Finitude, Ambiguity, Loss: Theologies of Creation between Alienation and Incarnation

Why were we not offered participation in the life of God from creation’s very beginnings? In this paper, my working hypothesis is that there must be a prelapsarian and an eschatological purpose for a life suspended between creation and eschaton, a raison d’être for finitude that needs to be explored beyond the categories of creation and fall. Drawing on Maurice Blondel’s argument that “natural mortification” is woven into the conditions of agency within finitude, I challenge Karen Kilby’s counterhypothesis that suffering and loss are never good, and that theologians should reject all positive valuations of suffering. I argue that mortification within finitude is crucial, first, for the preservation of the real (and not chimerical) agency of human beings, and second, for the articulation of an eschatological vision that can explain how human beings are destined as human beings, not for de-personalizing pantheistic absorption, but for personalizing union with God.

I examine how Nancy Eiesland’s account of Christ becoming “the disabled God” incarnates disability through the cross, ultimately locating the mode for Christ’s becoming disabled through his propitiation for sin. I argue that this location compromises Eiesland’s goal of detaching disability from its historic association as a sign of fallenness. While other modes of embodiment are incarnated through birth for Eiesland, Christ’s disability is incarnated through crucifixion. By reimagining her anthropology through Eastern Orthodox creation narrative, I am able to reposition Christ’s incarnation into disability within his human nature, specifically within Christ’s passibility. I pair Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius’ descriptions of passibility as contingency with critical disability theory’s descriptions of interdependency, specifically Tobin Siebers’ definition of complex embodiment as contingency. In this reconsidered framework, Christ incarnates disability outside sin or fallenness, accomplishing Eiesland’s goals of resymbolizing disability in Christianity as a part of what it means to be human.

In c. 524 CE, after his unjust condemnation and death sentence, Boethius develops one of the most important formulations of the doctrine of the creation in the Middle Ages. The Consolation of Philosphy recounts the comfort he finds in God’s providential ordering of creation. In 1457, the Portugese chronicler Zurara deploys Boethius’ doctrine of creation to both acknowledge the suffering of newly arrived slaves and to justify their enslavement. Nearly 1000 years later, Boethius’ doctrine of creation, which has achieved near-classical status, is transformed from consolation for the captive to consolation for the captor. Can the classical doctrine of creation be saved from this depoloyment as a tool for oppression? In this paper, I will argue for the doctrine’s ongoing usefulness as a doctrine of limits, the kind of limits that might restrain and subvert human evil, not sustain it.

This paper borrows the scriptural and theological theme of exile, which has become prominent in political theology, to explore the suggestion that creation theology also stands in need of an exilic perspective. Such a perspective would make creation faith more truthful and relevant in a situation of environmental crisis. In full awareness of the way in which exile has sometimes subtended quasi-Gnostic tendencies in theology, I shall argue that a rejection of the exilic perspective makes Christian theology naïve and irrelevant, able to speak of the created world only in a voice of glorious affirmation. In contrast, the exilic perspective  rescues creation faith from captivity to the picturesque, giving voice also to the experience of alienation and brokenness; it suggests that a sabbatical celebration of the creation must often take the form of a defiant hope—a desire for a world we cannot yet see.

This paper explores the space between the expected outcome of a process of creation and the disappointment and devastation that emerge when things do not go as planned. To do so, it draws on both traditional and underrepresented voices from within the theological tradition, from ancient to contemporary, and weaves these voices together with personal narratives of experiences of pregnancy loss and infertility from multiple generations of the same family. Reading the etiological narratives in Genesis from the perspective of God as a frustrated artist may help address some of the tension that arises when readers encounter God the Creator as simultaneously God the Destroyer in them. Such a reading of text and tradition may enable greater comfort with the ambiguity, uncertainty, and chaos present in not only these sacred stories but also in our lives, both public and private, today.