Chapter 2 - Making

Summary

It would be impossible to do justice to recent theological conversation about creation and creativity without giving serious attention to the offerings of process theology. Characterised by a privileging of creativity within both the world and the godhead, and offering an attractive connection between human and divine creativity, process theology provides what seems to be a promising avenue for the theological work required. Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep represents the most compelling and influential recent articulation of a process theology of creation and creativity. Its careful, daring, and imaginative engagement with scripture, and the literary and philosophical traditions presents the best of the process theological tradition. By a close examination of Keller’s Face of the Deep, however, I demonstrate how, despite its manifest attractions to a theology of mythopoiesis, Keller’s process theology is unable to account for the novum of human making while preserving the witness of the creedal tradition of Christian faith or falling into a dangerous nihilism.