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82 five Transcendent Immanence and Evolutionary Creation James P. Mackey The aim of this piece is to bring together a critical account of the Christian doctrine of divine creation with an equally critical account of some relatable elements of the best of postmodernist thought, and then to see, to put the matter perhaps too bluntly, if prospects of collaboration emerge or if we are still in the more familiar war-torn territory of recent decades. Now the reader will notice that this brief account of the intended content of this essay does not contain any mention of the term ‘‘transcendence,’’ even though that term defines the topic of this volume and occurs also in the title of this essay. This is because, as David Wood’s contribution to this volume amply illustrates (chap. 9, below), all known deployment of that term and its derivatives could be adequately accounted for in a godless universe; and, further, because many alltoo -common usages of the terms ‘‘transcendence’’ and ‘‘the transcendent’’ as straightforward ciphers for divinity are examples of the sin of onto-philosophy, as that latter term is to be defined and argued against later. Transcendence then will be talked about, as the theme of the volume requires, but only in such a critical manner, and in the context of discussing from the point of view of a particular, indeed foundational piece of Christian theology—namely, the Transcendent Immanence and Evolutionary Creation 83 Christian theology of creation, and the relationship of religion and postmodernism . In sum, the task undertaken by this piece would be all the less compromised if the term ‘‘transcendence’’ were not used at all. So then, to the Christian theology of creation. Creation The Christian doctrine of creation, as commonly presented, is bedeviled by two related and equally questionable assumptions. The first is that this act of divine creation consists (or rather consisted) in a one-off act, or one-off series of acts of naked power, imagined as acts of unconditional and irresistible command ; from which there resulted what a contemporary scientific cosmologist would call a space-time singularity, that is to say, a state or stage of the universe brought about by processes different from those that govern its continuous coming-into-being as experienced in all other stages; a space-time singularity from which in turn the universe we now know derived.∞ The second is that this doctrine of divine creation can be caught properly and accurately only in a highly abstract conceptual formulation of the theme—creatio ex nihilo. The standard unpacking of the connotation of that abstract conceptual formulation of the phrase yielded little, if anything at all, in addition to the following two negatives: (1) that the world was not created out of parts of the divine being or substance itself, that is to say, out of the divine ousia; and (2) that it was not created out of any material that could be thought to have coexisted with, or even preexisted the divine act of creation. Despite the almost entirely negative yield of this abstract conceptual formulation, those mythic formulations of belief in the divine creation of the universe so freely available in the age of Genesis were commonly refused consideration, on the grounds that they represented nothing more than illusory and unedifying imaginings from the wayward childhood of the race. The creation stories in the opening chapters of Genesis were then loudly proclaimed not to be myth, and their obvious similarities to the creation myths of surrounding civilizations in the ancient Near East were explained (away) as the clever inclusion of elements, symbols and themes of this ambient mythology precisely in order to counteract the false impressions and bad examples inevitably conveyed in their own context, by including these elements now in the context of the serene omnipotence of a divine creator who brought all things into being, each in its own place and in all its pristine goodness, without struggle or compromise. If that second assumption above, concerning the adequacy of the abstract conceptual formula for divine creation and the inadequacy of mythic formulations is considered first, then it does not take a great deal of critical and literarycritical acumen to see how eminently challengeable it is. The case against the assumption can be made in both general and particular terms. In general terms it can be maintained that imagination is the prime heuristic ‘‘faculty’’ of the human mind, and everything from the image to the metaphor, through...

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