In The Difference Nothing Makes, Brian Robinette offers a phenomenological and genealogical account of creation belief. He unpacks the theological intent behind creatio ex nihilo, refusing its reduction to speculation or enlistment in ideology. Instead, creation belief works back from the lived reality of life in God. In Christ, and drawing on the cumulative insight of God’s first covenant people, it became possible to intuit the world as God’s creation from nothing. Most notably, it is in cultivating the non-defensive vulnerability of contemplation that creatio ex nihilo becomes conceivable. As I reflect on Robinette’s discussion, there are three areas where I would like to hear more from him.

Epistemology

We have become used to thinking of creation as either challenging or affirming a scientific account of origins, so Robinette’s approach offers a welcome corrective. As to the “why?” of creation belief, it emerges in the reification of faith in God’s saving outreach to Israel, which slowly began to suggest cosmic implications (30). “Even if the second-to-third-century debates over the eternity of matter are the proximate reason for its technical foundation,” Robinette explains, “creatio ex nihilo makes explicit in that particular context what a biblical vision of divine creativity and freedom already implies” (28). Creation thus emerges without necessity or struggle solely from the gift of unconditional love—hence, one can say, from nothing (149).

Robinette’s protology follows from eschatology. “Creation is thus eschatology in retrospect, or—what amounts to the same thing—eschatology has to do with what creation was meant to be ‘from the beginning’” (111). It draws equally on Christology, as the first born from the dead becomes the one through whom all things were made. Christ is the aperture through which divine creativity reveals itself (83), with his non-rivalrous, non-competitive nature suggesting an otherwise scarcely conceivable original peace (86).

Here René Girard’s mimetic theory is invoked as a counter to founding violence. It affirms the original goodness of desire, Christ’s repudiation of its rivalrous excesses, and his alternative to sacrificial catharsis. This counters the limited imagination of humanity’s functional and violent-tending religiousness with a life-affirming substantive alternative, coming from God as a shockingly free and unencumbered gift—though, as Eliot’s “Four Quartets” might suggest to us, it represents “A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything).”

“Approached in this way,” as Robinette explains, “the insight into our creatureliness that creatio ex nihilo enshrines will be interpretable as something like a way of being in the world, with others, rather than a discrete proposition about a state of affairs determined by a fixed meaning” (44). This recalls Pierre Hadot’s reminder that philosophy in antiquity entailed lived practice and not just theoria (48). Robinette insists that there are more than instrumental and causal considerations at work in the epistemology he is commending (66). Creatio ex nihilo is presented instead as a meta discourse.

The epistemological key to the “why?” of this belief is given most explicitly on the last page, where Robinette refers to “spiritual senses.” These “flower in silence” to re-establish a connection “with the inmost source of our filiation of all creation” (265). This recalls the silence of contemplation, integral to Robinette’s phenomenology of creation belief, which is presented throughout as a self-authenticating path to the truth. I am reminded of Augustine’s illumination, which required his conversion before he could understand God rightly (Confessions, IV. 15), and also John Milbank’s concurrence—most interestingly, in his exploration of Hume’s intuition beyond the causality that he has disavowed.1 It would be good to see this epistemological position more fully elaborated.

God at Work

A recurring challenge when theology engages with science, and especially with the problem of evil, is how to understand God’s action in the world. Robinette does not address this issue in specific detail. He sees God at work releasing humanity from the burden of anxious, defensive self-creation, as contemplation opens minds and imaginations to something more gracious and all-encompassing. As for God’s action in the physical world more generally, Robinette lines up with other contemporary Catholic theologians such as Elizabeth Johnson, Ilia Delio, and Denis Edwards addressing the tenor rather than the means of God’s action.

In keeping with the sacramental way God works through, rather than coercively upon, the web of created agency, the distinguishing form divine action takes is one of sustaining, compassionate presence that accepts and waits upon creaturely limitations, undergoing them with creation but also opening them up to new possibilities and ultimately their eschatological fruition in the Spirit. In sum, the whole creation is addressed by God’s promise of resurrection (251).

But what are the connections to extramental reality? Robinette traces the phenomenological roots of creation belief, which only subsequently migrated to the cosmic stage. I would be interested to see further exploration of this transition, and how creation from nothing accords with the science of origins—whether it can, how it might, and if it should.

If the burden of divine action falls to inner human attitudinal transformation alone, it becomes possible to dismiss such action, and God with it, in a postmodern quasi-Buddhist way. What contemplative disciplines would then reveal is simply the non-self, and the non-substantiality of various worlds that humans create, fostering a mellow and un-attached persona. All the rest is left behind a veil of unknowing. A post-Christian, a-theologian like Don Cupitt is content with the belief-less use of religious language and practice as software in such a decentring project, limited to the cultivation of non-anxious non-attachment.

Robinette’s solution appears to sidestep the distinction between mental and extramental, with God in creation becoming more a matter of creation in God. “Creation is not ‘outside’ of God,” he proposes, “but a happening within the infinite ‘spaciousness’ that God’s relational life is” (74). Beyond monism and dualism, then, there is “a dynamic relation in which creation’s constitutive openness to God is grounded, empowered, and pervaded by God’s self-diffusive love (panentheism). Creation is the capacity for God …” (229). “Creation is just that which comes ‘to be’ when divine life, illimitable in itself, is rendered participable” (xiv). This is not about Neoplatonic emanation, though Robinette does explore his preferred option of panentheism with reference to Russian Sophiology. One might avoid thorny questions of God’s action in an independent realm of creation if that realm is not regarded as wholly independent of God but is a dimension of intra-divine relationality with its own freedom and agency.

The question of divine action brings with it the question of God, which cannot be considered today apart from atheistic critiques—a set of challenges that Girard-influenced theology welcomes on its own terms. Accordingly, Robinette notes with Simone Weil that there are two types of atheism, one of which serves to purify notions of God (178). Beyond systems of meaning that typically involve distinctions and dualities—including the distinction that monism represents, as against dualism—we also find ourselves beyond the accustomed distinction between atheism and theism. Robinette’s recourse to Trinitarian relationality rather than theistic individual sovereignty, and his endorsement of panentheism—the alternative to pantheism, theism, and deism whereby everything is understood to be ‘in God’—represents a transformed theological imagination. He argues that contemplation helps theology to reframe its engagement with atheistic critique in a non-defensive way, taking that inquiry to a meta level (209).

Robinette welcomes the atheistic critique of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose nineteenth century classic The Essence of Christianity took God to be a projection of human ideals. He was followed in this by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud but also by Karl Barth, for whom the truth of God challenged all idolatrous projective tendencies. Subsequent theologians have emphasised contemplative practice in theological orthodoxy’s struggle against humanity projecting its own sacred (194). Given the Girardian account that Robinette develops, centred on Christ’s identifying and overcoming of humanity’s confected false sacred, he sees the gospel’s subversive mission as indeed implying “a kind of atheism” (176). This recalls how Girard reads Nietzsche’s death of God, from aphorism #125 in The Gay Science—not as typically understood in Protestant death of God theology as the denial of theism, but instead as undoing the violent sacred to which Nietzsche remained committed. For Girard, “the ‘death of God’ is nothing . . . but a misrepresentation of the tremendous desacralizing process brought about by the Christian revelation. The gods who are dying are the sacrificial gods, really, not the Christian God, who has nothing to do with them.”2

This represents a form of demythologizing (163), insofar as the “weak presence” of the actual non-violent God—who transcends and disavows controlling systems of meaning—proves to be scandalous in a context dominated by will-to-power (72). This recalls today’s widespread theological critique of ontotheology, inspired by Heidegger, as championed for instance by Girard’s philosophical interlocutor Gianni Vattimo.3

Such demythologizing, for Robinette, follows the dynamic reinterpreting and reframing of God that Hebrew Scripture first undertook, whereby “the people of Israel are slowly being inducted into an understanding of God that is unbound by human rivalry and violence” (142). Here is the world that Jesus changes: the destructive, self-organizing system that Walter Wink so powerfully analyses (151), rooted ultimately in violent self-definition.

Ecclesiology

Robinette shows how rivalrous self-creation at the expense of others, and an anxious grasping for being—which Girard identifies at the heart of modernity’s “ontological sickness”—are emptied out. Contemplation helps remove such distortions in our relationships with others, which prevent us from inhabiting our created relationality without anxious hoarding (171). Such mindfulness strikes Robinette as necessary if we are to begin appreciating what God and creation actually mean, so that—in touch with our porosity and at peace with our insufficiency—we might begin to appreciate what being loved into being by God could mean (185). This involves what I call mimetic detoxification, whereby the world and the ultimate reality of God emerge from the fever dreams of scarcity, envy, rivalry and, ultimately, violence.

However, Robinette makes only an oblique reference to the ecclesial implications of his proposals regarding creation. He declares that the proper work of spiritual growth includes the fostering of community as its very heart and not merely as its backdrop (168), with contemplation enabling the necessary conversion of desire that undoes judgementalism and other practices destructive of community (169).

A related theme, developed by James Alison, is what we might call the sanctified ordinariness that characterises such redeemed spiritual and ecclesial life. An authentic spirituality need not entail heightened emotional states, as I suggested in an argument that Robinette develops, but has to face the possibility of existential homelessness (177). This is because the overheated drama of human community—pursuing peace and stability by seeking to escape the always-possible dramatic escalation of rivalry through recourse to cathartic violence—enables only a fraught form of high-tension togetherness. Whereas the eucharistic community lives a de-dramatized life by comparison, much more boring and ordinary, or at least suitably underwhelming, as James Alison explains in his essay “Worship in a Violent World.” This represents and fosters what he calls “the detox of our Nuremberg-ed imagination.”4 The Church’s rituals cannot, and should not have to, compete with the false sacred in cultivating intense fellow-feeling—a state that typically hides a dark side.

Brian Robinette masterfully reframes creatio ex nihilo phenomenologically and genealogically. I have sought more from him on the epistemology of creation belief, and on his panentheistic conception of God at work in the world, along with the ecclesial implications that accompany creation belief.

Brian Robinette’s new book is a rich reflection on the theological topic of creation ex nihilo. Mere appreciation does not make for good conversation, so I will briefly state my admiration for this work, and then move to some questions about its relevance for an area of great interest to me: Buddhist-Christian discussion. 

I can quickly list three important contributions made by Robinette’s treatment of ex nihilo.  First, he offers a rich exposition of the contemplative dimension of this topic, something of significance for Christian practice as well as theology. Second, he draws out its profound  interconnection with the incarnation. And third, in his integration of René Girard’s work into this discussion—the ex nihilo as foundational to the non-rivalrous relation between God and creatures—he braces Girard’s thought against charges that it grants violence an ontological priority. 

In Robinette’s telling, creation ex nihilo is not oriented toward a causal beginning but indicative of an experiential spiritual mode of relation, a relation concentrated and summed up in Christ, whose incarnation most fully illuminates the connection of creature and creator. We may be accustomed to thinking of God becoming human as an improbable outlier event of history whose very definition involves the sharpest possible contradiction between the terms it unites. But Robinette makes clear any serious belief that this event has taken place involves a re-thinking of those terms themselves, a transformed understanding of creation. The New Testament (nowhere more dramatically than the prologue to the Gospel of John) sees Christ as a profound commentary on Genesis, revealing divine-human unity  is “baked in” from the beginning. Robinette explains how ex nihilo, an original not-twoness, expresses that truth. The world and humanity are from the start pregnant with God. The reality of ex nihilo obtains at every point, and can be touched by a receptive spirit at any moment in living contemplative experience.

All this holds tremendous relevance for comparative theology, specifically Buddhist-Christian studies. In this field, non-dualism is a constant theme of discussion, particularly the question of what, if anything, in Christian theology and faith might be thought similar to the famously non-dual nature of Buddhist enlightenment and of reality itself by Buddhist accounts.1 “Emptiness” is, in Buddhist telling, both a deconstructive insight, dispelling our reified projections (the emptiness of “realities”) and a luminous, unconditioned ground realized in liberation from ignorance (the reality of emptiness). There is a critical side to Buddhist non-dualism and a positive side.  Robinette has given us an account of Christian non-dualism sophisticated enough to fruitfully engage this complexity. 

Ex nihilo is a dialectical truth, Robinette says. “We are free for our creatureliness….. This is the difference nothing makes.” And on the other hand, there is zero blocking our connection with God, whose transcendence is not distanced from creatureliness: “This is the difference nothing makes” (62).  I want to explore both sides of his picture, the nature of creatures and the nature of unity with God, and check with Robinette how these might relate to Buddhist-Christian discussion. 

I

On the first side, regarding the emptiness of creatures, the two traditions find ready convergence in the overlap of the critical meaning of nothingness in Christianity with the critical meaning of emptiness (as unsatisfactoriness) in Buddhism. Both expose pretensions to self-sufficient reality, pretensions Buddhists call illusion and Christians call false selves or idolatry.  The kind of self that Buddhists find to be lacking in humans under introspective examination and philosophical argument—a self that is self-caused and permanent—is also lacking by Christian account. No less a voice than Karl Barth agrees: humanity “without God is not; [it] has neither being or existence”2 “Nothingness,” in Christian telling, can be readily understood as a privation, the negative vacuity out of which we sinfully cobble our alternatives and oppositions to God’s path. Evil is a neighbor to nothingness, in the sense that since the gnostic controversies Christians have held that evil is literally groundless, having no ontological purchase either in God’s own being or in something outside or apart from God (e.g. matter itself). Evil’s quality is derivative, a denial or a deformation of what is good in itself. 

So far, so much agreement, long noted in dialogue. However, Christians are used to quickly moving past this agreement. On their own, creatures are empty in a critical, analytic sense, but they are not truly on their own. Christians attribute enduring significance to the person-making process and to persons themselves, not because they have the self-subsistent being Buddhists deny, but because their contingent nature provides for that value through relation. Christians hasten by this “nothing on their own,” as both the avenue of opposition to God and a useful call to humility, hasten on from false and empty selves toward true ones, made in the image of God, preserved by divine power and participation.  It is the deliverance from nothingness we stress. We are less well supplied with positive accounts of this nothingness in its own right.

Robinette has done us the great service of lingering longer here with the ex nihilo, to allow its inner blessing space to breathe. In my recent study of Christ and the bodhisattva, I argue that an understanding of “creaturely no-self” would greatly enhance Christian theology.3 I believe Robinette has made a major step in this direction. We could sum up this side of the dialectic by saying for creatures there is joy in being nothing. Creaturely emptiness is at base neither sin or estrangement, but gift, the nothingness that makes space for freedom and creativity. To turn toward it is not necessarily an act of pride or even self-critique, but can reflect gratitude and grace. Our creaturely no-self, our nothingness-on-our-own, is in this respect a “very present help in times of trouble” as well as a source of mortification and humility. 

What I have I mind here is the positive dimension Buddhist views identify in selflessness, particularly its applied benefit. Surprisingly, Thomas Merton found his own voyage into Buddhism strangely empowered by Karl Barth’s theology precisely in this respect. Rowan Williams summed it up this way: “The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word ‘not absurd’.”4 Merton is deeply moved by Barth’s recognition that “the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God is poised on the divine word, the divine communication over an unfathomable abyss.”5   

 As many who have explored Buddhist meditation practices affirm, much pain can be diminished or even extinguished through the kind of disaggregating observation that reveals the extent of its constitution by our own projections (such as catastrophic thinking) or through “time out” in mindful attention to nothing but momentary experience. A vacation from being or having a self can produce a sense of relief and peace, simple acceptance of our emptiness, where the struggle of maintaining value or being by dint of our own power is simply abandoned. We are nothing in a way God is not: this is the difference nothing makes, according to Robinette, and it is good.        

Since Robinette stresses strongly that ex nihilo is a reality to be experienced contemplatively as well as appreciated cognitively, my questions here are concrete ones. Are we talking of Christian practice that includes the cultivation of this kind of emptiness, of states without any consciousness of God at all, because without consciousness as a self? In Buddhism, though practical benefits of such practice are by no means disparaged (most notably, they are thought to enhance the development of compassion and virtue), they are also valorized as realization of the truth, of the definitive way things are in themselves. Can Robinette say more about what specific kinds of practice he sees associated with his insight here, and whether these lean more toward a practical spirituality (by which I mean suffering relief, relational enhancement) or a mystical one (by which I mean a dwelling in the truth for its own sake). 

II

On the other side of the dialectic, we turn to “the difference nothing makes,” which bears on the nature of the unity between humans and God. In Buddhist-Christian discussion, Buddhist non-dualism often has a subtractive character, remaining when all distinctions are revealed as unreal, while Christian non-dualism has an excessive character, realized when boundaries between selves or between God and creatures are overflowed. Unlike many theologians, and particularly theologians seeking connection with Buddhism, Robinette does not see ex nihilo teaching as part of the problem on the Christian side.6 To make creation ex nihilo the origin of a dualism between God and world, Robinette argues, runs contrary to its internal theological logic. There is nowhere else for creation to be from than God. Ex nihilo in this sense already expresses a kind of non-dualism, one Rowan Williams calls “non-dual non-identity.”7  Otherness is a divine creation, a divine accomplishment, with no foundation other than gift. The primordial form of non-dual non-identity is the Trinity, which while it does not obviously violate the Buddhist strictures on “being” yet does not fully meet Buddhist standards for unconditioned emptiness. The “separation” that is from the beginning of the world (creator/creature) reflects that source, in whom there is no ontological basis for division. 

That creation comes out of nothing means that it has no foundational difference over against the divine. Robinette presses the meaning of ex nihilo on this point, emphasizing that the doctrine insists on a non-dualism before the beginning, that creation instigates non-dual non-identical realities reflective of that prior reality. Things can be made other from God enough to be real and free, but their otherness cannot be enough to separate them from God on the scale of being. The world and God cannot be thought apart from each other even provisionally: God cannot be just another thing in or over against the universe. God’s transcendence is such that God and world cannot be competitive, one excluding the other as an explanation for events or one flourishing only at the expense of the other. In terms of connection with God this means that, having no being of our own to compete for the same space or location, our unity and communion with God are immediate. Despite any brokenness in our relations with God, God is the “not other” to us, since it is entirely to God that we owe something rather than nothing. 

This is no abstract, philosophical argument. It is also a contemplative experience. Prayer and contemplation can find a “letting go” into emptiness, the nothingness of our creaturely existence, where there is nothing to defend, nothing to build up… a state of the sort we discussed on the first side of the dialectic. And prayer and contemplation can relax into a sort of bare divine immanence, where we are upheld through participation in unconditioned, free love. The unity of Buddhist nonduality is of a “never was otherwise” character.8 This unity, emptiness in the ultimate sense, is unconditioned and undifferentiated. Such nothingness has had less positive valence in Christian. Christians in dialogue with Buddhism look to forms of Christian unitive mysticism that suggest the same unconditioned lack of differentiation: a minority report  from apophatic divine darkness to Ekhart’s divine nothingness to Tillich’s God beyond God. But such comparisons always raise the issues raised by those reports within Christian tradition itself. Are these permanent states of undiluted oneness, or moments within a relation, dimensions of a communion that does not go back on created differentiation?   

Christian communion (with God and other creatures) also has a “never been otherwise” character to it, but one that points to the Trinity as its ground, and so to an ultimate with differentiation as integral to its oneness. Some Christian writers have suggested that the persons of the Trinity correspond to different modes of this spiritual unity. One of these writers, Robert Jonas, has said “To understand the true meaning of the Trinity, we must be the Trinity and practice the Persons.”9 This indicates states in which there is no consciousness of contrary otherness from God but still of the differentiation of self in God and of self from self as a mode of oneness. So, on the level of contemplative practice, does Robinette’s analysis require some kind of divergence in Christian experiences from Buddhist ones? These are deep questions, but one way of framing them is to note that in Buddhism both deconstructive nondualism (no self) and liberative nondualism (unconditioned mind) are non-personal. How would Robinette characterize the kinds of Christian spiritual experience on both sides of his dialectic, in regard to this question of their personal qualities? 

I look forward to his reflection on these questions precisely because his exposition of the ex nihilo holds such promise for this Buddhist-Christian dialogue, suggestive and fertile just where our standard theological views are often silent or vague. 

Brian Robinette has written a remarkable book that enriches the Christian understanding of the classic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. This doctrine, if understood as having an apophatic function, challenges certain assumptions that have plagued theological discourse for years. As Robinette writes, “the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo functions as a piece of negative theology, not because it means to be obscure, but because it means to remove any concept, intuition, or principle that might mediate between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ (xii).”

In my response, I focus primarily on how this apophatic understanding of creatio ex nihilo enriches and challenges the meaning of the atoning work of Christ, and I further develop Robinette’s insights for the field of soteriology.  

First, we begin with some idolatry. The first chapter offers a critique of John Caputo’s onto-theological understanding of God. Caputo has argued against the idea that God is strong, powerful, and mighty, and has instead argued for God as a “weak force.” While this may seem like a radical position, Robinette argues that this view does not take the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo nearly as far as it can be taken. In one sense, Caputo is correct to say that God is not “strong” and full of power and might, however, he is wrong to then claim the other side of the oh-so-human binary: weakness. God is neither weak nor strong like humans are, and any conception we have of transcendence that places God over and against humanity is false: “If God is transcendent, then nothing is opposed to him, nothing can limit him nor be compared with him: [God] is ‘wholly other,’ and therefore penetrates the world absolutely” (15). Caputo’s theology turns out not to be so radical at all. Not only does creatio ex nihilo reveal a God that is not against humanity, but it also reveals a God that willingly “enters” into the brokenness of this world, which is marred by false notions of power and hierarchy. 

It is in chapter four where we are offered a compelling account for how the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo impacts our understanding of the atoning work of Christ, or more broadly conceived, soteriology. Using the work of René Girard, Robinette places the revelation of these false forms of power in the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. He writes, “The resurrection of the crucified Jesus reveals by unveiling or unmasking those false forms of order and transcendence that trade upon illusion and fear, and that keep us beholden to destructive patterns of relating to one another” (127).

How does Jesus reveal this to us? Not by the kind of force that operates over and against humanity, but by allowing himself to be overtaken by the false powers that exist and transforming them from within through the Resurrection. The risen Christ does what none would have expected and offers forgiveness to those who crucified him: “No retribution, no retaliatory response, no tit for tat, the crucified-and-risen One is given back to those who expelled him with an utterly gratuitous offer of forgiveness” (148). This offer of forgiveness (the Joy of Being Wrong as James Alison would put it) allows guilt to be made visible for the first time, and thus transformed. 

Given Robinette’s understanding of soteriology as outlined above, it is clear that any atonement theory which states that God’s wrath is placated by the innocent death of Jesus is patently false. This kind of atonement theory takes the form of what we’ve come to call “penal-substitution,” but it can be any theory that argues that God needed or even desired the death of Jesus prior to offering salvation. This highly transactional account of salvation does not reflect the sheer gratuity of the forgiveness of Jesus, and it paints God (almost comically) as a vengeful Father figure that demands innocent blood. Rather than seeing the crucifixion as a result of unjust power structures, the cross is seen as somehow divinely sanctioned and willed by God in order to bring about salvation. 

I believe that Robinette has offered an important framework for dismissing these theories of atonement as steeped in onto-theology. Penal-substitution, and any theory similar to it, clearly paints a picture of a God that is operating within human categories of justice and forgiveness. A penal-substitionary theory of the atonement is a very logical understanding of salvation, but that is precisely its problem. Human beings deserve to be punished for their sin, but God cannot simply forgive them (we need a sense of justice after all). The “solution” is for God to punish Jesus in our place. When salvation is understood through the lens of human categories of justice and fairness, penal-substitution “works.” 

While it may be easy to dismiss this theory, it is important to point out that it is not entirely divorced from Scripture. Robinette is aware of this. While some theologians have opted to simply reject this language altogether, Robinette thinks differently. Highlighting Girard’s own reclaiming of sacrifice later in life, Robinette argues “we can even begin reclaiming the language of sacrifice in accounting for Christ’s death, that is, as ‘the one true sacrifice,’ or ‘the sacrifice to end all sacrifice’” (161). Of course, this reclaiming needs to be done in such a way as to separate it from any atonement theory that “implicates” God in the very process that God liberates us from. Such an atonement theory “leaves us with an ambiguous image of God at best” (158). 

I have always agreed with this sentiment—penal-substitution, or anything that seems like penal-substitution is false and steeped in human categories. This understanding of atonement presents a God that is, as Robinette argues, ambiguous at best. But Robinette has inspired a new (and perhaps much more challenging) question for me. When did ambiguity become a problem for the utterly transcendent God? 

Earlier, Robinette had argued quite persuasively that Caputo’s “weak” God was not radical enough. God’s strength and power are not to be understood as on the same level as human power. This allows us to say, quite emphatically, that God is powerful and strong, but in a particularly transcendent way. Might we say the same thing about God “demanding” or “willing” the death of Jesus? In other words, might there be a way to reclaim the notion of “obedience,” of “demand” of “desire,” much like we would retain and reclaim divine notions of “power” and “strength?” 

Any theologian willing to reclaim the language of sacrifice is opening up the possibility of reclaiming the idea that God wills a violent death (for the sake of liberation) and Jesus willingly accepts this mission. Of course, it is absolutely crucial to have a framework in place before we attempt such a dangerous feat. We must work out our categories, our understandings of the divine “will,” and why we react so negatively when we hear “God willed the death of Jesus,” or “God willed the Cross.” If we dismiss these ideas outright, we are falling into the onto-theological trap that Robinette so deftly freed us from in chapter one. 

Sacrifice is ambiguous because it can imply both passivity (they were sacrificed) and active acceptance (I am sacrificing). Re-claiming the language of sacrifice remains a dangerous task for the reasons that Robinette lays out. God can become yet another, more powerful King who demands vengeance as soon as divine honor is infringed upon. But it does not have to result in that image. Sacrifice pervades every aspect of Christian liturgical life, and precisely because of its ambiguity, it may allow us to examine our own assumptions about who we think God should be. 

I believe that if we are going to reclaim the language of sacrifice for our understanding of atonement, then we must sit with the uncomfortable idea that God “wills” the death of Jesus and Jesus “obeys.” In Luke’s Gospel, it is clear that Jesus did not want to go through with his fate, and yet ends in the prayer: “Not my will, but your will be done.” If we read this passage through the lens of creatio ex nihilo, this prayer does not imply an antagonistic relationship between Jesus and God, but nor does it imply that God did not will Jesus’ death. This may “implicate” God in violence, but we referring to the same transcendent God outlined above. Perhaps a more important question in light of Robinette’s book is: what does it mean for this transcendent God to will the death of his innocent son? 

The issue, in my view, is not that God willed the death of Jesus, but for what purpose. Why would God ever “want” something like this to happen, and why would Jesus ever imagine that his “abba” was asking him to go through with it? If it is to reveal the scapegoat mechanism, and in so doing, transform the fallen world from within by becoming the ultimate scapegoat that removes the brokenness that we cannot heal alone, then why wouldn’t God will that? This does not have to mean that God willed it to placate his own wrath or because he was feeling particularly stingy with grace that day. But it also doesn’t mean that God didn’t will or desire Jesus’ death. In rejecting atonement theories that seem to argue for God’s violence, are we not bringing God down into the depths of onto-theology and simply raising up the other side of the binary (e.g. forgiveness and mercy?).

I see two possible paths from here—the first is to reject altogether what I call the “atonement model paradigm.” Gustaf Aulén, as Robinette points out, was influential in shaping the contemporary discourse on salvation by proposing atonement theories. We now have a way of neatly categorizing and organizing the mystery of salvation based upon the scriptural metaphor used. While helpful in debating the meaning of Jesus’ death, the atonement model paradigm can actually deceive us into thinking that we do understand the entirety of salvation—so much so that we are willing to reject entire theories that don’t fit within our conception of who God is. Perhaps this is where creatio ex nihilo can come into play. What if it can help to dispel this atonement model paradigm entirely? Would that be useful to us? Would it be helpful in trying to sift through metaphors we find so problematic both in scripture and in the tradition, allowing us to sit with them rather than dismiss them? 

The second path has been articulated above. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive because they both rely upon a sort of apophatic soteriology, but this path is far more radical. Just as Robinette claimed that God’s transcendence and strength is much more radical than Caputo’s “weak” force, perhaps atonement theories that retain the language of penalty, substitution, and sacrifice are much more radical when they are understood from a different vantage point. 

Apophatic theology attempts to destroy our very human-like concepts of who God is, what God should be. Why is it when we enter into these discussions on the “atonement,” that we are so ready to dismiss notions of penalty, punishment, hell, wrath, and sometimes sacrifice? I confess that I don’t know where all of this actually gets us. These atonement theories are problematic because they forget the apophatic nature of salvation, but at the same time, outright rejecting the theories we find problematic runs the risk of eliminating those metaphors that invite us to enter more deeply into the mystery of salvation. It runs the risk of reducing salvation to our human preferences and conceptual frameworks—and that is not the difference that nothing makes. 

Brian has gifted us with an extraordinary feat of thinking. For those outside the guild this might seem impossibly abstract. However, for anyone with some appreciation for what this does in terms of enabling meaning to be sensed where none is apparent, of holding seeming opposites in different forms of tension, and of enabling clarity at the furthest outreaches of intellectual possibility, this is truly a gift to be met with gratitude and even, dare I say it, awe. I am very proud, and not a little scared (especially when it comes to the discussion concerning Bulgakov and Rahner, which is way beyond my pay grade), to have been invited to share in a Syndicate response to this book. That I am somewhat on the same page as Brian should come as no surprise, given our shared debt to Girard’s thought, and Brian’s generous mentions of my own writings in part II. However, I hope that I am doing more than beating a shared drum, or tooting a shared trumpet, when I say that I find it particularly hopeful for the future of theology that Brian gives texts that are classical without being defensive, and modern without being dismissive. There is something here that is central to a non-polemical, and thus graced, living of Christianity as Vatican II “settles in.”

What I would like to do in this forum is explore Brian’s central point with a musing which I hope comes close to, or rubs up, against it. This concerns an analogy for creation which is very precisely an analogy for a creation out of nothing.

The death of Christ as analogy of the “nothing” that makes a difference

One of the problems of our word “creation” is that, in ordinary speech the word comes with a whole set of resonances which are to do with “making something.” Whether in the far distant past, contemporaneously, or both. With the result that our discussions are typically about the chunkiness of what is around us, how things came to be. Manifestly discussions privilege our natural assumption that we make things out of pre-existant things—pots out of clay and so on. When it comes to God’s creation we quickly say that in this lies God’s difference to us: that God makes things without there being any pre-existent things or un-things which might be transformed into what we see, know, and inhabit. The word “nothing” doesn’t refer, as Brian points out, to some sort of negative thing about which we can talk, but is more like a negative gesture, a refusal of a word. One made even while we are aware that our very negatives (given that we are “things that are”) are by opposition to something, while there is simply “nothing” contrastive or oppositional in the “nothing” we use in order to hint at the unrivalled and unbounded freedom and power of the Most High.

Scripture uses the potter/clay analogy in a couple of places, but the key analogy in Genesis and second Isaiah is speech: God “says let there be…” the word leads to things. It is the power of a word to lead to something that is the analogy. It would seem to depend on a relationship of power between the one speaking and that which is spoken into being—a king commanding a city to be built, or some such.

Please remember that the point of an analogy in this sphere is that it is held to be pointing to something true, but where the dissimilarity between the image used and what is really true is far greater than any similarity.

However, if we give weight to the key passages in John’s Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews and various of Paul’s epistles where creation is in some way attributed to Christ, and those in the synoptics which tell the same thing in narrative fashion, then we find ourselves being given a new and rather fuller analogy for the act of creation than we might expect. And this is because it develops both the positive relationship between nothing and what is and the power dynamic involved in a way that is strikingly dissimilar to any notion of power that we may have. It fills out the power and the deliberation of the “Word” that “speaks” into being.

I will illustrate this narratively. From Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan until his death on the cross it becomes clear in the references to the Spirit that creation is being talked about. At the baptism the Spirit that had been “hovering over the waters” comes down upon Jesus as he “comes up” from the waters. It does so in the shape of a dove. In Genesis a raven had swept away, or dried up, the waters of the flood by beating its wings, and a dove had been used by Noah to test whether there was dry land, before finally setting off and not coming back. In the baptism the wandering dove finally settles on Jesus.

The “coming up” from the waters is that of the ordination of the Great High Priest (the Son, the Melchizedek figure pointed to in the Psalms which are referenced in the Gospels), and the “opening of the heavens” to him is what would have been expected for the High Priest in the Holy Place in the Temple which symbolized precisely the open heavens prior to creation. But here the opening is happening outside the institutional framework, by the river Jordan. While John the Baptist by his lifestyle, preaching, and choice of place had summarized the prophets and the law, the baptism of Jesus takes us further back, to the beginnings.

Jesus’ life then is the living out of the Son who shows who he is by signs and by teaching and eventually turns to fulfil the rite of atonement, voluntarily and deliberately, in the midst of a concatenation of human violence. Again, this is conducted outside the relevant institutional framework, though entirely framed by language derived from that framework.

Shortly before dying, in the garden, Jesus enacts the new Adam getting right what the old Adam got wrong, and is taken to his trial and execution. On the way to the cross he is stripped of the seamless tunic, referencing the tunic with which the High Priest would have been vested at the feast of the atonement to indicate the Son’s entry into created reality. As Jesus is on the cross, the sun’s light fails and darkness covers the land, so we are back before the first day of Genesis. Then the veil of the temple rips open. Thus is marked the removal of the separation between heavenly reality and the current material reality to which we normally refer as “creation.” Simultaneously Jesus breathes out his Spirit, which takes us back to before the foundation of the world, the hovering Spirit of Genesis 1.

Now however the contentless hovering Spirit has acquired the full content of the reality of Jesus’ human life, lived up to, and including into, his death. And it is this that is so important in the breathing out of the Spirit. Whereas up until now the Holy Place in the Temple was kept absolutely separate from death, now death has been assumed, occupied by Jesus so that what he breathes out is now the Holy Spirit, the Creator Spirit, which has emptied death of its power and will now be given to empower others to live as if death were not, and so become insider participants in finally accomplished creation, sons and daughters in the Son.

Please note that what is offered here is a counter-chronological account of creation, using the texts and reference points of the Hebrew Scripture and Temple tradition, one that seemed comprehensible at the time to authors sufficiently different from each other as the four evangelists, Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 

In this counter-chronological account of creation the whole of Jesus’ life leads up to him performing a content-rich act in dying. In that act of dying he breathes out the Spirit which now has real anthropological content—content at a humanly available level—making what the fullness of creation looks like begin to become intelligible and habitable by us.

Because we are so used to this narrative, I want to ask us to go slow and think a little of the central place of “nothing” in it. For ever since we became human, and able to think about death, there is nothing more nothing-y than death. It is for all of us, very obviously, the ultimate despoliation of everything that is. After it, someone who was there is not there. There is suddenly a jarring hole within a set of relationships that were previously more or less supportive of the deceased, and more or less supported by the deceased. Far from “nothing” being an intellectual abstraction, it is an entirely existential and fully corporal and physical awareness that, absent an entirely invisible “Other” who might maintain us as a living embodied being yet to be imagined, all our power, creativity, imagination, plans and so on come to an abrupt end and the physical elements which sustained them are very quickly transformed into something quite else.

It is in Jesus’ occupying the space of death (“tasting” it as Hebrews says) before us, in our face, that we have the sense God gives to the nothing out of which God creates. And what does this something out of nothing look like? It looks like someone doing something almost incomprehensibly rich for us, ending in that person’s death. Which means that they are before us as absolutely powerless. Someone who has died has no power over you. Even their will can be contested whether by heirs or lawyers. But the dead person has no say. Whatever it was that they wanted to communicate with you before their death is no longer their property, to alter, to interpret, to correct. The “for” you, me, us, is suspended in nothing.

The sort of power by which the Creator brings into being is the same sort of power that a dead person has. The closest human analogy to nothing. Yet the expiring breath manifests the whole divine interpretation of that particular death and the life that led up to it, such that it might indeed move you in a way that is entirely different from any sort of “being moved by a power” of which we are aware. But you have no obligation to be moved by that power. Indeed it is only able to be perceived as a power at all when you remember and understand that someone did that for you. In other words, that there was a love for you in the dead person having occupied that space. And that your access to recognizing and receiving that love passes through that dead person’s imagination possessing you such that you begin to be stretched towards arduous goods that were previously unimaginable to you; and you relax into that dead person’s conviction that you too are able to walk across “nothing” to be able to become like him.

When Paul says “Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God”, he is, I think putting forward the analogy of creation. Jesus displayed as dead before us, with the background story that led to that moment, including the instruction that we remember it as something given, acted out, beforehand, actually is the nearest analogy we have for the power of creation out of nothing. And the wisdom of God is the creative intelligence which led Jesus to occupy that space, knowing that once detoxified for us, and so occupied without fear, it would render intelligible everything that is, by rendering us sharers in the growing intelligibility of what is.

So the final breath of a violently tortured dead man reaches us, if we receive it, the nothing-y-est of nothings. And yet Holy Breath enters into us in the middle of time to become intelligent participants in the bringing into being of the unimaginably ancient network of relationships which long more fully to disclose the power which looks more like “giving yourself away into nothing so that others may live” than anything else.

  Brian Robinette’s The Difference Nothing Makes continues the rich hermeneutical tradition of the fundamental distinction between Creator and creature as noncontrastive and noncompetitive, exemplified by Robert Sokolowski, David Burrell, and Kathryn Tanner. In keeping with his forebears’ parsing of “the distinction,” he maintains that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is central to a thoroughgoing appreciation of the integrally related doctrines of creation, incarnation, redemption through Christ’s death and resurrection, and sanctification or deification in the Spirit. Robinette makes several significant contributions to how we are to understand “the distinction” and its implications, including but not limited to: (1) his engagement with René Girard and James Alison toward a rearticulation of how the creator God saves with the same creative power of gratuitous love, freeing us from the idolatrous powers of competition, violence, and exclusion that continue to plague us in a world fraught with individualism, conflict, inequality, exploitation, and war; (2) his cogent demonstration of how the incarnate and risen Christ reveals that our creator God’s transcendence is one of utter freedom in love, establishing created beings in a noncontrastive relation to the Divine with their full freedom in a union of complete and grateful dependence with the triune life that is their sustenance and destiny; and (3) his prophetic stance toward contemplation (infused with insights from Thomas Merton, William Desmond, Sebastian Moore, Karl Rahner, Sergei Bulgakov, and others) as a universal call to a conversion of mind and heart that emboldens our actions, leading us to fuller communion with all of creation and to consummate union with the triune God. Robinette throws open the door to a spacious, contemplative dwelling place wherein his readers can “rest in” the all-encompassing Love embracing them into being, into truly living, and into wholly accepting their vulnerability and contingency that grounds their communion with other created beings in noncompetitive equality and in the cooperative power of shared love and respect.

   Having walked through the door that Robinette has graciously opened, I remain in the regenerative room of contemplation, that “inner room” into which Jesus summons us where we pray to our God in secret and where our God who sees in secret will “repay us” (Matt 6:6). We are “repaid” in the silent darkness with the resurrection light of new life, the freshness of awe and wonder that does not hem us in with limiting expectations or false presumptions about God, ourselves, others, and the natural world that is our “common home.” The inner room opens out to the whole miraculous universe and ever outward to the very heart of God who dwells within us. As Robinette explains in Chapter 5, turning within and opening outward, we are freed from “the projective tendency of human religiosity,” because we have “returned to zero,” as Desmond would have it (178). Accepting “our being as nothing,” “prompts a receptivity that opens us up to what is beyond our grasp,” granting us a “new porosity to God” (182). Here in this room, the contemplative and the atheist find common ground: liberation from false gods. Though they ultimately traverse this common ground differently, their unity in the purgation of illusions is instructive. The darknesses of uncertainty, of questions without definitive answers, of confusion in the face of suffering and tragedy—these teach us about our vulnerability and our contingency, and they break us open to divine, human, and cosmic mystery. When we are in the “in-between,” we learn to let go of the control we never had in the first place, and we are purified as we transition from desiring control to desiring freedom from grasping and freedom for unbounded love.

   While inhabiting the contemplative space of the “in-between,” I would like to sit awhile upon the common ground I share with all those who—also akin to the atheist—find themselves in-between the “children of faith” they once were and the “seekers of religion’s relevance” they are now. This felt sense of the “in-between” can be quite prevalent among those entering adulthood and also among those who have experienced trauma and pain within a religious context that was not purified of “projective tendencies.” They may have separated themselves from religious community and ritual, finding them to be sources of additional confusion, aridity, exclusion, self-doubt, or suffering. Stepping into their sense of the “in-between,” I am compelled to ask, “How can we understand and share the space of religious ritual such that it becomes a contemplative—apophatic while cataphatic—space of rejuvenation and healing? Imagining my way into this question through the Roman Catholic liturgical and sacramental tradition in which I stand, I foresee ecumenical and interfaith parallels that I will not be able to explore here. I also hope that the preceding question and the following foray into it, might be a fruitful means of continuing to open the gifts bestowed on us by Robinette’s The Difference Nothing Makes.

  Contemplation in the “in-between” sparks imagination of welcome possibilities nurtured by memories of past openings into newness. In this case, the silence leads my receptive mind to remember liturgies forever rooted in the paschal mystery’s revelation of Christ’s powerless power for unconditional love and forgiveness. When I was just entering young adulthood, I had the privilege of worshipping with a community led by a Franciscan pastor who partnered with his pastoral associates to create Sunday liturgies that anticipated the supreme celebration of the Easter Vigil. The church architecture was being renovated to reflect the second Vatican Council’s liturgical renewal, and our pastor conversed with us about the significance of our facing each other around the altar that we might look at each other and thereby meet the gaze of Christ looking back at us. This unassuming Franciscan priest embodied the essence of servant-leadership, imitating Christ’s poverty of spirit as he interpreted the scriptures with attentiveness to our pain and our “dark nights,” revealing that he too struggled, stumbling in the dark, insisting that this is precisely where Christ meets us, bringing us out of darkness and into the light by entering the darkness with us and transforming it from the inside out. I can hear the resonances with Robinette’s insights into “deep incarnation”: “It [the incarnation] reaches into the heart of human darkness [and all creaturely travail]…It ‘descends’ into the hell of creaturely despair and those loveless recesses of human experience (e.g., shame, fear, resentment, abandonment) in order that they [and the depths of cosmic pain] may be brought out into the light of loving acceptance” (237). At the time, though my study of academic theology was just beginning, I intuitively understood I was witnessing something theologically profound in this ecclesia whose members grew closer to each other and to Christ by lovingly accepting their vulnerability in unison with their pastor who met them exactly where they were and beckoned them to traverse the paschal journey together. Every time a Sunday liturgy ended a few minutes early, he would conclude with, “We can add these five minutes to the Easter Vigil.”

   I turn now to my recollections of certain aspects of those beloved Easter Vigils in which the year’s other liturgies were concentrated. The scriptures during the Liturgy of the Word were more enacted than read. From the creation story to the Exodus, to the prophets and beyond, God’s goodness and faithfulness was poured out upon us as multiple parishioners voiced God’s words of love, justice, and forgiveness in multiple and varied ways including: “God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:10). “I will sing to the LORD, for he is gloriously triumphant;

Horse and chariot he has cast into the sea” (Exod 15:1). “The sound of my lover! Here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills” (Song 2:8). “Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come” (Song 2:10). “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back.” (Isa 54:7). These last two biblical verses were spoken in turn by a wife and her husband in our congregation, symbolizing the love between God and God’s beloved. As the story of salvation history unfolded before us, it became clear that though our God did not need us in order to be God, our God made us “to be” out of a limitless love that could not do otherwise than love us into being and redeem us into resurrected life through the Spirit in the Word made Flesh: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).

   This baptism of dying and rising with Christ was profoundly undergone and witnessed to, as each adult catechumen was fully submerged in the waters of an enormous, outdoor pool and lifted out into the welcoming arms of their families. Our pastor then anointed them by letting a stream of oil flow down over their heads in superabundance, representing God’s prodigal love that blesses us without reserve. As the rest of us watched in amazement and delight, we remembered the countless occasions we ritually marked the graces we received at all times—in times of darkness and times of light. We could not have felt more connected to our new siblings in Christ than we did at that moment. Now all aglow in their white garments, they joined us around the outer edges of the church and we danced with them while we sang “The Lord of the Dance”: “I danced in the morning when the world was begun, and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun. I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth. In Bethlehem I had my birth. Dance then, wherever you may be; I am the Lord of the dance, said He.” This Lord of the cosmic dance led us to the eucharistic table to receive him as the Lord of self-sacrificial love who undid the cycle of violence in which we participated and through which we were victimized. We mindfully shared this meal that had come from the earth and that was now transformed into the body of the Divine Lover, so that we might be transfigured into his image to bring his peace to our community and to the world.

   The preceding act of anamnetic storytelling witnesses to the possibility of contemplative liturgy that encourages its participants to come exactly as they are—with all their doubts, their fears, their questions, and their inability to pray as they might want or as they used to pray—to be surprised by unconditional, triune love. In a liturgical setting such as this, we tangibly sense the Spirit teaching us to pray in original ways that address the needs we bring for our communal healing; we see ourselves dying and rising within God’s enveloping love as we rest in the arms of the members of Christ’s body who surround us with the compassion they also received from the wounded and Risen One in the Eucharist. Feeling the liturgy’s transformational effects so intensely, can be a rare or intermittent experience for many reasons; it requires a complex dynamic of interrelated elements such as pastoral inspiration, individual investment, and cooperative, communal participation, all following the Spirit’s lead. We know that God’s grace recreates us even when we do not acutely sense the metamorphosis occurring during or after our liturgical celebrations. However, as Robinette’s appeal for us to return to our spiritual senses in order to meet and respond to the world anew suggests, how we sense our reality—both physically and spiritually—matters immensely. How might these senses be regenerated both liturgically and sacramentally? I offer this question together with the previous one—how can we understand and share the space of religious ritual such that it becomes a contemplative space of rejuvenation and healing?—to further our discernment of “the difference nothing makes.”

When we talk of God’s creating, we do not mean an “intervention into a previous state of affairs,” a messing-with or a striving against “rival forces” which displaces one state by another (68). We mean a wholly pacific act for which there is no over-against, no exteriority, whatever. God’s creating is not “an agent exercising power over others, bending them to the divine will,” but instead the act which enables the entire situation of finite becoming in all its aspects (18, quoting Rowan Williams). But this means, as William Placher puts it, that “there is not a single point where God is absent or inactive or only partly active or restricted in action” (38–9). God’s creating is not one element or force within a created situation, jostling against others either to come to expression or be frustrated. God’s creating does not strive against any element of any situation of finite becoming, because it is the unrestricted act activating or enabling that finite situation in toto. And because it is the Unrestricted—wholly necessary, wholly free actus purus, with no over-against at all, totally without extrinsic determination, with nothing at all to strive against—nothing in any finite situation represents any recalcitrant exteriority “with which God must cope” (38). There are no extra-divine conditions determining God’s creating; instead, all the conditions of finite becoming are there at all by being immediately grounded in God’s wholly unconditioned act. There are no resistant “raw materials” which God can “only do so much with” (38). Creating ex nihilo means creating out of, or presupposing, or extrinsically determined by, absolutely no conditions at all—none, that is, besides God’s own radiant, unrestricted Life. So God is not responsive to anything in creating, but wholly spontaneous. Whatever conditions determine the finite order of becoming and created freedom, they are not primitive vis-à-vis God; they are at all because God in wholly uncoerced fashion, with no conditions conditioning God’s act other than God’s own being, originates them from nothing.

Nothing can be excepted here, neither the painfulness or vulnerabilities of embodied becoming, nor created freedom. As Augustine absolutely correctly saw (though he drew some monstrous conclusions about the massa damnata), created freedom is not something God contends with, or must win over from some resistance. God moves us not by appealing to or opposing our freedom as a rival force God must strive against, but precisely by moving our freedom: by changing the “weight” of our loves, changing our affect, causing us to grow up. God is not responsive to or in competition with (=extrinsically determined by) created freedom, any more than God is responsive to the laws of physics. God spontaneously and non-competitively originates created freedom, in addition to spontaneously originating all the components of the entire context of created freedom’s unfolding. To say that God must “cope with” or may possibly be “frustrated by” created freedom is to lapse into a mythological view of God as the demiurge—a Very Big, Very Strong “chap,” who must jostle against others to bring its will to expression—rather than the absolutely unrestricted source of all reality out of nothing, the non-rivalrous One who “moves us without displacing us.”1 Nothing in God’s moving our freedom attenuates that freedom, because God’s moving us is not another finite will or cause in competition with or limiting ours. God’s action on us is a “wholly other kind of reality.”2 As Karl Rahner saw, God’s non-competitive transcendence means that the relation between the integrity and actuality of the creature’s free action is in a “direct”—not an “inverse”—proportion to the intensity of God’s action.3 We are more ourselves the more God acts, because it is God who is causing us to be at all, rather than be nothing at all. “‘If God is transcendent, then nothing is opposed to him, nothing can limit him nor be compared with him: [God] is “wholly other,” and therefore penetrates the world absolutely. Deus interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.’…[T]he world cannot oppose God because God is not an oppositional reality, that is, not a being among beings, not a power among powers” (15, quoting Henri de Lubac). Our freely acting is enabled in all its aspects by God’s originating both it and all its conditions out of nothing at every moment. God is creating us as free, not competing with us. Our freedom is still just one secondary cause among many, the conditioned self-determining of a conditioned reality under myriad conditions. Yes, we are responsible secondary causes; in the order of secondary causality, our willing participation in the good of our being and the good of the world is constitutive of those goods. But prime causality is the non-oppositional God atemporally originating that whole world order of secondary causes and goods out of nothing. Our freedom and that prime causality just aren’t on the same level of reality.

What all this means is that God’s creating a world order out of nothing is God’s originating absolutely all aspects of that world order—all its conditions, all its events. In originating a world order out of nothing, God is not responsive to any created events in that world order, including creatures’ free acts, whatever we end up meaning by “free” and “act.” God disposes the world order absolutely, at the non-competitive, highest-order level of prime causality. This should not reawaken the image of God as patriarchal tyrant. The very reason God disposes all reality absolutely is that God is the non-oppositional source of all out of nothing, not a Big Force bending little wills to its Will. But precisely because God is the non-oppositional source of all out of nothing, nothing about this world order surprises or resists God in any ultimate fashion. If any finite conditions or events are at all, they are because God originates them in wholly spontaneous fashion, pacifically and non-competitively enabling them from moment to moment. This finite order of becoming, with all its agonies and ecstasies, is what God wholly spontaneously brings forth as a finite expression of God’s Love and Life. Its being the way it is—in absolutely all details—is not God’s compromise with forces or conditions God cannot control, God “doing the best God can” with some recalcitrant exteriority. How this world order will unfold is not a “roll of the dice” or an open adventure for God. God knows and non-competitively causes exactly what will happen, with all created events and conditions. Denying this is just denying creatio ex nihilo—which is just to be speaking of popular atheism’s Big Chap demiurge, rather than the real God.

 As Robinette points out, then, creatio ex nihilo heightens theodicy questions, rather than resolving them (38–40). The only way to get God off the hook for suffering and evil in creation is to make God the demiurge rather than the unconditioned source of absolutely all reality out of nothing. (One says instead that God is “doing God’s best” against resistant free wills, or against prior conditions God cannot master and does not originate, etc.) None of this, though, means that suffering and evil are ontological ultimates in Christian faith. The shape of God’s action and presence in Jesus discloses for us that evil, sin, injustice, and suffering are ontological “penultimates”—parasitic defects on creation. They are not the face of the universe God is ultimately bringing forth from nothing. They have an excruciating force in the present age, but only as the death we are to leave behind on the seashore (Exod 14:30–31), as the evil which God’s creating action (proleptically in Jesus and in other glimpses of the humanum) swallows up in life eschatologically. The Christian theologian’s response to theodicy questions, then, cannot be to downplay God’s ultimate responsibility for the evils of the present age, because that only makes God the befuddled demiurge, doing his best with recalcitrant materials. It can only be to affirm that we will only know the meaning of that ultimate responsibility when we have been completely created, in the eschaton. It’s in Jesus’ resurrection that we glimpse, proleptically, what God is “up to” in originating ex nihilo (=uncoerced) an order of finite becoming pervaded by suffering and sin; it’s there that we grasp in anticipation where this is all going, what the end of creation’s story is, the glorified cosmos deified in the Son, anointed by the Spirit’s delight, the radiance of the Father’s unquenchable joy.

Because God is not a temporal reality, and because God originates the total order of created events and principles (not just some), the object of God’s atemporal act of creating is the total world order in its eschatological consummation. That eschatological creation is God’s “delight,” the creation God unqualifiedly wills from all eternity. We don’t know definitively what God is creating until that creation arrives. And that means that under our highly ambiguous present circumstances, our affirmation that “everything God created was very good” (Gen 1:31) is an expression of eschatological hope, made in faith in the eschatological action of God that will show it to have been good, somehow, that absolutely everything in this world order should be. If God creates ex nihilo, God’s unconditioned and uncoerced willing, God’s primal Love, is saying “Yes” to every created situation being in every moment, situations of suffering, of vanity, greed, abuse, joy, loss, laughter, horror—everything. And God’s “Yes” is, again, not responsive, but is the “Yes” which is originating these created situations ex nihilo. What Jesus’s life unambiguously reveals is that God is saying “Yes” to the negativities of the present age not absolutely or for their own sake, but only as that which God’s creating overcomes eschatologically, “making them as though they had not happened” (39; quoting Schillebeeckx), “heal[ing] and transform[ing] our weaknesses by giving them an eschatological future” (249). The final act of God’s love is the one which so radically and definitively heals and transforms that every creature can affirm with the God who originates them, Yes—it is good that I am; it is good that I be—just as I am, with my concrete history. Whatever happened, it was worth it because of the goodness of my being, because it brought me about; and I am “very good” (Gen 1:31). A concrete human person is an embodied, relational history; if my history were different, God would be bringing another human person to be. Who I will be is the terminus of a narrative, an unfolding development of personality and relationships. In that light, being able to affirm “It was all worth it” is the same as affirming “I was worth it.” The irreproducible “I” who came to be through “all that” was worth it in the eyes of God’s love.4 Christian eschatological faith is the conviction, in hope, that every human person—and somehow, every creature in cosmic evolution’s trackless paths—will have been worth it, that “everything God made was very good.” 

None of this may devolve into the breezy attitude that suffering and injustice are somehow “not our problem,” permissible, and so on. That is an extreme distortion of what we see in Jesus, and in the witness of those who take responsibility for God’s reign in the world. To the contrary, it is only in those who, with Jesus, “indwell the suffering of others as agents of transformative justice and reconciliation,” that the eschatological shape of God’s creating action begins to shine through the veil (40). Even though God’s creating agency is causing all created situations to be real without interruption, that agency also has a distinct trajectory in the present age, and a human life in the shape of Jesus’ participates in revealing that trajectory, making it more conspicuous.

But this trajectory manifests in a “strange” agency. God’s power is power in weakness (2 Cor 12:19), the “non-discriminating cause of all out of nothing” which does not need to push away or master in order to invincibly draw creation to its radiant end (163–64; quoting Sebastian Moore). Jesus’s dying and rising transforms mimetic patterns (and so the human persons constituted by those patterns) yet without reciprocally opposing them. It is a creative agency that unbinds and recreates utterly freely and gratuitously, yet without being one force jostling among others—a human agency which, like God’s, manages to have no over-against. We begin to glimpse in Jesus an agency creating the entire universe in all its aspects, the non-discriminating cause of all out of nothing, one not aligned merely with these elements of creation over-against those, but instead embracing all events and created aspects without interruption and without displacing them in any way. We cannot identify this strange agency with any thing or aspect in particular. Instead, it begins to dawn on us in places of weakness and lowness, “in the vulnerability of a silenced, dead victim” (123)—or, in an evolutionary Christology, in the anonymous death and “uselessness” of innumerable organisms (238–53). The Love creating from nothing is the Love embracing-without-displacing even all that, the Love which draws creation to its glorious end without needing to oppose anything, not even death and wastage. The “distinct trajectory” of God’s creating action is, in fact, mysteriously indistinct: the agency which transforms and disposes by somehow bearing up and allowing everything—non-competitively disposing all reality precisely by being this kenotic, all-embracing agency, causing to be by letting be. It is distinguished by its strange indistinction from all things and events.5 There is an apparent paradox here, but the itinerary Brian traces shows how it may all come together in a single life. The creature who patiently lets be in the all-embracing and non-reciprocal way of Jesus is the one who manifests the distinct shape of God’s creating agency working in all things.

Likewise in a contemplative register—to give short shrift to what is among this book’s most luminous contributions. What Robinette limns is the contemplative habit of “relaxing into” the vast, silent awareness which peaceably allows all my experience to arise, good, bad, and ugly. To “relax ever more deeply into this silent awareness” is, in fact, to begin to relate to myself the way the non-discriminating cause of all out of nothing relates to me, peaceably giving all of me to be without discrimination or competitive reciprocity—saying “Yes” to all of me (203). I can “relax into” this Cause, and “experience being created” out of nothing (42). I can begin to let be God’s letting-me-be. I can begin to say “yes” with God’s atemporal and unrestricted “Yes,” that this very created situation, in this moment,6 should be—that its to be is primally good. We are “yes and no” towards ourselves and our lives, “but in Him it is always ‘Yes’” (2 Cor 2:19). All there is at the root of me—all there is to me as a created self, once I let drop all the anxious strategies for securing my identity—is this primal “Yes.” And if I can rest in the primal “Yes” that bears me without interruption or discrimination, then “all the birds of the air” have a place in the branches of my open resting (Matt 13:32), and I become, by fits and starts, more and more a created image of the creating Love which “bears all things” (1 Cor 13:7).