring contingent creation through the “event” of invitation. If stirring within the deep is the creative potential for beauty and harmony, so too may tehomic energies fragment and destroy. Creation unleashed is an ongoing process that we, along with God, cocreate, enjoy, and endure in hope. The promise of creation is “a promise that keeps its fingers crossed.”5 The argumentative burden of this chapter is to show that Caputo’s characterization of creatio ex nihilo is deeply misleading. Though I wish to affirm much of what appeals to Caputo in his theopoetics, not least a view of God as noncoercive love, a God whose creation exhibits genuine contingency and open-endedness, I do not believe he demonstrates that the classical affirmations of creatio ex nihilo and divine omnipotence are responsible for all he heaps upon them. On the contrary, these affirmations are precisely what enable us more richly and consistently to envision creation as gift. The constructive purpose of engaging Caputo’s work in this nexus of issues is that it affords us an opportunity to appreciate the point of creatio ex nihilo, which, when taken as an isolated matter of abstract reflection, runs the risk of losing its rich significance within the ecology of Christian discourse. We can engage Caputo’s intervention, gratefully but ultimately critically, as a spur for opening up fresh perspectives upon a doctrine that might otherwise go unnoticed. Such is the potential gain of disputatio. I shall proceed in two major steps: first, by showing that creatio ex nihilo affirms God’s unconditioned transcendence in a way that expressly avoids construing the God-world relationship in competi tive (or contrastive) terms. It reflects a basic grammar for speaking of God and creation in a way that names their radical, qualitative difference—a difference that in fact allows us to affirm divine transcendence precisely as God’s unfathomable nearness. This “difference nothing makes” can also help us appreciate what divine omnipotence might actually mean. It does not mean domination, which is the way Caputo tendentiously frames his analysis of power, and which forces him to set up an untenable dichotomy between “strong” and “weak” theologies. Caputo tends to reverse the terms he opposes, without

Grammar and Contemplation

appreciating that it is just this dichotomy that the affirmations of divine transcendence and creatio ex nihilo mean to subvert. Second, I wish to show the internal consistency of creatio ex nihilo with the central affirmation of the New Testament—Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. This is crucial for the kind of remembering Rahner commends in his essay. The event of Easter, itself an eschatological transfiguration of memory, opened up for Christians a perspective upon God’s creativity in a significantly new light. The theology of creation from nothing is logically coherent with, and in Christian theology historically dependent upon, a view of a God who raises to life what has succumbed to the nihil of death. A post-Easter imagination, not unmoored metaphysical speculation, underwrites its discovery. By raising Jesus from the dead—this is the definitive mani festation of divine power from a Christian point of view—what is revealed is a God of forgiving hospitality, a God whose boundless generativity is not agonistic or contrastive with creation but pacific, pardoning, and self-diffusive. Such a view, it must be admitted, will not do much to theoretically explain evil and suffering, which, along with Caputo, I am wont to avoid; but it does constitute the Christian hope that evil, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Indeed, despite Caputo’s intention to avoid theodicy, his claim that divine omnipotence must be rejected should we wish honestly to face the mystery of suffering does more to explain that mystery than most classical approaches, and without any obvious advantage in motivating us for its practical overcoming.

A Spectrum of Positions

To begin, it will be useful to identify three broad positions one might take in assessing the status of creatio ex nihilo and its relationship to the biblical traditions. The first is that creatio ex nihilo, as it gained a formal character in the second and third centuries, represents an innovation that imposes something new and largely foreign upon the biblical traditions thought to support it. The genealogies accounting for the historical and ideological factors leading to this imposition may

The Difference Nothing Makes

vary in their details, but the basic contention such critics share is that its ascendancy is emblematic of a failure and an eclipse, an ill-fated fall into a metaphysical picture that retrojects a set of considerations about God and cosmic origins that the biblical narratives do not raise and cannot be legitimately enlisted for support. A second position recognizes the innovative character of creatio ex nihilo but views its normative status as consistent with, and elucidatory of, the biblical traditions. The development might be compared to the emergence of the christological dogmas of Nicaea and Chalcedon. If one can grant that the interaction between scriptural traditions and Greek philosophy led to creative syntheses exhibiting both novelty and fidelity in christological reflection—and in fact one sees this interaction already occurring in the New Testament itself—then, similarly, the considerations entailed in the doctrine of creation from nothing need not be thought of as merely late, or fabrications of dubious eisegesis, but providing an interpretive framework that helps us better to understand those scriptural traditions as new questions and insights arise. Even if many of the accounts of creation in scripture remain unclear as to whether God creates ex nihilo in any strict sense, once the question of unoriginate matter became live, for example, it became incumbent upon theologians to clarify the point. The doctrine, as formally articulated by Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian, draws the appropriate conclusion once the issue was posed. The third (and perhaps most traditional) position is that the postbiblical theologies of creatio ex nihilo are not innovative at all but fully continuous with the content of those biblical traditions clearly supporting it. Even if a more technical conceptuality is at work in its later elaboration, the content is the essentially same. The biblical traditions reveal little ambiguity; any fair-minded analysis will show their intent to narrate the act of creation as not dependent upon some prior potentiality or raw material that God fortuitously discovers and against which God must eternally contend. If some of the early church fathers, such as Justin Martyr, taught that God created the world from preexistent, unformed matter, this will be viewed as, say, an uncritical reception of Plato’s cosmological speculations in the Timaeus, not a valid inference from scripture.

Grammar and Contemplation

Caputo (and Keller) clearly opt for the first position, whereas my own view accords with the second, at least in outline.6 Recent attempts have been made to argue the third, though I shall not consider them here.7 In taking the second position, it is not essential to my argument that the doctrine’s unambiguous affirmation be traced back throughout all the various strata of the biblical canon. Indeed, it is instructive to appreciate its historical emergence, especially as it intertwines with parallel developments in eschatology. As we shall see, protology and eschatology in Christian theology are mutually informative and find in creatio ex nihilo a logical meeting place. Before examining this interaction between protology and eschatology in the biblical traditions, however, we must first deal with some formal considerations of creatio ex nihilo as they relate to objections to classical affirmations of divine transcendence and omnipotence. At issue here is the sort of grammar (or rules of speech) operative in such affirmations. My central contention is that if creatio ex nihilo is elaborated according to a competitive logic, or as Kathryn Tanner alternatively puts it, a contrastive logic, then its meaning will become irretrievably distorted, with the result that its explicit rejection or modification in favor of presumed alternatives may amount to a subtle acceptance of onto-theological terms, that is, that God and world coexist within a continuum, on the same plane, on a competitive basis, and so on.8 A more adequate understanding of creatio ex nihilo, at least initially, is one that sees in it a systematic denial. Far from making the origin and ground of creation accessible to full comprehension, the statement requires the work of an apophatic discourse that opens up human understanding to the utter gratuity of creation. Formally speaking, nothing is necessary about creation at all.9 It derives wholly from the incomprehensible mystery of God, whose relationship to creation remains one of loving freedom and fidelity. Rather than implying an agonistic picture that situates God and creation in a relationship of rivalry—such a picture only underwrites the serialization of binary and hierarchically arranged terms (e.g., power/weakness, higher/lower, spirit/body, male/female, active/passive)—creatio ex nihilo in fact ruptures such a picture as it emphatically denies that God is “part” of any continuum whatsoever.

The Difference Nothing Makes

According to Caputo, however, creatio ex nihilo represents a disfigurement of the biblical narratives, one that has turned a more Hebraic vision of creation 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.”10 Caputo would have us take notice of the metaphysician’s selective memory that conceals the fragments and unnerving indeterminacies of the creation narratives in their extant form. “We ever-suspicious sacred anarchists, we who have a strong affection for weak theology, suspect foul play.”11 Who is this “we,” and how did it ever come to be that “they” buried the bodies? It is difficult not to notice that Caputo relishes the role of the gadfly, as an exile from a kingdom of orthodoxy that denies him credentials for admission. One might view the constant refrain of “we anarchists” throughout The Weakness of God as the seriously playful work of the ironist, since what frequently passes as acceptably orthodox seems decidedly unplayful, far too confident in its ability to trace origins, establish historical continuities, and monitor boundaries. Yet there is a risk that such self-identification makes the work of the ironist more acutely so—that is, not in the way intended— since the rhetoric might only deepen the very “us” and “them” polari zation so passionately decried. I point out this recurrent rhetorical feature because it highlights a more basic dichotomization that contributes to the caricature of the doctrine Caputo would deconstruct. The “us” and “them” polarization extends throughout his treatment in the sharply delineated categories of “weak” and “strong,” Hebraic and Greek, heterodox and orthodox, and finally creation ex profundis and creation ex nihilo. One suspects that the terms are set up too conveniently for the sake of argument, and with the consequence that the deconstructionist’s professional sensitization to dualities and oppressive hierarchies achieves largely a reversal of terms rather than their fundamental questioning. Consider the following statements: Divine omnipotence is a concept fulfilled in fantasy, spinning wildly in ideal space, with absolute velocity, while the brutal course of the real world proceeds at a slower, bloodier pace.

Grammar and Contemplation

No wonder, then, that the idea of absolute omnipotence did not arise from biblical and historical experience, but rather arose from a metaphysical debate among ecclesiastical theologians in the process of consolidating institutional power who seized upon a biblical idea (con-capere) and set it loose into infinity in a way that neither historical nor religious experience could support. The mainstream orthodox tradition has drummed the primal elements out of the discussion in order to make way for creation ex nihilo, which makes for a cleaner cut, everything black and white, and gives things a firm foundation. The theological tradition thinks that God comes out ahead this way, that God is even greater and mightier, and that God is a greater giver of gifts if God’s gift-giving were complete, including both form and matter, exhaustively ex nihilo.12 Before looking at the particulars of its historical development, we must notice straight away that creatio ex nihilo (and one of its corollaries, divine omnipotence) is objectionable as ideological fantasy, concocted and peddled by a theological elite.13 It serves as a classic case study in religious neurosis and projection, for by locking God up in a solipsistic bubble of absolute sovereignty it only inures those who maintain it from those harsh realities of history. The biblical traditions do not affirm creation from nothing in the sense articulated in the second and third centuries CE but presume God’s creative activity as drawing from tehomic depths that have no bottom, no absolute origin, and no lasting determination. Creation is an interminable process of becoming in which God solicits our participation. Creatio ex nihilo excludes all meaningful sense of becoming, we are told, for not only does divine creativity operate under such terms by absolute fiat, it also means that the world comes ready-made. Stasis, not dynamism; closure, not openness; force, not invitation is the result of this metaphysically stifling world picture. “My idea,” writes Caputo, “which is deeply sympathetic with the critique of omnipotence in process theologians, is to shift the emphasis on the Genesis narratives back from power to goodness, back from being to life, back from a muscle- flexing causal force to a gift-giving word who fashions life out of desert and deep.”14

The Difference Nothing Makes

The choice Caputo sets before us is starkly binary: either theology must come to grips with a view of God who is “weak,” and who brings life from tehomic depths that have no final master or origin, or theology continues to bury the slippery and stubborn textual bodies in the creation stories that signify those depths in order to maintain the consoling illusion that a cosmic puppet master controls all. Caputo’s negative characterization of divine power and sovereignty is here cast in a zero-sum relation with creation: either God is omnipotent, which rules out historical ambiguity and openness within creation, or God is a “weak force,” in which case we must learn to accept a vision of creation as an ongoing process we undertake along with God. Or again, either we assert divine omnipotence, which entails an interventionist and “thaumaturgical” view of a God who “suspends or bends natural laws so that in the end things turn out just the way God has planned,” or God is more like a “weak force” whose actual existence we can never be quite sure of but whose name harbors the “event” of possibility.15 “The power of God,” writes Caputo, “is the weak force of a word, a meaning, a sense, a solicitation, an invitation, a hermeneutical rather than a physical or metaphysical rule, a call that calls us beyond ourselves and our self-concern, that assures us that the ‘world’ is not all in all.”16 If there is something attractive about this last statement—and there is something attractive about it—the only way it can be consistently affirmed, we are told, is by consigning cre atio ex nihilo to the scrap heap of metaphysics.17 But must we accept this tidy characterization? Are we really at an impasse? Are there no resources in Christian theology, whether ancient or new, that might allow us to hold together the meaning of creation ex nihilo and creation ex profundis in closest unity, as not at all in competition for claiming our allegiance and inspiring our discourse and practice? Must unconditioned transcendence be fatally at odds with God’s nearness? Must omnipotence even be at odds with vulnerability? Along these lines, we might ask whether Caputo’s formulation of the problem reflects its own kind of forgetfulness. Might we discover that the manner of framing the problem shares unquestioned premises with modernity’s problematization of transcendence and power, and thus despite his attempts to overcome a certain metaphysical picture he remains subtly beholden to it?

Grammar and Contemplation

Transcendence (and Immanence) without Reserve

Among the recurrent themes in contemporary theology, criticism of “classical” formulations of divine transcendence figures prominently. Often such criticisms come with the plea that an equal or greater emphasis be given to immanence to balance out some perceived one- sidedness in the theological tradition. Perhaps divine transcendence is thought to dispatch God to a realm of rarefied ideality, some remote space “out there” that leaves God magnificently indifferent to our creaturely drama. Or perhaps the criticism views divine transcendence as a source of oppressive paternalism and thus the wrong kind of involvement in the world, since those who have acquired the privi lege of representation can maintain unquestioned authority vis-à-vis others. Talk of God’s transcendence becomes code for investing certain persons, cultures, institutions, and religions with the power of normativity. A robust defense of immanence might therefore become strategic for giving expression to a God who is vulnerably involved in the material and historical processes of our contingent existence, for destabilizing and pluralizing “from below” those power relationships that have achieved institutionally sedimented, “top-down” privilege. Such considerations underscore just how loaded our God-talk is, which is why a central task of theology is to subject to criticism the complex and largely unnoticed ways our discourse about God carries ideological freight. But the almost self-evident link between “transcendence” and divine “apathy” or “tyranny” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. To put it simply, the problem is not that a greater balance between juxtaposed terms is required, or that a radicalization of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) is necessary to subvert all such “strong theologies.” The problem is that all such characterizations of divine transcendence are insufficiently radical. Creaturely “Distinction” within God

Commenting upon the theologies of divine transcendence in Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Cusa (among others), Henri de Lubac writes that those who affirm transcendence “do not deny immanence. Indeed, they grasp

The Difference Nothing Makes

the idea of transcendence sufficiently to understand that it necessarily implies immanence. If God is transcendent, then nothing is opposed to him, nothing can limit him nor be compared with him: [God] is ‘wholly other,’ and therefore penetrates the world absolutely. Deus interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.”18 While a statement like this may initially confirm suspicions that transcendence so understood implies domination (nothing can “oppose” or “compare” with God), the statement means to say that the world cannot oppose God because God is not an oppositional reality, that is, not a being among beings, not a power among powers. To declare God as “wholly other” is to issue a denial of a thoroughgoing sort. God and world are not “one,” yet neither are they “two.” God and world cannot be identified, yet neither are they two beings constituted by a zero-sum relationship. They are “not-two”—noncontrastive and noncompetitive. Precisely because God is the incomparable and unconditioned, utterly boundless and unconstrained, God is radically near to creation in its particularity, contingency, and texture: without measure, without opposition, and with no need for a chain of intermediaries in order to be present or efficacious in the world. The infinite “more than” of God is fatally misunderstood if imagined according to a scale of similitude. God and creation stand in a relation of absolute, qualitative distinction—a distinction that comes “to be” through God’s free origination. Creation implies a distinction “from” God that, because of its absolute character, remains “in” God.19 “The difference between God and the world,” writes Karl Rahner, “is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.”20 God grants the world its own sphere of integrity, as other than God, and yet the world wholly dwells within God who remains its (nonobjectifiable) ground. Although on our “side” of this qualitative distinction we might conventionally speak of transcendence as “beyond” the world and immanence “within” it, a more consistent way of putting the matter is that the self-bestowal of the wholly transcendent God is “the most immanent factor in the creature.”21 God is nearer to me than I am to myself, as Augustine declares. The implications of this theological grammar should not go unnoticed: limited transcendence means limited immanence. If God

Grammar and Contemplation

is in some sense regional in relationship to creation—that is, if the distinction is not absolute but categorical—then God would only be somewhere “out there,” negatively defined and limited by the world, and so able only to operate “on” or “in” or “with” the world in a local manner. Such a view is in fact characteristic of much Hellenistic thought. Tanner summarizes: In Greek and Roman religion and in Greek philosophy to a great extent, divinity refers to a kind of being distinct from others within the matrix of the same cosmos. Divinity characterizes that which is most powerful, self-sufficient and unchanging among beings, providing loci of intelligibility and meaning within an otherwise disordered world. As a distinct sort of being differentiated from others, like any other kind, within the same spectrum of being making up the cosmos, divinity is a predicate determined by commonality and susceptible of difference: it is the sort of thing which can be said to be shared generically with specifying differences of degree.22 God and world (and entities within the world) are distinguished according to a valuational hierarchy. God is atop the Great Chain of Being, and divine actuality cascades down the scale to that which is most passive, namely, “matter.” As Tanner makes clear, this formulation is contrastive and spatial. We find it in Aristotle, and we find it in Middle Platonism, which formed the philosophical milieu for the debates over creatio ex nihilo. In Middle Platonism “divinity is localized as First or Primary Being within a cosmological hierarchy and characterized in an exclusive way that sets it apart from everything else. Divinity and the rest of the world taken as a whole are viewed as logical contraries within a single spectrum; this forces an a priori separation of the two.”23 Such a picture makes the postulation of matter’s eternity entirely logical, perhaps even necessary according to its own terms. The affirmation of God’s radical transcendence unsettles this world picture, however. By declaring that God freely originates the whole of created reality, and that there are no preexistent constraints with which God must necessarily contend, whether passive matter, cosmological laws, or khoral indeterminacies, creatio ex nihilo affirms

The Difference Nothing Makes

God’s relationship to creation as gratuitous. The point has nothing to do with securing for God some tyrannical power, which human beings might co-opt. Rather, it is part of a vision of the God-world relationship that sees no rivalry between them. The Gift of Being Creaturely

That the biblical narratives speak of God as creator is deeply significant here. Even if scripture is not immediately engaged in the kinds of questions we are considering in this more formal manner, the affirmation of God as creator inclines toward the view of the non-eternity of matter once the question gets explicitly raised. If God is not viewed as “part” of the world in any way, not even its best part, we already have an understanding of God’s transcendence that challenges the Hellenistic picture by articulating God’s relationship to creation as unnecessary. God does not need the world, nor does God depend on the world in order to be God. Yet God “gives” the world and elects to be intimately involved with those creatures dependent upon God for their very existence. “In Christian belief,” writes Robert Sokolowski, “we understand the world as that which might not have been, and correlatively we understand God as capable of existing, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world had not been. . . . The world and everything in it is [therefore] appreciated as a gift brought about by a generosity that has no parallel in what we experience in the world. The existence of the world now prompts our gratitude, whereas the being of the world prompts our wonder.”24 To suggest, as does Caputo, that such a view of God is not available to experience is to miss the difference nothing makes. Sokolowski ventures to say that “the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is” is hardly a matter of abstraction, even if the idea can be abstractly formulated. “The distinction is lived in Christian life”—a point I shall try to make clear later in this chapter and throughout much of the book.25 But even here we might consider how the simple act of prayer can help nourish the insight that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo enshrines. Rowan Williams elaborates the point with contemplative prayer specifically in mind:

Grammar and Contemplation

To say, “I exist (along with the whole of my environment) at God’s will, I am unconditionally dependent upon God” means [that] . . . my existence in the world, including my need to imagine this as personal, active and giving, is “of God”; my search for an identity is something rooted in God’s freedom, which grounds the sheer thereness of the shared world I stand in. . . . Before the literally inconceivable fact of the divine difference and the divine liberty we have no words except thanksgiving that, because God’s life is what it is, we are. . . . The contemplation of God, which is among other things the struggle to become the kind of person who can without fear be open to the divine activity, would not be possible if God were seen as an agent exercising power over others, bending them to the divine will. Contemplative prayer classically finds its focus in the awareness of God at the centre of the praying person’s being—and, simultaneously, God at the centre of the whole world’s being: a solidarity in creatureliness.26 Williams’s account of contemplation entails transcendence (and so immanence) without reserve. While obviously affirming the contingency of creation—creation is “unconditionally dependent” and can be beheld in its “sheer thereness”—Williams also affirms God’s radical proximity to creation. Precisely because God’s transcendence is illimitable, God is at the “centre of the praying person’s being” and the “centre of the whole world’s being.” This is what the grammar of transcendence is really about; and it is just this grammar that lies at the heart of creatio ex nihilo.27 One lesson to be drawn from this is the following: those who might plead for a greater emphasis upon immanence in order to correct some perceived imbalance will actually make a more coherent case by deepening our understanding of divine transcendence. The latter includes the former. It is a lesson Caputo seems to have forgotten, or chooses to ignore. To wit: “Indeed, rather than speaking of God’s transcendence at all, it might be better to speak of God’s inscendence (incendiary inscendence!) or ‘insistence’ in the world. The essence of God’s transcendence lies in God’s insistence. . . . I am trying to displace thinking about God as the highest and best thing that is there by starting to think that God is the call that provokes what is

The Difference Nothing Makes

there, the specter that haunts what is there, the spirit that breathes over what is there.”28 Overcoming the onto-theological frame is not best served by denying or limiting God’s transcendence, as Caputo seems to imagine. It is served by articulating “the distinction.”29 As Tanner puts it, Christian theology “needs to radicalize claims about both God’s transcendence and involvement with the world if the two are to work for rather than against one another.” Caputo’s position may seem radical in its incendiary insistence, but it is not radical enough. “A contrastive definition [of transcendence and agency] is not radical enough to allow a direct creative involvement of God within the world in its entirety. A contrastive definition does not work through the implications of divine transcendence to the end: a God who transcends the world must also . . . transcend the distinctions by contrast appropriate there.”30

Power (and Vulnerability) without Reserve

In light of the noncontrastive account of transcendence above, we can give an account of God’s power (or omnipotence) in a similar fashion. Adequately understood, they are two aspects of the same grammar. Caputo clearly intends to avoid a competitive view of God and creation. “God’s transcendence is not to be taken onto-theo-logically as a summum ens towering over finite beings,” he writes, “nor is it to be taken onto-theo-politically as a sovereign master who supplies the paradigm for the human mastery over everything else. . . . I do not think of God as some super-being who out-knows, out-wills, out- does, out-powers, and out-exists every entity here below, a higher super-entity, a hyper-presence dwelling in a high world.”31 Taken on these terms alone, such statements seem consistent with two fundamental rules Tanner formulates for speaking of divine transcendence and agency. The first, which we have already analyzed, is to avoid any “univocal attribution of predicates to God and world in a simple contrast of divine and non-divine predicates.”32 If God is understood in terms of “being” so that God is, as it were, a very big being standing apart from and over all other beings, God and world will be construed as coexisting within a continuum. Such is a case of onto-theology,

Grammar and Contemplation

and it runs roughshod over their absolute, qualitative distinction. It also produces untold confusion in practical and theoretical matters in theology, especially in theologies of grace. If God and world coexist within some kind of continuum, then divine agency is exercised at the expense of creaturely agency, and vice versa. The question of divine will and human freedom becomes an intractable problem.33 The second rule therefore follows from the first: “avoid in talk about God’s creative agency all suggestions of limitation in scope or manner. The second rule prescribes talk of God’s creative agency as immediate and universally extensive.”34 In the same way transcendence and immanence should not be opposed, so must we avoid opposing divine agency and creaturely agency in a manner that suggests reciprocity or mutual exclusion. If we speak of God’s agency as limited in some way, either as the result of incapacity or in direct conflict with some other agency, we can no longer consistently speak of God’s unconditioned freedom. “Like that of a finite agent, God’s influence will be of a limited sort: it may not extend to everything, it may presuppose what it does not produce, it may require the intervening agency of others.”35 This last point should be embraced by one who wishes to avoid thinking of God as a whimsical power who intervenes here and there, or who violently breaks in upon the world in order to subject it to some implacable design. If God is regional vis- à-vis creation, then divine agency will also be regional, with the result that creaturely agency gains its sphere of autonomy to the extent divine agency is uninvolved. Divine power, insofar as it becomes operative in a region where it does not yet reach, will do so in a way that extends, overcomes, appropriates, or cajoles. The point of this second rule is not to secure for God arbitrary power but rather to show how divine creativity is not at all competitive with the world whose very existence it sustains from within. The alterity of God is wholly pacific and generative, limitlessly nurturing and empowering of contingent creation. This is how to understand the abstract idea of “omnipotence.” It may be easy to confuse omnipotence with tyranny, but such an understanding “misses the true concept of omnipotence,” writes Wolfhart Pannenberg. The “power of God has no precondition outside itself,” no “object” against which it must strive, no “antithesis” to which

The Difference Nothing Makes

it is tied. “Power” is not a univocal concept that can equally apply to God and creature. A fundamental asymmetry pertains, since the creator God is the one who freely originates and sustains creaturely agency as such. “For this reason,” continues Pannenberg, “the scriptures consistently related what they say about God’s omnipotence to references to his creative work.”36 A Theopoetics without Reserve

This last statement is crucial. Christian discourse cannot properly speak of divine power in abstraction from a set of stories that account for God as creator, as redeemer, and as the One who “who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist.” This latter expression from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (4:17) finds so many echoes throughout the New Testament that Richard Bauckham has declared it “close to being a definition of God.”37 “God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power” (1 Cor. 6:14); “the power of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:12); “who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9); “who raised the Lord Jesus [and who] will raise us also with Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:14); “established as Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness through resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4; see also Rom. 4:24, 8:11, 10:9; Eph. 1:20; Col. 2:12; 1 Pet. 1:21). There is an intimate relationship in these (and other) passages between God’s character, God’s power, and Jesus’s resurrection. We have here a narrative intervention in an otherwise abstract consideration that gives our discourse a determinative theological shape.38 Here is a theopoetics without reserve; for rather than denying power to God, which the cross of Jesus disassociated from resurrection might imply, it reframes and reformulates power by revealing its true vocation in the gratuitous offer of reconciled life, even when (and especially when) life has succumbed to violence and unjust death. I say “theopoetics without reserve” with reference to Caputo’s project, for it is here where, after providing a brilliantly suggestive reading of the cross, it stops short of giving an equally suggestive account of how Jesus’s resurrection from the dead might creatively reconstruct and rehabilitate the language of power. One cannot but admire Caputo’s cross-centered deconstruction: “The power of God

Grammar and Contemplation

is not pagan violence, brute power, or vulgar magic; it is the power of powerlessness, the power of the call, the power of protest that rises up from innocence suffering and calls out against it, the power that says no to unjust suffering, and finally, the power to suffer-with (sym- pathos) innocence, which is perhaps the central Christian symbol.”39 This “power of powerlessness,” so quintessentially Pauline, would seem a creatively subversive way to think of God’s activity in the world. It would seem to set up for an incisive understanding of how divine creativity is not reciprocal to the false powers of the world, but is rather a power that is true because it is good, a power that is unlimited because it freely gives itself away and distributes itself so as to reconstitute others in reconciled relation. It seems on the verge of giving a rich account of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, in fact, as the “new creation” that shows how powerlessness so transfigured might provide us a vocabulary for talking about the redemption of “the powers and principalities,” even their “participation” in divine life. But this Caputo cannot do. God’s “weakness” is not the result of divine freedom. It is incapacity. Explicitly distancing himself from Paul’s presumption of God’s unconditional agency (and therefore Paul’s reading of the cross in light of the resurrection), Caputo offers a “more radical conception of the weakness of God, of the weak force of God,” one that frankly denies God’s ability to act “causatively” at all. “God is an event, not in the order of power or being, but in the order of the good.”40 Caputo rejects (not naïvely) the second of Tanner’s two rules. He views divine agency not “as immediate and universally extensive,” but as a “summons” (a “call,” “event,” or “lure”) that disallows any analogical predication of power to God. “The name of God is the name of an unconditional promise, not of an unlimited power. A promise made without an army to enforce it, without the sovereign power to coerce it. That is what I am calling the weak force of God. That force is the power of powerlessness.”41 If such a statement is motivated by concerns with human appropriation and questions of theodicy, we must pause here to consider the implications of systematically disassociating the “order of power/being” from the “order of the good” in this way. I will mention two.