Caputo, Keller and herstory

From the continuing discussion in the Noah thread:

One can accept religion and even Christianity without that certain metaphysics. Perhaps this thread based on a book Keller edited might be of help. Therein a relation is shown between religious idealism (“false unifications”) and conservative polity. And here's Keller from the first post in this thread:

"Such progressivism does not need consensus on whether God is the name of the possible, its source or its realization, whether God is omnipotent, weak or alluring. It does need concurrence on the formal criteria of progress: the actualization of social, ecological and planetary relations of justice with sustainability. Such rhizomatic radicality is not about uprooting our traditions but about exposing them to our confounding togetherness—as species, peoples, genders, sexualities, races, religions, even—Lord help us—our Christianities. [...] The more theology absorbs the methods of deconstruction and pluralism, the more the opposition between secularism and religion can itself be deconstructed. And as Jim Wallis has pointed out, 'the secular left will give up its hostility to religion and spirituality, or it will die.' And this is politically crucial. For that hostility contributes to an evangelical stereotype about Godless humanists, etc. But the more we heal that hostility, the less we constructive theologians sound like Christians to evangelicals."

And this from Keller on Faber on god as differential nondualism:


“When he collates differance with divinity […] this difference signifies a self-deconstructing otherness. Yet is does not destroy rationality, or even the categorial scheme. […] Faber in this way continues the Whiteheadian struggle to capture in language a difference between God and the world, or one and the other, without reinscribing the settled boundary between them—or erasing their difference. This differential nondualism [...] translates for him into 'God's in/difference.' One must not lose that inaudible slash, else 'in/difference' will be confused with the chilling apatheia. […] Thus 'this negative assertion paradoxically requires that because God is indeed nothing beyond all differences, God thus appears only in differences.' […] Faber's divine in/difference morphs into difference itself, the difference so radical as to be comprised by the 'essential relationality' of all differences” (190).

In the next post Faber concurs:

"From Faber's chapter he notes that what is necessary “after the ecologicial death of God [is] the mystical move of becoming-animal, becoming multiplicity. This unio mystica […] [is] the consummation of all unity into the realm of multiplicity. […] It is the khoric realm of a paradox where we have to go through divergences, bifurcations, and antinomies all at once. […] In this mystical in/difference, everything is only in difference” (227-28).

Also check out Keller's Face of the Deep, where she re-writes the creation story from Genesis. Caputo used it in the following from p. 2 this thread:

"The opening verses of Genesis make no use whatever of a metaphysical distinction between an eternal, infinite and supersensible being creating finite, temporal being, which is an un-Hebraic conception that is unconceivable outside of the two-worlds schema that Christianity inherited from Hellenistic metaphysics."

"Caputo, in his chapter of TWOG “The Beautiful Risk of Creation,” reflects on the Genesis myth. He uses Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep to show how herstory [in history] is left out. She refutes creatio ex nihilio and instead posits creatio ex profundis. In the former's beginning something was created from nothing. In the latter there was already something there, and that something, according to the Bible itself, was the barren earth, the darkness over the deep waters and the restless air. It is from these elements that Elohim molded, as with clay, into lifeforms. Subsequent Christian interpreters completely left out these primal elements in their narrative, instead reducing them to 'nothing.' And Keller ascribes the feminine to these primal elements, hence, the elimination of herstory by the later, second half of the second-century, metaphysical creatio ex nihilios."