God: Augustine’s “unshakeable lastingness”

Thursday 1 February 2024

Questions for discussion

What language shall I borrow to speak about God, and why (metaphor, analogy,
apophatic, kataphatic, queer, feminist theologies, etc.)? What are your community’s (and
your own) biggest challenges in speaking about God, and how does it relate to your
speaking to God?

What are the arguments for shifting the focus away from God’s creation from nothing
(creatio ex nihilo) to a “creatio ex profundis” (Keller)? Do you agree? Why or why not?

What images or concepts do you have of God? What is obscured and what is illuminated
by these God concepts? What are the political and ethical implications of these images
and concepts of God?

Optional listening:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/stephen-hawking-thomas-hertog-1.6814286
Thomas Hertog interviewed by Matt Galloway about his work with Stephen Hawking,
and the latter’s admission that his theory about what came before the big bang was from
the wrong perspective (17 April 2023).

Art and Theology

Margaret Atwood, “If You Speak Truth to Power”
Catherine Martin, TEDx MSVU, Respect for creation
Michelle Sylliboy, “The Art of Reconciliation”

Doctrine of God
Simone Weil says that doctrine is like a lantern—you do not stare at the light itself but
look around to see what objects are illuminated in the space around you by the light. She
also refers to the “ordeal” of using words such as God, justice, love—no fixed conception
is possible.

The early church was faced with the challenge of integrating the God of the Hebrews, the
Abba of Jesus, and the God of the Greek philosophers (who conceptualized divinity as
impassivity and as impassibility).

In what is known as classical theism, one of the first claims of the Christian tradition,
strongly influenced by the Greeks, is that God is impassive (placid, calm, not showing
feeling or emotion) and impassible (does not experience emotions or pain) as that would
imply change. God’s perfection is understood as immutability (impossibility of change).
Another facet of God’s power—omniscience—knowing everything but not affected by
anything (McGrath 182-3, 187-9).

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In this view, which we see in complex ways in Augustine’s Confessions, the creature that
suffers and changes is not as great as that which does not suffer and change (which
implies that suffering is diminishment, lessens, or that change implies that something is
or was less). Only the creature experiences movement toward or away from perfection,
betterment (for example, grades in piano mark stages from less to more proficient; aging
viewed as a loss of powers).

God as utterly self-sufficient, impassive is a powerful strand in church history, though

in the past 500 years this is being questioned. When theologians like Martin Luther
return to Scripture, there is no evidence of this impassive nature: God is a jealous God;
God gets angry; God changes God’s mind.

In keeping with this view of divine impassibility, some early Christians tried to say that
God didn’t die (an early Christology: Jesus is God). The divine nature of Christ didn’t
suffer, only his human nature suffered. In the Arian controversy, which McGrath calls the
most influential debate of the early church, the Arians propose that Jesus Christ and Holy
Spirit are less than God the Father, the impassive ruler (more on this when we discuss
Christology).

This notion of impassivity creates all sorts of paradoxes and tensions: how to imagine
God’s love as in no way susceptible, as unmoved by the suffering of those God loves?

16th C: Luther speaks of a “crucified God”—and of the discipline required of every

Christian to find God’s glory hidden in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

During traumas in history—wars, genocides—the impassivity of God proves to be an

untenable idea and provokes a rethinking of classical theism.
• Abraham Heschel’s God of the Prophets (1930): pathos of God
•Kazon Kitamori, A Theology of the Pain of God (1946): pain at the heart of love
•Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1972): impassibility is a deficiency in God—the
capacity, willingness to suffer is a perfection
• William Placher’s Narratives of a Vulnerable God (1994), and John Caputo’s The
Weakness of God (2006)
• books by Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (2010), and
Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (2017) and Serene Jones, Trauma
& Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (2010), bring trauma theory into conversation
with theological themes related more to Christology

How do we imagine power? Does power mean passionlessness? Does perfection mean
exemption from loss? Does perfection mean overabundance?

In the Christian Scriptures, God is love—an agapic love that pours out, gives out of
fullness. Are all other formulations elaborations of this? The wellspring of love … power
as an outpouring (Phil. 2: 6-7): the kenotic spirit that self-empties does not diminish the
plenitude of the Godhead. Ethically, this is a view of perfection that is not diminished by
loss—I gain my life by losing it. Graham Ward uses the metaphor of breathing to avoid

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the risk of understanding kenotic love as lack: breathing is both fullness (plero) and
emptying (keno).
Ellen Armour (Constructive Theology 43) questions how images of God function—what
do certain concepts of God allow us to imagine, to be and to do? What is obscured by our
God-concepts? What are the political and ethical implications of our God-concepts?
“Concepts of God have political and ethical consequences that reach far beyond the
religious communal bounds of those who espouse them.” For example: “Is God Male?”
(McGrath 175-177).

Catherine Keller discusses theopolitics in relation to both the dominant understanding of

creation theology, creatio ex nihilo (and how, in some manifestations of American
politics, this can be paired with an understanding of God as unilateral power) and in her
constructive proposal, creatio ex profundis, a theology of becoming with its guiding
“uncertainty principle” that is “precisely not lacking in ethical clarity” (149). See further
discussion of Keller below.

THEODICY
Greek theos (God) + dike (justice)
In the form of an odd syllogism, classical models of theodicy try to relate two
propositions with a third proposition (rather than conclusion)
1) God’s omnipotence, omniscience (power); with
2) God’s perfect goodness and love; and
3) Evil exists in God’s creation (a loud buzzer that seems to invalidate the first two)

Two Classical Models of Theodicy (see McGrath for a slightly different typology, 202f)
1. Augustinian pattern—so called Free will defense model
Pain and suffering are punishment for sins, ie., like the Deuteronomistic principle in the
Hebrew Scriptures (good rewarded, evil punished). This view upholds a sense of order
and justice, but it is harsh. The doctrine of original sin means you are always already
guilty—but keep in mind the major claim of this position: our creatureliness, our being
not-God, is not sin: God delights in our finite creatureliness (more on this from Rowan
Williams, below).

Philosophical/logical propositions for this approach to theodicy:

1) evil exists because of sin
2) evil comes into the world because of human freedom
Original sin refers to the helplessness of humans to stop sinning. The Calvinist-
Augustinian notion of total depravity holds that we are free and have chosen evil;
therefore, it is our responsibility. Augustine explains the rebellion of the fallen angel
Satan, created good, but who tries to assume control of divine authority, a rebellion that
spreads to the world. (Augustine doesn’t explain how a good angel turns bad.) An
extreme sense of human depravity in this approach to theodicy leads to an extremely
robust doctrine of grace (sometimes the former is accentuated without attention to the
latter).

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By contrast, Pelagianism asserts that we are born, like Adam and Eve, with a fully intact
ability to choose good or evil (this also implies complete responsibility). Every moment
is a possible good.

Two problems with the free will defense model:

1) the temptation to view creatureliness as bad or sinful: we have a wilful bent toward
self-destruction;
2) does human freedom limit God’s freedom? a) God creates the space for our freedom
OR b) God works with the results of our evil to produce good (God’s providence always
at work)

Even so, there may still be a huge “net” loss and evil, for example, in the Holocaust, the
Rwandan genocide, the cultural genocide of First Nations people in Canada, and so on.

2. Irenaean Pattern—so called “vale of soul-making” theodicy

Irenaeus of Lyons: humans are created in a state of immaturity, and creation is a series of
tests that enable the maturation of souls, both communally and personally.

In Evil and the God of Love, John Hick develops the Irenaean idea that evil is a testing
ground that compels us to exercise our freedom of choice—in this exercise of freedom,
we become more fully human.

This view offers a compelling emphasis upon human freedom, yet it is hard to maintain
in the face of suffering of young children. There are inequalities of testing/suffering.
Hick takes the model into the life beyond this one, as it is evident that “fairness” is not
worked out in this life. It also raises an uncomfortable question: does evil have a positive
role in God’s purposes?

Challenges to classical models

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a number of protests were raised against the classical
theodicies. These challenges are quasi-theodicies in that they drop one aspect of the
initial syllogism, either God’s power or God’s love

Protest theodicy: John Roth maintains that God is omnipotent, evil is real, but he gives
up the claim that God is perfectly good. The idea of a dark side to God is a view strongly
affected by Jewish literature, Eli Wiesel’s writing, among others, also Dostoevsky, The
Brothers Karamazov.

Suffering God theodicy: very prevalent—refigures the omnipotence of God. Conceives

the power of suffering as growth and movement—not the power to interfere but the
power to suffer with and the power to grow with. Examples include Douglas John Hall,
Essay on the Theology of the Cross; Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God; Dorothee
Soelle, The Strength of the Weak, and Suffering.

Another form of theodicy in the 20th and 21st centuries isn’t a theodicy as it is usually
understood.

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Practical theodicies: the best way to witness to the power of God is to be an instrument
of that power and love. This moves theodicy out of the academic, intellectual realm and
into the practical world, for example, in Liberation theology, feminist theology, political
theology. In this view, theodicy is not philosophical speculation about God but many
forms of witnessing and responding to what Kenneth Surin calls the “radical particularity
of evil.”

Dorothee Soelle’s book Suffering discusses theodicy in practical terms.

Her practical response to suffering asks two questions that must be kept in tension:
1) what are the causes of suffering and how can they be eliminated (not universal but
specific suffering);
2) what is the meaning of suffering and under what conditions does it refine us and make
us more human?

Soelle uses Simone Weil’s analysis of affliction which involves physical, psychological
and social suffering—so that the sufferer is shamed, ostracized and avoided—and
whereby the pain is made invisible. Weil contends that affliction cannot really be seen
without supernatural love: our human tendency is to attack the suffering in others and in
ourselves (as pathetic, weak). The analogy she uses to suggest this is hens that peck to
death an injured member of the flock. As we read in “Reflections on the Right Use of
School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” grace allows us to draw near the
sufferer without reducing them to their suffering, and to be able to hear a response to the
question, “What are you going through?”

We may only be able to help rectify social or psychological dimensions of suffering but
that must be done—we have the responsibility to contend with the forces of evil, subject
to our moral attention and beyond it at the same time. The practical possibility of
attention—drawing near the suffering, patience with the repetitive speech of suffering
when the person is able to speak, and the capacity for silence when they are not (a theme
in chapter 5 of Rowan William’s Being Human).

For Soelle, we need to move from philosophical language to biblical and mystical
language, activating the question, how do we help others to move out of the black hole of
silence and into language? See Ps 22: 24 “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction
of the afflicted.” Resonances here with Serene Jones’ essay that includes a reading of
Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms (reading for 15 February).
• silence > lament > remembering
• meaninglessness > psalm > protest
• screaming > petitionary prayer > asking for help
• incoherent > analysis > planning
• powerless > hope > work

It is the job of Christians to accompany someone into the next step; the encounter is a
practical one, and the philosophical question of theodicy is suspended by our
commitment to act out of God’s love (to manifest God’s love). Affirmation becomes
possible.

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God as creator
This returns us to a Hebrew view of God (McGrath 194-202). The world is distinct from
God, not an extension of God. The world itself is not divine. God desires to bring forth
the world—a contingent thing. What is the creator’s relation to the creation?

CLASSICAL DOCTRINE—three principles

1. created out of nothing, no previous matter: the consummation of creation is the
Sabbath Day—the moment of rest and delight. God delights in the fruit of divine
creativity. God is reflected in the world (humans in God’s image) even though it
is separate from God. The world is not to be worshipped. Humans are always in a
relationship of stewardship or fellowship with rest of creation (“solidarity in
creatureliness,” Rowan Williams). Affirmation of goodness of creation and of
matter against Gnostics, Marcion. God’s creation is qualitatively different from
our creations as God creates from nothing: “For my thoughts are not your
thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than
your thoughts” (Isaiah 55: 8-9)
2. God creates through God’s own freedom and will—a free expression of
God’s will: God wills to become the creator. God’s freedom is expressed in the
will to be in covenant as creator. What does it mean that God covenants as our
creator? Does being the creator bind God? Compare human promises: are they
limitations on our freedom or extensions of our freedom? How do we define
freedom? (Recall David Foster Wallace’s contrast of two freedoms.) Do we
become free by becoming promise-making creatures? Auto-nomos [self-rule]:
freedom to rule oneself is one understanding of freedom (the Kantian model is not
to be confused with doing whatever one wants at any given moment in time). We
can view the Creator’s work as self-expression in creation rather than as a limiting
bond.
3. God creates out of love, as a consequence of who God is; desire to create is a
sign of God’s love: God’s love and will are the same—complicated by a tradition
in Western theology that God must withdraw in order for there to be a space in
which to create. Creating in an abandoned space: Simone Weil, “creation is
abandonment” (a notion common to Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah) and as
crucifixion. Is creation God’s self-renunciation? Creation as a reflection of God’s
love (Augustine and Paul inform this theology).

Contemporary (and early debates) about creatio ex nihilo (orthodoxy since 3rd C) versus
creation as construction (McGrath 198-200) which receives a nuanced articulation in
Catherine Keller’s proposal of creatio ex profundis. The doctrine of creation has
received more attention in the last several decades because of cosmology, the
environmental crisis, and feminism (challenging associations of woman as nature/death).

creatio ex nihilo: Rowan Williams, “On being creatures” in On Christian Doctrine (63-
78) and “‘Good for Nothing’: Augustine on Creation” in On Augustine (59-78).

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Williams argues that we need to recover the radical implications of the doctrine rather
than retooling it (as has been done with notions like original blessing and panentheism) in
response to the distortions into which the doctrine has fallen. What are the radical
implications of a belief in creation from nothing? Of God as prior to and other than the
world? The classic doctrine upholds an understanding of humans as creatures (which
Williams believes is becoming a lost art). As McGrath notes, the distinction of creator
and creature is fundamental to Orthodoxy (145). What does it mean to be a creature?

Williams objects to interpretations of Augustine’s theology of creation that assume that

his theology, from an understanding of God as distinct from the world, leads to
metaphysical dualisms, hierarchical binaries of spirit/body, man/nature, man/woman,
with the dominating side associated with God. Sallie McFague and Anne Primavesi argue
for the need for new models, like the world as God’s body, or creation as birthed from
God, and part of God.

Augustine views God as discontinuous and continuous with creation (created things are
‘in’ God but this differs from Manichaean dualism in which matter is opposed to God but
contains fragments of divinity, and Augustine’s earlier view that there was something
material about God’s universal presence.

Creation participates in God by being a coherent system, not literal ‘bits’ of God, nor an
overflow of divine essence (62). God orients everything in being: “the one who limits all
things, gives intelligible shape to all things and directs all things to a goal. Our reality is
shaped by a presence beyond what we will and do” (63).

God is the source of good, but not the greatest of these good things (the basis of classical
theories of analogy) and the way God acts, not a way God must act. God is not the best
thing, but whatever God’s life is, we see its effects manifest in beauty, harmony. God
creates things in process, rather than static things, things moving toward homeostasis
(and losing it and returning to it again and again). Love draws us back to where we
belong (stability and harmony).

God’s action as a summons, a call that creates the possibility of an answer. Not an
explanation but a confession that everything depends on the action of God. Rethinking of
creation not in terms of an exercise of divine power over an ‘other’ nor an imposition or
manipulation into something alien. As creatures in relation to eternal being-with of God
as Trinity, we are freed to be distinctively human in cooperation with others, in world of
differences; to learn humility not as submission to an alien will but as the acceptance of
limit and death (Being Human).

This doctrine challenges the image of the self who disavows dependence and uses
achievements and status to form an impression of autonomy and independence,
challenges “the myth of self-creation and isolated self-regulation” (76). As in
Augustine’s Confessions: “will anyone emerge as the craftsman who makes himself”
(Book 1, 11)?

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What enables an act of trust in my capacity to act and give? We are here; we are real
because of God’s creative summons, God’s ‘word.’ We are made for praise (Michael
Hanby’s “doxological self”). God doesn’t negotiate with us, does not need us, and
cannot be manipulated. Against the view of process theology, there is nothing for God in
creation: God’s love is need-free, does not assume kinship or similarity (72-74):
implications in this for social ethics. This reality of being rooted in God’s free utterance
without demands or needs, decreases our anxiety about being involved in constant
negotiation of needs in the world. God as Trinity, the being of self-love and self-gift. At
the same time, God is not everything (problem with the popular where is God in this?
question). (75)

An ethic of 1) “non-negotiable commitment to egalitarianism/politics, capacity for

ongoing negotiation, adjustment, listening; 2) acknowledgment of powerlessness (not
passivity!) that models the divine dispossession; 3) neither good intention nor
commendable action—both about performance—but “fidelity to the character of God, its
‘epiphanic’ depth” (264).

Matter is pure potentiality (69), it cannot be evil, it can only be unrealized or frustrated,
and therefore a deficit, incomplete, or worse, eroding some purposive action of a thing.
Creation is generative: we must grow into new life. “God, the soul and evil are none of
them solid substances taking up space but spiritual realities, ie. forms of agency.”

In his essay “Omphalos,” an exploration of queer theology, Gerard Loughlin goes beyond
the usual theology of transgression to take up complexities that McGrath doesn’t have the
space to explore—questions that arise despites the theologically true statements to the
contrary, for example, God is genderless and God is biblically depicted within the matrix
of gender (a complex poetic tension that contradicts logical truth). If pressed, Christians
would confess to a sexless God while the God of souls appears to remain male. Knowing
God doesn’t have a body, as Loughlin argues, erases significant parts of the Biblical
narrative. He resolves these tensions with the complexities of worshipping an embodied
God, a God plunged into bodies by human analogy, and then by incarnation.

Creatio ex profundis
In an earlier work, From a Broken Web: Sexism, Separation and the Self, Catherine
Keller draws on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead; feeling as the vehicle
of all connection and fluidity and interpermeability: long associated with the monstrous,
with the feminine, this is the character of every being in the universe.

In her books, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003); On the Mystery:
Discerning God in Process (2008), and in essays, “‘Be This Fish: A Theology of
Creation out of Chaos,” and “The Democracy of Creation: Chaosmos and Counter-
Apocalypse” (in God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys, Keller makes a case for
what she calls a theology of divine creatio ex profundis. She cannot support the doctrine
of creatio ex nihilo (orthodoxy from 3rd C onwards). For her, becoming is
incompleteness. Keller’s views are compatible with contemporary scientific
investigations into the nature of the universe—especially in relation to the process view

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of superposition, entanglement in Quantum Mechanics and to Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle.

Keller translates the first verses of Genesis as follows: “When in the beginning Elohim
created heaven and earth, the earth formless and void, darkness was upon the face of the
deep (tehom) and the spirit of the Lord (ruach elohim) vibrating on the face of the
waters.”

She argues that there were political motives for the doctrine of creation out of nothing—
the Hebrew verses allude to Ancient Near Eastern creation stories in which a battle (or
intercourse) takes place between a masculine divine and a feminine monster. Babylonian
Enuma Elish with its cast of characters: Tiamat, Apsu (abyss), Marduk. In her feminist
analysis, Keller contends that misogyny and homophobia come together in an orthodox
“fear of the deep” (tehomaphobia)—replaced with “nothing.”

Doctrine of creation out of nothing gained an “aura” of incontestability since it was

articulated against rival theological positions (it became the banner of theological
respectability). These include the Greek understanding of God working with pre-existing
matter to shape the world, a notion taken up by the Gnostics (creation as construction by
a lesser deity), and evil due to defects in the material God worked with to construct the
world. Origen, a deeply Platonist theologian, retains the notion of construction of the
world (McGrath 200-201). The positions named as heresies, Keller notes were more
consistent with the literal meaning of Genesis as well as allusions found in other biblical
literature, including the Psalms, Isaiah, and Job with images of a warrior God creating
through violence, and God’s struggles with the sea monster.

For decades, scholars of the Hebrew Bible say that first verses of Genesis do not support
the ex nihilo construction given to it by orthodox Christianity (and continued to this day
by “intelligent design” proponents in the US).

Keller’s position: God is a lover of the deep, as a “strange attractor” evoking intricate
fractals of dimension within the Deep—strange attraction that draws forth waves of
beginnings that are full of promise and loss (chaos theory in the essay you read from God
and Power). Can we experience the dark waters with tehomophila that accepts “chaotic
risk,” accepts what is ambiguous and turbulent: both “unformed potentials” and
“deformed pasts” (“Be This Fish” 17)?

Augustine elaborates the “creation out of nothing” doctrine, yet his writing still remains
“pregnant with a fluidity that may burst the bounds of any frozen subjectivity”—a belief
in an immaterial God, but a confession that we are born in and belong to
time/flesh/carnality. In her essay, “Confessing Identity, Belonging to Difference,” which
engages with Keller’s work, Kathleen Skerrett contends that “the incomplete presences
we are to each other reverberate with the superabundance and sorrow of the Deep. With
practice and patience, our incompleteness might be conceived as opening on the deep that
God loves, rather than as a sign of divine retribution.”