Eyre Lines

“God, the Divine Eros of the Universe, is the origin of the prophetic restlessness that reveals the distance between our current personal and social structure and what could be in God’s realm of Shalom.  The ultimate source of the order of the universe, God is also the primary challenger to the status quo. The 8^th century BCE prophet Amos experiences God’s dream for the world and seeks to embody the Divine dream in the lives of the Northern Kingdom of Israel: 

Let justice roll down like water
            and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  (Amos 5:24)

God inspires the laughter of children, the devotion of scientists and parents, the creativity of poets and musicians, and the protest of prophets. God is the inner voice inspiring the cries of those who protest against unlimited war, human trafficking, environmental degradation, economic injustice, demagoguery, racism, and white nationalism.”  So writes Bruce Epperly in his new book “The God of the Growing Edge” (at the point of writing, forthcoming from Energion Publications).

It has tended in recent times to be the case in theology that we see the opening words of Genesis “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day…” as indicating an ordering of what was previously chaotic “without form and void” rather than the older idea of “creatio ex nihilo” (creation out of nothing). Certainly, God is then seen in a lot of scripture as the force of order – God gives rather copious instructions to the Israelites (Judaism has counted 613 commandments, not just 10) and is then seen as enforcing those against the hapless Israelites time and time again. And yet, as Bruce points out here, there is a constant countervailing force of disruption of the status quo, of questioning the priestly wisdom, which runs through the prophetic tradition – and this arguably chaotic activity is also sponsored by God. One can perhaps recall the passage from Isaiah “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.“

In passing, I should mention that “tohu wabohu” in the Hebrew (“without form and void”) cannot on the face of the words of the passage (as early Latin theologians wrongly argued), mean absolute nonexistence. There is an earth. There is a deep (“tehom”, which some scholars link linguistically to Tiamat, the Babylonian’s chaotic serpent slain by Marduk in their creation myth), and there are waters. We are not, therefore, looking at creation out of nothing “creatio ex nihilo”. It is clearly an imposition of order, just as in Gen. 2:19 God presents animals to Adam for him to name – this is a first alphabeticisation of the animal kingdom, an ordering of it. Indeed, it might be argued that naming of things is the actual act of creation of them (perhaps a very strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Naming something is traditionally held to give you power over it, and while the concept is sometimes scoffed at as a “magical” idea, it seems to me that the process of categorisation of things does give us a sense of control. We feel better if a doctor  can give a name to the complaint we’re suffering from, even if there’s no cure proffered. It certainly is an idea prominent in some magical traditions, but it seems to me that it also betrays a psychological reality. And if, indeed, tehom is a form of Tiamat, then rather than a slaying of the forces of chaos (the deep, waters) this is a story of chaos being tamed – at least somewhat – by naming, categorisation. Indeed, we often feel that if we can name something we have some control over it…

Against the reservation of destruction to God in creation, however, perhaps the most major Biblical story of God causing destruction is the Flood, though I rather prefer the Tower of Babel, where God intervenes specifically to prevent too much uniformity (something I might like to see mobilised against Macdonalds, Starbucks, Hilton and many others). Of course, in the current world, linguistic uniformity is a threat – English is probably the likely winner there, though Mandarin and Spanish are worthy contenders. I wonder in passing whether this is as much of a threat as is monoculture, particularly of cereal crops – one very specific plant disease could wipe out a massive amount of food production, as imagined by the Science Fiction book “The Death of Grass”. I don’t personally subscribe to the stong form of Sapir-Whorf, but am well aware that I think differently in English and French, and that there are concepts in French and Koine Greek (to name just two) which I can’t express with any accuracy in English. How much does the supremacy of English suppress possible thoughts, I wonder? How much might it do so if it were to become the true world language?

Then, too, I need to note the current of particularly scholastic theology starting with Augustine and continuing at least as far as Altizer’s “God and the Nothing” (chapter 4) equating evil with the privation of being or, in other words, nothingness, In this conception, the Genesis creation establishes evil not just by the action of Adam and Eve in Gen. 2-3 (which I’ve questioned elsewhere) but by the very act of creation in Gen. 1. However, I cannot (for the reasons listed here) regard that as establishing a nothingness, and so as establishing evil. Nothing, in addition, is just nothing, and so is not some particular thing (i.e. evil) nor is it the absence of a specific thing (i.e. good). The nothing of Gen. 1 is at most the nothing of my son, when asked what he’s seen on a trip out “Nothing”, he responds, despite haveing had his eyes open the whole time. Nothing, in other words, which he can name, nothing he can bring into control by alphabeticising it.

Most seriously, however, it seems to me that life is perched on a balance between order and chaos. Too much order, and you have something which is unchangeable – and the only things which are unchangeable are dead (and I apologise to theologians who hold that God is immutable… to me, their god-concept seems more like an impersonal law of nature than anything god-like). Too much chaos, and everything falls apart. Life requires the ability to grow – and yes, the ability to decline and die. Thus Bruce’s title “The God of the Growing Edge” is very appropriate, although he does not make an order -v- chaos point in the book!

At this point it occurs to me that there are some in the Radical Theology tradition (if it can be called a tradition) who would say “so God is the divide between order and chaos” (following a tendency to state that God is a cut, a tension, an opposition – and nothing more). Again I have to say that this feels too impersonal, too much like a law of nature. I incline towards the position taken by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp in “The Predicament of Belief”  in saying that, for me, God is nothing if not personal – and persons are not simple (they also very reasonably find quite a few other positive statements to make about God, not all of which I’m with them on). Of course, to be a person is to be alive, and as I’ve remarked, life is by its nature perched on the divide between order and chaos, but I don’t feel that that is a full explanation of why God has this ambivalent position (among the many other potential ambivalent positions God may have…).

It follows, therefore, that I cannot associate God with either entropy nor with negentropy, though it seems to me that life is the chief negentropic force in the universe, and it feels slightly “off” not to associate God with life. As I’ve remarked, however, life seems to me to require a balance between order and chaos, so presumably between entropy and negentropy as well.