The Theologian as Wounded Innocent

We often learn as much about a person by how they die as by how they live. Indeed, how one approaches one’s own death is often the most accurate reflection of one’s attitude toward life. This was certainly true of Alejandro García-Rivera’s courageous last months. Those privileged to spend even a few minutes with Alex during those days were inspired by his witness to the wondrous, extravagant gift that is our creaturely existence. In the midst of what could only have been a harrowing physical, emotional, and spiritual struggle, Alex never ceased to affirm life, whether by inquiring about the well-being of his students, planning future scholarly projects, welcoming dozens of visitors to his home, or tending the idyllic garden that graces the entrance to that home.

It is no coincidence that Alex’s last book, his last testament, is titled, The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology (2009). This is truly, I think, a masterful work that breaks much new ground in a number of areas, particularly in its call for the articulation and development of a thorough-going theological cosmology. In order to appreciate the theological and spiritual richness of this work, however, I think it must be read in the context of Alex’s entire oeuvre, as both a culmination of his entire scholarly project and, at the same time, a groundbreaking new direction for that project. Today, we can only speculate wistfully about how this undertaking, the development of a theological cosmology, might have evolved in the future. It is now left to those of us inspired by his work to attempt, in our own small ways, to take up the challenge he laid before us.

To that end, I would like to offer some reflections on the book, The Garden of God, but do so in relation to Alex’s somewhat earlier work, A Wounded Innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art (2003). I want to postulate that it is precisely this latter eponymous concept—so strange-sounding at first glance—that makes possible and generates a theological cosmology. More specifically, it is the Christian’s own (Alex’s own) identity and life as a “wounded innocent” that breaks open and reveals this earthly “veil of tears” as indeed “the garden of God.” It is no coincidence that Alex locates the origins of his book, The Garden of God, not in some personal experience of beauty, but in his horrifying realization, as a young physicist working for Boeing, that he was unwittingly helping to manufacture nuclear cruise missiles:

I would be helping bring hell to earth. . . . Mystical visions are supposed to be moments of great ecstasy. What does one do with a mystical vision of hell?¹

The Garden of God was born from a “mystical vision of hell,” a physicist’s vision of a nuclear conflagration. That’s the definition of a wounded innocence.

It is the honest confrontation with creatureliness, contingency, and mortality that liberates us to worship the God of life, the Creator of the garden we are invited to help tend. It is only then that we become once again, even if only at the end of our lives, the little children to whom the Reign of God, the Garden of God, belongs. Alex embraced and radiated the hard-won simplicity of the wounded innocent.

As he intimates in his book, The Garden of God, such a wounded innocence is already represented in the Bible in the figure of Job. For this reason, García-Rivera argues in that work that any doctrine of creation ought to be grounded not only in Genesis but in Job. The Book of Job sets forth a hermeneutic for interpreting both Creation and the human person. We can only understand and, indeed, justify both Creation and humanity—we can only really talk about the goodness of Creation—when we do so from within what García-Rivera calls “the web of evil.”² It is in the confrontation with this web of evil that, paradoxically and unexpectedly, the authentic goodness and beauty of Creation are revealed, not as ours...