Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Creatio ex Nihilo, Terra Nullius, and the Erasure of Presence

 Creatio ex Nihilo, Terra Nullius, and the Erasure of Presence W H I T N E Y A . B A U M A N The total structure of man’s being as a creature made out of nothing roots his life beyond himself in the transcendent source of his existence, in God his Creator and preserver. —langdon gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of Creation Religion is a here-and-now conquering of nihilism and a re-creation of our world out of nothing by continually generating new metaphors and new interpretations. —don cupitt, Creation Out of Nothing The Indian tribes in the new world were regarded as mere temporary occupants of the soil, and the absolute rights of property and dominion were held to belong to the European nation by which any particular portion of the country was first discovered . . . as if it had been found without inhabitants. —u.s. supreme court, Martin v. Waddell (1842), in Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide Justified by a transcendent and omnipotent Creator ex nihilo, imperial Christianity has been re-creating the world—as if ex nihilo—for the past 1500 years. The theology of an all-powerful Creator and Preserver has arguably served as the justification for a theoanthropology in which humans mimic the power of the Creator God through what Don Cupitt calls the ‘‘conquering of nihil’’ and the ‘‘re-creation of’’ the world. 354 兩 e c os p i ri t Through this re-creation, an erasure of agency and identity takes place—as if the many spaces recreated by colonial powers had been, indeed, ‘‘found without inhabitants.’’1 In this chapter, I argue that creatio ex nihilo can and did provide a justification for the colonial concept of individual property articulated by John Locke, along with the corollary colonial, national legal claim of terra nullius, or Territorium Res Nullius. The latter terminology suggests that there is ‘‘no prior presence’’ in conquered or ‘‘discovered’’ territories and they therefore can be owned and ‘‘made useful’’ through colonization. Is there an epistemological and ethical source—flowing from the erasure, through the doctrine of ex nihilo, of the pre-existent chaos in Genesis and that book’s context within and alongside other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories—for the erasure of nature’s agency in the Lockean concept of property, and the erasure of human and nonhuman agency in the concept of terra nullius? FOUNDATIONS FOR A C HRISTIAN LOGIC OF DOMINATION In Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller argues that theologies of creatio ex nihilo might support precisely such a colonial epistemology and colonial anthropology as I seek to excavate here.2 Keller’s work brings process metaphysics and postcolonial theory into dialogue. From process thought, she brings a critique of the classical understanding of God’s aseity and corresponding omnipotence, which Charles Hartshorne referred to as ‘‘the taint of divine tyranny which disfigured classical theology.’’3 Included in this critique of ‘‘divine tyranny,’’ or the classical understanding of God’s omnipotence, is a critique of ex nihilo. Process theologians have critiqued the notion of God’s power as power-over and offered in place a concept of power-with, or power-as-lure. This critique of power flowing from the metaphysic of process has included a serious challenge to creatio ex nihilo.4 From postcolonial thought, Keller brings an understanding of the power of discourse, the textual nature of all human understandings of reality, and an appreciation for the edges or interstices of chaos and order, of self and other. She brings this interstitial postcolonial and process perspective together in her understanding of the God-world relationship.5 Keller argues that the interpretation of creation as ex nihilo arises out of tehomophobia—her term for the fear of the deep, of the chaos called tehom in Genesis, the chaos that exists already when God begins to create. w h it n e y a . b au m a n 兩 355 This fear or anxiety of otherness, wildness, chaos, and difference is what doctrines of ultimate origins and final ends seek to alleviate.6 In doing so, however, these ultimate origins and ends only ‘‘background’’ the contextual , fragmented nature of all narratives and their knowledge claims, and thus succeed in transforming this fear of difference into a universal justi...