Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.

Abstract

 Face of the Deep is the first full theology of creation from the primal chaos. It proposes a creatio ex profundis - creation out of the watery depths - both as an alternative to the orthodox power-discourse of creation from nothingness., and as a figure of the bottomless process of becoming. The dogma of creation from absolute nothingness dominates the Western religious imagination as well as modern common sense. The creatio ex nihilo reflects the unquestionable presupposition of faith in an omnipotent Creator and Lord, and so in the pure and simple origin of our complicated world. Creative processes in matters natural, social, and textual are thus also read as functions of power and order, upholding the transcendent power-structures of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim orthodoxies. But the ancient scriptures, says Catherine Keller, imagine a messier beginning, with no clear point of origin and no final end. The heteroglossic Deep - the Hebrew tehom or primal oceanic chaos - already marks every beginning. It leaks into the bible itself, signifying a fluid matrix of bottomless potentiality, a germinating abyss, a heterogeneous womb of self-organising complexity, a resistance to every fixed order. It sweeps away myths of abstract potency - of the paternal Word - in a tumultuous jumble of neglected parts whose creation is material and laboured. Voyaging through a hermeneutical sea mapped upon Moses and Moby Dick, Augustine, Derrida, Deleuze, Whitehead, Job's whale, Irigaray and feminist theology, Face of the Deep is more than a provocative deconstruction of fearful orthodoxies of nothing. It seeks to relate the maternal floods of primordial chaos to the swirling interdependencies of our embodied, interpretive beings. Engaging with the political and the mystical, the literary and the scientific,  the sexual and the racial, it grippingly argues for the Deep as a dual symbol of denigrated marginality and of diffuse, metamorphic possibility, suggestive of the submerged faces within our culture and the gendered face of their suffering. The forgotten chaos struggles with ongoing creation; its turbulent indeterminacy nurtures our becomings. On its surfacing depths we catch a glimpse of our emergent selves. From within a dangerous and crowded postmodernity, Catherine Keller's impassioned, graceful meditation opens up an ultimately hopeful space within the magnetic depths of cosmic origin. As a landmark work of immense significance for Jewish and Christian theology, gender studies, literature, philosophy, and ecology, Face of the Deep stretches our originary story to profound new horizons, rewriting the starting point for Western spiritual discourse.