The Shared Making of Signs

In this chapter we take this discussion in Chapter 6 further by focusing on the shared creation of powerful gestures, ceremonies, and rituals in the ‘immanent frame’. Embodied individuals and communities find ritual or liturgy to be a connection between the material and finite with the transcendent. Is the secular space capable of being ritualized? The chapter will focus mainly on the idea of rituality occurring in an immanent frame or habitus (Pierre Bourdieu). It will engage with a range of sources and argue that there is a broad liturgical potential opened up by an anthropology rooted in ritual. As well as the focus on the doctrine of creation, the chapter explores the phenomenology of ritual in the secular space and asks if it might constitute a positive step towards the joint creation of meaning and practice in the public sphere.

Creation, Action, and Sabbath

What is the kind of action that a creational theology might endorse? The chapter sets up a contrast between strongly activist liberative views and a more sabbatical mood. Consideration is given to the work of Paul Knitter who has engaged extensively with the theme of creation for interfaith dialogue. However, contra Knitter, it is suggested that the quotidian is the arena par excellence for the practical sense because it happens to be the most common aspects of our lives. However, what kinds of praxis come into view? It is proposed that human work and activity (the vita activa) might be a form of creational soteriology. Finally, the chapter asks: What is the mood of a creational theology of religions? Our basic claim is that the underlying attitude generated by a turn to creation, and the ground for relations between creatures, is rest or Sabbath.

Creation and the Transcategorial Phenomenal

This chapter considers the concept of ineffability. Has this concept been monopolized by pluralists who use it to provide an object that is sufficiently mystical and unfathomable to accommodate religious differences? Does the ineffable do any work in their systems other than provide a formal category of ultimacy? The chapter seeks to investigate this by evaluating the use of ineffability, or the transcategorial, by advocates of the pluralist view of religions. In the second part, the chapter seeks to bring the analytic tradition into dialogue with the phenomenological tradition and particularly with the work of Jean-Luc Marion. Marion highlights the given-ness or excess of experiences that do not rely on metaphysical grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative account of ‘the Real’ as an experience of excess (the ‘transcategorial phenomenal’) that takes place in the midst of the event of interreligious encounter. ‘The Real’ from the ground-up.

Creational Politics

In this chapter we will seek to consider ‘creational politics’. In dialogue with the work of Frank Ankersmit, the chapter will review the aesthetic politics of representation, how this seems to eschew strong ethical identities and how it occupies a liminal territory of its own. As part of this discussion, the chapter also considers the idea of ‘comparative classic individual’ that may act as an interfaith exemplar through the work of David Tracy and David Clairmont. Finally, the chapter will consider the important creational theme of ‘the gift’ and consider the ways in which the logic of superabundance challenges how different communities might relate in their contested spaces.

Towards a Creational Theology of Religions

The final chapter will draw on the elements from the foregoing chapters in order to outline a possible creational theology of religions. Underpinning the constructive enterprise will be the doctrine that has pervaded the book’s key reflections: creatio ex nihilo. The chapter will attempt to redirect into the context of creation and createdness some of the common philosophical and theological themes in debates on religious plurality. This is an exercise in philosophical theology rather than pure philosophy. The Sabbath is at the heart of a creational interfaith spirituality. Wisdom and blessing is cross-cultural and is the profound aspect that gives creation its ‘depth’ and vivifies the immanent. The creation, through its gifted creativity, wisdom, and worship, exceeds human and religious boundaries.

Logos and Sophia

Here we seek to compare the approaches to other faiths through the lenses of Logos and Sophia. This chapter will propose that a creational theology calls for a contextual sense of order rather than the universal type. Attention is given to the work of Sergius Bulgakov and David Kelsey. A contrast is made between Sophia and the rational scientific logos (which is not identical to the Logos). It is argued that everyday wisdom emerges across different cultures and traditions. Kelsey seeks to separate creation from other theological themes such as redemption and consummation. That is, a theology of creation is established less on the Genesis texts and more on the Wisdom tradition. In so doing, a new territory opens up, one that provides a space for discourse between religions based on quotidian interests rather than soteriological ones.

The Sky Is Not the Limit

In this chapter, we engage with the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We seek to build on Bonhoeffer’s comment that ‘God’s “beyond” is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life.’ The chapter addresses the early faultlines in Bonhoeffer’s thought, especially the themes of Mündigkeit, Sicut Deus, penultimacy, ‘natural life’ and creaturehood, evidenced in his Ethics as well as Creation and Fall. The affirmation of this-worldliness and religionless Christianity finds a more profound rendition in the doctrine of creation and creaturehood. The invitation to the religious other is a ‘call to creaturehood’ and to live etsi deus non daretur.

Introduction

This introduction outlines the agenda for the book. It is an agenda that seeks to bring the doctrine of creation and the theology of religions into dialogue and in so doing it comes at things from a different direction than other works. The doctrine of creation generates a new arena – one that lowers our gaze to more quotidian, finite and limited concerns. The book contains an extensive exploration of the doctrine of creation and asks how it might intervene distinctively into interfaith relations and produce a new conceptual and practical topography. In this introduction, we consider thetrajectories taken by scholars towards understanding religious pluralism and the nature of revelation. Has the ‘god of the philosophers’ dominated the debate? Is the doctrine of creation a theological home for more localized comparative theologies? It is argued that closer attention to themes of creation, phenomenology, and embodiment is required to shed a new light on the debate about interfaith relations. The second half of the introduction contains a synopsis of the book as a whole.

Creation, Sacrament, and Liturgy

In this chapter we seek to extend the themes in the previous chapters in a more practical direction by considering liturgy, ritual, and embodiment in the immanent sphere. If we consider the world as a sacrament, and ‘form-making’ to be an ontological feature of the imago dei, then is the stage set for the shared making of rituals and symbols? That is, can a ritualized immanent sphere play host to interreligious meetings, and how does a complex ‘gothic’ space open up new territory? Can liturgy by improvised in the midst of particular moments and events? The chapter considers the advantages of rich liturgies for providing new opportunities for engagement.

The Creaturely View

What is the nature of the creaturely view? This chapter critiques some of the contemporary literature concerning the theology of creation primarily to discern what kind of vehicle it might be for interreligious dialogue. It will give some attention to the different perspectives on creation: the emanationist, pantheist, and feminist views, and so on. However, the chapter settles on a non-contrastive ex nihilo understanding or what has been called ‘the Christian distinction’. This view makes it clear that finite causal world is emphatically not a model for understanding the relationship between God and the world. The difference is of an entirely different order. The chapter argues that this ‘non-contrastive’ relationship allows one to speak of the freedom of God as well as the gift of meaning to the creation. It thus sets the stage for wisdom to speak ‘for itself’ in the immanent.