God Being Nothing

Toward a Theogony

Hart Ray L.

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine".God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question": How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God's self-revelation in history is ongoing, when the active manifestation of God is still occurring? Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. The book's ultimate implication is that Being and Nonbeing mutually participate in an ongoing process of divine coming-to-birth and dying that implicates all things, existent and nonexistent, temporal and eternal. God's continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create "ex nihilo".

About the Author

Ray L. Hart is professor emeritus of religion and theology at Boston University. His books include Unfinished Man and the Imagination and Religious and Theological Studies in American Higher Education.

Reviews

"'God Being Nothing' reveals Hart's creative mind at work fashioning an alternative to confessional theologies and pallid forms of theological liberalism – his intelligence is obvious, his mastery of the complex material even more so. Bringing us both back to a moment in theology before the deconstructive turn and forward with an anchoring realism in language, God Being Nothing is a much anticipated and eminently readable book" – Cyril O'Regan, University of Notre Dame

"A deeply original, meticulously written, and monumentally structured work. Hart, already a name to be reckoned with, is reviving theological language for metatheological use, and in doing so, he steps into an important niche that many will be happy to see filled" – Jack Miles, author of "God: A Biography"

"In this brilliant speculative work, Hart not only provides a new method for philosophical theology but a new and daring set of readings of the major issues of contemporary Christian theology and philosophy of religion, from God to humankind. Inspired by his principal speculative mentors, Jakob Bohme and Friedrich Schelling, Hart develops the daring explorations of his earlier epoch-making work, Unfinished Man and the Imagination, in a manner that challenges every serious philosopher and theologian: a major work that restores speculative thought to its rightful place in contemporary Christian theology" – David Tracy, University of Chicago Divinity School

Back to the list of books