Incarnate Earth: Deep Incarnation and the Face of Christ [1 ed.] 9781003287346, 9781032249414, 9781032262482

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Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

INCARNATE EARTH DEEP INCARNATION AND THE FACE OF CHRIST Matthew Eaton

Incarnate Earth

Incarnate Earth reimagines the doctrine of Incarnation by extending the unity between Creator and creation beyond Jesus to the entire world. In dialogue with contemporary theologies of deep incarnation and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the author argues that the face of Christ is encountered in the cruciform demand for justice embodied in the creaturely finitude and vulnerability that grounds ethics. Central to this vision is a recognition that the religious role-functions at the heart of Jesus’ life—the revelation of God and the redemption of the world—are performed throughout the physical world, irreducible to humanity or one heroic representative of the species. Thus, the human encounters the divine Christ in and as the face of any vulnerable thing—animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise—not as a transcendent being mediated through humanity. The radical nature of this reimagination necessitates renewed discussions of ecological and animal ethics, calling for compassionate care for all vulnerable bodies insofar as this is possible. It will be of interest to scholars of Christian theology and the philosophy of religion, particularly those focused on ecotheology, religious naturalism, and environmental ethics. Matthew Eaton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology at King’s College in Pennsylvania, USA.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high-quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for con­ temporary society. The Fathers on the Bible Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu The Theological Imperative to Authenticity Christy M. Capper The Political Theology of Pope Francis Understanding the Latin American Pope Ole Jakob Løland Transhumanism, Ethics and the Therapeutic Revolution Agents of Change Stephen Goundrey-Smith Fittingness and Environmental Ethics Philosophical, Theological and Applied Perspectives Edited by Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel Misusing Scripture What are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible? Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/religion/series/RCRITREL

Incarnate Earth Deep Incarnation and the Face of Christ

Matthew Eaton

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Matthew Eaton The right of Matthew Eaton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-24941-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-26248-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28734-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For my teachers, especially Fred, Gayle, and Dennis

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

1

Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

1

2

Deep Incarnation

27

3

God, the Face, and Incarnation

57

4

Deep Incarnation and Redemption

77

5

Deep Incarnation and Revelation

108

6

Incarnate Earth

139

Bibliography Index

184 198

Acknowledgments

On the road to completing this book, I was fortunate to have encountered a few wonderful dialogue partners and friends along the way. I am especially grateful to Tim Harvie for his enduring encouragement along with his recognition of life’s aporias and absurdities, which I find ultimately more useful than any academic commentary. Special thanks are also due to Dennis O’Hara and Mark Wallace for years of support, mentorship, and friendship—they have my infinite gratitude and affection. David Clough and Celia-Deanne Drummond have also consistently offered me advice and encouragement over the years and, perhaps unknowingly, provided much-needed guidance in my early academic career. Likewise, I am thankful for many others who have shaped my thought and encouraged me in one way or another while this book came to fruition—the “Animals and Religion” group at the American Academy of Religion; Trevor Bechtel, Aurica Jax, Tyler Tully, and Tim Middleton; my Toronto cohort including Nick Olkovich, Chris Zeichman, and the “three stooges,” Darren, Mike, and Jerry; and finally the theology department at King’s College, where I have found a home with Janice, Joel, Dan, Michael, Russ, and Bruce. Lastly, I recognize the divine Niels Henrick Gregersen, who has earned my sincerest thanks for his inspiration and encouragement. I will always cherish his willingness to engage me as a graduate student by sending me heaps of PDFs and some unpublished manuscripts and our one face-to-face meeting at a conference in Cologne, Germany, where he proved to be a hilarious and enjoyable human being in addition to a first-rate scholar. I look forward to more of the same in the future. On a personal note, there are many others who did not really help with the book but made life possible and worth living while I wrote it; you too have my love and thanks: Jackie, Fargo, Maeve, Maurice, my parents, Andrew “the scholar of the first sin,” Mark, Andy, and Gerard.

1

Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

Some time ago, I lost the ability and desire to clearly differentiate the divinity of Jesus from the vulnerable face of things. The Son of God, who redeems brokenness and reveals the infinite within the Christian tradition, has since undergone perpetual incarnate transmutation in my thought, polymorphing here and there as the countless creaturely faces who express the cruciform cry for justice. As such, while the Son remains human, it is impossible for me to think incarnate divinity as anything other than a ubiquitous, multi-form, and multi-unitary expression inseparable from and inherent to all things—elemental, vegetal, animal, eco-systemic, and cosmic. This book wrestles with this possibility and explores a Christological model in which divine incarnation is ubiquitous, and Christ expresses not simply in the face of Jesus, but the face of things themselves. The ideas developed throughout this book originate from the experiential overflow of certain relationships that I have had with the more-than-human word. These relations have blurred the line between the sacred and the profane, the divine and banal, and require that I bear witness to their expression. Only in the wake of these affective encounters, which reverberate throughout time and make thinking possible, can I make sense of them through dialogue with philosophical and theological systems. Concerning such systems, I have found deep incarnation Christology to be the most useful and meaningful, especially when brought into contact with a posthumanist reading of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics and philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, these frameworks only make sense in the wake of certain sensitive, affective encounters with things. As such, it seems fitting to begin a book that bears witness to divine expression in the face of things with a brief autobiographical reflection on the deep, visceral roots of my theology, which becomes a crucial part of the philosophical method I develop in subsequent chapters.1 This allows me to introduce the main ideas and issues explored throughout this work in the way a standard introductory chapter might, while acknowledging the experiential, encounter model at the heart of the book and the primary relation that initially blurred the line between Christ and creation. DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-1

2 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

Early Encounters While I had been baptized into the Roman Catholic church as an infant in northern New York state, there was little religious experience to speak of in my early life. After baptism, I was neither catechized nor confirmed and there was no life within the church to shape my religious perspective. I would, however, formally enter the Roman Catholic church in my 30s, while a graduate student in Toronto, Canada after many years of considering myself an anabaptist Christian. My views toward and understanding of religion was initially shaped more by the music I enjoyed than anything else. Music would stitch together the principal peer community of my teenage years and deeply influence the intellectual and ethical horizon I would carry into the future. Grunge and alternative rock was the catalyst for feeling and recognizing the affective and political power of music—the sight of Eddie Vedder writing “Pro Choice” in black sharpie on his arm during Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance of “Porch” for MTV Unplugged left an indelible mark on my twelve-year-old mind.2 Yet, it would be my later encounter in the mid-90s with punk rock music and it’s often intensely political subculture, and unabashed views toward religion, that would add a definitive shape to my ideals, ethics, and somewhat ironically, my views toward and commitment to religion. By the mid-90s punk had developed and become popular enough to make its way to smaller towns across the United States, and by 1995 the sounds of the mostly underground and DIY scenes of New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles had spread to smaller cities like Watertown NY. Punk music, as with any cultural horizon, cannot be easily reduced to a specific set of traits or ideals that clearly define it. There are, of course, significant exceptions to the way I perceived and continue to understand punk as a musical genre and a revolutionary social community that often functions as a religious phenomenon.3 Nevertheless, I was deeply shaped by a certain socio-political persuasion that is common, even if it is not absolute, within punk music.4 Michael Iafrate puts it better than I could: A descendent of a variety of countercultural movements, punk rock developed almost simultaneously in Britain and in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a set of movements in response to increasing corporate consumerism and the social conservatism of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. Punk is known for its ethos of rebellion which was expressed in the music’s lyrics, loud and abrasive sounds, and shocking clothing styles and imagery, all of which were denounced by clergy, politicians, and parents alike, much like previous incarnations of rock music. Punk rock communities provided safe spaces for marginalized youth who felt that they did not fit the mold of the socially conservative values of society and of right-wing Christianity. But beyond the familiar punk rock icon of the rebellious

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outcast, it is punk rock’s DIY ethic that is widely recognized as the heart of the movement.5 Without essentializing any of these features, punk’s overwhelming orientation toward justice and liberation, often working to unmask the violence perpetrated by a state against its vulnerable population, became central to my adolescent horizon. As such, as idealized as such an account may be, punk was for me a baptism within an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and an anti-war social movement expressed through music and in the revolutionary communities that organized their scenes around this ethos. More than anything, it was the ethically and politically charged lyrics that shaped my thought and began my understanding of religion as springing from affective, ethical encounters with the face of things. I give one example to demonstrate how punk was the catalyst for a life-long interest in religion and the possibility of finding the divine incarnate amidst the more-than-human. It was the influence of Bad Religion, a band emerging from the early 1980s Los Angeles punk scene who would spark my initial interest in both religion and ethics. Bad Religion was, like many punk bands, deeply critical of classical religious traditions. Part of the punk ethos in general we could say is a rejection of any system of rigid dogmatic thought that demands absolute sovereignty and allegiance, and religion, fairly or not, is often first in line to receive this critique. Classical religion, however, was not what was expressly meant by the implied critique of “bad religion”; a bad religion could be any system of thought coopted by those in power aimed at dominating others or any sovereign power that demands allegiance without question.6 Bad Religion, furthermore, took a deeply political and ethical approach to their music and explored a plurality of socially engaging ideas in their songwriting and it was this that sparked a life-long interest in religion, power, and ethics. Their song writing often focused on the perils of capitalism, war and other forms of state sponsored violence, the use of misuse of science and technology, systemic racism, and what would influence me most going forward, ecological responsibility and the moral status of the more-than-human world. Consider, for example, the lyrics to the song “Watch it Die.”7 I was born on planet earth The rotating ball where man comes first It’s been around for a long, long time But now it’s time to watch it die I saw a man on my big blue screen He ruled the world economy He said the rich would never concede But someday soon, he’ll be put to sleep I’ve seen the life of the forest green And adaptations of the deep blue seas

4 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters And who knows who is the fittest They will all soon be put to rest On a plunging flight And we’re sitting in the pilot’s seat In the midst of life People on a dark horizon praying Somebody will save their lives I was born on planet earth At a drastic time full of plastic mirth And everyday I’ve seen increasing signs And you would too if you’d opened your eyes You had a chance, you did not try So now it’s time to watch it die. This and other songs like it were my early primers in ethics, religion, and environmental responsibility. I did not care much for academic study at this point in my life, but I recall pouring over liner notes and lyrics that accompanied my CD’s and holding onto the progressive and revolutionary ideas found in so much of the punk movement. In spite of the critical approach to and rejection of religion in many of the music scenes that drew me in, I grew increasingly interested in how religion and social issues intersected. This interest led to my first real involvement with what most would be comfortable calling religion. I began attending a rather odd church that was confessionally Mennonite while also deeply charismatic—something I can only describe as a mix of Pentecostalism and Anabaptism, which I would never again encounter in any of my engagements with anabaptism. This relationship was, however, short lived as I was soon off to college where I would get further acquainted with the Christian tradition. College was a deep dive into Christianity, even if it was a turbulent adventure. After a brief stint in film studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I transferred a small liberal arts College in Mishawaka Indiana, Bethel College (now Bethel University). My uninitiated eighteenyear-old brain thought at the time, “Christianity is Christianity, and one Christian college is as good as any other, right?” While the school was evangelical in its Christianity, its confessional stance was rooted in the anabaptist tradition, which would later become crucial to my own theological evolution. As such, while there was a preponderance of conservative values and theological positions that I would soon aggressively reject, I found voices within the faculty that did not fit the evangelical mold and fostered a rigorous and critical academic approach to religion and theology. One professors in particular stood out—Fred Long. Professor Long was my introduction to rigorous theological scholarship. Long demanded a scholarly rigor in the classroom that was a little shocking for many students and I grew fascinated with the idea that biblical and theological studies could

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be pursued as a deeply intellectual, scholarly exploration separate from the restrictions of confessional dogma. A defining moment in college was the day he arrived in class with stack of books for us to choose from for a book review project. As I looked through them he pointed out a dissertation on the rhetorical structure of 1 Corinthians and commented: “this one would be really hard but you do good work, you should do that one.” It was the first time a professor had directly and confidently suggested I had strong academic skills, which until then I had not really cared about. His brief comment would set the trajectory for the rest of my academic career. The wonder generated by a thoughtful, scholarly approach to the Christian tradition would get me into trouble with other professors as I developed an aggressive and outspoken distaste for certain nationalist, anti-science, and patriarchal perspectives common among evangelicals—I distinctly remember being chastised by a disappointed instructor for writing a major senior seminar paper on Paul and gender in which I used and warmly embraced a feminist approach to the biblical texts. Thus, I left college with two key insights: the study of the Christianity should be scholarly and there was the possibility of a radically progressive socio-political orientation within the tradition that I had not fully tapped. With Donald Crosby at the end of his college studies, I could say that “My days of unreflective credulity were coming to an end.”8 After college, I spent some time teaching at a middle school and working with youth in South Bend, Indiana with a church deeply devoted to economic and racial justice. Eventually, I decided to pursue graduate studies in theology. My plan was—and my apologies to those at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary for my naïve thought—to get some classes at the local Mennonite seminary and then transfer “somewhere better.” After a semester that plan was scrapped. The education I received was scholarly and rigorous, perfectly preparing me for further graduate work, but what stood out was the radical approach to justice I discovered among these Anabaptist scholars. For three years, I studied peace theology and dove into the explored the relationships between Christianity, empire, and nationalism; was introduced to post-colonial and liberation theologies and read classic works such as Gustavo Gutierrez’ A Theology of Liberation and James Cone’s God of the Oppressed9; explored feminist and eco-feminist philosophy with Gayle Gerber-Koontz, who like Fred Long, manifested the ideals I had envisioned for what a scholar and professor could be. The approach to theology at AMBS was deeply interested in listening to and learning from the experiences of those outside of ourselves and focused on theology rooted in a life lived in relation to socio-political power structures than one revealed from a divine source beyond the world. The Mennonite ethos was strikingly similar to the punk ethos that had formed my moral horizon years prior. What could easily be dismissed as a teenage rebellious streak was now solidified as a serious post-colonial framework that was deeply suspicious of the way sovereign power functions through domination. Rather than ground theology in a

6 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters traditional sovereign authority in the likes of ecclesial power or a God beyond the world, theology began to take shape as a bearing witness to the voices of the marginalized as an authentic and ultimate source of religious revelation and redemption. Insofar as I had been told early in my seminary experience that I had little to no pastoral skills—a liberating and insightful truth my advisor was quick to share—I was encouraged to consider where and what I might like to study after AMBS. I had written a thesis on sixteenth-century Anabaptist soteriology, but my deepest curiosities lied elsewhere. I had contemplated religious pluralism as I had developed a fascination with the possibility of a plurality of divine expressions that took on incommensurable shapes, but a course in eco-theology proved too overwhelming to resist. The reasons for this were obviously plural, but what stands above everything else was a concrete connection I had made with a certain non-human creature. For three years, I had been studying liberationist and post-colonial theologies that condemned domination and violence and began to consider the voices of the marginalized as the divine ground of authentic religion. It dawned on me during an ecotheology class, late in my program, that all my studies outside of the classroom had been done in the presence of a little tabby cat I had adopted year earlier and had become incredibly close to. Fargo was a constant fixture in my study space, napping either on my desk or my lap whenever I worked. I wondered why, in all of our discussions of violence and non-violence, had the more-than-human been so silent? Or rather, why had it not been listened to, contemplated, or imagined? Even when ecology was discussed, the focus remained on larger systemic issues that appeared to me, while obviously important, to betray an anthropocentric focus. I wondered whether the voice of the other animal, the individual creature, could become the basis of morality and theology when marginalized and dominated by anthropogenic violence. Such a thought was possible because of the revelation that Fargo, this little creature of unfathomable significance, who constantly sat with me while I contemplated non-violence.10 Importantly for this narrative is that in line with my growing interest in pluralism and contemplating the myriad ways, we might conceive of divine expression, I began to wonder about the possibility that the non-human and the divine might overlap in some way. Afterall, many of the religious impulses I had once drawn from sacred texts seemed to radiate from the creature itself. It was not simply a divine speaking through the creature, it was an expression that appeared to be ontically entangled, or incarnate, within the flesh itself—this was the heart of the anabaptist, liberationist, post-colonial theology that shaped me at AMBS. Fargo, I realized, was become divinized and I wondered if the whole world might also be divine in some sense. By the end of seminary, I was thus determined to explore the more-than-human world and whether non-human creatures might be a source of divine expression and ethics that refused to fit inside an anthropocentric lens.

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I thus began to doubt classical theistic formulations of God—agential, transcendent, immutable, maximally great, and omnibenevolent conceptions of divine personhood—which I now saw as too reflective of humanity, and to consider alternative models of divinity: process, panentheist, pantheist, and atheistic models. I could feel the pull that someone like Rudolf Otto11 or Gordan Kaufman12 must have felt when they began to doubt traditional theism and transition to some sort of non-theistic understanding of God. Initially, it was in fact Kaufman, a Mennonite whose work was frequently discussed at AMBS, who sparked my own early attempts to creatively re-imagine of divine ontology along non-theistic and nonanthropocentric lines.13 “I contend,” Kaufman writes, “that such a humanlike God—however comprehensible and meaningful it may have been in past generations—is for many, including myself, simply no longer intelligible.”14 I wanted to explore a non-anthropocentric vision of God as Kaufman did, without abandoning the radical socio-political vision I had found within the tradition of anabaptist peace theology. Resolving to combine the two, I sought further graduate studies and was fortunate enough to enter a PhD program at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, Canada, where I aimed to re-imagine divine ontology apart from anthropocentrism and in dialogue with an ethic supportive of more-thanhuman voices. After developing a foundation in ecologically minded theology in the spirit of Thomas Berry and other Catholic thinkers, who complimented my Anabaptist education strikingly well, as well as the disciplines of eco and animal theologies broadly conceived, I somehow caught wind of mid-twentieth-century continental philosophy. This was the lens through which I decided to pursue theology. It was a line in the working notes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s final book that defined my perspective and what I hoped to wrestle with in my work. Unable to fulfill his vision by the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless suggests in The Visible and Invisible that we “can no longer think according to this cleavage: God, [humanity], creatures.”15 The necessity of the flesh to have any experience, to feel and know anything at all, required, I thought, a deeper role for materiality within theology to the point of admitting an ontic overlap between categories that are kept separate in the Western theological and philosophical traditions: mind/matter, spirit/flesh, human/animal, creator/creation. Experiencing the divine is inseparable from the divine performance of the flesh. If we could know anything of divinity, it must express in and as flesh. Looking beyond Merleau-Ponty, whose ethics is not as obvious as his metaphysics, I read Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. With these two thinkers, I found the possibility of a synthesis between ethics and ontology that would allow me to speak of encounters with the divine as inseparable from the vulnerable cry of alterity. Here was a way of thinking that allowed a radical re-imagination of divine ontology grounded in the ethical event itself—ethics could become first theology and the ontic makeup of divinity itself, at least in some

8 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters degree.16 This, without reducing religion to ethics, would become the whole content of my Christology—Christ would proceed from the original event of ethics, be incarnate in and as the event and the body that cried for justice. In this pursuit, I was amazingly fortunate to have a supervisor, Dennis O’Hara, who allowed me to explore this line of thinking, ensuring a rigor of thought with room for a deep creativity that could take the risk of landing outside of a neat, orthodox theological box. The Christian tradition is open to an ontic overlap between creator and creation. Confessionally, however, it restricts the fullness of such an overlap to the life and being of Jesus of Nazareth, insists on an ontic distinction between creator and creation, and thus falls short of the pantheistic vision I develop in this book. I knew, however, that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, following in the footsteps of Irenaeus, Gregory Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, and Nicolas of Cusa, took radical liberties in re-imagining and extending the incarnation of Christ. Teilhard’s “Mass on the World,” one of the most influential texts in guiding my thought, understands divine incarnation as ubiquitous throughout the world even if Jesus is still the pinnacle of the creator/creation overlap: “Through your own incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate.”17 The essence of this idea would be taken up nearly a century later, concentrated in a Christology we now call “deep incarnation,” which this book explores in detail. The idea that the doctrine of incarnation might radically revise how the Christian tradition understands the ontology of the cosmos as well as the ethical responsibilities of humanity toward the more-than-human is among the most promising directions in modern theology. Such a re-sacralization of the world holds real potential for Christianity to develop a significant voice and strategy for dealing with a plurality of problems facing contemporary people, including anthropogenic climate change; the desertification of land and the functional decline of crucial ecosystems such as tropical rain forest and marine environments; the loss of biodiversity and even mass species extinction; the rise of ecological refugees as human and other animals experience loss of habitat; and the unparalleled cruelty toward animals taking place within modern industrialization that process all sorts of bodies for human consumption. Yet, there was something highly unsatisfying to me in Teilhard’s understanding of the doctrine of incarnation as well as virtually all contemporary theologies of deep incarnation. The same would be true if we had time to trace the ancient and medieval roots of the panentheistic tendencies of Irenaeus, Gregory Nazianzus, Maximus, and Nicolas. In the ongoing attempt to decenter the human from theology, I could find few theologies of deep incantation or examples in contemporary ecological and animal theologies that satisfyingly overcome the anthropocentric impulse that haunts the Christian tradition.18 The human unequivocally retains the top spot within the hierarchy of being and value in deep incarnational theologies. Likewise, God in classical, Christian theism is nearly always identified

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in relation to the possession of the most prized characteristics of humanity, which to no one’s surprise supports an anthropocentric hierarchy and protects the human’s metaphysical sovereignty in the cosmos. The human remains the image of God and God thus appears a bit too suspiciously to exist as the alter ego of the human. There is, of course, ample room for the more-than-human in deep incarnational theologies, but such is qualitatively less than the divine human in the hierarchy of being and value. This idea was and remains, in my thinking, incoherent.19 Theologically, it undermines the idea of divine infinity—the idea that God is absolutely other than myself and my (or any) species, incapable of being pinned down within a set of character traits that could identify divinity in any reductionist or essentialist sense. Infinity demands that there is always more than I can understand and thus the need for radical ontic openness. Ethically, it undermines a sense of humility that eschews egoism and is, I would argue, necessary for morality. The whole system of being and significance seems rigged from the start to ensure that the human and its divine alter ego maintains a metaphysical sovereignty over all else. Any assertion of ontic superiority or ethical sovereignty that blatantly exalts those claiming power feels a bit suspicious, like a farse or even a joke. Xenophanes, I decided, recognized the joke and countered with his own: Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men [sic.] do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.20 The problem, for Xenophanes, does not rest with the idea of divinity necessarily, but with a species normative metaphysic that encloses the identity of such. In a similar mindset, I dedicated my doctoral work to exploring the precise manner in which contemporary ecologically minded theologies fell prey to anthropocentrism and to attempt, insofar as is possible, to contemplate an experience of divinity as otherwise than human.21 Of course, the Christian tradition will firmly deny that its conception of God is simply a mirror image of the human ego—the human is the image of God, not vice versa. But this idea seemed more and more untenable to me as I moved through my studies. My experience neatly overlaps with what Donald Crosby describes in his own theological evolution: “I gradually began to suspect that Ludwig Feuerbach was right after all, and that the idea of God is the projection onto the heavens of the image of humanity.”22 Or, at least the classical notion of God as a transcendent agential, humanlike being whose intentionality creates and interacts with a world ontically other than itself. I thought rather than abandoning the idea of God as a hopeless anthropomorthic projection of the self, it would be better to try to think otherwise and re-imagine what was meant when we referred to the divine, or at least the divine Christ.

10 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters Rather than purely going the way of Paul Tillich and exploring the idea of God as existentially encountered as “being-itself” or the “ground of being,”23 I followed those like Levinas, Buber, and Merleau-Ponty who found a more particular expression of divinity incarnate as flesh. Such divinity erupts from certain religious performances inherent to matter itself rather, which is not a passive conduit for an other-worldly or more-thanworldly person. Levinas and Buber found divinity in and as the face of the creature and helped me see that my divinization of Fargo might become a Christological paradigm for the world itself. What became the driving impetus for such a Christology was the idea of religious performance—it was the manner in which a creature—Jesus, Forgo, or whoever, performed the Christ’s divinity. Fargo, like Jesus, redeemed in his call to ethics and revealed an infinity outside of myself that became the incarnation of the divine in a Christological sense. Only a God who was metaphysically and essentially human would necessarily restrict their incarnational possibilities to humanity. Thus, I was eventually able to profess a faith that upheld to the cruciform divinity of Jesus as the iconic focal point of my tradition and an object of religious devotion, while insisting that this divinity was part of a multi-form and multi-unitary expression of God, a cruciform embodiment incarnate throughout Earth in the face of things. I affirm Jesus’ divinity, his redemptive and revelatory power; I simply can no longer tell the difference between the divine Christ expressing in the face of Jesus and that expressed in the face of any vulnerable creature who demands justice and performs the identical role Jesus performed in his own community. The face of things, I concluded, is the divine Christ. God is not reduced to Christ, as I explain in subsequent chapters, but the face of Christ was now firmly incarnate in potentially any creature.

Christology and Religious Naturalism As I re-imagine Christology in this and the following chapters, I envision the doctrine of Incarnation as a religious articulation of human experiences with the face of things, which I understand as essentially any creaturely vulnerability that solicits compassionate care or justice. Such is, I think, ubiquitous in creatures and irreducible to any specific form, including forms linked explicitly and exclusively to humans or human-like beings. The inclusion of the face of Jesus into a deeper creaturely phenomenon wherein the face of things, in their multi-form and multi-unitary expressions, is the fullness of Christ is not an abandoning of the Christian tradition but a naturalization of it. As explained in the brief autobiography above, classical theism—a belief including the idea that God and the world are not identical even if the world emerges within divine being—has lost its explanatory power in my thinking and for many others who have no interest in abandoning religion, but simply naturalize the phenomenon. In my own experience, this mostly stems from what I see as an inextricable anthropocentrism tied to Christian theism,

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which substitutes human normativity for a divine infinity that ought to transcend reduction to any one species. Beyond this, I have no interest here in going into any detail concerning the viability of theism. For one, I am not confident this question can be answered adequately to begin with and second, I spend much effort addressing the problem of theistic anthropocentrism in subsequent chapters as I critically engage deep incarnation Christology as a promising model for thinking Christology apart from human normativity, even if it ultimately succumbs to anthropocentrism.24 In what remains in the chapter I simply wish to describe the route I take to understand and construct a Christology throughout the book, a paradigm that I believe fits in within what other scholars now describe as a form of religious naturalism.25 Religious naturalism understands religion as a fully material phenomenon that emerges within the confines of cosmic and biological evolution within (at least) human culture. There is nothing “supernatural” about religion or its source in a religious naturalist perspective and the sacred, object of religious devotion is identical with the world itself not anything other than the world.26 Instead, the feelings and concepts invoked by religious and spiritual traditions that give ultimate meaning to human existence are recognized to be emergent and meaningful within a fully physical context. Religion thus retains its significance in human experience without reference to an ontological source that transcends the world. Essentially, religious naturalism is a post-Enlightenment, but spiritually potent, worldview that enables one to respond—religiously, ethically, and theologically—to the perplexity, splendor, and power of this world. That is, religious naturalism recognizes not only the metaphysical ultimacy of nature but also the religious ultimacy of nature.27 Or, as the title of a monograph by Loyal Rue puts it, Nature is Enough—i.e., the world itself is the origin and object of religious feelings, ideas, morality, institutions, and aesthetics.28 Charley Hardwick, who professes an explicitly Christian religious naturalism, notes at least four principles of naturalism crucial for a reimagination of religion. These are: (1) that only the world of nature is real; (2) that nature is necessary in the sense of requiring no sufficient reason beyond itself to account either for its origin or ontological ground; (3) that nature as a whole may be understood without appeal to any kind of intelligence or purposive agency; and (4) that all causes are natural causes so that every natural event is itself a product of other natural events.29 While Hardwick notes two additional two dynamics in sometimes implicit in naturalism, he is drawing on the work of Rem Edwards here, namely “that natural science is the only sound method for establishing knowledge,

12 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters and (6) that value is based solely in the interests and projects of human beings,” he rightly rejects these as necessary additions to any definition of religious naturalism.30 There are obvious and serious implications for such a view concerning classical notions of theism as well as other theistic notions such as process and panentheisms.31 Thus, the understanding of divinity and its cruciform incarnations that I construct in this book is neither supernatural nor theistic insofar as these understand divinity as either separate from or non-identical with the world. With Harwick’s Christian naturalism, when I speak of the divine I do not mean “(1) that God is personal, (2) that some form of cosmic teleology is metaphysically true, and (3) that there is a cosmically comprehensible conservation of value.”32 I have nothing to add concerning items two and three. I am doubtful but ultimately agnostic concerning any purposeful teleology that guides the world as well as the possibility of an individual ego surviving in perpetuity beyond death.33 Before moving on, however, I should add a qualification concerning the personhood of God. While I do not understand God as a personal, agential being who transcends the world intentionally willing this or that, this does not mean that divine personhood does not emerge within cosmic and biological evolution. While this idea is developed over the course of several chapters, I am not afraid of the idea of a divine personhood though do not reduce the idea of God to such. I do see divinity as possibly, though not irreducibly, personal and capable of expressing in agential forms that manifest as an intentional will. The cruciform version of such is the expression of the will that resists threats to its vulnerability, a notion Levinas describes as the face. Thus, while my theology is non-theistic, there are qualifications to my rejection of the notion of a personal God. Insofar as notions of a personal God carries the baggage of biological and humanist analogies turned ontological, I look for new models of divinity. Nevertheless, if given adequate time and space to express, I would fully support divine personhood in a sense that exists within and emerges from a more-than-personal ground that contains the possibility of an intentional will.34 I should note that while I am completely comfortable using “God-language” freely speak of the divine in my theology to refer to the object of religious devotion, this is not universally accepted among religious naturalists. Religious naturalism is not a uniform phenomenon beholden to orthodox dogmas beyond the general ideas expressed above, and many prefer not to adopt speech that hearkens back to theistic frameworks. Jerome Stone notes that On the topic of God … religious naturalists tend to fall into four groups: (1) those who think of God as the totality of the universe considered religiously, (2) those who conceive of God as the creative process within the universe, (3) those who think of God as the sum of human ideals, and (4) those who do not speak of God yet still can be called religious.35

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The idea of God and the language of divinity are not necessary, but they are too integral to my own religious tradition to be done away with because there is no other language that sufficiently and effectively communicates what I have in mind. I am drawing on the expressions of creatures and other natural phenomenon that perform the same role as God and Christ do in the Christian tradition, redeeming life and revealing the infinite, and these concepts are best able to communicate the ideas I am developing and the role I argue the physical world can play in the Christian religious imagination. The power of such revelatory and redemptive performance is analogous enough with the divine Christ to warrant the use of God language to understand the ontic nature of creatures. Describing such performances as divine effectively communicates the religious power found in and as the world. Following Gordan Kaufman and many other naturalists, who refers to a naturalized, non-anthropocentric object in his God talk, I suggest that divinity continues to function as an effective symbol communicating the idea of an “an ultimate point of reference” which becomes the object of religious devotion.36 It would not be the only or even a necessary symbol, but it functions well despite the baggage that comes along with it, having been “so soiled, so mutilated,” for many.37 I would be sympathetic to anyone arguing that such sweeping statements about God talk in the West no longer finds merit. Yet, insofar as I write within the Christian tradition, I am unable and unwilling to abandon a language that communicates so clearly the ideas I have in mind. The idea of God central to the Christian tradition, while problematic, is embedded too deep in my psyche and tradition to simply abandon; it helps me make sense of my world, expressing the idea of an object, infinitely mysterious and powerful, that is worthy of devotion.38 “We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”39 Since my main concern in this book is to re-imagine the divine Christ, and not divinity more broadly conceived, I would further qualify my God talk. There is a sense in which I would speak of a broader divine essence, the unified ground of existence or a creative force extended throughout the universe, though I would not restrict divinity to such totalities. I find each of these frameworks reductive in their approach to the idea and infinity of God, whom I understand as multi-form and multi-unitary, existing in the abstract, amorphous ground of existence, but also in and as the individual existents that populate the universe. The infinite is not complete simply in and as creativity or in the mereological totality of things and would extend beyond human value; it must include the particular assemblages that differentiate from the abstract and the whole and take definite shape. My principal resource for this is, of course, Levinas, but I should admit here a growing admiration for the thought of the sixteenth-century philosophical theologian Giordano Bruno, for who the divine was not simply incarnate as a cosmic maximum but also in the face of the creaturely minimum.40 This position gets

14 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters theologically tricky as it relies on multiple religious models including both monistic pantheism and the plurality of polytheism—this is explored in depth in Chapter 6. Thus, Christ is understood in this book as divine, as God and a god, because such effectively communicates the role the cruciform face plays in the Christian tradition.

A Constructive Task Going forward, this book offers a revisionist Christology as a form of religious naturalism. This work of constructive re-imagination draws on the tradition but clearly re-envisions Christology for the Christian who seeks to avoid anthropocentric visions of God and for whom classical theism has lost its explanatory and ontological power. Once more, Gordan Kaufman serves as a methodological inspiration for my work. In Jesus and Creativity, Kaufman sums up the constructive task of theology: In my opinion, however, Christian theology should no longer be thought of as essentially a hermeneutical task, that is, as largely interpretation of traditional material. Although one cannot do theology properly without awareness and understanding of the main Christian traditions, its central task is essentially constructive: to put together a Christian world-picture (or some important features of that picture) appropriate, in a specific context, for orienting human life, reflection, and devotion. We cannot carry out this task, of course, without paying serious attention to the traditions that have informed Christian faith in the past. However, in the course of history, from the time of Jesus up to the present, great changes in and many variations of Christian faith and life have appeared, as Christians have had to adapt themselves repeatedly to new unforeseen circumstances. So our theological task today is to construct a Christian world-picture that can orient faith and life appropriately and effectively in today’s rapidly changing modern/postmodern world.41 Even if I do not draw on Kaufman’s specific framework extensively in the book—“God as serendipitous creativity”—he grounds the philosophical framework characterizing my approach to Christology. Thus, following the spirit of Kaufman, I dramatically re-imagine the Christological myth and revamped morality emerging from re-envisioning the cruciform object of my religious devotion. I do not wish to reduce religion to these two elements. In addition to myths and morals, there are aesthetic, institutional, and ritual manifestations within religion. I do, however, see myth and morality as the core that informs other religious expressions, and so I focus on the Christian narrative concerning divine ontology erupting from ethics throughout this book. Myth and the root metaphors that comprise them make up, according to Loyal Rue, the “integrative core” of any religious tradition.42 All other religious dynamics that serve as ancillary strategies to ensure the tradition’s survival—the

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intellectual, institutional, aesthetic, ritual, and experiential—hinge on this core in his philosophy of religion. “Cultures,” Rue insists, “are narrative entities. At the core of every tradition there is a story, a myth, a narrative integration of ideas about reality and value.”43 Even if this framework is not ideally suited to all religions, as some maintain, I believe it works successfully enough with the Christian tradition to proceed with this framework in mind.44 Thus, a religious “myth integrates cosmological and moral elements,”45 which help believers negotiate “how things ultimately are in the cosmos,” and “which things ultimately matter.”46 The core of religion then is a mythic, metaphorical understanding of the ontic essence of the world and the consequent ethic emerging from such a world. In this way, according to Rue, religion erupts as evolutionary strategies within human cultures that serve to assist the human species survive and ensure that it fulfills its emergent goals.47 Thus, a religion’s myth along with its root metaphors unite facts and values, associating ontic interpretations of the way things are with ethical understandings of what matters in in living a meaningful life as both individuals and collective societies. Religious myths, however, are not static or always easily accessible. Myths and their root metaphors endure through an evolutionary process wherein their interpretation develops along with wider socio-political and cultural movements, especially as cultures experience difference in approaching life’s questions and as new problems arise that people must cope with and overcome. “Myths excite the imagination by leaving much to the imagination. Thus we see that mythos (story) is typically augments by logos (rational discourse) in the normal development of religious traditions.”48 While the meaning and importance of myth is typically safeguarded by an authoritative body of one or another sort, eventually in the face of cultural shifts or intellectual disputes, it is inevitable that the dogmatic interpretations of one age or tradition do not hold forever. In such an evolutionary context, religion develops, and its root metaphors becomes more or less useful in the face of ever-changing cultural dynamics, which demand an active, lively interpretation and re-imagination among its adherents to ensure its constant relevance. The most obvious paradigm shifting event in modern history evincing such a development is the move from PtolemaicAristotelian cosmology to a Copernican-Galilean one. Religion, of course, was not annihilated in the cosmological development, but it did require a radical re-assessment of some of its root metaphors to compensate for socio-political and cultural developments.49 “New experiences,” Rue writes, “result in new memes, and new memes occasionally produce new fashions of thought and action, some of which mature into movements that distinguish themselves in important ways from the prevailing interpretation of a central story.”50 This need not lead to schisms within traditions or altogether new frameworks, but simply new ways of understanding one’s religious inheritance. The context in which religious naturalism is developing, as well as more traditional approaches to theology, is of course this centuries-long evolving

16 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters relationship between scientific and religious methodology and epistemology along with the more recent emergence of the ecological crisis. These require, as all paradigm shifts in an evolutionary understanding of religion, fundamental developments in how a tradition’s myths and root metaphors function to maintain their plausibility and remain life-giving. Traditional religious faiths according to Rue, and here I have some doubts concerning his thesis, are not able to successfully face the growing challenge of naturalist perspectives or the ecological crisis and as such are en-route to extinction. This is principally due to his assumption of the growing difficulty modern people have with realist interpretations of classic religious myths, which are falling out of fashion due to the rise of modern science and religious pluralism. I am not overly concerned with the veracity of these claims in this book and while they ring true to my own experience, I do not wish to make too strong of a claim concerning the secularization of the world. My bigger concern is whether traditional religious myths must maintain a classical or literal sense to be taken seriously and considered as making “real” claims about the world. Likewise, I am concerned with the idea that losing the possibility of believing in certain interpretations lead to the conclusions that classical traditions are dying or whether they should be abandoned. Rue clearly acknowledges that traditions goes through metamorphosis from time to time and what I suggest throughout this book is just this: that the Christian myth and its root metaphor—what I believe to be divine incarnation—simply needs to evolve to remain life giving.51 This does not mean that the myth is less real, meaningful, or believable than it was in the past, simply that it for many people its life-giving power needs to be re-interpreted and re-imagined.52 I share Rue’s ultimate agnosticism concerning how successful this effort will be. On the one hand, the general opinion seems to be that whereas the great mythic traditions of the world have never placed ecological responsibility at the core of piety, they do nevertheless possess sufficient resources to inspire a forceful response to the ecological crisis.53 I absolutely agree and devote significant effort in this book dedicated to reimagining the Christian myth toward this end. Yet, Rue is also on the mark when he says of Christianity that “While liberal theologians were busy working out the foundations for an environmental ethic, religious conservatives were busy forging alliances with right-wing politics.”54 There is no guarantee on the nature of the long-term role that religion, and Christianity in particular, will play in helping humanity re-conceive of its relationship with the more-than-human world. Without suggesting that religion will be the ecological savior of the world, I am not ready to move to speculative post-apocalyptic predictions on non-traditional religions that might emerge after global societal collapse due to the failure of both religion and government to stop impending doom.

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Rue suggests that: “From the ashes of global collapse we may expect to see a phoenix arise in the form of a new Nature-centered meta-myth: the Myth of Religious Naturalism.”55 This seems an overly romantic and highly unplausible idea even if we were to engage in an utterly unpredictable speculative historiography of a post-apocalyptic future.56 He may, of course, be right to put off hope. Perhaps other ideas, like Crosby’s “Religion of Nature,” that utterly give up on the world’s classical religions is more fruitful in the face of the baggage of our inherited faiths and the admitted herculean task of re-imagining classical religions in ways that stick. But, the fact of the matter is that our current religious traditions are so well entrenched in the collective mindset of our cultures and possess enormous power to shape the world. Retreating to a religious naturalism apart from our religious inheritance feels like a losing endeavor because, as Rue admits, these are currently powerless.57

An Incarnate Earth This book re-imagines and re-constructs the Christian myth and its predominant root metaphor—divine incarnation—to the end of erasing the cleavage between God, humanity, and other creatures. As I have suggested earlier, what leads me here is the anthropocentric character of classic Christological assertions and assumptions about divinity, which has been a concern among philosophers and theologians from Xenophanes to the present.58 Anthropocentrism has rendered classical interpretations of the Christian myth, the idea of God, and the doctrine of Incarnation increasingly implausible in my experience as it divinizes one species and annihilates the idea of divine infinity, which precludes identifying divinity with characteristics bound to human normativity and essence. This book is thus an attempt to think Christology apart from anthropocentrism and the problematic ontology that comes with assigning a human-like figure to the role of creating, governing, and guiding the cosmos from a transcendence position that is either beyond or somehow non-identical with the world. The result is a Christology shorn of classical theistic metaphysics that continues to embrace the tradition as a type of religious naturalism. The idea of God continues to function, Christ remains divine, Jesus retains his place as the focal object of religious devotion, and the tradition continues to maintain its life-giving power, albeit in a way that fits into a naturalist framework where divinity is ontically entangled with, inseparable from, and identical to flesh itself. Such preserves the idea of infinity necessary if the divine object of our religious devotion is to escape a reduction of the other to the same. One of the strongest efforts in contemporary Christology to overcome the cleavage between the divine and the world in a way that adequately addresses the challenges of the modern world are the theologies of deep incarnation that are currently being developed by theologians such as Niels Henrik Gregersen. This theology understands the doctrine of Incarnation as

18 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters indicative of a greater divine presence throughout the entirety of the cosmos mediated through, and in some sense ontically entangled with all flesh. In deep incarnation, the ontological and ethical scope of divine incarnation exceeds the life of Jesus of Nazareth insofar as the divine Christ has taken up the entire cosmological and biological evolutionary story into his own human body. Divine incarnation then embraces all flesh within the divine self. While deep incarnation advocates have developed theology in refreshing and crucial ways and do more than most theologians to address modern problems concerning the tenuous relationship between humanity and Earth, I argue in this book that they remain constrained by a metaphysical anthropocentrism that ultimately identifies divinity with humanity and thus reduces theology to anthropology. I embrace the impulse of deep incarnation theorists to expand the relationship between the divine and the flesh and re-articulate the central root metaphor of Christianity. Yet, to overcome the anthropocentric impulses deeply embedded in Christology, I radicalize this relationship between divinity and the flesh in a way that absolutely erases any cleavage between Christ and creature. In thinking otherwise than anthropocentrism, Incarnate Earth reimagines the Christian doctrine of Incarnation by further radicalizing the ontic unity between divinity and creation grounded in the ethical relations that erupt between the human and a more-than-human world. In dialogue with contemporary theologies of deep incarnation and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the book argues that Jesus of Nazareth is fully human and fully divine but that his divinity erupts from the latent divinity inherent in the vulnerability of all flesh, which serves as the origination of ethics and a naturalized Christian idea of God. The doctrine of Incarnation is thus interpreted as a form of Christian religious and ethical naturalism—a paradigm advocating an ontic unity and identity between the divine object of ultimate religious devotion embraced in Christian faith and vulnerable face of creatures. In this dramatically re-imagined Christological myth, the performative actions that have classically indicated Jesus’ divinity—his performing the roles of redeemer and savior of broken bodies and revealer of an infinite alterity outside of any egoist horizon—are encountered in the faces of creation and creatures rather than a transcendent God beyond the world. As such, the Christian meets the divine Christ in and as the face of any vulnerable thing—animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise—not as a being non-identical to but mediated through the world. Such grounds a radical, naturalist Christology and a consequent ethic for embracing a more-than-human world. This performative approach to religion and theology, where the essence of divine being or objects of religious devotion is inseparable from the performance of a role in the life of a religious devotee, is like that found in another religious naturalist, Donald Crosby.59 This perspective understands religion and identifies objects of religious devotion in terms of the roles or functions they have in organizing life around concerns that matter most for individuals and communities. Or, as John J Thatamanil phrases it, religion and religious

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objects perform the role of providing a “comprehensive qualitative orientation to existence.”60 Similarly, I suggest that such applies to the objects of religious devotion, what is fundamental and ultimate in our lives, including what have been traditionally understood as God or gods. A role functional theory of religion, then, is one which seeks to specify the role played by objects of religious interest within some larger context, such as the entirety of a person’s aims, interests, or experiences; or such as the cosmos as a whole, viewed or interpreted in such a way as to accord a certain definite place to an object of religious concern.61 These roles are not tied to unambiguous and unchangeable attributes the object under discussion happens to possess, but refer to the broader manner in which the object performs a more general, but nevertheless distinctive religious function that could, in principle, be fulfilled by any number of things.62 Religious objects then are those that perform religious labor, namely, soliciting our deepest desires and ultimate devotion, and orienting the manner in which we understand, value, and organize existence. The Christological performance focused on in this book are those of redemption and revelation, which are essentially embedded in Christology and the rolefunction Christ plays ubiquitously throughout the Christian tradition. I suggest that, once classical theism is no longer a tenable option for us and the divine is other than the human alter ego, these roles are in fact fulfilled widely by all sorts of things and are embedded in the cruciform face of things. This face is present in, but irreducible to the human face of Jesus; any other interpretation annihilates divine infinity and divinizes a single species. Christ then becomes a multi-form and multi-unitary object of religious devotion, centrally represented by Jesus but ontologically irreducible to him. This not to say that Christ is omni-expressive in any and every instance of physical existence, but rather in those that are distinctively cruciform in their performance of redemption and revelation. Religious or divine ontology, as I see it, is inseparable from performance and the idea of the divine Christ is inseparable from the creaturely faces from whom revelation and redemption originate. Christ is as Christ does. I bear witness to this perspective over the course of the five chapters that follow. Chapters 2 and 3, along with the current chapter, establish a theoretical framework for the Christology of the book. Chapter 2 explores the paradigm of deep incarnation Christology in contemporary scholarship as well as its twentieth-century roots. I trace an intellectual genealogy of the idea from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to the present, with particular attention to the work of Niels Henrik Gregersen, the central figure in modern discussions of deep incarnation. This chapter provides the reader with a standard interpretation of deep incarnation that I critically embrace, reimagine, and radicalize in Chapters 4–6. The focus rests on the potential anthropocentric tendencies in deep incarnation Christology and why I wish

20 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters to eschew this perspective. Chapter 3 explores Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of religion and his idea of God. As Levinas is my principal inspiration and interlocutor throughout the book, this chapter explores the foundational ideas I take from Levinas to construct my critique and re-imagination of deep incarnation. This chapter outlines the basics of Levinas’ philosophy of religion through an exploration of his insistence that ethics is not only first philosophy but also potentially serves as first theology. Grounding his idea of God in concrete, face-to-face encounters with the vulnerability of human bodies, Levinas proves a useful dialogue partner for deep incarnation theologians and religious naturalists who insist that divinity that is not simply mediated through the world but, in a sense, identical with it. Because there are certain obstacles to a straightforward use of Levinas to inform Christology or an ethic open to the more-than-human, I also wrestle with some problematic aspects of Levinas’ philosophy and offer a way past these issues so that Levinas may be responsibly but critically employed in Christological construction. Chapters 4 and 5 expand on the theoretical frameworks established in chapters one through three to construct a re-imagined Christology in reference to the two doctrines necessary in any discussion of Christological performance. Chapter 4 addresses the doctrine of redemption. After exploring the redeeming role of Jesus in the early Christian tradition, noting the connection between salvation and ethics crucial in post-colonial readings of the New Testament, I explore how contemporary theologies of deep incarnation understand redemption and ethics within the more-than-human world and suggest ways of moving past its anthropocentric tendencies. Using Levinasian ethics rooted in face-to-face relationships along with a postcolonial reading of Paul and Ivone Gebara’s Christian ecofeminism, I reimagine Christology as a doctrine of deep Redemption that remains grounded in Jesus’ life and death while extending cruciform identity beyond the human to the divine face of things. Chapter 5 turns to the doctrine of revelation. After discussing the revelatory performance of Jesus in early Christian writings—especially the Gospel of John—and focusing on the necessary connection between immanence and transcendence, I explore how contemporary theologies of deep incarnation understand cruciform revelation beyond Jesus and within creation. Responding to the idea that only a human can fully reveal the object of religious devotion, I draw on Levinas’ understanding of the idea of infinity, with help from Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, to re-envision a doctrine of deep revelation that once more embraces Jesus as central to the Christian tradition without discounting the multi-form and multi-unitary nature of divine unveiling that is irreducible to the human. These chapters suggest that the divine performance of redemption and revelation, both expressed in and as alterity’s infinite and immanent call to justice with its consequent solicitation of human responsibility, is not restricted to Jesus of Nazareth, or the human face in general. Divinity is encountered in and as the face of all vulnerable creatures insofar as they

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perform the redemptive and revelatory roles of Christ, which invites the human to ethical responsibility in working toward a just and peaceful community. The world is thus divinized as all vulnerable bodies become ontologically identical with a Christ understood in a religious naturalist framework. In overcoming anthropocentrism, such theologies preserve divine infinity and a reduction of the divine other the same. Chapter 6 concludes the book by fleshing out a general approach to Christology and the doctrine of incarnation in wider conversation with religious naturalism. Christ is imagined not as a divine being existing beyond the world and exclusive to the life and death of Jesus, but as the root metaphor of the Christian tradition that describes human’s ethical encounter with the face of any creature—animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise. I describe the world as a religious ecology in which cruciform divinity erupts from and is inseparable from all vulnerable bodies. I contextualize my approach within perspectives on religious naturalism with an interest to demonstrate the similarities and differences with theologians and philosophers such as Donald Crosby and Charley Hardwick. Central to these discussions are just how expansive Christ is as the object of religious devotion and whether the flesh itself is to be divinized. Furthermore, this chapter answers other questions that arise without being sufficiently addressed in the previous chapters. In clarifying my approach to religious naturalism, I explore broader religious frameworks that may be appropriate for further understanding my perspective on an incarnate Earth—namely pantheism and polytheism. This is done in the spirit of Levinas and in more direct exploration of the thought of Giordano Bruno, whose multi-form and multi-unitary idea of God is becoming increasingly important in my Christology. I conclude with a final thought on the structure of Christian faith as necessarily ethical in nature and inclusive of the human place within a more-than-human world. Such becomes the foundation for a variety of socio-political approaches to the concrete issues the world faces, especially with respect to issues pertaining to ecological and animal ethics. No solution is offered for constructing socio-political ethics or public theology, but a path is opened for further studies pertaining to specific ethical contexts which might benefit from dialogue with deep, naturalist Christology.

Notes 1 I was inspired by the opening chapter of Donald Crosby’s A Religion of Nature, to begin this book with a deeper examination of my experiential relationship with the Christian tradition and the more-than-human world. 2 Pearl Jam, “Porch (Live),” October 20, 2014, YouTube video, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=llOpE85bmW0. 3 The punk community often functions essentially as a religious community insofar as it comprises an organized cultural horizon that facilitates a mythos of how the world functions and provides meaning, ethical development, and a set of ritual practices that make sense of and give meaning to a community’s

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existence. I am heavily reliant on Thatamanil, Circling the Elephant, for this expanded notion of what religion consists of and its ubiquitous presence in life beyond the existence of classical religious traditions. Roger Sabin suggests that while “most accounts assume that punk was ‘liberating’ politically, and created a space for disenfranchised voices to be heard—notably women, gays and lesbians, and anti-racists … . there is plenty of evidence to counter these claims.” Sabin, Punk Rock, 4. On a liberationist reading of punk, see Iafrate, “Punk Rock and/as Liberation Theology.” Iafrate, “More Than Music,” 40. Punk is often seen as categorically against religion, but this should be tempered to focus more on the recognition of the way world religion is often co-opted by powers that aims to silence the voices of marginalized people and partner with statesponsored violence. Concerning the name Bad Religion: “Despite having been raised in a religious family, Marcella [singer Greg Graffin’s mother] wasn’t offended by the band’s name. ‘I loved it,’ Marcella said. ‘I really did. When the kids were asked why they named the band Bad Religion, they would say different things. What Greg said to me and to others was that anything could be a Bad Religion. If you give up your sense of independent thought and you’re not thinking for yourself, then that’s a Bad Religion. Well, of course, that appealed to me. I didn’t have negative feelings about the name at all.’” Bad Religion, Do What You Want, 7. Bad Religion, Recipe for Hate. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 5. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation; Cone, God of the Oppressed. I have explored this relationship and the revelation of his unfathomable moral significance in Eaton, “On the Eyes of a Cat and the Curve of his Claw.” Otto, The Idea of the Holy. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery. Kaufman and John Howard Yoder were help up as intellectual giants among Mennonites, but the non-theistic character of Kaufman’s thought along with direct ethical commentary resulted in his being downplayed in favor of Yoderian ethics. I always had the feeling that others were proud of Kaufman’s achievements but uncomfortable with his non-theistic vision of God. Or perhaps he was simply harder to fit into courses that were predominantly ethical in nature. I never saw reason to focus on one over the other and would discover a means of radically integrating the two. Kaufman, Jesus and Creativity, 32–44. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Revealed, 274. Ethics, for Levinas, replaces metaphysics as the basis of philosophy. “The ethical, beyond vision and certitude, delineates the structure of exteriority as such. Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 304. Yet, elsewhere Levinas says that ethics could also function as the basis of a philosophical, as opposed to confessional, theology. “Holiness thus shows itself as an irreducible possibility of the human and God … . An original ethical event which would also be first theology.” Levinas and Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be?, 182. Teilhard de Chardin, “The Mass on the World,” 17. Mark Wallace is a theologian who does overcome anthropocentrism. See, for example, his latest work When God Was a Bird. This is, of course, not a robust exploration of arguments for and against the existence of God. This autobiographical introduction simply points to one argument against classical theism and is not meant to participate in any exhaustive discussion of divine ontology. While I hold up the anthropocentric vision of classical theology as the focus of my difficulty with the doctrine, there would be

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far more to say if the discussion focused on the believability of theism as such. For one such exploration, and one that concludes in a manner like congruent with my own thinking, see Oppy, Arguing about Gods. Xenophanes, Fragment B15 in Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 119. This took place mostly in dialogue with the theology of Niels Henrik Gregersen and much of this book engage this great thinker. I find it unfortunate and frustrating that my appreciation for Gregersen may become lost in the focus on difficulties I have with certain aspects of his thought, which take center stage in my writing. Nevertheless, I owe Gregersen an enormous debt for the inspiration and support he has provided me and my work. There is thus a far greater appreciation for his theology than the polemic in my writing would suggest. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 9. Tillich, The Courage to Be. The idea of God might in fact be satisfactorily described in these terms to some degree, but I am interested in a more specific manifestation of the divine ground of being. Tillich may be useful for speaking of unified, formless divine creativity usually associated with pantheism but not the particular expressions of God, which differentiate themselves from one another while remaining united—what Giordano Bruno calls the “multi-modal” and “multi-unitary” expressions of the divine. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. God, I argue, is insufficiently known as simply as the one if the identity of the Many is neglected. I take up this issue in Chapter Six. My complaint concerning the anthropocentric nature of a theistic God is not proof against theism. It simply represents my own suspicion that God could be understood in a way that betrays such a strong similarity to the human subject. It is an unsatisfying way to make sense of my world due to the apparent bias it maintains for my own species and perhaps those sufficiently like my own creatureliness. Theism, of course, is only slightly less satisfying than the nearly equally inscrutable idea that the cosmos is ontologically self-sufficient and necessary. I may very well be wrong. At the end of the day, I mostly just do not care about arguments for and against such positions due to their inscrutable and inexhaustible nature and the intellectual and affective exhaustion that follows attempting to sort through them. I embrace a type of religious naturalism in this book but am under no pretense that there is any conclusive, ultimately satisfying case for any religious framework. I do not feel an overwhelming need to label my theology within a particular philosophical system but what I am doing in this book does seem to be helpfully articulated within this wider movement in American theological and religious studies and in dialogue with like-minded theologians and religious studies scholars. An outstanding introduction to religious naturalism complete with an exploration of its possible intellectual roots is Stone, Religious Naturalism Today. Another helpful orientation, including the possible conceptual and cultural changes that make religious naturalism possible as a (re)emergent phenomenon in the West is Hogue, The Promise of Religious Naturalism. Supernaturalism, “asserts that the world of nature fails to exhaust the ‘real’ because reality consists of nature and a superordinate reality that grounds the natural world and provides its end.” Hardwick, Events of Grace, 5. There are some tricky positions that complicate such a definition such as Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism. For Griffin’s theistic naturalism God appears to include the totality of the real, and there is nothing outside of or supernatural to this reality and nothing that disturbs the world. Such would, I think, be similar to positions such as Nicolas of Cusa, whose Neo-Platonism posits the world as part of God’s being without being identified with divine fullness. Jerome Stone, however, does not include this in the paradigm of religious naturalism, seemingly due to the

24 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

27 28

29 30

31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38

personal nature of the divine which constitutes the world. “God so conceived is a supreme power, the only entity involved in the origination of every other event and giving to each of them it’s ideal aim. This God is ontologically distinct and supreme, and thus not really an aspect of naturalism as I am characterizing it.” Stone, “Defining and Defending Religious Naturalism,” 10. Wheeler, “Deus Sive Natura,” 106. Rue, Nature is Enough. See also his more detailed exploration of religious naturalism, Religion Is Not About God. For a survey of what some prominent religious naturalists believe concerning what makes their perspective explicitly religious, see Hogue, The Promise of Religious Naturalism, 85–139. Hardwick, Events of Grace, 5–6. Hardwick, Events of Grace, 6. While empirical scientific epistemology certainly makes some sense of reality, it does not exhaust the human ability to understand the world and will always suffer from interpretive finitude. Likewise, the blatant anthropocentrism of humanist value posited in number 6 above is not tenable, as I argue throughout the entirety of this book. “For the process thinkers close to Charles Hartshorne there is one entity that is unique in being surpassable by no other entity except itself in a future state. This entity is supremely related and compassionate and often is thought of as conserving value. These characteristics make this one entity so ontologically distinct and supreme that it is a form of the supernatural. An entity surpassable by none except itself is not naturalist—immanentist yes, naturalist, no.” Stone, “Defining and Defending Religious Naturalism,” 10. I believe a similar line of thinking would also apply in most cases of panentheism and in Neo-Platonist theism. Hardwick, Events of Grace, 8. Jerome Stone draws on Owen Flannagan to describe this position as a “nonimperialistic ontological naturalism,” which I would claim as indicative of my own. “Flanagan also makes a distinction between what he calls ‘imperialistic ontological naturalism’ and a ‘non-imperialistic ontological naturalism.’ The former makes a strong claim that the supernatural does not exist, the latter a more modest claim that ‘for all we know and can know, what there is, and all there is, is the natural world.’” Stone, “Defining and Defending Religious Naturalism,” 8–9. For the sort of emergence that I have in mind and which I do not have space to describe, see Crosby, Nature as Sacred Ground. Stone, Religious Naturalism Today, 130. See 128–131 for a deeper exploration of the debates concerning the idea of God among religious naturalists. As will become clear in Chapter 6, I do not restrict the idea of God broadly speaking to the totalities that Stone suggests are the object to which God refers. I understand God as multi-form and multi-unitary, wrapped up in the totality of universe both as ground of existence and the individual existents that take shape as the cosmos. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, 8. See 3–17 for a fuller defense of why God talk continues to function well and retains power in many cultures. Buber, Eclipse of God, 6. For Kaufman, Buber, and others, the word conjures the deepest passion and devotion in the human heart and suggests an infinity beyond the subject both in terms of knowledge and power. I am not saying that all religious naturalisms need to connect with major world religions, but it is not necessary to reject one’s religious inheritance even when the principal metaphors of that inheritance radically develop and cease to mean what they once did. Charley Hardwick, in his own naturalist Christology, writes: “I am constantly reminded here of Santayana’s dictum that ‘the attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.’” Hardwick,

Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

48 49 50 51

25

“Religious Naturalism Today,” 115. Other similar voices include Peters, “A Christian Religious Naturalism”; Baker, James, and Reader, A Philosophy of Christian Materialism. Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, 6–7. Ultimately, I think Loyal Rue is right when he insists: “Whatever metaphors do the trick are fine, so long as they don’t compromise the principles of naturalism. Religious naturalists must remain open to a range of options for resolving the problem of the missing metaphor.” Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 365. On the minimum and maximum in Bruno, see Schettino, “The Necessity of the Minima in the Nolan Philosophy.” Kaufman, Jesus and Creativity, 2–3. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 125–164. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 126. Rue acknowledges that some would deny that any general framework can satisfactorily describe religious traditions as such. Given the radical incongruities between religions or the lack of explicit cultural acknowledgments of religion as a unique sphere of human experience, the risk is that any general philosophy of religion would be vague at best but possibly a distortion of a given religion or culture’s self-understanding. Religion, those rejecting a general philosophy would say, is always radically particular and incoherent outside of experiential rootedness in the tradition. Rue essentially sees this view as too individualistic, and that subjective meaning always also occurs within a wider body of conventional meaning shared beyond subjective, egoist frameworks, which are open to possible overlaps with the horizons of those outside of the tradition. Such is rooted, for Rue, in the basic neurobiology of the species whose brains share the same possibility of creating meaning. The neuro-biological roots of meaning making can unite the idea of religion into some coherent, broad strokes of specifically adaptive meaning that serve a common, fitness-oriented purpose rooted in the creation of metaphorically driven myths that say something about the way the world is and what this reality means. Thus, while religious myths are irreducibly unique, they develop similar structural strategies to ensure human flourishing. See Religion Is Not About God, 4–11. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 128. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 126. “Religious systems have emerged as cultural artifacts because they have proven to be biologically significant. Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, religious memes exist in service to the ultimate value of viability.” Rue, Nature Is Enough, 61. See his Religion Is Not About God, 28–166, for a full analysis of this idea. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 128. See Feyerabend Against Method, for a description of this pre-eminent paradigm shifting event in the history of modern Western religion. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 130. The openness of myths to evolve in light of cultural developments, like the rise of modern science, seems downplayed in the final chapter of Rue’s book, which seems to boarder on a myopic bifurcation of science and religion and an unwillingness to allow the possibility of radical re-interpretations of religious traditions. This is clearest in his understanding of the metaphor of “personhood,” which he understands as a mirror of the human self. There is ample possibility of overcoming this, for example in n neo-animist understandings of personhood, but Rue’s discussion is restricted to severely outdated and poor examples of animist frameworks. Rue, Religion is not about God, 144–152; 316–318. Tim Ingold, for example, has reimagined personhood as part of a

26 Introduction: Incarnate Encounters

52

53 54 55 56

57

58 59 60

61 62

robust foray into philosophical, sociological, and anthropological scholarship. See e.g., Ingold, Being Alive. I am sympathetic with Rue and I may be too optimistic concerning the continuous power of classical religious traditions. Most of what I say in this book, for example, will be considered so radical it has virtually no chance of being adopted by any major Christian traditions, let alone my own tradition of Roman Catholicism. Religion, of course, is far more complex that what is represented by the gatekeepers of orthodox and the beliefs of local communities of faith should not be discounted in favor of groups with more power. Still, it is difficult at times to maintain faith within a tradition when what is required is such a radical re-imagination of its myth and root metaphors. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 354. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 354. Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 362. If I were to engage in such a problematic, but admittedly fun task, I would imagine classical religions continue in a re-imagined form in the face of such an apocalypse, as portrayed in Walter Miller’s classic sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. “Religious naturalism is already in the air, but it is not yet a robust mythic tradition because the ancillary strategies are not in place to exert a full-court press on behavior mediation systems. We may see some movement in this direction during the coming decades, but it is unlikely that religious naturalism will become a dominant influence until the events of history render alternative mythic visions irrelevant and unpalatable.” Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 366. Xenophanes, Fragment B15 in Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 119. Crosby’s original exploration of this position occurs in his Interpretive Theories of Religion, especially 36–45, 233–275. These ideas are subsequently developed throughout his extensive writings, including A Religion of Nature. Thatamanil, Circling the Elephant, 155–171. The religious, for Thatamanil, is that which solicits and holds our deepest desires, loyalties, and allegiances and provides a way to understand, value, and organize the entirety of existence. Such solicitation is performed by a plurality of enfleshed expressions systems, creaturely and cultural and are not necessarily otherworldly beings. Furthermore, Thatamanil argues that this does not simply apply to classical world religions or even a distinctive “religious” sphere of life over against the secular. This is a significant dynamic of my own thinking that I develop in Chapter 6 in relation to my incorporation of pantheism and polytheism into Christology. Crosby, Interpretive Theories of Religion, 41. Crosby approaches religious objects outside of any specific tradition and suggest uniqueness, primacy, pervasiveness, rightness, permanence, and hiddenness as “a set of categories whose conceptual interplay and tensions are intended to clarify the nature of religious interest.” Crosby, Interpretive Theories of Religion, 233. I am more interested in a specifically Christian account of performance and religious object, so I am not excessively interested in fitting my work into this way of analyzing the role-function of religious objects. I am not opposed to these categories as indicative of religious objects and agree that not all objects are religious in nature but prefer to focus on the Christian categories of redemption and revelation as indicative of the object appropriate for religious devotion. These may in fact fit into Crosby’s schema, but I am not interested here in judging the entire package of criteria he suggests. I engage this more in Chapter 6.

2

Deep Incarnation

Modern and contemporary theologies, especially those concerned with ecological and animal studies, are increasingly exploring the possibility of decentering the human within Christian thought. This consideration of the more-than-human does not exclude humanity from the discussion but struggles with the place of humanist sovereignty in theological thought and whether metaphysical anthropocentrism should or can be avoided in understanding divinity and judging the nature of the divine relationship with the world.1 The post-Copernican and post-Darwinian recognition that the human has emerged within the same creative narrative that births all of creation are pushing theologians to re-imagine theology both doctrinally and ethically.2 Avoiding metaphysical anthropocentrism in theology is necessary if otherwise than human worlds are to be properly respected and embraced, allowing non-human alterity to express itself beyond judgments and identifications of the world that place Homo sapiens at the top of a value hierarchy. Likewise, eschewing myths of human sovereignty is crucial theologically insofar as we wish to avoid religious thought and practice that can be accused of reducing theology to anthropology.3 This chapter explores one path taken within the broader movement to decenter the human in theology and sets the stage for the Christological explorations at the heart of this book, which encounter Christ beyond the life and death of Jesus as redeemer of the world and revealer of the divine. Below, I examine theologies that re-imagine the doctrine of incarnation in light of creaturely concerns connected more broadly to what we would call ecological and animal theologies.4 These Christologies are increasingly articulated today within the spatio-temporal metaphor of “deep incarnation,” a term coined in 2001 by Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen.5 This approach to Christology holds much promise, doctrinally and ethically, for Christianity’s re-imagination of the relationship between divinity, cosmos, and Earth and the renewal of ethical relations between humans, ecosystems, and other creatures. Yet, I suggest that most articulations of “deep incarnation” continue to harbor subtle tendencies toward humanist sovereignty grounded in a metaphysical anthropocentrism. Thus, while a welcome re-envisioning of the traditional doctrine of incarnation and consequent DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-2

28 Deep Incarnation theological ethics, anthropocentric bias prevents deep incarnation from adequately decentering the human within existence. As a result, deep incarnation, as it is currently understood, ultimately maintains a reductionist view of the divine that conflates the idea of God with human normativity and subsequently maintains a material value hierarchy that threatens the dignity of non-human alterity and possibly the hospitality theology might otherwise extend to the more-than human world. In the following analysis, I have three goals. First, I aim to provide a genealogy of the idea of deep incarnation. This gives a much-needed sense of historical depth to the idea of deep incarnation, rooted in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s work introduces the basic concept of expanding the scope of incarnation to incorporate materiality beyond Jesus of Nazareth into Christology and the idea of Christ. Second, I outline the idea of deep incarnation as it exists in contemporary theological scholarship today. My focus rests on the thought of Niels Henrik Gregersen, who more than anyone else has articulated a vision for extending the significance of incarnation beyond Jesus of Nazareth and classical Christological interpretations. Third, I anticipate the dialogue and critique developed further throughout the book by offering a preliminary philosophical and theological response to the idea of deep incarnation in its current form. My concern rests specifically with the question of whether or to what degree the doctrine escapes metaphysical anthropocentrism and what is needed to push discussions of Christology forward in directions that resist anthropocentrism and embrace the more-than human.

A Doctrinal Genealogy While never naming it as such, the idea of deep incarnation discussed in contemporary theology since the early 2000s can be discerned at least as far back as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s 1916 essay, “La Vie Cosmique.”6 While his cosmic Christology is more clearly developed in subsequent writings, the seed of Teilhard’s deep incarnation theology is present in his earliest war-time essays. Though his Christology differs in key respects from most contemporary notions of deep incarnation, there are important overlapping ideas to note as we explore the historical roots of the deep incarnation narrative. Furthermore, while I do not follow him in all respects and find certain aspects of his thought problematic, there are certain Christological dynamics present in Teilhard’s work—an irreducible monist cosmology and emphasis on divine infinity—that I find useful for Christology. The refrain heard throughout Teilhard’s work is that “there is a communion with God, and a communion with earth, and a communion with God through earth.”7 This sacramental communion is made possible by a certain understanding of the ontic character of reality. For Teilhard, the cosmos is a dynamic matrix of differentiated individuals who share a common origin in the body of God and consequently share the ontic essence

Deep Incarnation 29 of the divine. The world, for Teilhard, emerges from divine creativity not as a separate entity composed of absolutely distinct creatures, but as an overflow of divinity itself grounded in love. As such, while the totality of existents in the world can never be amalgamated into some undifferentiated whole devoid of difference and particularity—an idea that Teilhard, rightly or wrongly, refers to throughout his writings as pantheism—neither can existents be understood as bodies existing on their own.8 Each thing shares its essence and being with each other thing, including God. Embodied boundaries are not absent, but they are porous and non-absolute with each thing existing as a perpetual, simultaneous, and dynamic reorganization of one divine thing. Thus, for Teilhard, the spiritual and material comprise a unified and inseparable whole, each exists within the other throughout the creative process of cosmic and biological evolution. The human, according to Teilhard, must abandon all the illusions of narrow individualism and extend himself, intellectually and emotionally, to the dimensions of the universe: and this even though, his mind reeling at the prospect of his new greatness, he should think that he is already in possession of the divine, is God himself, or is himself the artisan of Godhead.9 Teilhard’s articulation of this divine/world or spirit/material identity is based in a cosmic Christology and sacramental cosmology understood in terms of a deeper, more expansive interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation. Through his Incarnation he entered not only into mankind but also into the universe that bears mankind—and this he did, not simply in the capacity of an element associated with it, but with the dignity and function of directive principle, of centre upon which every form of love and every affinity converge. Mysterious and vast though the mystical Body already be, it does not, accordingly, exhaust the immense and bountiful integrity of the Word made Flesh. Christ has a cosmic Body that extends throughout the whole universe: such is the final proposition to be borne in mind. “Qui potest capere, capiat.”10 Here, the incarnate presence of divinity taking shape in Jesus of Nazareth provides the impetus and paradigm for extending the divine/world or spirit/ material entanglement to all that is. Such references to the ubiquity of the incarnate presence of Christ throughout the cosmos throughout its evolutionary history abound in Teilhard’s writings, but are especially poignant in his Eucharistic meditation “The Priest,” written in the forest of Compiègne in 1917, and “The Mass on the World,” completed in the dessert of Ordos in 1923.11 In these theopoetic narratives, Teilhard explores the possibility of creation emerging, existing, and developing as a transmutation of the Creator, uniting

30 Deep Incarnation matter and spirit while maintaining a sense of irreducibility, mutual transcendence, and difference. Such an entanglement occurs inherently in all that exists through cosmic and biological evolution, but reaches its peak, according to Teilhard, in Christ and the Church. “The universe is rent asunder; it suffers a painful cleavage at the heart of each of its monads, as the flesh of Christ is born and grows. Like the work of creation which it redeems and surpasses, the Incarnation, so desired of man, is an aweinspiring operation. It is achieved through blood.”12 This is more than a dualistic unity wherein God and matter exist side by side as active creative agent and passive created object. The divine unfolds in time and space as a dynamically plural physical body, multi-modal and multi-unitary, composed of spirit and flesh modeled on the dual natured body of Jesus in classical Christology. The universe is the body of God evolving toward a pre-determined telos of greater and greater degrees of unity with the perfection of the divine Christ. Each thing, for Teilhard, is differentiated from others while sharing a sense of collective ontic identity, existing as uniquely manifest but simultaneously dependent on the cocreative power of the divine totality of the cosmos. No creature loses its particularity in this identification with the totality, but each does exist as a physical expression of the one Creator.13 Such is revealed, for Teilhard, and only understandable in the light of the doctrine of Incarnation. Through the life and death of Jesus, and the transmutation of the eucharistic elements in the mass. In this deep ontic entanglement consisting of a shared identity the immanent phenomenal world of creatures and the transcendent divine being of a Creator ultimately come together in a chimerical, incarnate unity where no singularity can ultimately be separated from another. Building on the logic of the Jesus’ incarnation, which is extended forward to the sacramental theology of the Eucharist, Teilhard insists that “when Christ, carrying farther the process of his Incarnation, comes down into the bread in order to dwell there in its place, his action is not confined to the particle of matter that his Presence is at hand, for a moment, to etherealize. The transubstantiation is encircled by a halo of divinization real, even though less intense—that extends to the whole universe.”14 Christ’s incarnation is not a one-time historical event breaking into the world at the birth of Jesus and extended to the liturgical life of the Church, it is the basic paradigm of creativity itself. “Through your own incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate.”15 Creation is a Christological event, the cosmos and each existent populating it are viewed here as the evolving body of God. Divine creativity is the ubiquitous incarnation of the sacred within the fabric of things as they unfold in time; there is a deep unity and identity between matter and spirit, creation and Creator. “In a very real sense,” Teilhard’s cosmic Christ is, “the plenitudo entium, the full assemblage of all beings who shelter, and meet, and are forever united, within the mystical bonds of [Christ’s] body.”16 As such, while there are differences between the Creator and the

Deep Incarnation 31 world insofar as the former contains the totality in its ideal character apart from the imperfections and the finitude of particular creatures, Teilhard’s theology everywhere insists that “to present the Christian God as … external to and (even quantitatively) less than, nature, is in itself, to impoverish his being.”17 As in the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and the spirit of Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian definition, “all the sounds of created being are fused, without being confused, in a single note which dominates and sustains them.”18 Thus, the doctrine of Incarnation is central for Teilhard’s understanding of the relationship between creation and Creator. Incarnation is not a historical event that interrupts cosmic development and biological evolution in a singular event; it is the primordial event of creativity itself extending throughout time. The physical is the ongoing and ever-changing event of divine incarnation, which is fully manifest, according to Teilhard, in the life and death of Jesus. Thus, while Creator and creation share identity in Teilhard, they are not quite synonymous. The world of creatures expresses Christ partially and imperfectly, though the unified whole of creation is understood to be always evolving toward a greater degree of unity with the fullness of Christ. As such, the precise identity of God, while inseparable from things, is nevertheless unique and transcendent.19 The incarnate divinity of materiality is understood in terms of the degree to which all things conform to the person and being of Jesus, who serves as the Omega Point of creation, the telos of matter and the end toward which cosmogenesis and biological evolution move. “There is only one safe course between Scylla and Charybdis: to admit that Christ is in a very real way the only concrete end awaiting the universe—adding, however, that his Being operates through extensions of his aura in which his divinity is not always equally embodied, and therefore manifests itself to us through a gradual and creative attraction.”20 Nevertheless, despite this degree Christology, “Everything that is active, that moves or breathes, every physical, astral, or animate energy, every fragment of force, every spark of life, is equally sacred; for, in the humblest atom and the most brilliant star, in the lowest insect and the finest intelligence, there is the radiant smile and thrill of the same Absolute.”21 As such, the Creator/creation relationship, for Teilhard, is not one in which the divine will simply informs or manipulates matter from a position of otherworldly transcendence, but one where the life of Christ is inseparable from materiality. While differentiated particularity is not dismissed, things exist relationally within a totality that is monistic and divine. “Strictly speaking, there is in the universe only one single individuality (one single monad), that of the whole (conceived in its organized plurality). The unity or measure of the world, is the world itself.”22 This is the deepening of the doctrine of Incarnation, which insists that Christ’s incarnation is extended into the depths of materiality. This deeper sense of incarnation bestows significance to all things, re-enchanting and re-sacralizing creation with the being of the Creator.

32 Deep Incarnation

Deep Incarnation Today While the gap between Teilhard’s writings and the emergence of ecotheology is close to a half-century wide, there is less than a decade between the initial publication of his work in 1955 and what may be the first ecotheological essay in the modern sense of the discipline. In his 1962 essay, “Called to Unity,” Joseph Sittler explores a theology linking Jesus’ incarnation to the dignity of the entire physical order and approaches what we would today call deep incarnation Christology.23 Drawing on the theology of Irenaeus, Sittler claims that the salvific impact of the incarnation of divinity in Jesus extends grace beyond humanity to all creation.24 Following this rationale, Sittler insists that, for the Christian, the doctrine of incarnation ought to erase any notion of absolute human/nature or spirit/ body dichotomy. By taking on flesh, divinity embraces not simply humanity, but the physical world in which the human originates and evolves. “The way forward,” Sittler writes in reference to the contemporary ecological crisis, “is from Christology expanded to its cosmic dimensions, made passionate by the pathos of this threatened earth, and made ethical by the love and the wrath of God.”25 Thus, from the inception of ecotheology as a sub-discipline of Christian theology, the basic idea of deep incarnation Christology is established. From 1962 to the early 2000s, this Sittler’s idea, similar to the thought of Teilhard, is expressed in many works concerned with Christian doctrine and ecology.26 In its contemporary form, deep incarnation begins to take shape in 2001 with Niels Henrik Gregersen’s article, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World.”27 My survey of Gregersen’s work here provides an overview of the doctrine as it is understood today and establishes Gregersen as the major theological interlocutor for this book. While I ultimately adopt a different understanding of deep incarnation than Gregersen, I follow him in utilizing the “unique resources” of the Christian tradition with its insistence on “a union of creator and creation” to construct a theology of incarnation that ethically embraces the more-than-human world.28 The idea of “deep incarnation,” first articulated by Gregersen, is introduced as the basis for a specifically Lutheran theodicy. Deep incarnation is thus initially conceived to make sense of the violence, pain, and suffering inherent in a world created through both the complexities and horrors of creaturely evolution and the love of a benevolent Creator. While this focus on suffering is applicable to a wider understanding of violence in cosmogenesis, Gregersen focuses on the pain emergent in the process of natural selection, and how this specifically impacts the lives of animal bodies complex enough to suffer in a sense comprehensible to human beings, centered on feelings of physical pain and the psychological duress accompanying suffering in animal minds. The problem of animal pain with the accompanying need for an adequate theodicy is thus the initial matrix for Gregersen’s move toward deep incarnation Christology.

Deep Incarnation 33 After discussions of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, theology of the cross, and a post-Darwinian understanding of natural selection, Gregersen looks to the incarnation of divinity in Jesus of Nazareth, suggesting that this event gives hope to all those who suffer from the violence implicit in the epic of evolution. Gregersen rehashes a classic Christology wherein humanity and divinity dwell entangled together in Jesus, allowing God to dwell uniquely and phenomenally, among earthlings. Yet, through an incarnation into human flesh, which Gregersen later universalizes as a manifestation of materiality in general, God, through the cross, identifies not simply with human pain and suffering, but with all victims who suffer from evolutionary violence.29 Thus, through the divine endurance of victimization and violence in a human body, which experiences the ubiquitous vulnerability of being, God suffers alongside all victims of natural selection.30 Gregersen thus pursues a “thought experiment,” wondering if “Christ die[d] not only for sinners, but also for the victims of natural selection and of social deprecation?”31 As Gregersen notes, this line of thinking has been taken up by Patristic and later Scholastic theologians, Maximus the Confessor serving as one example, who assert that the entire universe is present within the human, and therefore, salvation is vicariously extended to the rest of creation insofar as there exists a macro-/micro interrelationship between Creator and creation.32 In frameworks wherein God embraces all materiality, the incarnation indicates not just divine care for human bodies that suffer pain and death, but all flesh suffering a similar fate as a result of evolutionary violence. Through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus, Christ is revealed as caring for all creatures redeeming the entirety of the animal pain and suffering inevitable in our world. Such redemption, according to Gregersen, operates the same for human and non-human alike, not necessarily in this life-time, but at least in an eschatological “act of resurrection.”33 Here Gregersen for the first time describes his theology as indicative of “deep incarnation,” a term becoming increasingly common in ecological Christology.34 In deep incarnation, the Word made into human flesh offers soteriological grace not only to humanity but also to all bodies that suffer, feel pain, and die, extending hope to all victims of natural selection. These ideas mature in Gregersen’s 2010 essay, “Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology.”35 Here we find a more developed and nuanced description of deep incarnation based on interweaving of modern evolutionary theory and the Stoic, Logos theology of John’s Gospel where we read that “the Word became flesh.” Deep incarnation now appears to move beyond the constraints of Gregersen’s earlier article, where Christology is relevant for the pain, suffering, and death experienced by animal bodies, toward a more inclusive theology that embraces a deeper plurality of vulnerable expressions. Such an expansion opens divine incarnation to relevance beyond animal pain, suffering, and death to “the depths of material existence,” and “the living bond in and

34 Deep Incarnation between all that exists.”36 Thus, while there are limitations to his theology, Gregersen moves toward an inclusive view of incarnation, much as Teilhard had done, where vulnerability as such, regardless of the forms it takes, becomes Christologically relevant.37 After examining the possible Stoic influence on John’s Christology, Gregersen discusses the ontic scope of the “flesh” (σὰρξ) assumed by the divine Logos or Word in the prologue of the fourth gospel.38 “Flesh,” in both biblical and Stoic frameworks need not become the exclusive possession of humanity. As such, while the flesh of the Johannine declaration—“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)—could refer to the particular body of Jesus of Nazareth, or in other contexts that which is sinful, “flesh” may be interpreted as the physical world itself with no explicit formal restrictions other than a general assumption of the inherent frailty and vulnerability of things.39 Building on the semantic openness of “flesh,” Gregersen suggests that the fourth Gospel points toward the possibility of a deeper incarnation of the Logos, an incarnation linking divinity not simply to humanity or animality, but to all vulnerable flesh without concern for specific characteristics. All of this is possible because of the evolutionary framework with which we now understand as driving the unfolding of the world. Gregersen suggests that the “flesh” assumed by the divine Logos extends beyond Jesus’ humanity through the interrelatedness of all creatures through biological co-evolution. The humanity of Jesus, emerging from the relational and physical structure of cosmic and biological evolution, carries within it the information, history, and flesh of all that precedes it. In a world governed by evolution, a deity enfleshing any one species would necessarily participate in the entire physical being of the creature, including its deep genealogical connection to all that preceded it. As such, when Christ incarnates as the flesh of Jesus, God links up with all vulnerable creatures, with the sparrows in their flight as well as in their fall … indeed, with all grass that comes into being one day and ceases to exist the next day. In Christ, God is conjoining all creatures and enters into the biological tissue of creation itself, in order to share the fate of biological existence. God becomes Jesus, and in him God becomes human, and (by implication) foxes and sparrows, grass and soil.40 This incarnate connection to creaturely vulnerability carries within it all the soteriological and revelatory implications of classic Christology. Jesus’ life and death, an unmistakable physical phenomenon occurring within the epic of evolution, has clear ramifications beyond humanity to all vulnerable being. Building on the soteriology of Gregory Nazianzus, Gregersen posits that the cross of Christ has redemptive implications for all creatures who suffer at the hands of natural selection. According to Gregory, “that which [God] has not assumed he has not healed, but that which is united to his

Deep Incarnation 35 41

Godhead is also saved.” If we understand humanity as encompassing the physical as such, Jesus can be viewed within Gregory’s logic as a microcosm of the wider cosmos and thus extending the work of the cross to creation in all its plurality and particularity. Jesus, in deep incarnational thinking, assumes all physicality and unites creation to the Godhead, and is thus able to heal the totality of being.42 By redeeming humanity, who contains the cosmos within itself, God reveals the redemption of the physical without formal limitations. This re-imagined and deepened understanding of the doctrine of Incarnation with its extended soteriological and revelatory depth combines traditional theology and a modern evolutionary perspective that constitutes a welcome development in Christology and Christian theology in general. Denis Edwards’ sums up the idea of deep incarnation as “an event not only for Jesus and not only for the whole of humanity but also for the whole interconnected biological and physical world.”43 Gregersen likewise sums up the situation by insisting that “what it means to ‘assume’ the flesh of the whole creation ‘in some way’ … means God’s accepting and embracing the cosmic aspects of the world, in order to renew the world from the inside out.”44 Yet, as Gregersen and others make clear, they do not envision a flat equivalence of Christ’s incarnation in and as Jesus and the broader incarnate entanglement of divinity and materiality. “Even though the proposal of deep incarnation firmly asserts that Christ as the incarnate One assumed all that exists, the proposal does not say that God’s Word is simply speaking incarnated in all that exists.”45 As Gregersen continues to refine his deep incarnation theology, he articulates three senses in which Christ is understood to be incarnate within the world.46 There is first a “strict sense” incarnation pointing to in the unique ontic anchorage between the divine Logos and Jesus. This is a classical notion of incarnation and this sense is not shared beyond Jesus. Gregersen insists that it is only within a human person “that incarnation can have a genuine comprehensive scope.”47 Furthermore, “in this sense, there is a distinctiveness or setting-apart of Jesus as God’s self-incarnation in the strict sense of the term.”48 This sense of incarnation includes the self-expression and revelation of divinity, which cannot, according to Gregersen, extend beyond human bodies, and more particularly, the life of Jesus. Gregersen suggests that it seems obvious that the identity of God as Love can’t be revealed in a tomato or in a mussel, nor in the birth and decay of stars and galaxies in the macro-scopic realm of the cosmos. The incarnation must take place in a self-reflective religious human person.49 Second, there is a “broad sense” incarnation concerned with the human as a microcosm of the totality of being and the shared embodied conditions between Jesus and other creatures. Insofar as divinity takes up the flesh of a human, God has become clothed in all materiality insofar as the human

36 Deep Incarnation carries within its body the history of biological and cosmic evolution. Important here is also the idea of the Cosmic Christ, wherein the Logos, as the informational matrix of all materiality—that is, the divine architectural agent who determines and manifests creation’s physical form—extends a divine presence throughout the universe as the ground of its being.50 In this dimension of the incarnation, Christ is not merely present “along-side” of existents, but exists “in, with, and for,” all materiality, broadly speaking.51 As such, there is here not a “strict separation between creation and incarnation,” though God and materiality are not synonymous because only Jesus is the self-revelation of God.52 Third, there is a “soteriological sense” of the incarnation that builds on the first two in order to suggest that the incarnate presence of Christ throughout the world seeks to renew and thus redeem some forms of materiality from the violence inherent in creaturely existence. Insofar as things resist violence and that which interrupt personal flourishing and fulfillment, Gregersen thus envisions the possibility of an eschatological reversal of fate for those creatures who suffer. While it is unclear what this will look like, redemption awaits not simply humanity, but creation as such. I take up a more detailed discussion of the three senses of incarnation in Chapters 4 and 5 and will engage Gregersen’s ideas in more depth throughout the book. For now, the above sufficiently presents the scope of deep incarnation today, outlining its principal thesis and concerns. In the rest of the chapter, I suggest the potential shortcomings of the contemporary paradigm of deep incarnation Christology and outline a path forward for a renewed discussion of the idea aimed at eschewing, insofar as possible, Christology rooted in metaphysical anthropocentrism.

Metaphysical Anthropocentrism and Christological Paradigms Deep incarnation is a much-needed theological paradigm for the modern era insofar as it represents the serious attempt of Christian theologians to rethink their responses to issues as such as theodicy, the importance and goodness of the physical world, and in considering Christianity’s moral responsibilities in the context of anthropogenic climate change and other violations of creatures and creation. Deep incarnation thus attempts to eschew, or at least limit, the humanist prejudice that reinforce the attitudes of human superiority over the otherwise than human that justify unnecessary and unmitigated violence toward Earth, its inhabitants, and its ecosystems. There are, however, possible shortcomings in this desire to think otherwise than anthropocentrism and recover a Christian faith that upholds the dignity of creation by re-sacralizing materiality and providing a religious foundation for the compassionate treatment of creation by re-imagining its intimate relationship with its Creator. Despite its intention to expand the ontic scope and significance of the doctrine of incarnation beyond humanity, today’s ecologically deep

Deep Incarnation 37 Christologies remain grounded in metaphysical anthropocentrism, a framework they seek explicitly to move beyond. These deep Christologies manifest as the normalization of certain human characteristics that define and limit divinity: ego-centric rationality, love, and an animalistic perception of pain.53 Divinity, as such, is not infinite but enchained to the human body, enshrining the human as the creature of highest moral significance due to its ability to identify others through its own subjective power, which seems to always necessitate a correlate moral value that seats the human as the crown of creation. Thus, just as no voices beyond the human are referred to in answering questions about the nature of Creator and creation, so humanity will also receive a weightier moral status when contemplating ethical action toward beings. In distinguishing between a “strict” and “broad” sense of the incarnation, Gregersen differentiates between the human and the cosmic Christ, acknowledging that while both express divinity, the former reflects divine being as such or in itself (καθ’ αὐτό). The difference between the strict and broad sense of incarnation concerns divine self-revelation. The strict-sense of incarnation is incarnation as classically conceived. It is the unique religious event, occurring within Jesus of Nazareth alone, wherein the divine Logos is physically embodied as the self-revealing, self-expressing incarnation of Christ, who uncovers God the Father through the power of the Spirit. Jesus alone, for Gregersen and most others, is fully identical or synonymous with Christ and reveals God. Thus, “just as Jesus was, in the unfolding of his spatiotemporal life story, so God is—in the past, now, and forever. Jesus was fully transparent to God: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’” (John 14:9).54 This exclusive representation and self-revelation of divinity, complete with soteriological efficacy, occurs in Jesus alone, as we come to see, precisely because of an ontic link between humanity and divinity identifiable through certain key character traits that uncover and link the mutual the essence of God and humanity.55 Such aims to protects divine identity from any pantheistic extension to things, preserves a Creator/creation distinction in spite of the manner in which these categories are not mutually exclusive in the broad sense of incarnation, and ensures Jesus’ unique being and role in the Christian tradition. Concerning divine self-expression and revelation, Gregersen suggests “that only a human being who is living in full resonance with God’s will, while also being transparent to God’s eternal nature, could be said to be a proper embodiment and character-description of God.”56 The humanist necessity within divine revelation is further clarified insofar as it seems obvious that the identity of God as Love can’t be revealed in a tomato or in a mussel, nor in the birth and decay of stars and galaxies in the macro-scopic realm of the cosmos. The incarnation must take place in a self-reflective religious human person … whose life is fully attuned to God’s.57

38 Deep Incarnation The possibility of representing and revealing God is here linked to certain abilities that are assumed to manifest the essence of both divinity and humanity, restricting the divine to physical expression in this one form. While I am confident that proponents of deep incarnation will insist that God is more-than human, the essence of divinity is nevertheless inseparable from a set of normative characteristics it takes to be proper to humanity. Leaving aside the extraordinary problem of restricting such traits to humans, the forms held up as necessary for revelation include a self-reflexive awareness and the possibility of acting as a moral agent.58 It is not simply the human in its totality that is capable of divine revelation, it is a certain normative human presence and ability. Such normative ability is indicated by the possession of a neurological structure sufficiently complex for linguistic, conceptual, and self-reflexive rationality; the perception of animalistic pain and suffering; and the capacity for pro-social, empathetic, responsible behavior that can translate into ethical precepts and possibly laws.59 Thus, while deep incarnation extends Christological relevance beyond Jesus and humanity, “the self-embodiment of God’s Word or Wisdom must have its anchorages in a particular member of the human species,” as “only human beings can be mindful of the universe at large … [and] are capable of cultivating an ethical concern … [and] evidence a self-reflective relation to God, as the source of all that is.”60 Thus, in order for divine expression and self-revelation to unfold in history, the Logos became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, who expressed divinity, and could not have done otherwise, by means of his specifically human body. This description has profound ontic implications for understanding divinity. For deep incarnation, not different than any classical, orthodox Christology, as Jesus was, so God is. The being of Jesus, especially in these cognitive and moral structures, is transferred to God; they express the manner of divine expression, and identify the necessary, ontic structure of God and thus restrict divine being to a formal template assumed to be the exclusive possession of one creature within creation. Since divinity is only able to express itself through a creaturely form sufficiently like itself, God must possess a parallel structure to the creatures capable of divine revelation. God is self-reflexive love and cannot be otherwise. If God were otherwise, either more-than human or in fact infinite, presumably divinity could express in and as any number of subjects who share a similar overlap in ontic characteristics. Religion and knowledge of God are thus reduced to the realm of self-reflective, conceptualist expression, and moral agency. Divine self-revelation is possible among humanity alone because divinity and humanity share an overlapping ontic structure, grounded in conceptualist thought and ethical agency. These, I argue throughout this book, do constitute a revelation of God, but only in part. Divinity, and Christ more specifically, express beyond the structure of the awakened consciousness and moral contemplation so prized by the human species precisely because neither God, Christ, nor divinity are human. Incarnate

Deep Incarnation 39 divinity, I argue, is rooted far deeper within the physical structure of being and not bound to human normativity. Deep incarnation as it stands is thus too humanist in its orientation to adequality recognize the possible depths to which the divine Christ is embodied and embedded within the world. A non-anthropocentric Christology is needed not because divinity is unable to assume human shape, but because when incarnation is limited absolutely by the human form, theology becomes indistinguishable from anthropology. More than this, the anthropological vision concerns a normativity that may exclude many from full participation within the species and is rooted in exclusionary, poorly conceived biology that sees humanity as isolated from its evolutionary context insofar as its most prized traits are shared with other animals. My primary concern here is that deep incarnation, as much accepted Christological dogma throughout time, runs the risk of idolatry. Presenting God as the human alter ego, annihilating the possibility that divine alterity might be otherwise than ourselves, represents one of the oldest theological problems in the Western philosophical tradition. The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes, cynical of the anthropomorphism of human gods and concerned to rethink the blatant similarities between the gods and their worshipers, makes fun of the reduction of the divine other to the same that is so common in Western theology: Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men [sic.] do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.61 While Xenophanes’ concern is not precisely my own, his point that we ought to be skeptical of images of God that look suspiciously like religious adherents needs to be taken seriously. Thus, any Christology privileging normative, human characteristics determined ahead of time as the sole markers of “strict sense” incarnation betrays the possibility of metaphysical anthropocentrism. The concern today is not the particularity of incarnate divinity—let creatures conceive of the gods how they like—but the reduction of God to an absolute, immoveable form imagined in the likeness of the artist. Absolutizing the divine form betrays the infinity inherent in and necessary to the idea of God. If God cannot be otherwise than human, infinity, transcendence, and the dark enigma of divinity fail as the human is deified. God, in a sense, would thus die, or if you prefer, become chained up by humanist language and thought, ceasing to express and embody the necessary dynamics of divinity. To refuse the possibility of divine self-identification, self-revelation, and self-expression beyond the confines of a human-like selfreflexive, moral agent is to obliterate the possibility the idea of infinity and thus the idea of God in the Christian tradition. If God were infinite, one could not place a priori anthropological restrictions on the identity of divine alterity

40 Deep Incarnation and would allow divinity to speak itself and challenge human sovereignty. I am not suggesting an absolute apophatic theology where nothing of God can be affirmed. My concern is with theologies that reduce the being of God by disallowing divine expression to overflow the characteristics cherished by humans, as alterity is not safe when governed by a humanist horizon that assumes authority in assigning identity. Furthermore, when the Creator is assumed to have an inherent, unchanging set of characteristics and attributes that parallel a specific creature, the inevitable result is the re-inscribing of value hierarchies that elevate certain creatures above others. In this case, the human, as the image of God, is placed at the top of the hierarchy of creation. The result is thus a loss of infinity, transcendence, and ultimately divinity in the being of God, and the deification of Homo sapiens as the creature who transcends creation. Following Mary Daly’s famous critique of Christianity’s androcentrism—“if God is male, then the male is God”62—it is necessary to proclaim an anthropocentric correlate: “when God becomes (absolutely) human, the human becomes God.” Such an attitude does little to move beyond the human exceptionalism that has played a major role in the tenuous relationship between humanity and Earth—a concern at the heart of all ecological theologies. The idea of divinity, then, must include the notion of absolute overflow; it is an idea whose ideatum is always already beyond what anyone is able to think. It would not conclude that anything and everything that takes place in the world incarnates divinity in a Christian sense but would require an openness to a divine self-expression beyond the human horizon. Thus, there are severe limitations in insisting that only a reductive human normativity can embody an authentic, strict sense of divine revelation. This should not discount the shared identity Christ has in deep incarnation theologies with the cosmos itself, insofar as Christ is the form containing all forms that erupt from his creative power, which supplies the matter, energy, and information that shapes each thing. Yet, such is less than the strict sense identification between Christ and Jesus. This should also not underestimate the soteriological emphasis deep incarnation insists on for all things. Beyond ontological debates, there is the infinitely more important insistence that all things possess moral significance and are subject to the redemptive arc of the Christian tradition.

Conclusion: Resurrecting Historical Debates Neither Gregersen’s construction of deep incarnation nor my own fit perfectly within the most widely accepted classical Christological assumptions.63 While Gregersen’s theology sits more comfortably within the tradition than my own, his vision would likely have been looked at suspiciously by theological and ecclesial authorities of the past. Such was the case with anyone open to a messier metaphysics where the ontology and identity of Creator and creature was blurred.64 As I have reflected on the

Deep Incarnation 41 differences between Gregersen and myself over the years, I have come to see them as a resurrection of similar differences among two Neo-Platonist philosopher theologians of the sixteenth century, both of whom were questioned by traditional authorities but who experienced radically different responses within the Christian community. I am thinking specifically of the intellectual relationship between two great Renaissance thinkers Nicolas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno. While both thinkers relied heavily on the concept of coincidence of contraries to argue for a radical ontology that identified Creator and creation, they differed at a key point in much the way Gregersen and myself differ. While Cusanus placed certain restrictions on his metaphysics and Christology to protect God and Christ from creaturely finitude, Bruno stripped away such restrictions for a more complete identification of God and the world. Likewise, while Cusanus insisted that the human shared in some essential divine characteristics and were fully the imago dei, Bruno claimed that each creature was a full and complete expression of the Creator. I end this chapter with a brief discussion of this historical relationship to summarize the similarities and differences between Gregersen and myself, anchor our differences in a lager historical context, and to say a brief world about the concerns each side has about the other’s position. For Nicholas of Cusa, there is a sense in which all that exists is an expression and overflow of God, just as for Gregersen the divine Christ is broadly speaking incarnate in all that exists. There is a non-oppositional, dialectical identity between Creator and creation understood within a framework of a coincidence of opposites wherein transcendence and immanence, divine and creature, coincide in ontic unity and identity despite a crucial difference between the two. Cusanus, like his Neo-Platonist forebears, maintains an idea he traces back to Anaxagoras, “each thing is in each thing,” including God as the form and essence of all. God is the unity of existence prior to differentiation in the universe (complicatio) as well as the manifestation of the world in all its diverse plurality (explicatio). “God is the enfolding and the unfolding of all things … insofar as He is the enfolding, in Him all things are Himself, and … insofar as He is the unfolding, in all things He is that which they are, just as in an image the reality itself is present.”65 Paradoxically, identity is shared despite the distinction between Creator and creation. Strictly speaking, following deep incarnation terminology, “God is the Absolute Quiddity of the world, or universe.” Broadly speaking, however, “the universe is contracted quiddity.”66 This is the difference between God and the world despite sharing a singular identity, and I believe something similar is at work in deep incarnation theology where God, strictly speaking, is the essence of each thing but insofar as no creature can completely manifest the fullness of the divine, God is spoken of only as the totality, the form from which all forms derive their being. In this framework, God exists in contracted form in all things and all things exist within God’s absolute form.

42 Deep Incarnation There is mutual transcendence at work here as divinity is irreducible to matter while extending into the world. Likewise, the world is present within the divine absolute, though it too cannot be seen as its fullest self in absolute form, but only in its particular manifestations. If Cusanus says that God is beyond things, it is because matter is not all that exists and because matter is too restricted for him to confidently name as God.67 Here resides the problem for Cusanus concerning a more robust identification of Creator and creation. Strictly speaking, God is fully God only as a totality, only as sameness or the “Not-other,” because for him, the infinite cannot manifest restrictions as the world of matter does.68 We can only speak of God as the enfolded totality that unfolds to becomes all things. Spirit and matter are not strictly speaking the same but express a plurality of modal existences belonging to one ontological reality defining and expressing itself. If anyone sees that Not-other is not only the definition of itself and of all things but also the object of its own definition and of the definition of all else, then in all the things which he sees, he sees only Not-other defining itself … . What [does he see] in the sky except Not-other defining itself? And similarly for all things. Therefore, the creature is the manifestation of the Creator defining Himself—or the manifestation of the Light (which is God) manifesting itself.69 As such, while all that exists as a divine incarnation, God as the object of religious devotion is not the universe or the creature but the fullness of being inclusive of everything—the not-other that is the essence of everything. Only the totality, for Cusanus, is that infinite and most simple Oneness worthy of the divine name; “God is the only being who is actually (i.e., who actualizes) each infinite thing.”70 There is one exception within creation, where the abyss between Creator and creation or the absolute and contracted maximum is nearly bridged. The human is a unique manifestation of the divine and Jesus of Nazareth the perfect incarnation of such and the fullest expression of God as a creature. Thus, while any divine expression is an incarnation as something—for example, a stone or the sky, the moon or the sun—the human expression alone approximates the infinite God and eschews the finitude of other expressions. This is possible because of the human intellect, which according to Cusanus reaches toward the essence of infinity insofar as it transcends the restriction and finitude of perspectival knowing. This does not mean that the human mind is completely without limits, but that humanity is able to know that there exists a fundamentally impenetrable source of being, a Creator who exists beyond positive knowledge. In fact, the limitation of the creature is key, since the being who is able to unite the absolute and the contracted maximums must be above all other creatures while still residing in the flesh, and yet possess an angelic intellect. The intellect, however, is the crucial distinction between the human and other creatures, for Cusanus, that maintains the

Deep Incarnation 43 human as the imago dei and further characterizes God. While all things are in a sense an incarnation of God and exist as the likeness of the divine, the human participates in the divine to a greater degree than anything else because of its intellect, which is differentiated from the flesh, and thus exemplifies the full potential of divine contraction into the world, fulfilled only in Jesus, the perfect human.71 The human thus attains the status of an image.72 Likeness refers to the general presence of God in everything. But only in a spiritual being is that likeness an image of God. Though God’s presence is always total, the mode of that presence varies according to the degree of participation. Intellectual beings participate at a higher degree in God’s life, and they may increase their capacity of participation as they become more aware of their being images of God.73 This monistic perspective is strikingly similar to Gregersen’s view of deep incarnation.74 Though rooted in Stoic philosophy and the Gospel of John rather than Neo-Platonism, Gregersen has made similar points concerning the divine Logos as the absolute form from which every existent derives its essence.75 The Logos—“meaning Pattern or Structure as much as Reason or Word”—is the generative matrix, or physical possibility, of all actualities that populate the world.76 The universe is the overflow of divinity itself, not just a manipulation of passive matter by an active, transcendent power. Comprised of informed mass-energy, the world flows from the Logos’ own being, who is the exemplary form of forms, self-expressing as this or that. As such, the Creator gives its essence to creatures in the act of creation and in a sense similar to Cusanus, constitutes the being of things. This broad sense of deep incarnation reflects a real identity between Creator and creation, but like Cusanus’ vision does not consider this divine presence to be absolute God, strictly speaking, and thus the object of religious devotion. For Cusanus this is because God cannot be named within finitude, while Gregersen, as seen above, seems more concerned with defining God in terms of agential love.77 Insofar as the world expresses many forms that are impersonal and amoral, if not evil, Gregersen cannot attribute the divine name to such even if “the divine Logos/Wisdom is (minimally) co-extensive with all material forms … . and there is no gulf between Christ and creation.”78 Thus, as we have seen, it is only the human being, with its capacities for religious agency and ethical behavior that can strictly speaking, incarnate an absolute self-expression or revelation of God. Thus, while different, Cusanus and Gregersen evince an incarnational structure wherein the world shares a divine identity broadly speaking, but strictly speaking, the fullest degree of identity resides with humanity, the exemplar of which according to the Christian tradition is of course Jesus of Nazareth. While deep incarnation is a contemporary movement within ecologically and scientifically minded Christology, its internal debates are focused on old issues. These debates have been ongoing in one form or another

44 Deep Incarnation throughout history as those in the Christian tradition have wrested with the God/world relationship in the wake of the doctrine of incarnation. The issues I bring up with Gregersen’s theology are paralleled by Giordano Bruno’s response to Nicholas of Cusa. Remembering older discussions put contemporary one’s in their context and remind us that the Christian tradition’s understanding of Christ as the focal point of the God/world relationship has always been contentious to one degree or another. Briefly, as I deal with this substantially in Chapter 6, I note Bruno’s response to Cusanus, which is simultaneously one of admiration and critique. Deeply influenced by the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, “as the Cusan, the inventor of geometry’s most beautiful secrets, divinely pointed out,” Bruno too argues for a shared identity between Creator and creation.79 Yet, Bruno’s understanding of coincidence has theological ramifications extending beyond Cusanus’ framework. While each rooted their thought in the consequences of thinking God as infinite, Bruno could not find reason to restrict divine fullness to the totality of non-otherness. For Bruno, infinity was not threatened by differentiation amidst the actualization of the world. On the contrary, infinity requires inclusion not only the unification of all in oneness, but the reality that this totality necessarily becomes many things.80 This inclusion is likewise not simply found in the mereological sum of all things but resides in each particular thing as well.81 There is absolute unity in the enfolding and unfolding of the world, between the one and the many others.82 We are, therefore, correct in affirming that being—the substance, the essence—is one, and since that one is infinite and limitless, both with respect to duration and substance, as it is in terms of greatness and vigour, it does not have the nature of either a principle or of what is principled; for each thing, coinciding in unity and identity (that is to say, in the same being), comes to have an absolute value and not a relative one. In the infinite and immobile one, which is substance and being, if there is multiplicity, the number which is a mode and multiformity of being by which it comes to denominate things as things, does not, thereby, cause being to be more than one, but to be multi-modal, multiform and multi-figured … . Every production, of whatever kind, is an alteration, while the substance always remains the same, since there is only one substance, as there is but one divine, immortal being.83 Infinity contains an element of sameness but does not stand apart from alterity. The one polymorphs into the world and its many others and each taken by itself, the same or the other, is constricted, incomplete, and finite. As a result, Bruno insists that God cannot be restricted to non-otherness and must include alterity, abandoning the ontological hierarchy that allows Cusanus to restrict the name of God and the person of Christ.

Deep Incarnation 45 Rather than saying that matter is empty and excludes forms, we should say that it contains forms and includes them. This matter which unfolds what it possesses enfolded must, therefore, be called a divine and excellent parent, generator and mother of natural things—indeed, nature entire in substance.84 Building on this, Bruno further insists that there is nothing about any single species that represents the infinite divine better than any other. Identifying absolute divinity via characteristics, whether agency, morality, or anything else, does not preserve infinity but rather annihilates it. Thus, insofar as the world is the incarnation of God, the human loses its place at the top of the hierarchy and ceases to be the sole imago dei while all else is relegated to second-class status as a mere reflection of something greater. “You come no nearer to commensurability, likeness, union and identity with the infinite by being a man than by being an ant, or by being a star than by being a man, for you get no nearer to that infinite being by being the sun or the moon than by being a man, or an ant.”85 The infinite divine is fully incarnate in this or that because creation is the process of the enfolded one unfolding as the impossibly complex many others, self-expressing here and there in the face of things. Brunian pantheism, unlike the Cusian variety, recognizes that “there is unity in the multiplicity, and multiplicity in the unity, how being is multi-modal and multi-unitary, and how it is, finally, one in substance and in truth.”86 The perspectives of Cusanus and Bruno show great similarity and subtle, though important, differences. Neither escaped controversy for their radical positions, which differ in their own ways from what was accepted by ecclesial authorities, manifesting the plurality of a tradition that is anything but myopic in its doctrinal experimentations.87 Christology, to drawn on Bruno, is a multi-unitary and multi-modal phenomenon with no normative perspective, even if some ideas have attained more power than others. Deep incarnation continues the tradition in its own unique way, in the context of modern science, ecological concern, and a vision to include the more-thanhuman in the Christian narrative. Deep incarnation wrestles with the God/ world relationship and the conversation developed in subsequent chapters parallel the historical struggles between philosopher theologians willing to think about this relationship in radical terms that find themselves at odds with classic Christology. Deep Christology, even before Pan had become Christianity’s boogeyman, meant to frighten those who thought the divine too close to the physical, has faced accusations of atheism, idolatry, obliterating individualism, eternity, and infinity. Nevertheless, we recognize that such accusations fail to account for the depths of a multi-unitary and multi-modal tradition that has never had a meta-narrative concerning Jesus and the God/world relationship.88 Going forward, I thus join Gregersen and others in the attempt to think the Christianity, the God/world relation, and the identity of Jesus in radically new terms that make sense of contemporary experience while fitting within the broad strokes of tradition.

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Notes 1 References to humanist sovereignty or metaphysical anthropocentrism throughout this work refers to the normalization of humanity as the singular embodiment adequate for understanding and judging existence, divine or creaturely. We may wish to specify that even within this framework, anthropocentrism is often further reduced to a vision of the human conforming to Western, colonial, and androcentric frameworks. As such, there are further problems with anthropocentrism that I simply do not have the space to adequately explore here. Nevertheless, I am concerned with any bias that assumes the ontological makeup of both Creator and creation are open to human perception without a rigorous consideration of the idea of infinity—i.e., the idea that alterity is irreducible to the normativity and sovereignty of human judgment and that the human is not the normative center of being. Such a bias enshrines the human within religious thought, and as I argue throughout this work, reduces the idea of God to an anthropological alter ego. Such takes place through the uncritically normalization of the human insofar God is identified within the limits of what makes sense within a humanist horizon, thus restricting the expression of divinity and materiality through an appeal to the capacities of ableminded human beings. For a detailed exploration of metaphysical anthropocentrism and humanism in the sense in which they are used here, see Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?. 2 There are many wonderful examples of this. See, for example, Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity; Clough, On Animals; Deane-Drummond, The Wisdom of the Liminal. 3 The modern critique of theology as disguised anthropology belongs chiefly to Ludwig Feuerbach, in his The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), though the idea can be traced throughout the history of the Western philosophical tradition, all the way to pre-Socratic thinkers such as Xenophanes. 4 I believe this book is more extensive in scope than eco or animal theology, but the ideas were forged within and find their initial interlocutors within these theological sub-disciplines. 5 Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World.” 6 Teilhard de Chardin, “La Vie Cosmique.” For the English translation, see “Cosmic Life.” Teilhard dates this essay to April 24, 1916. This work, like most of his theological writings, would not be published until Teilhard’s death in 1955. 7 Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 14. 8 Teilhard understands pantheism as the absolute lack of particularity: “Everything that exists is (or becomes), in the whole of its self, identical with God. Understood in this sense, the Universal element embraces all … and everything becomes indistinguishably identified with it (more or less directly).” Teilhard de Chardin, “The Universal Element,” 292. Teilhard holds that reality is “to be united (that is, to become the other) while remaining oneself.” Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, 116. This logic is found throughout his work, see especially “Pantheism and Christianity,” in Christianity and Evolution, trans. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 28–32. This is, however, not an accurate understanding of the complexities of pantheism nor the variations of this perspective, only some of which fit Teilhard’s vision. On Pantheism, see Levine, Pantheism. 9 Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 16. 10 Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 58.

Deep Incarnation 47 11 Teilhard de Chardin, “The Priest.” A later iteration of this essay would be completed in 1923: “The Mass on the World.” 12 Teilhard de Chardin, “The Priest,” 209. While the “blood” of this passage refers to the violence of evolution, it is likely also a reference to the blood spilt in war. Teilhard’s participation in WWI fit into a broader schema wherein human progress brings about justice and a consequent deeper unitive relationship between God and the world. 13 “I plunge into the all-inclusive One; but the One is so perfect that as it receives me and I lose myself in it I can find in it the ultimate perfection of my own individuality.” Teilhard de Chardin, “The Mass on the World,” 19. Likewise, Teilhard writes, “Christ, it is true, does not destroy nor dissolve us. He does not modify our nature nor wipe out our human personality—on the contrary, by melting us into himself he completes our differentiation as individual persons.” Teilhard de Chardin, “Forma Christi,” 266. The need to distinguish between Creator and creation, seems linked to the former possessing the perfection of the totality of the latter or the ideal forms things are evolving into that perfectly conform to the character of Christ. 14 Teilhard de Chardin, “The Priest,” 207. 15 Teilhard de Chardin, “Mass on the World,” 17. 16 Teilhard de Chardin, “The Priest,” 212. 17 Teilhard de Chardin, “Forma Christi,” 250. 18 Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, 120. 19 “Of the cosmic Christ, we may say both that he is and that he is entering into fuller being. He has already appeared in the world; but a long process of growth awaits him in this world, either in isolated individuals—or still more, perhaps, in a certain human spiritual unity, of which our present society is no more than an adumbration. The whole function, and task, and drama of the universe—the whole economy of human progress, of grace, of the sacraments (the Eucharist) take on their ultimate significance in this individualization of the Universal Element in which the Incarnation consists.” Teilhard de Chardin, “The Universal Element,” 298. This is important not simply because it further highlights Teilhard’s universal understanding of the incarnation and his degree Christology, but because it begins to reveal the anthropocentric limitations of his vision. Insofar as the universe moves toward a Christic end characterized by traits prized in the human—e.g., consciousness, morality, freedom, and a “humano-divine power”—Teilhard’s vision remains anthropocentric and can be faulted along with most deep incarnation Christology. Teilhard de Chardin, “The Universal Element,” 265. 20 Teilhard de Chardin, “Forma Christi,” 254. For a full consideration of the “Omega Point,” see Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, 167–208. There is also a teleology of complexity implicit throughout Teilhard’s work. “The analysis of matter is making us see it as a limitless aggregation of centres taking over and mastering one another in such a way as to build up, by their combinations, more and more complex centres of a higher order.” Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 19. Such is Teilhard’s teleological view of matter with its assumption that complexity is the divinely ordained trajectory of the cosmos. While such could of course be the case if one allows for the possibility of divinity as an intentional, personal Creator prior to creation, it could also be called into question in less personalist understandings of God and the anticipated entropic decay of the world to a state of equilibrium. 21 Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 28. The egalitarian feel of Teilhard’s language should not be overestimated. There is, throughout his work, a clear hierarchical understanding of the universe. The “equality” simply refers to the

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ubiquitous divinity of matter without eschewing the idea of degrees of intensity where matter may be more or less like divinity, which is deeply human-like. Teilhard goes so far as to suggest that humanity needs “to master nature, to make it unlock its secrets, to dominate it, to inaugurate a new phase; in that phase intelligence, which emerged from the universe, will turn back to it, to readjust and rejuvenate it, and make it provide its conscious portion with the full contribution it can make of growth in joy and activity.” Teilhard de Chardin, “Cosmic Life,” 34. The cosmos is not an egalitarian communion of equally divine matter, but the evolutionary fusion of all into a particular mode of highest divinity grounded in human forms and ideals. Teilhard de Chardin, “The Universal Element,” 296–297. Sittler, “Called to Unity.” “For Irenaeus, the Incarnation and saving work of Jesus Christ meant that the promise of grace was held out to the whole of nature, and that henceforth nothing could be called common or unclean.” Sittler, “Called to Unity,” 181. Sittler, “Called to Unity,” 186. This is the role Christology plays in Christianity’s responsibility to combat the ecological crisis. “Doctrines are evoked, clarified, refined, given force and precision within the challenges of exact circumstances. The facts of history are the exciters of insight; the nature of the moment’s need engenders the doctrine to serve and bless it.” Sittler, “Called to Unity,” 185. Sittler’s essay encapsulates much of what ecotheology would become and continues to be. Surveying all of this literature would be too large a task in the context of this chapter and would provide little value insofar as the idea of deep incarnation, while developing slightly in various works, does not see a robust and systematic articulation until the early 2000s. For those interested in a literature survey of ecotheology and incarnation between the 1960s and early 2000s, see Eaton, “Enfleshing Cosmos and Earth,” 82–104. Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World.” In this same year, Duncan Reid constructed a theology explicitly concerned with fleshing out the ecological implications of deepening incarnational theologies. Reid, “Enfleshing the Human.” Reid’s theology is virtually identical to deep incarnation theology as it has come to be defined today, though he ground his work on Athanasius of Alexandria and a re-appropriation of Alexandrian Christology. This is followed today in essays such as Behr, “Saint Athanasius on ‘Incarnation’”; Edwards, “Incarnation and the Natural World.” Gregersen, “Christology,” 36. The language of victimization, suffering, and violence has serious moral connotations. Gregersen, rightly, argues that the evolutionary process is an amoral part of the developing world, but his language is justified insofar as all things resist their demise in the face of the energy needs of others, as evinced, for example, in systems of predation. As such, the world is a complex matrix wherein a system might develop amorally due to the legitimate needs of some that require the interruption of the other. And yet, the resistance of those who are consumed for the existence of others have a voice as well—creation thus sometimes rebels against creativity. All things exist because of and yet resist the violence of cosmogenesis, resulting in a paradox of morality that both legitimizes and sympathizes with victimization and violence. Something overlooked here is the legitimacy and relevancy of comparing Jesus’ crucifixion with evolutionary pain and suffering. Aside from potentially flattening all suffering into a vision of sameness that annihilates particularity, an explanation is needed to determine how an analogy can be legitimately drawn between the unjust, political execution of Jesus on the one hand and the violence

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of natural selection on the other hand. While some general connection might be drawn, the two instances of suffering occur in radically different contexts meriting a further discussion. While the “No!” of creatures to evolutionary violence is ethically significant and an inescapable evil, there is moral ambiguity inherent to the process of evolution. This differs from the demonic violence and political domination resisted by Jesus, which is not creative nor necessary for Rome’s flourishing. The former violence, what we typically speak of as “natural evil” is inescapable and has a creative, good result despite its evil, while the latter violence is oppressive without a creative, good end. I explore these issues later in the book, especially in the fourth and sixth chapters. Michael Lee makes this point in his “Historical Crucifixion.” Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 197. Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 193. Here Gregersen discusses Maximus the Confessor’s notions of microcosmic anthropology and theosis. See also Tollefsen, “Saint Maximus the Confessor on Creation and Incarnation.” Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 193. In the fourth chapter of this book, I engage the eschatological character of this anticipated redemption. Deep incarnation, I believe, would do well to engage New Testament, liberationist, and post-colonial theologies of redemption and resurrection that eschew a focus on eschatology as a post-death phenomenon in favor of the immanent, political relevance of soteriology. The problem is that pushing redemption into a post-death eschaton allows the violence of the present to continue unabated and easily justifies unavoidable violence. Of course, there is no sense in which “natural evil” will come to an end, and thus redemption must cope with the fact the reality noted by deep incarnation theologians that there is no hope in overcoming violence as such. Nevertheless, I do not think the answer to this problem is adequately dealt with in hopes of a peaceful afterlife. Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” 204–205. The popularity of the terminology is seen, for example, in its use as a basic category of thought in basic ecotheological textbooks currently being published. See as an example, Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology, 72–88. Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology.” Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation,” 174. There remains a privileging of animal bodies with the neurological capacities needed to make suffering a possibility—a capacity closed off to most of materiality. As I argue later in this chapter and throughout the book, this argument only extends moral significance to others based their conformity to the human image, a metaphysical anthropocentrism that fails to fully embrace the depths of materiality and the infinite face of divinity. Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation,” 181–182. Duncan Reid’s theology of deep incarnation is likewise predicated on Johannine theology and an inclusive interpretation of the flesh. John’s inclusive Christology and understanding of the flesh provides the “insight that opens the possibilities of an ecological Christology. It is the story of Jesus as a human being that, when separated from this insight of the Johannine prologue, endangers this possibility by driving Christology irreversibly in the direction of anthropology.” Reid, “Enfleshing the Human,” 72. While John may have a Stoic reading of Jewish theology and the semantic nuances of σὰρξ are rather wide, there is reason to doubt that an intentional cosmic soteriology exists in John’s gospel. The immediate context of John’s prologue points toward more specifically human and Jewish theological

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concerns. The idea, however, is meaningful regardless of the intention of Johannine theology, as a contemporary evolutionary and ecologically minded framework might assign meaning and nuance to this narrative even if John did not have it in mind. Thus, we might re-imagine it considering our own experience, regardless of authorial intent. For more, see Eaton, “Enfleshing Cosmos and Earth,” 69–70. Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation,” 182. Gregersen’s inclusion of vegetal life should not be glossed over. The role of non-animal being should be explored in more depth by theologians, philosophers, and ethicists. While such may be laughable to some, there are deep historical roots to this issue. See, for example, Hall, Plants as Persons; The Imagination of Plants. According to Gregory Nazianzus in Letter 101.32, “that which [God] has not assumed he has not healed, but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 440. Cf. Gregersen’s discussion of Richard Bauckham’s difficulty with such a view, but ultimate acceptance of the human as a microcosm despite legitimate difference and distance between particular bodies. Gregersen, “Cur deus caro;” “The Extended Body of Christ.” See also Bauckham, “The Incarnation and the Cosmic Christ.” Edwards, Partaking of God, 54. Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 383. Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 385. Denis Edwards is also helpful in articulating this point: “This is not to say that God is incarnate in all things in the same way God is incarnate in Christ. Such a view would undermine the newness and the absolute gratuity of the incarnation and ultimately reduce incarnation to creation.” Edwards, Partaking of God, 54. Such positions could perhaps be reconciled with Teilhard de Chardin’s degree Christology as describe earlier in the chapter, though I believe that Teilhard de Chardin understands incarnation in a stronger sense than do Edwards or Gregersen. For the three types, see Gregersen, “Cur deus caro”; “The Extended Body of Christ.” Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. On incarnation through information and self-expression, see Niels Henrik Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity,” esp. 406–407. Being “in, with, and for” others and being “along-side of” are difficult to differentiate, but for now it should be clear that Gregersen’s self-articulation of his own position is that deep incarnation is more than omnipresence and beingalong-side of the other. The principal difference as far as I can tell is that Gregersen’s “broad” understanding of the incarnation is not indicative of a “self-revelation” of divine being. As such, Gregersen differentiates between the self-revelation of God in Jesus and divine presence within all materiality. Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation: Opportunities and Challenges,” 365. These traits are not exclusive to the human. Even if we discern rationality and love in other animals, my critique still holds insofar as divinity is reduced to a definable set of traits rather than remaining infinite and beyond a set of characteristics. Additionally, an extension of classically humanist traits to certain non-humans merely widens the circle of what is prized among our own species and maintains an anthropocentric essence. Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 235. This is what Gregersen refers to as “the scandal of particularity.” Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 235. Such a scandal calls into question the idea

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that one spatio-temporally particular human, embodied in a specific gender, race, class, sexuality, and range of abilities could be transparent to God. Gregersen’s response deals with the human proclivity toward sin and righteousness, suggesting that Jesus was fully resonate with God, whereas all others, human or otherwise, fail to be as open to divinity. This does not seem to deal with the scandal of particularity, however, and clings to the traditional assertion in the perfect piety of Christ. Yet, there is an assumption that this embodied matrix of Jesus’ life, his “world” and “community,” transcends its particularity and allows for a perfect resonance with the divine. We are left then without a clear answer to the question of how and why a Palestinian born, Jewish male, living within a Roman socio-political context is able to act as the ideal model of all materiality. The scandal of particularity thus remains unanswered, as well as questions concerning religious exclusivity and plurality that arise in this context. While I am not particularly concerned with the question of the normativity of religion, race, gender, and sex in this work, my critique of the humanism implicit in Gregersen’s work could be extended to the scandal of particularity and the apparent assumption that all of these somehow factored into the possibility of perfect resonance with the divine in the peculiar body of Jesus. Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 237. Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. As I argue in subsequent chapters, love, while not absolute indicative of divinity, is precisely revealed beyond human intentionality not in the possibility of moral agency and feeling, but in sheer physical vulnerability, which expresses to the human beyond the possession of any specific attribute. A mussel, to be sure, cannot love; yet, insofar as it resists its death, self-reflexively or otherwise, it could make a moral demand on a human being, revealing a divine love. Even if we do wish to reduce the idea of God to love, it is far from obvious that such cannot be revealed in the infinite depths of materiality beyond self-reflexive, religious persons. While Gregersen would assert that divinity is greater than the forms manifest in a certain, normative humanity, existing as the generative matrix of cosmos and Earth, a humanist structure nevertheless dominates and restricts this divine, creative power. The relationally driven matter, energy, and information that erupts in a universe is the overflow of divinity itself, but such divinity is fundamentally still an intentional, self-reflexive, loving person independent of cosmos and Earth. For more, see Gregersen’s essays “God, Information, and Complexity”; “God, Matter, and Information.” It is the conceptual insistence that God can only be revealed by a human that I focus on, not the fact that we can question whether any of the character traits drawn on here are proper to humanity. Nevertheless, I note here the problematic nature of the assumption that self-reflexivity and moral agency are “proper” to the human, and this the exclusive possession of this species. Deep incarnation appears here to see the human as a miracle, or rupture from materiality, something so novel that it transcends the world. This assumption is, of course, ethologically and biologically untenable today, as such traits are no longer thought to be the exclusive possession of the human. The work, for example, of Franz de Waal firmly demonstrates the continuity between humans and other apes, and many other studies show that the idea of self-reflexivity and morality, which on my Levinasian reading is not restricted to the possibility a Kantian universalization of maxims, extends not only beyond the human, but beyond the lives of apes. See for example, de Waal, Good Natured; de Waal, Macedo, Ober, and Wright, Primates and Philosophers; Balcombe, Second Nature. For philosophical work in theory of mind and ethics relevant for other-than humans, see especially, Rowlands, The Nature of Consciousness; Animals Like Us; Animal

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Rights; The New Science of the Mind; Can Animals Be Moral? While this is an important area of inquiry, I am not particularly concerned with it in the context of this book. I am not concerned with merely expanding the circle of what species might possess the “right” type of body for divine incarnation and expression. Self-reflexivity and moral agency, while not exclusively human attributes, are also not what is proper to divinity. To simply suggest that there are some other-than human bodies that are similarly self-reflective and moral would do nothing but expand the circle of bodies who might express divinity based on the same humanist prejudice for bodies conforming to certain, species-specific attributes, enchaining divinity to a certain form rather than embracing its infinity. To do this would extend a certain dignity “to previously marginalized groups, but without in the least destabilizing or throwing into radical question the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralisation.” Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 99. Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 226. Xenophanes, Fragment B15 in Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 119. Xenophanes, of course, depicts the idea of divinity in other ways that could be deemed anthropomorphic. The point here is simply to reveal the historical depth of the problem of correlating absolutely the creature with the Creator. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 38. The thirteenth century saw condemnations of such “pantheist” Christological formulations, though the term pantheism would not exist until the eighteenth century. Likewise, the Christology of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, would likely take issue with deep incarnation Christology just as easily as they did with David of Dinant. Aquinas, for example, “actually refers to the claim that God is in a stone in Summa contra gentiles 1.26.9, where he denies that God is the formal being of any thing.” Moran, “Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nickolas of Cusa,” 135. I would assume that Aquinas would likewise take issue with Gregersen’s view, touched on below. I am not, of course, asserting that deviant Christologies are perversions of some original “orthodox” view, but simply referring to perspectives that gained more power than others. On the myth that heresy is a perversion of a pure original, see Bauer, Orthodoxy and Earliest Christianity. While some might claim that such ideas exist outside of the Christian narrative, they have always been upheld in one form or another even if they historically failed to acquire the power other Christological interpretations did. I am not aware of a time in the Christian tradition where this issue was not debated because of the doctrine of Incarnation. As I insist below, there is no singular Christological narrative that serves as the normative position of the tradition. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, II.iii.111. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, II.iii.116. See also II.ix.149. “In his earliest philosophical work, De docta ignorantia (1440), Cusanus proposes to think of the divine as being the actuality of every possibility. God is all that can be, and also all than he can be. God is actually everything possible (est actu omne id quod possibile est, De docta ignorantia I.v.14), and all that he can be (est omne id quod esse potest, I.iv.11). Moran, “Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nickolas of Cusa,” 144. “Similarly with things: since they cannot be the Maximum, it happens that they are diminished, other differentiated, and the like—none of which [characteristics] have a cause. Therefore, a created thing has from God the fact that it is one, distinct, and united to the universe; and the more it is one, the more like unto God it is. However, it does not have from God (nor from any positive cause but [only] contingently) the fact that its oneness exists in plurality, its

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distinctness in confusion, and its union in discord.” Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, II, ii, 99. On God as sameness or not-other, see Nicholas of Cusa, On God as Not-Other. Nicholas of Cusa, On God as Not-Other, Proposition 118, 143, 145. As Moran points out, this is a radical position insofar as it differs from Thomistic theology: “Again the Platonic metaphysics of the image is here modified through the Cappadocian and Eriugenian tradition such that the image has only got reality in so far as it has the reality of the exemplar. Thus image and exemplar are in fact identical, not just similar. In this respect Cusanus and Eriugena agree, and differ from Aquinas, who argues only for a likeness between creatures and God, a likeness which is real only from the creature’s point of view.” Moran, “Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nickolas of Cusa,” 141. Moran, “Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nickolas of Cusa,” 141. Book three of On Learned Ignorance constructs this perspective, but see especially, III.iii.195–202. For Jesus’ perfection of this potential perfected unity, see III.iv.203–207. “But he distinguishes this unity from the one that distinguishes the mind from all other creatures, particularly when the mind becomes divinely enlightened and understands itself as an image of God that ‘grows toward the Image.’ Cusanus was well aware of this distinction. In a Latin sermon entitled Ubi venit plenitudo temporis (“When came the fullness of time”),” he writes: “Only the intellect is like a living image that is susceptible to the taste of life in itself, that is, of true life of which it is an image … . [It] discovers by discovering itself as image, the truth, the exemplar, and the form which gives it its being to the effect that it exists as image.” Dupré, “The Question of Pantheism from Eckhart to Cusanus,” 85. Dupré, “The Question of Pantheism from Eckhart to Cusanus,” 85–86. My description of deep incarnation above left out the discussion found in Gregersen’s more scientific and metaphysical writings. Keys for this discussion are two papers: Gregersen, “God, Matter, and Information: Towards a Stoicizing Logos Christology,” and “God, Information, and Complexity.” Gregersen recognizes the similarity acknowledging Bonaventure as an exemplar of the idea he develops. For Bonaventure, “each and any creature is a reflection and expression of the ‘face’ of Christ as the divine Wisdom, entailing all forms while also present in all distinctive creative forms.” “God, Information, and Complexity,” 407. Gregersen often distinguishes Stoicism from Platonism based on the materialist perspective of the former and the clear distinction between matter and form in the later. At least in Medieval and Renaissance Christian Neo-Platonism, such a distinction is not as prominent as seen in the world of Cusanus. This distinction may be retained in the insistence of Cusanus that God is only spoken of in the totality of the non-other, whereas this is not a concern for Gregersen working with Stoic Christianity and its interest in naming God based on characteristics such as agency and love. Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity,” 406. There is an aspect of spirit at work here connected to energy, with the Logos being explicitly tied to information. See, e.g., “God, Matter, and Information,” 325. Parsing out Trinitarian minutiae and potential scientific correlates is present throughout Gregersen’s writings but too tedious to include here. Note, however, that Cusanus does maintain that it is the human intellect that makes God’s absolute incarnation only possible among homo sapiens and not among plant life or animality outside in general. So, there is clear connection between Cusanus and Gregersen on the issue of human cognition and its unique ability to support divine incarnation in its fullest sense.

54 Deep Incarnation 78 Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity,” 407. Breaking from Thomistic approaches to the Creator/creation relation, Gregersen roots his perspective in a more robust idea of infinity. “If God is genuinely infinite, then God is the comprehensive reality—not a being fenced in as one existent alongside other existents. Moreover, if there are finite existents in the world, they must somehow be included in divine life.” Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity,” 396. 79 Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 97. 80 These many thus possesses real difference, even while containing the same essence and substance of the one. As the one limits itself in the faces of many others, alterity demonstrates multi-unitary and multi-modal dimensions and simultaneous paradoxical sameness and otherness. See, Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. 81 Interestingly, Bruno’s idea of infinity within the world of matter is so strong that he in fact posits an infinite material universe where every possibility is actualized. This goes too far for my liking but cannot be discussed here. Nevertheless, the infinite of the one is manifest in an infinite universe as well as in the face of each thing—nothing is excluded from this multi-unitary and multi-modal reality of shared sameness and alterity. I explore this more in Chapter 6. 82 Even if we grant, as Bruno does, that the many proceed from the one, they still reside eternally within it. The eternal dimension of temporality, along with the absolute coincidence of opposites, prevent us from establishing any ontic priority for Bruno or a Hegelian sense of dialectical progress. The one and the many are always unified, always co-exist and coincide within one another. We cannot establish absolute priority of one over the other. “In consequence, neither the one nor the other matter is ever formless, although each is formed differently; one in the instant of eternity, the other in the instant of time; one in simultaneity, the other in succession; one by way of enfolding, the other by way of unfolding; one as a unity, the other as multiplicity; one as being all and each thing, the other individually and thing after thing.” Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 81. For a brief summary of Bruno and the relation between the one and the many, God and the world as a coincidence of opposites, see Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence, 109–124, 133–150. 83 Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. 84 Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 83–84. This includes not simply the infinite substance that grounds all beings, but beings themselves, “since all forms are contained in [matter], produced by it … they have no mode of actual existence in sensible and intelligible being other than through accidental existence.” Cause Principle, and Unity, 9. 85 Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 88. 86 Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 10. While many would defend Cusa against pantheist descriptions, I think would describe it as a form of pantheism. The problem with most depictions of pantheism is that they are highly reductionistic and rarely grapple with the many forms and actual nuance such a philosophy might take. For example, Teilhard de Chardin’s depiction of pantheism represents one form of pantheism that maintains a radical distinction between appearance and reality—and his interpretation by no means captures the nuance of these views, found, for example, in Berkely or Shankaracharya and the Advaita Vedanta school. See Levine, Pantheism, 73–84. 87 Grace Jantzen notes that pantheism is essentially treated as a “swear word,” is typically rejected “with minimal serious argument,” and “otherwise careful scholars either ignore pantheism altogether or offer arguments unworthy of their intelligence to disparage its very possibility.” Jantzen, “Feminism and Pantheism,”

Deep Incarnation 55 272. Contemporary scholars who would like to comment on pantheism are fortunate to have easy access to Michael Levine’s, Pantheism as well as the more recent treatment of pantheism, the fears surrounding it, and its life-giving potential as a religious framework in Rubenstein, Pantheologies, 28–62. Historically, critiques of what we now call “pantheism” were subsumed under accusations of atheism and idolatry under the Aristotelean assumption that the substantial transcendence of God was not preserved, causing a conflation between Creator and creation and effectively annihilating the unique identity of the former as an agential, personal deity possessing freedom, holiness, omnipotence, and omniscience. Michael Levine writes that “the primary reason for equating pantheism with atheism pertains to non-personalistic types of pantheism (i.e., most types). The critic simply presupposes that there can be no such thing as non-personal theism.” Furthermore, “It is question begging to assume that pantheism, or any kind of belief in ‘God,’ must conceive of God as a person if it is to count as belief in ‘God.’” Levine, Pantheism, 3, 4. Furthermore, akin to Cusanus’ reasoning, insofar as creation is finite, temporal, and multiple, it lacks the simplicity, eternity, and infinity that is associated with God in Christian theology. Bruno’ extension of Cusanus’ philosophy of coincidence is one way around this dilemma, though there are many ways of conceiving of oneness, eternity, and unity within the universe that maintain the idea of infinity without denying the idea of God. See Levine, Pantheism, 25–47. Apart from the official, doctrinal problems leveled against atheism/pantheism, some scholars note further underlying problems with the framework especially insofar as a Creator/creation conflation threatened the accepted metaphysical hierarchies of the Western philosophical tradition that reinforced correlate socio-cultural hierarchies. Ecofeminists have long pointed out that dualism produces clear distinctions and imbalances in power and significance between those on either side of the ontic split. God, spirit, mind, humanity, and men are preserved and unified on one side of the split over and against matter, flesh, sensibility, creatures, and women. Without attempting an ecofeminist genealogy, I note that I am deeply influenced by the work of Warren’s Ecofeminist Philosophy. Grace Jantzen writes specifically on this subject in the context of Christian pantheism. See Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body; Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Likewise, gender analysis in the context of pantheism is found throughout Rubenstein’s, Pantheologies. An even earlier deconstruction of the gendered nature of theological claims can be found, ironically, in Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity, 70–74. After listing the derogatory ways matter is described in Aristotelian philosophy, which includes being chaotic and insatiable, the cause of sin and evil, almost non-existent, and inherently subservient, he notes the connection made by philosophers between matter and women. In the words of Polliinnio—the mouthpiece of Aristotelian philosophy who is refuted and mercilessly mocked throughout the dialogue—“a woman is but matter. If you do not know what a woman is because you do not know what matter is, study the Peripatetics a little; they will teach you what a woman is by teaching you about matter.” Cause, Principle, and Unity, 74. Thus, while on the surface the official condemnations of “pantheism” would be linked to atheistic doctrinal errors, it is highly likely that another reason the church condemned such positions was to maintain a dualistic value hierarchy that maintained certain socio-cultural power relations, including the refusal to associate divinity with women due to a Western androcentric bias. 88 This idea is common throughout Christian history and represented today especially by Radical Orthodox theologies, which theorize religious identity away from the general toward the particular. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine; Milbank, Theology and Social

56 Deep Incarnation Theory. Radical Orthodoxy essentializes and reifies religious identity through the creation of narratives representing a supposed authentic and autonomous worlds understood fully only by the practitioners of a faith and hearkening back to pre-critical, original, and authoritative perspectives on the tradition. A religious tradition is composed of narratives and rituals that are incommensurable with others and follow irrevocable rationality and rules that cannot be deviated from without betraying authentic orthodoxy. Pantheism in this vision would, of course, betray the Christian tradition because historically God has “officially” been understood to transcend the world. I would follow Paulo Gonçalves, who argues that such frameworks are not simply describing religious traditions “but rather generating, promoting, and perpetuating idealized or romanticized fantasms of quasi-autonomous and homogenous traditions—fantasms which are possibly far removed from their actual historical forms, and which ignore the agonistic history of their constitution as ‘traditions’ or ‘religions.’” Gonçalves, “Religious ‘Worlds’ and their Alien Invaders,” 116. Such homogenization of the Christian tradition perpetuates a colonialist caricature, or reduction of the other to the same, present in the very instantiation of the idea of religion in the first place, which ignores the basic hybridity and plurality of faith traditions in actual development and practice. See Thatamanil, Circling the Elephant, 108–151. Levine, in Pantheism, 25–143, deals with many claims that would perhaps be brought against pantheism by the likes of Radical Orthodoxy proponents or those in general who scoff at theologies deviating from official doctrinal interpretations by various ecclesial authorities. This and the following chapters construct a religious identity not subject to the judgments of orthodoxy and instead “sensitive to blurred boundaries, variations of interpretation, marginalization by influential elites and the dynamics of innovation and transformation.” Gonçalves, “Religious ‘Worlds’ and their Alien Invaders,” 125.

3

God, the Face, and Incarnation

If divinity is incarnate within the depths of materiality and not simply the human or its perfect representative, we require a framework to make sense of such encounters. Thus, before exploring the particular ways in which Christology might be expanded and articulated beyond classical and humanist Christological formulas, we require a philosophical architecture to structure the thinking of the infinite within the finite and, more specifically, identifying a particular divine expression appropriate for naming Christ.1 This mixing of divinity and physicality has consumed religious thoughts from antiquity to the contemporary era, whether it was believed that divinity was synonymous with the world, embedded within but distinct in some way, or whether the two were absolutely and ontically distinct.2 One’s understanding of the nature of the God/world, or infinite/finite relationship, is one of the most consequent factors in the determination of theological ethics and the viability of religious thoughts directed at ecological and animal concerns. This chapter explores one possible way to ground the expansive Christology explored in this book.3 Below, I follow an unlikely interlocutor in shaping the philosophical momentum for a non-anthropocentric theology that ultimately grounds my take on deep incarnation Christology. Despite Emmanuel Levinas’ anthropocentrism and distaste for the idea of incarnation, his work provides a philosophical infrastructure capable of supporting a Christology that thoroughly blends divinity and physicality in a way consistent with Christ’s general performance of divinity in the Christian tradition. Levinas’ philosophy of religion, which imagines a non-theistic or, as he describes it, an atheistic idea of divinity rooted in ethics, provides the resources sufficient for encountering an embodied infinite. Such transcendent divinity resides immanently within the alterity of the Earth and the wider cosmos apart from a subjective, anthropocentric identification of the divine that amounts to a reduction of the other to the same. Below, I analyze Levinas’ philosophy of religion through his understanding of alterity’s face, saving my critiques of his position—especially his anthropocentrism—for subsequent chapters.4 This chapter lays the philosophical groundwork for encountering cruciform divinity in the depth of the physical, even if source of the vision remains DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-3

58 God, the Face, and Incarnation problematic. What I take from Levinas is the notion that divinity is performed in the corporeal expression of vulnerability and encountered by a subject in the face of another. From this arises the possibility of reimagining Christ’s divinity as a divine expression potentially residing in all things rather than a performance tied exclusively to humanity.

Ethics and Incarnation Ethics, for Levinas, precedes all: philosophy, religion, language, and the possibility of thought itself. Thus, Levinas is well known for his common insistence, contra Aristotle and Descartes, that ethics, not metaphysics or the awakening of the subject, is the “first philosophy.”5 Ethics is the most fundamental moment of human becoming; it is redemptive through its revelation of the infinite within the finite, pointing beyond self-isolation to loving, responsible relations with others. There is a fundamentally religious aspect to ethics explored throughout Levinas’ thought that gives rise to the possibility of not only thinking philosophically, but theologically as well. “Holiness,” Levinas says, “thus shows itself as an irreducible possibility of the human and God … . An original ethical event which would also be first theology.”6 This position is, of course, “to be understood not confessionally but strictly philosophically.”7 We thus cannot speak of Levinas’ philosophy apart from his ethics and even his theology. Face Levinas is concerned with escaping the horrifying and isolating enchainment to self through ethical relationships with others.8 While his terminology evolves throughout his writings, it is useful to describe his approach to alterity with reference to the central concept in his thought: “the face.”9 The face of alterity provides the revelation required to escape self-isolation and thus find redemption as a responsible subject in relation to others. The face is the expression of alterity’s desire to flourish, a plea for dignity, well-being, respect, and the freedom to speak for oneself apart from subjective sovereignty and judgment. The face is thus “not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second,” but rather alterity’s embodied selfexpression announcing its desire to be and become.10 This expressiontakes place before any subject has time to comprehend and intentionally interpret the expression by assigning meaning and identity to the other. This is thoroughly explored in Totality and Infinity, wherein Levinas wrestles with the ethical relation arising when the subject—an awakened consciousness able to identify, analyze, and judge perceived phenomena—is disrupted by the affective, corporeal expression of another, prior to and beyond the possibility of subjectivity classically understood in Greek and later Cartesian philosophy. The relationship with the face is thus an embodied relation, taking place before the origin of intentional consciousness in which a subject is able to

God, the Face, and Incarnation 59 assign conceptual, comparative meaning to the visceral communication taking place amidst material affects expressed. The subject then cannot identify others as this or that through comparisons to other perceived phenomena. As such, alterity is incapable of being passively assigned a precise form or set of character traits that absolutely identify it. Perceivable form can never exhaust the identity of another, who necessarily retains an infinity or transcendence from the perspective of the subject. Levinas thus seeks a relationship between the other and the same wherein the former is not a passive object whose identity is determined by the latter as a sovereign, thinking subject who authoritatively assigns meaning to what comes to light. The face does not exist in a subject–object relation and maintains a nonphenomenal character insofar as it occurs between bodies prior to the emergence of subjective consciousness.11 It is, as I describe below in more detail, an ethical relation wherein communication is corporeal and effective—it originates in one’s gut and develops only later in one’s brain.12 The face, as Levinas understands it, is thus invisible to the perceptions and sensations of a conscious, self-aware subject. This is not to say that alterity is an incorporeal specter, but that the fullness of its embodied identity reveals itself counter-phenomenally, overflowing the idea that thinks it and assigns meaning after the fact of encounter. “Invisibility,” writes Levinas, “does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. Vision is an adequation of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses.”13 The impetus in exploring the possibility of face-to-face relations then is the desire to let another be truly other, and thus infinite or transcendent insofar as it is free of the powers of a subject who claims sovereignty over the being and expression of others. Infinity, for Levinas, is what resists thought and absolute identification. There is a coincidence of opposites then in any finite being, who is infinite insofar as they remain hidden from even the most robust analytic powers. The real aim here is to reverse the power dynamic concerning subjects and their relations by letting alterity reveal itself of its own accord and by its own authority express its desire for fulfillment. In Levinas’ thought, the subject is divested of its power and is not initially capable of acting in the ethical relation. This avoids the problem of the reduction of the other to the same, which allows the subject to possess alterity insofar as it holds the power to identify it within its own conceptual schema. “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.”14 Such identification occurs apart from alterity’s self-expressive revelation; it bestows an unlimited epistemic power to the subject where “everything belongs to me.”15 Possession and domination then are the essence of subjectivity, and in this epistemological power lies the threat of all violence according to Levinas. Such a relation between the subject and alterity “affirms the other, but within a negation of its independence. ‘I think’

60 God, the Face, and Incarnation comes down to ‘I can’—to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power … . a philosophy of injustice.”16 The problem with subjectivity is not simply its identification of others by means of comparison, but the ego’s desire for power in the refusal to allow alterity to overflow and question its perspective, by extension of its sovereignty. If, on the contrary, the subject cannot grasp infinite alterity and reduce it to comparison and analogy with one’s experience, it cannot be sovereign. Ideally then, rethinking alterity and ethics results in a redistribution of power and limits the violence that flows from epistemic toward socio-political domination. Epistemic and political decolonization is thus at the heart of ethics, which disrupts the “imperialism of the same” that tells another what its essence is apart from its expression καθ’ αὐτό (by itself, as such), unmediated by a subjective horizon.17 Here, Levinas is worth quoting at length. The manifestation of the καθ’ αὐτό in which a being concerns us without slipping away and without betraying itself does not consist in its being disclosed, its being exposed to the gaze that would take it as a theme for interpretation, and would command an absolute position dominating the object. Manifestation καθ’ αὐτό consists in a being telling itself to us independently of every position we would have taken in its regard, expressing itself. Here, contrary to all the conditions for the visibility of objects, a being is not placed in the light of another but presents itself in the manifestation that should only announce it; it is present as directing this very manifestation—present before the manifestation, which only manifests it. The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and beyond form. Form—incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into a plastic form, for it is adequate to the same—alienates the exteriority of the face. The face is living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated.18 In contrast to knowledge wherein the subjective ego is sovereign over objects by identifying them, Levinas suggests that knowledge, philosophical, theological, or otherwise, cannot be reduced to object-cognition; it erupts when “a being that stands beyond every attribute” puts forth an ethical demand that calls the sovereignty of the thinking, speaking, and naming subject into question.19 Ethical knowledge is thus apophatic and effective, a passive feeling of the desire of another as an embodied but counter-phenomenal expression. Despite the apophatic character of the face, there is a positive dynamic to its expression. The transcendence of the face is felt in the space and time

God, the Face, and Incarnation 61 prior to thought, in the “surplus of the social relation.”20 Such surplus is manifested in the life of the subject in the feeling of compassion or a cosuffering where the pain of alterity overwhelms and inhabits the subject.21 In social relations, others summon soon to be subjects to feelings of responsibility that allow alterity to disclose its own self-revelation and dignity, resisting the totality of the same. Such feelings arise through the vulnerability of others, which plead for possibility of flourishing free of violence and domination. The face, for Levinas, is thus rooted in the suffering and misery bodies that express affectively beneath and beyond linguistic phenomena perceptible and comprehensible in language.22 This infinite, transcendent character of the face is met fully in its resistance to violence, its self-assertion to identity, and its own place in the world, an existence on its own terms without being consumed. The expression cannot be heard by all, but the responsibility of an ethical relation becomes possible in those who can feel and attend to the vulnerability of others. Thus, the structure of ethics as the other’s infinity, expressing a resistance that solicits responsibility from the subject, disrupts power over others in two concrete ways: it resists any absolute, reductive identity and resists its own mortality. Ethics is the moment wherein alterity calls the subject’s sovereignty into question, denying that it is or ever could be reduced to an object to be consumed through identification or the threat of violence. As such, ethics is a plea for peace and end to hostility within concrete individual as well as public, socio-political relationships. The result is not oppositional in the sense of a counter-violence seeking to destroy an enemy, but a “pacific opposition … one where peace is not a suspended war or a violence simply contained.”23 The pacific opposition does not force but does demand that subjective freedom embrace responsibility for another’s vulnerability. The resistance of the face then is structured positively as ethics, “maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity.”24 The subject thus gains its identity passively, as one who is responsible for another, through the creative power of alterity. How each chooses to enact such responsibility, however, is up to individual subjects and communities in relation to the wider matrix of relationships in which they participate. The infinite resistance of the face reverberates throughout the body. This resistance is most often manifested in human suffering within particular socio-political contexts where broken bodies express a cry for justice. For Levinas, “the whole body—the hand or a curve of the shoulder—can express as the face.”25 The language here likely draws on Vasily Grossman’s novel on the siege of Stalingrad and warring totalitarian states, Life and Fate. In a moving passage describing the destitution of those seeking news of loved ones arrested for political crimes under Stalin’s rule, Grossman writes: “Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person’s state of mind. People had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the windows; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be

62 God, the Face, and Incarnation sobbing and screaming.”26 This effect, expressed in the trembling shoulder of another, speaks apart from spoken language organized into comparative concepts, signs, and symbols. Such expression is felt by others prior to the possibility of its translation into speech. The idea of logocentrism is thus eschewed in the experience of bodies in dialogue through feelings. Subjects awaken to the reality that their bodies have been already engaged in conversation prior to their awakening. Pathos precedes and makes the rationalizing and objectifying power of logos possible. As such, Yevgenia’s recognition of suffering and her takingresponsibility for this pain she feels comes after bodily discourse with the face had occurred. But the face is irreducible to the sadness expressed by the shoulder or any other character trait. The trembling of a weeping shoulder is an expression of an infinite reality that cannot be pinned to any singular, predictable form. Attempts to identify and systematize the experience betray the infinite reality that had once faced the subject. Levinas points to Grossman as revealing the expressions of the infinite meaning and reality of the face through the body: “all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from [the nape]. [Grossman] doesn’t say it that way, but the face can assume meaning on what is the ‘opposite’ of the face. The face, then, is not the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc.”27 The face is beyond the particular form that expresses, though it includes it. The face is a greater, infinite reality inextricably tied to the totality of experiences in a world and all of the impossibly complex narratives that shape being.28 The nape, or any individual part of the body, is not precisely the person in all its dynamic complexity and the total narrative of its experience, but the impossibly complex alterity of the face erupts in and as these embodied expressions. The vulnerability of the face then overflows any meaning one is able to assign to it even if it is understood to a degree. Proximity with another, a face-to-face encounter, occurs beyond the horizon of language in feelings akin to compassionate care erupting from the suffering of another. Commenting on the transcendence of pain and suffering, Elanie Scarry stresses that pain’s “resistance to language is not simply not of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is.”29 Nevertheless, despite its transcendent quality, suffering is simultaneously social. Sarah Ahmed discusses pain, among other affects as individually, inter-personally, and politically creative. “It is through sensual experiences such as pain that we come to have a sense of our skin as bodily surface … as something that keeps us apart from others, and as something that ‘mediates’ the relationship between internal or external, or inside and outside.”30 While pain is not alone in creating individual, social, and political experiences, it is impossible to consider being apart from the reverberations of pain from the past into the present and future as they mingle with the plurality of sensations, affects, and judgments that mold being. Pain shapes individual behavior toward the world, draws creatures closer together or pushes them

God, the Face, and Incarnation 63 away depending on the presence of solidarity, and drives political agendas that demand liberation and justice when a sovereign power causes harm. It is inconceivable to imagine any coherent framework that presumes a continuity of being between the past, present, and future, which absolutely eradicates the social power and creativity of pain. Tears, as an infinite resistance to domination and violence, becomes the basis of ethical responsibility and the creation of the subject. [The other] thus opposes to me not a greater force, an energy assessable and consequently presenting itself as though it were part of a whole but the very transcendence of his being by relation to that whole; not some superlative of power, but precisely the infinity of his transcendence. This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’ The infinite paralyses power by its infinite resistance to murder, which, firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in to total nudity of his defenseless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent. There is here a relation not with a very great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance—the ethical resistance.31 Out of a plea for peace, ethics unfolds within the social relationship as a redemption both the other and the same from violence. The other summons the subject to a freedom of responsibility that would manifest in hospitality. Responsibility is to extend one’s hand to another in agreement to share the world. Ethics opens up in the positioning of two, face-to-face, insofar as the subject is called to divest itself of power in light of the infinity of another whose identity and mortality confront one from beyond. This plea never asks to be left alone absolutely. The plea is a summon to co-exist in peace, and when necessary, attend to another’s mortality, “to not remain indifferent to this death. To not let the Other die alone.”32 It is a plea against indifference in favor of hospitality, that both may be saved from violence, have their own place under the Sun, grounded together on the same Earth.33 Such ethics eventually opens up beyond the other and the same to a political philosophy that is far more complex, but the face-to-face basis of morality for Levinas is the groundwork for all that follows in his thinking, philosophically and theologically. A-Theism, Mediation, and Incarnation The divine nature of ethics is not, for Levinas, a poetic expression of the power of love. There is throughout his writings a qualified sense of identity between divinity and the face. Alterity does not exhaust divinity, but the demands of embodied vulnerability expressed in the face is literally divine and not the mediation of a divine existent separate from the world. When

64 God, the Face, and Incarnation asked in an interview, “On this relation between philosophy and religion, don’t you think that, at the origin of philosophizing, there is an intuition of being that would be close to religion?” Levinas insists: I would say, yes, insofar as I say that the relation to the other is the beginning of the intelligible. I cannot describe the relation to God without speaking of my concern for the other. When I speak to a Christian, I always quote Matthew 25; the relation to God is presented there as a relation to another person. It is not a metaphor: in the other, there is a real presence of God. In my relation to the other, I hear the Word of God. It is not a metaphor; it is not only extremely important, it is literally true. I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God.34 The difference between the particular divinity expressed in and as the human face and God rests on the idea that divinity extends beyond any individual face. The face, however, remains divine even if there is more divinity to speak of beyond this particular face. The entanglement of divinity and materiality is seen clearly in Levinas’ response to the following question posed to him, which reveals that the interviewer may have taken Levinas’ statement in a sort of panentheistic way, believing that God and the world are distinct, but overlapping. “Is [the face],” the interviewer asks, “a mediator between God and us?”35 “Oh, no, not at all,” Levinas responds, “it is not mediation—it is the way the word of God reverberates.”36 God is not mediated from beyond the world as a distinct being breaking into physicality. The face expresses its own divinity and while not absolutely God, it is divine. “There is no separation,” Levinas continues, “between the Father and the Word; it is in the form of speech, in the form of an ethical order, an order to love, that the descent of God takes place. It is in the Face of the Other [Autre] that the commandment comes which interrupts the progress of the world.”37 The God of the Bible, according to Levinas, not only bends down to view human misery, but inhabits that misery.38 Divine expression is thus wrapped up in the ethical summons even as it extends beyond any single expression of it. That God is not a being beyond the world entering into or entangled with corporeity is asserted with further clarity in Totality and Infinity. Here, we see Levinas’ non-theistic understanding of divinity as a-theism, a view of God that he suggests desacralizes the sacred.39 Levinas insists on purging myth from our understanding of the divine, thus allowing us to relate to the absolute in the world that we inhabit for there is no way to engage in discourse apart from the flesh. “To posit the transcendent as stranger and poor one is to prohibit the metaphysical relation with God from being accomplished in the ignorance of men and things. The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face … . It is here that the Transcendent, infinitely other, solicits us and appeals to us.”40 Only the social relation

God, the Face, and Incarnation 65 preserves infinity as the theology, according to Levinas, proceeds as the assigning of identity and meaning to a God beyond the world rooted in the human cogito resulting in a divine alter ego. Theism appears to lack direct proximity to God insofar as divinity is beyond the world and merely mediated to the human within the social relationship. There can then be no proper discourse with the divine, and thus no revelation, no direct giving of the law and salvation, and no creative act that makes a world. There is no room in theism for a genuine encounter with alterity as otherwise than the alter ego of the subject. Thus, Levinas’ understanding of divinity is necessarily a-theistic, an embrace of a God inextricably tied to the physical while remaining redemptive and revealing an infinite alterity beyond the constraints of the same. An a-theistic relation with the divine is necessary to prevent knowledge of God from being reduced to object-cognition at the mercy of the sovereign subject. The relation with divinity by means of the other human, principally through the ethical relation, preserves the possibility of discourse beyond the structures of knowledge by putting the subject into direct proximity with alterity as described earlier in the chapter, which alone redeems from violence and reveals the infinite. Theology, for Levinas, is mostly “a thematization, be it a knowledge by analogy, of the attributes of God.”41 Divinity, however, like the face, is necessarily counter-phenomenal and resistant to any universal language able to describe or represent the infinite. Knowledge of another as such, divine or otherwise, does not begin in the awakening of a subject grasping exteriority, but in the passivity implicit in anarchic relational affectivity. For this reason, divinity must be met in the proximity of a face-to-face relation as only one’ neighbor is capable of revealing transcendence and amidst an immanent relation. “The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being an ineluctable moment of the revelation of the absolute presence … which expresses itself. His very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan.”42 These three, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, present a trope revealing the heart of the Levinas’ understanding of divine revelation, announcing the divinity of those the Torah names as the most vulnerable in society. God is unapproachable apart from the felt, corporeal vulnerability that leads pleads for justice. Thus, Levinas preserves and demythologizes the idea of God in the a-theistic encounter with the face as the physical ground for religion. “Ethics,” Levinas insists, “is the spiritual optics. The subject–object relation does not reflect it; in the impersonal relation that leads to it the invisible but personal God is not approached outside of all human presence … . There can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from the relationship with men.”43 Is the other human then, strictly speaking, God? Or, does the human serve as a sort of bridge leading to an alterity greater than its own? Or, does Levinas perhaps have something otherwise in mind? Two ideas found in

66 God, the Face, and Incarnation Levinas’ philosophy of religion are crucial in order to sort out this problem: mediation and incarnation. As mentioned above, Levinas firmly rejects the idea that there is a God beyond the world as a being who manifests in the face of corporeal alterity. The face of the other human does not point to a more absolute other outside of the vulnerability of another, who “does not play the role of a mediator.”44 Mediation is rejected because a vulnerable face is an irreplaceable and irreducible singularity that cannot be silenced and objectified in their serving as a mere sign for another. Suffering bodies express themselves on their own authority and not that of another who legitimates that misery. The essential problem then with the idea of suffering mediating a divinity not its own is that mediation devalues the face and annihilates a properly ethical relation to alterity. That is, by grounding ethics in an otherworldly authority, rather than the direct solicitation of the one who suffers, the face is denigrated insofar loses power and responsibility is carried out for reasons other than compassionate care for alterity. Removing mediation allows Levinas to claim that corporeal vulnerability has infinite moral significance and power by virtue of its own distinct voice.45 Thus, the face becomes “the very locus of metaphysical truth,” the divine word commanding, “you shall not murder.”46 There is then “nothing theological, nothing mystical [that] lies hidden behind the analysis that we have just given of the encounter with the Other.”47 Yet, Levinas also rejects the language of incarnation and the suggestion that God is phenomenally manifested in the flesh. This is, however, not because divinity lacks an embodied, carnal nature, but because of certain implications Levinas associates with the idea of incarnation, which I see as unnecessary. It is crucial to sort this out as I am explicitly developing an incarnational theology in the wake of Levinas’ thought. There are two concerns in Levinas leading to his rejection of the idea of incarnation. Incarnation, for Levinas, first implies a form of theism wherein a God outside of the world enters into it from beyond. This follows the logic of his rejection of the other human as a mediator of God and the a-theistic idea of desacralizing the sacred. If the face of my neighbor is the literal scene of metaphysical truth, there is no need for a God beyond. Immanence and transcendence are inherently wrapped up within one another in his ontology, which is both monist and physicalist, without the need for a dualism that separates Heaven and Earth. Levinas illustrates this in a discussion of Moses meeting God at Mt. Sinai. “My neighbour’s face,” he writes, “has an alterity which is not allergic, but opens up the beyond … . The Talmud states it, in that apparently childish language that earns it, in the eyes of many who read it cursorily, the reputation of allying inextricable complications to a disarming naivety: ‘God never came down from Sinai, Moses never ascended to heaven. But God folded back the heavens like a cover, covered Sinai with it, and so found Himself on earth without having even left heaven.’ There is here a desacralization of the Sacred.”48 There is thus no sense in which God

God, the Face, and Incarnation 67 requires a unique incarnation event to enter into the physical world; divinity is inherently immanent and necessarily transcendent by virtue of its embodied particularity. Thus, Levinas rejects incarnation language insofar as it projects the theistic idea of a God who transcends the world and enters into immanence from the outside. Second, Levinas maintains that the idea of incarnation implies that divinity becomes a phenomenal object who is visible and open to sense perception. The divine face is counter-phenomenal in spite of its immanence because of the transcendent quality of alterity and the anarchic time in which the face-to-face encounter occurs. Neither God nor the face then can become objects of subjective sense perception, which, for Levinas, are implied in the idea of incarnation. Incarnation, according to Levinas, is a technical theological term that relates to the visibility of God. As such, “the Other is not an incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.”49 The divine face is a corporeal solicitation, but, from the perspective of the perceiving subject, can only be called “disincarnate” because divinity cannot be open to the subjective sense perception and consequent epistemic power that Levinas assumes coincides with the idea of incarnation. The face, as Levinas carefully expresses throughout his writings, is a counter-phenomenon due to its transcendence, which overflows anything the subject might think concerning it. It is not that the other does not give itself to vision, but that the other as such, its face, always resists any totalizing grasp, and thus cannot be identified by subjective consciousness. Concerning this critique of incarnation, Robert Gibbs writes “God is both personal and invisible … . What is visible is like an object of my intentionality. Here already is a critique of a theology of incarnation—God is visible neither in the stone statue in the Temple nor in the visible face of a human being.”50 Thus, in this critical stance toward the idea of incarnation, “Levinas takes his distance from one of the central doctrines of Christianity … . Levinas does not view the other person, particularly his face, as an incarnation of God or of the infinite. His account of the face portrays how it disrupts the reification that our judgments impose both on the other person and on God.”51 It is not that the divine face is incorporeal or disembodied. This cannot be what Levinas means by his rejection of incarnation and his embrace of disincarnation. The issue resides in the fact that, for Levinas, an incarnate God would be one open to sensibility after rupturing the physical world from beyond. To this critique of theism, I agree and embrace throughout the book. But, such a blanket rejection of incarnation language is unwarranted as long as by incarnation we simply mean a general embodied and affective character of the divinity that solicits subjects to responsibility in the face of suffering. Insofar as divinity is a physical event erupting from the alterity of another and the affects it solicits, it is incarnate, enfleshed, corporeal, and immanent. In this fleshiness resides a simultaneous transcendence that cannot be absolutely identified by any subject because it is

68 God, the Face, and Incarnation met in the proximity of affective face-to-face encounters. This need be all we mean by incarnate and the doctrine of Incarnation need not make God visible but suggest only that the divine and the material are in some manner entangled in such a way that immanence and transcendence come together in one ontological matrix. Furthermore, Levinas here unfortunately presents caricature of Christology, most of which would not suggest that Jesus presents divine infinity to human sense perception as if the color of Christ’s eyes, his male body, or anything else made God open to sense perception.52 In Chapter 5, I propose a reading of the Gospel of John that directly contradicts such an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. While agreeing with Levinas’ concerns and recognizing the veracity of his critiques against the doctrine of Incarnation insofar as his assumptions manifest historically, I do not suggest this means adopting an absolutely novel view of incarnation.53 Insofar as God has mostly been acknowledged to be fundamentally infinite within Christology despite the kenotic act of incarnation, there is no reason Levinas cannot be a dialogue partner in my endeavor and the previous chapter should at least clarify the depth of Christological interpretations that, while obviously not Levinasian, reveal that at least some share his concerns. Beyond Levinas’ legitimate critiques of incarnation, his thought ultimately does not discount or nullify divine corporeity, which is inseparable from the ethics arising from proximity with one’s neighbor. The problematic issue of incarnation is not at all a problem with the physicality of God, but rather a concern over the representation of the divine face within the human horizon. Divinity thus remains utterly corporeal and is never disembodied. The corporeal nature of divinity can in this sense be understood as the incarnate presence of divinity without fear of affirming a dualist ontology or rendering the infinite visible to sense perception. Is My Neighbor God? The annihilation of the boundary between God and humanity arising from eschewing the ideas of mediation and incarnation leads to the question of whether the divine face of alterity is strictly speaking, God. Asserting such a flat equivocation between God and the neighbor would be, to draw on Merold Westphal, a “wooden and uncharitable reading” of Levinas’ philosophy.54 Levinas is not saying that the other is divine absolutely and without qualification, thereby exhausting the idea of God in the singular expression of the face. Levinas’ God is otherwise than Being itself and otherwise than an irreducibly singular being manifest in an infinite plurality of forms. Divinity is radically plural, expressing in and as a plurality of bodies. I read Levinas, therefore, as a sort of radical monotheist, wherein God is one insofar as divinity is the ethical expression of the other person, but plural insofar as these expressions take on irreducible, particular expressions in multiple faces. God, for Levinas, is a unified, divine field of

God, the Face, and Incarnation 69 corporeal infinity and vulnerability that creates responsible subjects and communities. God expresses as the face of another, but in a kenotic withdraw, divinity refuses to be pinned down to any singular expression.55 As such, the question “is my neighbor God?” appears to be something other than a simple yes or no. Divinity itself expresses through the face and there is no greater alterity mediated by this singularity, and yet God is irreducible to this other person. In Levinas’ essay “God and Philosophy,” God is absolutely other, more other than the other, and yet, as in Totality and Infinity, accessible only as another’s vulnerability and only encountered through compassion.56 As with the infinity of the other human, the reality of God exists beyond the horizon of cognition, although it is able to penetrate this horizon through a particular body. And yet, Levinas writes, “as soon as he is conceived, this God is situated within ‘being’s move.’ He is situated there as the entity par excellence.”57 While not condemning thinking of God in this manner, Levinas refuses to accept the ontotheological implications of limiting divinity to something able to be pinned down into a constrained existence even if it is infinite and absolutely important. Such theology would enchain divinity to a finite identity, and so Levinas insists that God cannot be understood precisely as an exterior existent nor as a construct created in the mind. God is embodied in the dimension of the other human deeper than the “you” whom the thinking subject meets in the present. God is encountered or felt in the illeity of the other prior to thought found “in the depth of the you.”58 Such an expression “is but a word. But the word is God.”59 As a result of God being inseparable from the human face and the ethical summons to responsibility, but also irreducible to any one ethical expression, Levinas articulates his strongest and perhaps most peculiar statement on God. This analysis implies that God is not simply the “first other,” the “other par excellence,” or the “absolutely other,” but other than other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with another and different from every neighbor, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is [the il y a, the fact that there is].60 This text is peculiar. Immediately prior to this passage, Levinas had discussed the expression of God in the illeity of the other person and the ethical mode of divine expression. Yet, as we have seen, the essay also stresses a warning against onto-theology and situating God as an object of cognition that reduces divinity to “the entity par excellence” let alone a being enchained to a singular existence.61 Thus, while my neighbor’s face is the actual scene of metaphysical truth, it is not the only or absolute scene of truth. The expression of alterity is divine, but God is simultaneously “other than other … and different from every neighbor.”62 The face is divine, but

70 God, the Face, and Incarnation so are all other faces in their irreducible particularity. Divinity, despite being inseparable from the other human, also transcends the irreducible singularity of the face without the suggestion that what transcends the human is the greater alterity of a mediated, spectral being beyond the world. Because God expresses in the face of all human beings, Levinas implies that divinity simultaneously is immanent with and transcendent from all. Thus, God, while a unity under the banner of love, is plural; divinity is the face in its infinite expressions, embedded within human plurality. The moment we try to pin down divinity as incarnate as this or that one, the divine escapes and challenges subjective sovereignty. As expressed to Jacob and Manoah, the attempt to name the divine is met with incredulity and resistance: “Why do you ask my name? It is wondrous.”63 Yet, just as this does not mean that God is synonymous with the other person, neither does it mean that God is only the totality of faces that express divinity—a first or absolute other par excellence. This would strip the individual face of the bona fide divinity of its expression and would suggest the kind of mediation and incarnation that Levinas argues against. God is fully God in the face of one’s irreducibly singular neighbor even if God’s promiscuous relation to the face refuses any final being as this one face. The problem here appears to rest in the difficulty some have in understanding personhood beyond atomic individuality—or as Laurel Schneider describes it, a logic of oneness or sameness.64 Talk of God in Levinas must proceed along carefully nuanced lines. Insofar as illeity is expressed within while overflowing singular existents, God cannot be restricted precisely to any one neighbor, and yet remains inseparable from the appeal of each. God is not Being itself, nor a being mediated by the face, is not simply the totality of faces, nor reduced to any material singularity; it is as if there is a divinity field present and entangled within the corporeal vulnerability of all persons while beyond reduction to any one of these faces.65 “Beyond,” writes Adriaan Peperzak, “does not entail separation. God cannot be set off against the totality of phenomena (i.e., the finite universe), as if God were only greater, better, more beingly than the universe. […] God is present in and as the phenomena, whose dissimilarity hints to and darkly signifies that presence.”66 So, is my neighbor God or not? The answer is yes and no. There is a kenosis in the divinity such that the moment we contemplate its expression we recognize that the object of our reflection is gone, leaving behind only the inspiration of the trace of its utterance. “To live this inspiration is spirituality.”67 “Ethics is not,” therefore, “the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision. Ethics is an optic, such that everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression,” and consequently, “to know God is to know what must be done.”68 Here then, in the ethical relation, God becomes accessible or as I phrase it, incarnate. This reading, while clearly distinct from much of the

God, the Face, and Incarnation 71 Christian tradition’s theism, does find some resonance with some of the earliest Jesus traditions, which Levinas points out. I happened upon Matthew 25, where people are quite astonished to learn that they have abandoned or persecuted God, and are told that when they turned away the poor who knocked on their doors, it was really God in person they were shutting out. Having learned later the theological concepts of transubstantiation and the eucharist, I would tell myself that the true communion was in the meeting with the other, rather than in the bread and the wine, and that it was in that encounter that the personal presence of God resided; and that I had already read that, in the Old Testament, in Chapter 58 of Isaiah. It had the same meaning: men already “spiritually refined” who want to see the face of God and enjoy his proximity will only see his face once they have freed their slaves and fed the hungry. That was the antithesis. And, if I may be so bold, it was also the understanding of the person of Christ.69 Levinas goes so far as to claim: “I say of the face of the neighbor what the Christian says of the face of Christ.”70

Conclusion Moving forward in this book I extend the spirit of Levinas’ philosophy toward a pan-incarnate Christology that includes not just the face of Christ or the face of my human neighbor, but the plurality of faces, otherwise than human, that plea for their own flourishing, and utter “the primordial expression, … the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’”71 This is the basic framework that I draw on to form a deep incarnation Christology. In dialogue with Levinas, modern theologians from Teilhard to Gregersen, and other theological and philosophical frameworks what follows are attempts to piece together how we as humans encounter God non-reductively and a-theistically in and as creation in the redeeming and revelatory event of ethics. I am not claiming to write a Levinasian Christology but an a-theistic, or a naturalist, one inspired by his philosophy of religion and idea of how God comes to mind from the embodied performance of divine expressions in the face. The crucial take away from Levinas is the way divinity erupts in the embodied performance of expressions that the Judeo-Christian tradition has traditionally reserved for a God beyond the world. The two crucial expressions that we can detect in Levinas’ philosophy, and I argue subsequently are shared in the Christian tradition’s most basic understanding of Christ, concern the revelation of an infinite alterity outside of the self and the disclosure of an authoritative, salvific moral command beyond any subjective horizon that refuses reification to this or that form. These theological expressions—redemption and revelation—are explored in the chapters that follow. In each chapter, I engage deep incarnation theologies

72 God, the Face, and Incarnation in the light of this Levinasian framework and re-imagine Christology as atheistic or naturist, bound to ethics, and severed from anthropocentric concern. My suggestion is that insofar as expressions of redemption and revelation are performed by any body—human, animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise—the divine is incarnate, non-reductively and a-theistically, in and as that body as part of a broader religious ecology in which we live and move and exist.

Notes 1 In Chapter 6, I explore how God, broadly speaking, could be encountered in the world. This idea of God is more expansive than the idea of Christ. This chapter is concerned with an encounter with God that might be identified with a cruciform, Christological expression. 2 This relation of the divine and the physical rests at the heart of the Christological controversies begun in the early Church and continue today, especially in deep incarnation theology. Historically, there are varying degrees of both dualistic and monistic metaphysics found throughout the Church’s wrestling with this issue, from the extreme dualism of the Manicheans, to the moderate but ultimately dualist Athanasius, to thought of Gregory Nazianzus who seems to side with neither position absolutely. Even the early ecumenical creeds so widely accepted as binding for Christian orthodoxy betray a compromise between the variant positions and thus elements of interest to a plurality of positions. An introduction to the debate that this book continues is Beeley, The Unity of Christ. 3 I will not offer a genealogy of Christian attempts to overcome the difficulty of encountering the divine within the physical. I aim to simply construct my own philosophical framework for thinking of incarnation of the divine Christ within the physical. 4 I address in detail why Levinas’ anthropocentrism is incoherent in light of the major accomplishments of his philosophy, and why his critique of a certain reading of incarnation is essentially correct, but not his reductionist understanding of incarnation in the Christian tradition. A certain understanding of incarnation properly attentive to the idea of infinity need not conflict with Levinas’ thought. 5 “The ethical, beyond vision and certitude, delineates the structure of exteriority as such. Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 304. On the ideas of metaphysics and subjectivity as first philosophy, see Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in Aristotle, Complete Works; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. 6 Levinas and Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be?, 182. 7 Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others;” 61. Burggraeve continues, “If confessional religiosity wants to be a mature religiosity, then it must let itself be preceded and questioned by religious philosophy, with its anthropological, phenomenological and ethical approaches.” Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 61, n. 6. Such continues the logic and discussion concerning religious orthodox found at the end of the preceding chapter. 8 This ought not to displace the importance of loving oneself, and it must be remembered that this idea is a response to the self-sufficiency of individualistic Western philosophy, which is grounded in self-sufficient reason, identification and naming of others, and thus ultimately, according to Levinas, dominating those outside the self. This notion of escape and the foundation for his mature

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thought are found in Levinas’ early works: Levinas, On Escape; Existence and Existents; Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Despite the clear continuity in his thought, Levinas’ language shifts from the publication of Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being. The aim, following Jacques Derrida’s critique, attempts to think and express otherwise than through the spatial and ontological terminology of phenomenology. See Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics.” The idea of the face thus remains, though the language does not. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” 125. This is what Levinas means when he insists that alterity in ethics is expressed anarchically and unmediated. Alterity is initially, in the time of ethics, unmediated by the subject’s horizon and felt as an infinite other in the moral imperative. This feeling is an affect that is not the same as emotion, which is understood as a feeling contemplated. The idea of affect Levinas has in mind is pre-cognitive and later reflected on when one awakens in consciousness. I explore this idea more in Chapter 4 and Eaton, “An-archy and Awakening.” Briefly, the ἀρχή (archē: beginning/origin/principle), for Levinas, represents the awakening of the subject; it is the beginning of the present understood as time unfolding historically as a durative series of perceived events that are organized, interpreted, and processed within a selfaware, conscious, language-bearing horizon. An-achy is thus the pre-subjective time prior to the durative present. While time is a constant theme in Levinas’ writings, see Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 99–129. What Levinas means by phenomenology is a contemplation of another as an awakened subject. Confusion might occur for those reading with other phenomenologists in mind, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom phenomenology is not necessarily the work of subjective contemplation, but occurs in the depths of the body itself, prior to its awakening as a self-reflective subject. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. I am not suggesting a mind–body dualism in the description throughout the chapter. The brain and psychical perception are fully corporeal. The distinction I make concerns relationships that unfold beyond the assigning of meaning through comparative and linguistic signs and symbols. Such assigning inevitably occurs, but only after an initial, anarchic ethical encounter. Meaningful exchanges can occur apart from conceptual frameworks. Such corresponds to Levinas’ description of the “saying” of alterity, that is only “said” afterward by a subject who encounters the other prior to self-awareness. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 23–59. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. The result of such comprehension is a neutral, and supposedly objective language, by which the same is able to define and limit the other by identifying its essence apart from discourse. “This mode of depriving the known being of its alterity can be accomplished only if it is aimed at through a third term, a neutral term, which itself is not a being; in it the shock of the encounter of the same with the other is deadened. This third term may appear as a concept thought … in which objective quality and subjective affection are merged.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 37. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 65–66. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 74. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 221. “The just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other, opens suffering to the ethical perspectives of the inter-human.” Levinas, “Useless

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22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Suffering,” 94. The suffering of the other “solicits and calls me,” producing suffering in the subject so that the other is within the same. Levinas is typically so technical in his discussion that the basic sense that he is speaking of the everyday feeling of compassion can easily be lost. I find it useful to draw on another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who describes the basis of morality in strikingly similar ways to Levinas. Schopenhauer too views ethics as a prereflective relation where the pain of the other is substituted for the feelings of the self but is more straightforward, suggesting that the basis of morality resides in “the everyday phenomenon of compassion, i.e., the wholly immediate sympathy, independent of any other consideration, in the first place toward another’s suffering, and hence toward the prevention or removal of this suffering, which is ultimately what all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness consists in. This compassion alone is the real basis of all free justice and all genuine loving kindness.” Schopenhauer, “On Basis of Morality,” 200. One thing not found in Levinas is attention to affects beyond those related to vulnerability and suffering. An expanded philosophy of affects and their role in revelation, creation, and ethics would be greatly welcome. I comment on this below but such is inadequate for the variety of affects potentially relevant to this discussion. Levinas, “Freedom and Command,” 19. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 262. Grossman, Life and Fate, 683. Levinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” 232. While the subject is initially unable to contemplate the particularity of alterity, which is always tied to the particularity of the other’s body—a problem due to the time in which ethics unfolds—the demand for justice is felt. The felt expression has a history tied to the impossible complexity of the experience of alterity and would include its biology, its personal experiences and relationships, its social status, and its situatedness in a set of wider political relationships and cultural assumptions. The claim of some that Levinas ignores the embodied particularity of alterity misreads Levinas’ understanding of subjectivity, alterity, and most importantly the temporal dynamics of ethics as a originating in a counter-phenomenal relation. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 5. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 24. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” 109. “Mine-Thine. ‘This dog is mine,’ said those poor children; ‘that is my place in the sun.’ Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.” Pascal, Pensées, 85. Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 109–110. Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 110. Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 110. Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 110. The language of “bending down” and “inhabitation” is found in Levinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” 114. Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” 16. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78–79.

God, the Face, and Incarnation 75 45 This appears to be a variation of Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma, aimed at discerning the foundation of piety and goodness. Socrates asks Euthrypho, “is the pious being loved by God because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?” Euthrypho, 10a. See Plato, Complete Works, 9. 46 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. 47 Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” 126. 48 Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” 16. 49 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 79. 50 Robert Gibbs, “The Disincarnation of the Word,” 34. 51 Robert Gibbs, “The Disincarnation of the Word,” 33. 52 Levinas’ views are not always fair to Christian theologies of incarnation, especially contemporary ones, or representative of the idea of incarnation in its fullness. He is in no way concerned to engage in a sustained, detailed engagement with the doctrine of Incarnation. His claims are also subject to the same critique leveled against radical orthodoxy in the previous chapter. Once a counter example is presented to his objection, the Christian tradition ceases to be the myopic tradition he presents it as. Furthermore, even if he was right, this does not preclude the idea that dialogue with his philosophy or any others could not produce a new understanding of Christology. He engages the idea of incarnation based on generalized assumptions and only certain assumed aspects of the doctrine, some of which are true. See especially, Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” and “Judaism and Christianity;” “Judeo-Christian Friendship;” “A Man-God?.” A more nuanced view of incarnation is found in Bloechl, “Excess and Desire.” Other similar engagements include Purcell, Levinas and Theology, esp. 110–134. Purcell uses the term incarnation with minimal discrimination, which is problematic. He speaks positively of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation in terms of the locus of revelation and salvation without a critical discussion of Levinas’ concern with the concept. Purcell’s insistence on Levinas’ focus on the flesh is not misplaced, nor his discussion of the possible overlaps between Levinas and (Irenaeian) Christianity, but the critical nuances of the God–other relationship are not drawn out in depth. Likewise, Nigel Zimmermann claims that Levinas’ philosophy “does not contradict the Christian notion of Incarnation in its dogmatic content.” Zimmermann, Levinas and Theology, 40. Zimmerman’s analysis likewise lacks technical nuance, and such a statement greatly overstates any similarity between Levinas and Christianity. 53 An example here of where Levinas’ critique would be applicable include the common insistence throughout some historic Christian communities where Jesus’ maleness was taken as identifying something necessary to divine being. For a summary and critique of such Christologies, and a starting point to explore this further, see Reuther, Sexism and God-talk, 116–126; Johnson, Consider Jesus, 97–114; She Who Is, 159–179. 54 Westphal, “Levinas’s Teleological Suspension of the Religious,” 155. 55 There is thus a problem with wholly identifying God as both the totality of faces, as this does not do justice to the particularity of the particular, and the individual, as no one expression is indicative of the inherent plurality of faces that plea for peace. In either option, there is a crucial dynamic to divinity that is missing and reduced beyond its fullness. God is fully expressed in the face of any other. 56 Levinas, “God and Philosophy.” Robert Gibbs, in his analysis of Levinas’ view of divine expression via the Torah and all great pieces of literature, follows a similar line of thought embracing a plurality amidst unity. The Torah, and other great texts, do not express merely one interpretation, but several. “There is never only one interpretation but a plurality of interpreters, and that plurality is

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67 68 69 70

71

constitutive of the work of exegesis.” Gibbs, “The Disincarnation of the Word,” 43. The plurality of interpreters drawing on a plurality of readings suggests that the text itself is open in light of its unique dialogical relation with each reader. Thus, the singular, divine text would be simultaneously plural as each reading could be an authentic expression of its words emerging upon meeting a multitude of readers. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 154. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 165. Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” 126. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 165–166. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 154. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 165–166. See Judges 13:8; Genesis 32:20. In Beyond Monotheism, Laurel Schneider rejects theology proceeding from a logic of oneness or sameness insofar as it assumes the sovereignty of the subject over alterity. This logic demands that “there can be only one specific revelation. The logic of sameness insists that truth is one, and so the one revelation also sets the truth of divinity against all falsehoods.” Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 193. I engage Schneider in much more detail in Chapter 6. I will expand on the idea of personhood in the following chapters pushing beyond Levinas’ humanism. Merold Westphal is critical of the presence of the personhood of God in Levinas. He suggests, contrary to Levinas, that whoever this deity is, it is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but simply the individual and collective illeity of the human. Westphal, “Thinking about God and God-Talk in Levinas.” While God may not be a person or being, Levinas’ philosophy of religion is inseparable from the personhood of the human face and cannot for that reason be impersonal. Some, on the other hand, suggest that Levinas is in fact referencing a distinct being, based on a reading of Levinas’ essay “The Trace of the Other.” While Robyn Horner sees this as a possible reading, in her “On Levinas’ Gifts to Christian Theology,” 275, n. 50, others such as Kosky, Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion and Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism suggest that Levinas does have an onto-theological framework. Such a reading of Levinas is highly unlikely and would throw his various essays on the matter into an incoherent mess. Levinas clearly has the other human in mind, not a personal God who exists as an entity par excellence behind corporeal existence. My reading coincides with Peperzak. “For God,” Peperzak writes, “not much more than ‘Il’ or ‘ille’ is left over, but the abyss that separates God’s ‘glory’ from all powers of Anonymity is immense. The Name is never pronounced, but always remembered. As inspired by the Good we are in the trace of its passage. To live this inspiration is spirituality.” Peperzak, “Transcendence,” 191–192. Peperzak, “Affective Theology, Theological Affectivity,” 102. Peperzak, “Transcendence,” 192. Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” 17. Levinas, “Judaism and Christianity,” in In the Time of the Nations, 161–162. Levinas, Transcendance et intelligibilité, suivi d’un entretien, 51. As Jeffrey Bloechl notes, this remark did not survive the transition into the English translation of this essay, found in Levinas, “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” see Bloechl, “Excess and Desire,” 289, n.1. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. Deeper discussion with Levinas’ humanism, including reason for rejecting it within Levinas’ own framework, is found in the following chapters.

4

Deep Incarnation and Redemption

Redemption is a cornerstone in any Christological exploration. This chapter explores this doctrine within deep incarnation Christology and constructs a new understanding of soteriology through dialog with early Christian theology, contemporary biblical scholarship, and the idea of redemption and Levinas’ philosophy. In the following pages I extend the performance of Christ’s redemption from Jesus of Nazareth to the depths of physicality without preference for human forms. Christ is potentially expressive in and as creation and creature regardless of shape. The divine performance of redemption, structured as alterity’s immanent call to justice and the consequent responsibility of the subject, are not restricted to Jesus, or the human face in general. Divinity is encountered in the face of all vulnerable things insofar as they perform the redemptive role of the Son: inviting the human to ethical responsibility and working, insofar as possible, toward a just and peaceful community. Jesus is Christ insofar as he performs a redemptive role and remains the focal point of the Christian tradition but is not Christ absolutely and exclusively. Any vulnerable body who pleads for its place in the world may be Christ in a real, but non-absolute manner insofar as incarnate divinity is not restricted to any singular body representing a perfect union between transcendence and immanence. Cruciform divinity is seen as a multi-unitary and multi-modal performance potentially incarnate and ontologically synonymous in and as all that exists, without being reduced to any particular expression. Creation and creature, beyond humanity and Jesus as the perfect image of God, may thus be regarded as Christ the redeemer insofar as they perform cruciform liberation in the struggle for justice and peace. Below, I outline my understanding of early Christian soteriology as expressed in Pauline theology, explore redemption in deep incarnation Christology, and reimagine these in conversation with Levinas’ philosophy of the face. I ultimately re-imagine deep incarnation as deep soteriology, acknowledging the redemption the other and the same find in the event of ethics.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-4

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Christ’s Redemption My Christology focuses on the broadly construed roles that Christ plays in the Christian tradition. I will not, of course, follow these classical theologies in the details of their historical manifestations due to the assumption outlined in Chapter One of this book, but simply draw on some basic assertions about Christ’s work in order to reimagine what the divine performance might entail in an a-theist or naturalist theology of incarnation that looks beyond anthropocentric models of God. As such, nothing that follows claims to speak for past interpreters of Christ’s roles; I am simply wresting with a long history of attempts to make sense of the incarnation of divinity in the flesh and how this transforms the world. I begin with soteriology as one of two principal functions of Christ—Jesus in the tradition redeems broken relationships from the power of sin. While there are of course a plurality of interpretations of such, the following summarizes a compelling version of the narrative in conversation with contemporary biblical historiography. Christ provides salvation for humanity in particular, but also “a cosmic sigh of relief,” for the whole of creation.1 Through his death, resurrection, and insistence on justice, Jesus leads communities to fulfillment and purpose through freeing them from enchainment to sinful practices and structures. While the specific understanding of this role and the nature of soteriology evolves and takes various forms over time and place, the idea of Christ as redeemer is central to Christology. Redemption is eventually canonized in the Nicene creed as a basic Christological assumption. The creed states unequivocally and without comment that the Son is “of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made [both in heaven and on earth]; who for us [humans], and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made [human].”2 Redemption from sin comes expressly through the Christ’s incarnation, the eruption of the divine within the flesh. Christ’s redemption manifests originally in the early Christian church’s hope that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus will somehow usher in the Day of the Lord, a divine intervention that would put an end to sin understood particularly as unjust socio-economic hierarchies along with the oppressive violence, power, and idolatry of perpetrated by the Roman empire.3 The Day would see a return of the divine to the human community along with a fulfillment of the covenant relationship between God and humanity.4 Such redemption is shaped as a reversal of fortune where the weak and powerful would switch places. This reversal of fortunes and the eruption of justice was, for the Apostle Paul, initiated and ongoing through the resurrection of Jesus, but awaited fulfillment in a future event that he and the early Christian believed to be immanent. Following what is essentially the thesis statement of 1 Corinthians—“that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you” (1 Cor 1:10)—Paul argues that life after the Day of the Lord is one where the fullness of the divine covenant with

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 79 humanity is fulfilled, where social and economic power no longer create value distinctions among people in a community characterized by justice. For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble [οὐ πολλοὶ εὐγενεῖς, “not many high born or of noble birth”]; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world [τὰ ἀγενῆ τοῦ κόσμου, “the low born of the world”] and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. 1 Cor 1:26–29.5 The unification of the socio-economically and politically weak and strong is a major ethical component within early Christian soteriology.6 This theology, incarnate in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus, Paul insists manifests “wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor 1:30). Salvation is inseparable from a social ethic that eschews hierarchies and powers that dominate others through radical socioeconomic imbalances. Contextually, the ethics of early Christian soteriology are not simply concerned with power within a religious community. Rather, the ethics of redemption is rooted in a deeper social and political structure that takes aim at Roman imperial ideology and the power of empire broadly speaking. While the anti-imperial soteriological undertones are found throughout Paul, this idea is fully developed in the letter to the Romans where the aim of Paul’s theology, subverting Roman imperial violence and idolatry, reaches its heights.7 In consistently veiled language, never directly assaulting the rule of Caesar (Nero) and instead speaking in what appears to be rather obvious politically subversive language, Paul suggests that the Day of the Lord will soon end Roman violence and power.8 What precisely was Paul’s gospel and the redemptive power of the Day of the Lord opposed to? Roman imperial theology likewise proclaimed a gospel, but one whose peace was rooted in a universal assimilation to Roman ways through colonization and violence. Such violence is the “ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth” (ἀσέβειαν καὶ ἀδικίαν ἀνθρώπων τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων) to which Paul will oppose “the righteousness of God” (δικαιοσύνη … Θεοῦ, Rom 1: 17–18).9 Roman imperial ideology was rooted in a culture and theology of conquest. It was a power that construed those who wielded it as a community of naturally wise and superior people divinely anointed to dominate and assimilate others. The funerary inscription of Caesar Augustus, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, sets the tone for the gospel of Roman imperial ideology, proclaiming “the acts of the Deified Augustus by which he placed the whole world under the sovereignty of the Roman people.”10 Augustus is memorialized as the savior of the

80 Deep Incarnation and Redemption world, redeeming through both violent conquest and mercy for those willing to submit to Rome: “Wars, both civil and foreign, I undertook throughout the world, on sea and land, and when victorious I spared all citizens who sued for pardon. The foreign nations [Externas gentés/Τὰ ἔθνη] which could with safety be pardoned I preferred to save rather than to destroy … . I extended the boundaries of all the provinces which were bordered by races not yet subject to our empire”11 John Dominic Crossan summarizes Roman ideology as an imperial theology combining military, economic, political, and ideological power that consolidated, redeemed, and pacified the world under one hegemonic power.12 The power of the Caesars was a monopoly of all four of these forms of domination and raised the emperor to literal, not merely metaphorical, divine incarnation.13 Roman soteriology is aimed at peace, but a peace though military, economic, political, and ideological domination of the divine Roman Caesar that for Paul was ungodly, unjust, and ultimately false. Crucial here, to situate this idea within New Testament theology and my own understanding of divinity, is the performative nature of the divine status of the emperor. Rome had a history of divinizing its most illustrious leaders, those who established peace and maintained its dominance among the nations. Caesar Augustus (Octavian), for example, is deified, it seems, as a result of a divine heritage that is only realized through his actions. Divine being is predicated not purely on inheritance but on the successful performance of particular actions indicative of divinity and divine sonship. Obviously, none of the propaganda concerning divine lineage would amount to much had it not been followed with performance that demonstrated the claims to divinity. Augustus ascends to divinity through conquering and is hailed as “savior of the world” by Apollo after his victory at Actium, and his father, Julius Caesar, “marveling from his Idalian star: ‘I am a god, and thy victory gives proof that you art sprung from our blood.’”14 Horace’s Epistle to Augustus, reveals the performative nature of divinization even more clearly and shows the history of the Roman practice of divinizing its saviors. Romulus, father Liber, Pollux, and Castor, who, after mighty deeds, were welcomed into the temples of the gods, so long as they had care for earth and human kind, settling fierce wars, assigning lands, and founding towns, lamented that the goodwill hoped for matched not their deserts … . Upon you, however, while still among us, we bestow honors betimes, set up altars to swear by in your name, and confess that naught like you will hereafter arise or has arisen ere now.15 Divine sonship is thus attained through performance. Divinity required fulfilling a role, in the Roman case saving the world and establishing peace through military victory and subsequently expanding Roman territory and influence by subjugated the non-Roman nations and incorporating them into the empire.

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 81 Non-Romans in this framework (foreign nations, Externas gentés/Τὰ ἔθνη), were barbarized and feminized as a way of promoting the idea that they were naturally foolish and slavish, in need of redemption from this nature. Illustrating this ideology through the iconography of ancient Roman coinage, Davina Lopez writes: “The [Judea Capta] coin captures the point well enough: Roman forces have defeated and feminized (i.e., placed in the subordinate female role) the people of Judea. Such feminization articulates a position of lowliness and humiliation in a Roman-defined, maledominated hierarchy. The people are a passive and penetrated object; they are rendered harmless by defeat and disarmament.”16 Eschewing his previous alignment with imperial power, evinced in his persecution of the emergent Christian movement that proclaimed a lord other than Caesar, Paul re-imagines a world in which God embraces and empowers that which Rome sought to conquer.17 The nations—Jews and Gentile alike insofar as they are otherwise than Roman—are together embraced and redeemed by God. Paul unites those otherwise than Roman, eschewing the identity markers that designate some of dignified and powerful (i.e., free Roman men) and others as barbaric and subservient (i.e., politically marginalized women and men). Paul becomes an apostle of weakness and foolishness, feminized and barbarized himself as one conquered by Rome for the salvation of those falsely redeemed by Caesar. “Paul models a defeated, and not heroic male body. His defeated body is identified with slavery to Christ, who is in him and crucified alongside of him.”18 Paul’s idea of salvation, manifest in the Day of the Lord, implies a new set of relationships where domination is eschewed and replaced by a caring community characterized by solidarity and the rejection of sameness a factor in moral significance. In the face of the subordinate and dominated, Paul envisions his calling as one not to the Gentiles as peoples opposite the Jews, but to the nations (which included Judea) barbarized by Rome.19 Paul’s theology represented Judaism’s prophetic hope that God would draw all nations into the covenant community in the Messianic age. Paul’s gospel does not reconcile Jews and Gentiles so much as it liberates the uncivilized, barbaric nations from Roman imperialism, militarism, and economics. The Day of the Lord is a day of political and socio-economic liberation for the nations where the righteousness of God will overcome unjust Roman colonialism. Jesus, representing peasant movements resisting Roman domination, reveals the incontrovertible social agenda of salvation in the New Testament. Following this model, Paul’s soteriology concerns a release from unjust power structures and a consequent freedom to care for others in the wake of the Day of the Lord. “Therefore,” Paul insists, “do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness [ἀδικίας]; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God [δικαιοσύνης τῷ Θεῷ]” (Rom 6: 12–14). Salvation from sin was thus hardly a spiritual

82 Deep Incarnation and Redemption freedom divorced from material conditions on Earth; it was freedom from injustice and the sinfulness of colonial ideology, economics, and violence; it is freedom to be just in a world transformed in the Day of the Lord.20 Early Christian soteriology did not separate the juridical and ethical aspects of redemption, as would later become orthodox in the Augustinian response to the Pelagian controversy but saw them as inseparably bound together. As such, Michael Gorman insists, “any Pauline theology that separates ‘justification’ from ‘justice,’ … ought to be immediately suspect as an adequate reading of Paul.”21 Salvation, for Paul, is ethics; it is the invitation to faithful covenant life that includes justice for all and is given in tandem with embracing responsibility for a covenant life and community characterized by love. Salvation is a gift from beyond the self but also an embrace of being for others in the community.22 This is encountered preeminently in the cruciform love of Jesus, whose martyrdom is the preeminent act of loving resistance against injustices committed against the resident population of first century Palestine.23 Jesus’ resurrection is a vindication of anti-imperial ethics and a sign of right covenant relations; it marks a redeemed order that is extended into the life of the covenant community that ought to be marked by the imitation of cruciform love of the vulnerable.24 Soteriology erases sovereignty and replaces it with justice, refusing to naturalize domination through identity markers indicating hierarchical significance. Salvation eliminates the idea that to be otherwise than Roman is to be less than fully dignified. Thus, Paul’s soteriology responds to Roman imperial soteriology, and while it is structured in a similar way it radically re-imagines the nature of redemptive performance. Just as Caesars were divinized by means of their performance of divine acts, so Jesus is elevated through his performance of the pursuing justice through an end to domination and exploitation.25 Philippians 2 contains an early piece of Christian poetry that, while describing the humility of Christ, is more about his ascent to divinity than a descent from a pre-existent position of power. Through his pursuit of justice in the face of Roman dominance, Jesus is exalted to divine status. Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:8–12). There is no question regarding the divinity of Jesus; his divine status is clear in Paul’s writings. But it is a divinity apparently resulting from exaltation following performance, in this case the struggle for justice, that structurally parallels Caesar’s ascent through salvific action and yet questions the nature

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 83 of his sovereign divinity. Yet, Paul’s point is ultimately not to simply refine Jesus’s ontological status but to encourage the Christian to perform the gospel as Jesus did. This performance is their salvation (Phil. 2:12–15) just as it was Jesus’ and completes the redemptive arc of ethics. The anti-imperial soteriology of Paul’s Gospel was not long lived. While there are clear anti-imperial elements in the deutero-Pauline epistles, we also see the beginning of compromise with empire.26 The household code sections of Ephesians 4:17–32, Colossians 3:18–25, and Titus 2:1—3:1 have been pointed to by many as retreating from the justice of Paul’s gospel, reverting to the value hierarchies that grounded a broader Mediterranean social structure.27 Eventually, as Christianity and Rome learned to live with one another Christology would evolve from a revolutionary ethical sociopolitical doctrine toward metaphysics and the ontic nature of Christ’s human incarnation in relation to divinity. These concerns bloom into the great Christological debates of the Patristic era, culminating in the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. In the patristic era and beyond, concerns grew over how Christianity might reconcile the seemingly incompatible natures of humanity and divinity equally present in Christ, and insofar as the Church softened or abandoned its critique of empire, the gospel’s concern to overcome sin was universalized and was directed at the fundamental sinfulness of the species. Redemption is still, of course, meant to undo the consequences of sin, which is now simply a general human condition rendering all guilty and subject to the wrath of the still anticipated Day of the Lord. All people are now equally sinners and the previous focus on the socio-political sins of empire fade away with a Church seeking to make political gains that ensure its survival and safety through syncretism with Roman imperial theology. We could of course argue that ethics is still at the heart of the narrative of sin and redemption, but the universalization of sinfulness and divine wrath have taken on a decidedly more ontological focus with the structural dimension of sin and revolutionary nature of redemption pushed to the background. Soteriology evolves from a hope for regime change on the Day of the Lord to focus on an incarnation uniting divinity and humanity for the purpose of changing human nature itself through the offering of species wide forgiveness of a general sinful condition. My point thus far has not been to offer a detailed history of Christology or soteriology, but to provide an outline for how I understand the doctrine to function given my desire for an a-theist, naturalist theology anchored in the tradition and rooted in ethics. While there are various ways redemption occurs throughout the development of Christianity, there is no denial that soteriology is at the heart of Christology. I suggest that the reading of Paul briefly summarized above functions well as a theology of redemption because it is linked to a reasonable historical reading of the tradition, because it functions naturally within the assumptions of my physicalist metaphysics, and because it follows an ethical path to soteriology, which simply lines up

84 Deep Incarnation and Redemption with the weight morality carries in the experience of many people, myself included. Such redemption is found in the performance of Jesus, whose vulnerability demands dignity and freedom from violence incarnates Christ. His face is the precise location of salvation insofar as it incarnates vulnerability of an individual and a community desirous of liberation and a chance to be fulfilled on their own terms beyond the domination of others. I am not suggesting it is the only way to understand Christology as if I wished to re-inscribe orthodoxy into the tradition, but it is the narrative found within the multi-unitary and multi-modal tradition full of narratives that persuades and convinces me to the point of faith. Jesus redeems, I suggest, not by uniting and perfecting two separate natures, fulfilling a covenant, or satisfying the wrath of God, but by soliciting those he faces to a revolutionary ethic that demands care for alterity and politic action that safeguards the most vulnerable members of a community. Insofar as redemption arises out of such a performance, however, I also insist that his incarnate divinity cannot be restricted to Jesus even if he retains a place of preeminent focus in the tradition or a special object of religious devotion. As such, as I suggest below, redemptive performance is not restricted to Jesus and thus while he remains Christ, such is a more expansive role than can be accounted for in one person. While Jesus becomes the focal point of Christian religious devotion, such devotion may extend beyond Jesus to Christ in a fuller sense, incarnate in and as the face of all vulnerable bodies seeking liberation.

Deep Incarnation and Deep Redemption Transitioning to how redemption is understood in deep incarnation Christology, we recall the three senses in which Niels Gregersen asserts Christ is incarnate throughout creation.28 He speaks first of Christ incarnate throughout Earth in a “strict sense,” reserved for the comprehensive self-revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth alone. Beyond the strict sense, Christ’s incarnation extends into the world in a “broad sense,” indicative of Jesus’ humanity, which shares in the evolutionary history of all things. The human, Gregersen argues, is a microcosm that carries the history of things in itself, allowing the divine Jesus to partake in the totality of creaturely existence. Finally, there is a “soteriological sense” of divine incarnation, which has special relevance for the content of this chapter. What, precisely, is the nature and manifestation of the soteriological sense of incarnation? “While the reconciliation of humanity with God is the focus of salvation, the peace and union between God and the world is the more comprehensive scope of salvation.”29 Peace and union characterize the elements that often come up in deep incarnation accounts of soteriology. To start with the latter idea, union is commonly explored in the idea of co-suffering between Jesus and all those who experience the horrors of existence. Because Jesus has suffered and died, experiencing his own horror,

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 85 his resurrected life present to creatures identifies with others in their suffering so that none experience pain or die alone. As such, “Christ co-suffers with and for all suffering creatures, while the task of fulfilling salvation is left to the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, who will be ‘poured out on all flesh.’”30 Denis Edwards, another prominent proponent of deep incarnation, likewise embraces this picture of an incarnate God who suffers alongside of creation. A God unable to feel cannot be transcendent and infinite, Edwards insists, as such requires the freedom and possibility to be and become. “This means that the transcendent God has the capacity to enter into the limits and suffering of creaturely existence … . [and thus] the cross of Jesus is understood more explicitly as the sacrament of God’s redemptive co-suffering with all creatures.”31 While more often than not natural evil is in mind when considering creaturely suffering, Gregersen insists that suffering is not always natural or necessary for the continual flourishing of creation. Horror, according to Gregersen, is an inherent dynamic of existence that takes on a plurality of forms and needs redemption. With an air of lament, Gregersen speaks of an incarnate deity who can relate with “those aspects of creation (premature death, unjust suffering, suffering without meaning, natural evils) that cannot be redeemed within the life-time of a sufferer.”32 Through his cruciform life and death, Jesus shares in such horrors.33 While human feeling for one another certainly helps our species cope with suffering, Gregersen and others insist that this also applies to creation as such. The resurrected Jesus, deep incarnation insists, is present after his death “as a comprehensive body living for and suffering with other bodies, living or dead.”34 Redemption thus cannot be thought as part of the human experience alone and extends to at least all things capable of suffering. Denis Edwards writes extensively about the redemption of creation in the context of deep incarnation. Such salvation arises through the co-suffering of Jesus, whose death ensures a future fulfillment and freedom from inescapable earthly suffering. “I think it can be said,” he writes, “that the proponents of deep incarnation are taking up a further meaning and effect of the cross, namely God’s loving and redemptive solidarity with suffering creatures, and proposing an iconic or sacramental relationship between the cross and God’s redemptive co-suffering with creatures.”35 Redemption then is focused on cruciform co-suffering and solidarity between Jesus and creation, which are somehow efficacious in solidifying a good end for the more-than-human world. Co-suffering and solidarity entail a divine recognition of the everyday horrors that accompany life in an evolutionary context where suffering simply cannot be avoided. Yet, the hope of redemption here, insofar as the violence Jesus redeems is the everyday, natural violence that all experience without possibility of relief, is predominantly eschatological. Insofar as redemption in the fullest sense of the idea is impossible for any creature in this life due to death’s omnipotence, deep incarnation theology typically looks to the future for salvation. Edwards

86 Deep Incarnation and Redemption recognizes that co-suffering and hope for the future alone lacks the kind of restorative action that would actualize salvation—“it is not enough to say that God is lovingly present with suffering sentient creatures.”36 Yet, he spends no time in what this might mean and leaps to eschatological hope. Such a future, grounded in the vision of Romans 8, represents the full and final restoration anticipated from God, a future where familiar metaphysics end, where death and suffering cease and, in some unfathomable way, creation is fulfilled.37 As such, deep incarnation affords us a picture of the divine as sympathetic with creaturely vulnerability and “can enable us to speak of a God who accompanies creatures in their groaning, and promises their participation in liberation and fulfillment in Christ,” but only in an eschatological future that presumably is not subject to suffering and death.38 Creation’s hope thus lies in a future, presumably after death or a resurrection of things in some future Day of the Lord that radically alters the physical structure of the world. While this is a comforting addition to the classical Christian mythos, it is somewhat problematic given the reading of Jesus’ life and death as presented earlier. As Michael Lee insists in hi engagement with deep incarnation Christology, “death and crucifixion are not identical.”39 Lee, writing in the wake of Ignacio Ellacuria and the tradition of Latin American liberation theology, gets at the biblical insight addressed above, that Jesus seeks to redeem bodies broken by present day systems of violence and domination. This is redemption from socio-cultural systems that intentionally, brutally, and unnecessarily oppress in the here and now. Thus, Lee insists: “Crucifixion was a form of state-sponsored execution meant to instill terror and obedience into colonial subjects. Without this historical contextualization, Jesus’ suffering risks becoming metaphorized into a natural suffering that, although it might represent a solidarity with the natural processes of creation, does so without any reference to the historical causes of Jesus’s death.”40 While I would include freedom from natural violence as part of redemptive possibilities because of my broader appeal to vulnerability as cruciform appeal for justice and fulfillment, Lee’s emphasis on redemption of creation here and now, from concrete situations of unjust suffering, should take precedence in the socio-political ethic of any soteriology.41 Thus, co-suffering and solidarity are fine ways to articulate deep soteriology, but such cannot be approached as in Edwards and others as the mere recognition of vulnerability and compassion that we hope will be eschatologically overcome and fulfilled. Cosuffering and solidarity, if redemptively efficacious, must manifest a struggle for justice in the present world insofar as possible. Any discussion of redemption should focus on everyday acts of compassion in the face of all suffering as well the systemic powers that oppresses vulnerable creaturely life. I fear that theologies pushing redemption to an eschatological future, while well meaning, actually help mask creaturely suffering and domination and further the possibility of sovereign powers perpetuating violence.

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 87 Elizabeth Johnson attempts to overcome this deficiency and advocates a position that is more fittingly described as solidarity. However, her focus on justice is relatively minor in the context of her deep incarnation theology and receives comparatively little emphasis as far as soteriology goes. The greater emphasis is placed on the redemptive power of co-suffering and world transfiguring eschatology, as it is in Gregersen and Edwards. Nevertheless, there is a clear expectation for Johnson that the suffering of Jesus is meant to liberate not only the poor human but “all bodies, not only those beautiful and full of life but also those damaged, violated, starving, dying, bodies of human kind and otherkind alike.”42 Such liberation is for both individual relief from the “natural evil” facing creatures but the evils of systemic, political nature. Johnson recognizes that “Jesus died as a victim of state policy enforced to carry out the Roman empire’s will to dominate occupied peoples.”43 Johnson, in Ask the Beasts, suggests vaguely that such applies beyond the human in a deep incarnational framework, though not much is said, and the focus quickly switches to speaking of natural evil rather than any specific ways that political powers dominate creaturely life and violate the dignity of Earth. “Broadening the circle of redemption to include the natural world sets ethics strongly on the road to moral concern for ‘otherkind’ … and for the life-sustaining systems of water, land, and air that sustain us all. We need to work, personally and as a matter of public policy, for the well-being and fulfillment of all out neighbors in creation, all of whom are destined for salvation into the mystery of God.”44 To be fair, most deep incarnation theologians do admit that while cosuffering and solidarity in hope of eschatological fulfillment is itself inherently salvific, it is not the whole story of redemption. Yet, the solution proposed, what Elizabeth Johnson and others call “deep resurrection,” is likewise inadequate insofar as it glosses over justice in favor of a future hope over the eschatological gap, where the overwhelming wrongs done to creation are righted in a literally unimaginable future.45 Deep resurrection is simply the hope that Jesus is the firstborn from the dead, with at least some of the larger biotic community, beyond humanity, to follow. Redemption and resurrection are thus not simply for humanity, they are simply the at the beginning of a comprehensive soteriology. Jesus, as a microcosm of materiality as such, represents the start of the divine hope to redeem the totality of the physical order from which Jesus emerges. God assumes all being into the divine life and plans to offer eschatological healing and fulfillment in the final eschatological transformation of being itself. Johnson suggests such a transfiguration is physical and fixed upon the biological and not concerned with any disembodied spirituality, though she is quick to suggest that the final hope and salvation of creatures “is not seriously imaginable to us who still live within the time-space grid of our known universe.”46 Denis Edwards maintains a similar position although he remains unsure as to whom a physical resurrection would apply. Non-human species fulfillment will be specific to the creature, and the future existence of things may be in a physical

88 Deep Incarnation and Redemption resurrection or simply within the eternal memory of God.47 However this works out, “based on the revelation of the divine love found in Jesus, we can trust that each species and individual living creature will find its place in the divine communion.”48 This vision is, I think, an inadequate consolation to the problem Jesus faces in the cross. While there is a manifestation of justice in this vision of deep incarnation, it remains vague and disconnected from concrete instances of injustice and the hope ethics might bring to actual suffering here and now. Reliance on such a vague hope that the God of the eschatological gap will eventually heal the pain of the world in an incomprehensible way, with no talk of actualizing justice here and now, betrays Earth and its inhabitants. The redemptive vision of the Christian tradition demands more than hope in a Day of the Lord that always just over the horizon; it insists on caring for vulnerability and creatively working for justice. Following Paul’s redemptive vision, we I suggest we rethink redemption so that the Day of the Lord is not an anticipatory future but the perpetual reimagination of the world we inhabit. Deep incarnation and resurrection have not yet offered much beyond the loving presence of God to creation. Such would not be nothing, but it is far from the love of the cross. Christopher Southgate writes, “I can only suppose that God’s suffering presence is just that, presence, of the most profoundly attentive and loving sort, a solidarity that at some deep level takes away the aloneness of the creature’s suffering experience.”49 Such is, I think, an inadequate approach to suffering, and the hope of deep resurrection is far from “one of the most significant things theology can say,” despite Johnsons claim otherwise.50 Without justice, or at least the hopeless striving for something that approximates it, there is no redemption worth speaking of if the cross was the incarnation of a divine call to ethics.51 Co-suffering and solidarity are not meaningless for the otherwise than human; at least I hope it makes a difference. When I held my terminally ill cat Fargo in the final weeks of his life, including his last hours on Earth, I hope he passed with more joy and dignity had I not been there weeping for him and stroking his fur. In the last years of his life, as various illnesses slowly ravaged his weak, emaciated body we of course grew in friendship and love through co-suffering and tender care. Such was surely part of our mutual redemption, but more meaningful was the effort to end his illness and ease his suffering through visits to veterinarians who we hoped could heal his body. He died sooner than many domestic cats, cutting short our friendship and extinguishing the light he brought to a home that he now haunts. Co-suffering and solidarity in the face of an inevitable death is significant, but I think only when such manifests during the deeper pursuit of justice and healing that looks to overcome, insofar as possible, the here and now suffering of the present. He did not die alone, and he did not die without a tiny little community struggling against death for the sake of a more fulfilling life. Maybe a God beyond the world was present as he

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 89 expired and maybe this alleviated his suffering more than I could hope to. Perhaps such was the object of his glassy eyed gaze as I held his body, limp but punctuated by moans and seizures, as the needle plunged slowly into his vein. Did he enter the grace of the Day of the Lord then? I doubt it. Redemption emerged, I believe, throughout and because of the struggle.

Levinas, Redemption, and the More-than-human Beyond suggesting that redemption is the struggle for justice, we must establish a soteriological structure to help recognize when and where it emerges. If salvation involves the totality of a liberative relationship and all of the actors involved, including both the ones who demand justice and a chance to flourish as well as the subjects called to responsibility for this justice, we can begin to look beyond Jesus as absolute savior. To say that Jesus alone redeems undermines and pacifies the actors who necessarily demand and actualize the possibility of redemption. That is, if salvation is found in the face of ethics and in actualizing liberation and justice, it must involve the bodies that originate the ethical event without simple appeal to some heroic force acting unilaterally outside of and on the lives of those who need salvation. Thus, it is the role-function Jesus participates in—pleading for justice and inviting others to responsible action—irreducible to the particular manifestation of such, that I suggest is stereologically effective and broadens the possibility of a cruciform expression outside of Jesus that we may call Christ. There is in this critique a hint of the logic at work in Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma, where Socrates asks Euthrypho, “is the pious being loved by God because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?”52 In other words, is goodness good inherently or is goodness good because God says it is so? The question concerns the origin and actualization of morality. Similarly, in the context of soteriology, we are interested in the origin and actualization of redemption. Does redemption originate and come to be as the result of the voice of the vulnerable and responsibility of subjects faced by others or does redemption originate and come to be from someone outside of the experience of the vulnerable and separate from the possibility of responsible actions taken by subjects in the world? I suggest the former is the necessary structure of soteriology. Just because Jesus suffers does not mean he can enter or redeem others through co-suffering or actualize justice in contexts apart from his own immediate experience. At best empathy would allow Jesus to co-suffer but never inhabit the pain of another that cannot be felt or understood apart from the experience of alterity. The origin of any co-suffering, and thus salvation, would also rest in the face of the one who suffers. Likewise, Jesus might call a church to work for justice, but such is ultimately the responsibility of those faced by particular expression of vulnerability that carry the real weight, or authority, of ethics. The origin and actualization of salvation is inseparable from the incarnate relationships and structures involved in suffering and cannot be redeemed

90 Deep Incarnation and Redemption simply by an outside figure looking in on the experience. This cruciform structure lends these incarnations their divine essence and Christological form and become the time and space in which we continue to meet the face of Christ. Soteriology, as such, is not indicative of an ontological transformation of systems, relationships, and persons by a God beyond the world who declares sinners forgiven of guilt and calls them subsequently to righteousness. Salvation is the process of creatures working for justice and thus necessarily includes those creatures as both recipient and author of salvation. If divinity is involved, it is incarnate throughout the structure. While we have inferred the basic soteriological structure as salvation equals an ethic of liberation from Pauline theology, I understand the Christological extension from Jesus to the face in light of Levinas’ philosophy. With Roger Burggraeve, I would “interpret the entirety of Levinas’ thought as a ‘path of salvation’ or as a ‘dynamics of liberation.’”53 Salvation for Levinas is initially actualized in escaping and mastering the existential horror of isolation found in the threat of an impersonal existence or state of being that not only distinguishes itself from beings or subjects, but exists without subjects at all.54 “Being is: there is nothing to add to this assertion as long as we envision in a being only its existence.”55 Existence without existents is thus the facticity of being, the fact that there is (il y a) without any subject present.56 “There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm.”57 Horror toward being itself then a fear of being consumed, swallowed in existence without form or specificity, pure act without concrete form—or as suggested in Otherwise than Being into existance, “the esse, the process of event of being, distinguished from the ens, the Sein differentiated from the Seiendes.”58 Being trapped in being annihilates identity and reduces all to anonymity in the totality of existence; it is “a kind of slipping away of beings into an all-encompassing, muddled, bottomless ground of ‘nothing but being.’”59 Identity becomes a primary dynamic to the problem of being and for Levinas, an early possible solution is salvation through positioning oneself as a subject with a self-identity that masters and pushes back against the anonymity of pure existence/existance. Thinking back from maturity to his early thought, Levinas writes: My first idea was that perhaps a “being,” a “something” one could point at with a finger, corresponds to a mastery over the “there is” which dreads in being. I spoke thus of the determinate being or existent as a dawn of clarity in the horror of the “there is,” a moment when the sun rises, where things appear for themselves, where they are not borne by the “there is” but dominate it … . I spoke thus of the “hypostasis” of existents, that is, the passage going from being to a something, from the state of verb to the state of thing. Being which is posited, I thought, is “saved.”60

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 91 This path, outlined in Existence and Existents as a way to deal with the horror of being swallowed into anonymity and isolation of the il y a, explores salvation through the positioning of the self as a “hypostasis.” Such amounts to a self-identification constitutive of subjectivity; it is “a situation in being where there is not only being in general, but there is a being, a subject.”61 In Otherwise than Being, hypostasis is re-imagined as the conatus essendi, a Spinozan idea wherein “Every single thing endeavors as far as it lies in itself to persevere in its own being.”62 This is an autoidentification as a differentiated subject characterized by a finite identity and concrete attributes among a world of others who are both literally and figuratively consumed by the self for its own salvation. The sovereign subject may thus control and master the horror of the there is, able to “take refuge in oneself so as to withdraw from being” and thus curb one’s dread of annihilation in the anonymous. Subjective sovereignty is, however, soon abandoned as a possible source of redemption for Levinas. The path offered in auto-identification is inevitably circular and cannot escape the isolation of being and anchors one absolutely to the self. The hypostasized subject is not free, not saved from horror because it remains alone, chained to itself and in no better a position that it was when caught up in the anonymity of being itself. The only reliable path toward redemption then is one involving relationship and true “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break the most radical and binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself.”63 Salvation, Levinas comes to insist, can only be found in sociality and proximity with others, which alone can overcome the anonymity of being itself and the isolation of a life chained up with itself. This leads the early Levinas to deal with the need, animated by horror and solitude, that “turns us toward something other than ourselves,” toward the “tutelage of what is outside of us”64 to avoid being overwhelmed by the impossibility of “saving oneself by oneself and of saving oneself alone.”65 The question of salvation then concerns a shift in how the subject relates to what is outside of itself. The initial relationship conceived is one of consumption where alterity is used and devoured as a way to posit the subject as a living, thriving being either through the subject’s knowledge of the other, through its utilization of the other as a tool, or through its consuming another’s body for enjoyment or energy.66 Yet, such relationships remain fundamentally isolating, allowing subjects to live while desiring relationship beyond utility.67 The shift required for the relation between the other and the same to become redemptive must, Levinas insists, eschew the isolation of the I, which requires the questioning of self-sovereignty in the creation of asymmetrical relationships that redistribute power to alterity. Such a reimagined relational structure between the other and the same is concerned with the subject refusing to reduce others as objects to be identified and consumed unilaterally. Only relations that recognize the significance of others beyond utility result in a peace that redeems existence for both the other and the same.

92 Deep Incarnation and Redemption Knowledge, use, and enjoyment of others is a necessary relational guide to be and become, but it lacks liberative dynamic needed to fulfill human life. Ethics, as the annihilation of the subject’s power over others, liberates both subject and other from violence as it allows for the dignity of transcendence—i.e., alterity beyond the same that is able to assert itself apart from subjective sovereignty. Without the transcendence of alterity, subjects remain enchained to the self, alone, isolated, and unliberated while alterity likewise remains in a dominated, enchained posture in relation to the subject. Neither are free. Thus, “even though the economic dealing with the world brings me initially outside of myself, whereby the world for me is the new form of salvation, economics leads me ultimately back towards myself, so that the initial salvation is again made undone.”68 To truly escape one’s isolation and enchainment, self-sovereignty must be abandoned, and utility downgraded in its relational statues. Redemption is found only in embracing responsibility for the other’s life and death, fully incarnate and expressed in the divine command of the vulnerable face: “you shall not murder.” In my analysis, the Face is definitely not a plastic form like a portrait; the relation to the Face is both the relation to the absolutely weak—to what is absolutely exposed, what is bare and destitute, the relation with bareness and consequently with what is alone and can undergo the supreme isolation we call death—and there is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the other—and at the same time (and this is the paradoxical thing) the Face is also the “Thou Shalt not Kill.” A ThouShalt-not-Kill that can also be explicated much further: it is the fact that I cannot let the other die alone, it is like a calling out to me.69 Such performance takes on, for Levinas, the soteriological function of the divine present throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition and further underscores the divinity of the face, which I discussed in greater detail in the previous chapter. Salvation is thus freedom not simply from ontological anonymity and personal isolation, which could be overcome in any number of ways, but freedom from the violence that disrupts relationality. Redemption is the love that takes responsibility for others and enters into solidarity with those who plead for their own liberation from the indignity of violence and isolation. Soteriology, for Levinas, is the struggle for justice and peace and the ethical event is the time and place where the divine presence is directly encountered. Such derives not from an outside, mediated force beyond the world that tells us to care for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant in our perception of vulnerability, but erupts in and as the face of the widow, orphan, and immigrant. This divinity along with its offer of and plea for redemption is inseparable from alterity’s resistance to death, an incarnate

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 93 face expressing whenever and wherever it proclaims its “No!” to the violence that threatens it.70 The subject is thus freed and saved when it becomes responsible for the justice, “no one can save himself without the others.”71 Such redemption of course, incarnate in the divine command, seeks to simultaneously liberate alterity from sovereign violence. Only such sociality and solidarity in pursuit of justice redeems existence and brings freedom. Such is Levinas’ perversion of the Euthyphro dilemma, refusing to take a side, and insisting that the significance of things is inherent to each, but that such is in fact the identity of divinity. Before moving to constructing a soteriology in conversation with deep incarnation Christology, I should comment on Levinas’ philosophy in light of non-humans as he would perhaps object to my expansion of his philosophy to include the more-than-human. For him, while there is some element of doubt, ethics and salvation are restricted to humanity as he never unequivocally ascribes a face to non-humans.72 Levinas discusses ethics beyond humanity throughout his life, but the question never receives substantive, critical consideration.73 The most detailed insights concerning this issue come from an interview given by Levinas in 1986 to a group of graduate students from the University of Warwick. When pressed on presence of a face in the other animal—“Can an animal be considered as the other that must be welcomed?”—Levinas’ gives an ambiguous answer, but ultimately suggests that the face is an exclusively human possession.74 “I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face.’ The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.”75 Levinas reveals the reason for his position when asked “If animals do not have faces in an ethical sense, do we have obligations towards them? And if so, where do they come from?” 76 After insisting that there is a manner in which ethics extends to the non-human—i.e., by transferring the idea of human suffering and care to another and not a direct solicitation of the non-human—Levinas suggest that the human is a new phenomenon as a basis for comparing species and the ethical priority of humanity. Levinas’ philosophical anthropology is here grounded in the idea “that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being.”77 To be human, and thus to have a face, is to transcend an obsession with the self, to be otherwise-than selfish, and to struggle for the life of others so that “with the appearance of the human … there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.”78 On the contrary, “the being of animals,” he suggests in a reductionist and biologically misguided sense, “is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might.”79 As such, the logic here suggests that to be the kind of being who has a face—i.e., who directly solicits others to take responsibility for their well-being—one must also be the kind of being who is able to respond to the solicitation of another.80

94 Deep Incarnation and Redemption Given the insistence throughout his writings on the non-identifiable, nonphenomenological dynamics of the face, it is quite strange to see Levinas betray his core philosophy when confronted with the other animal. The problem with Levinas’ work on the question of the more-than-human is beyond “bad biology,” as Matthew Calarco insists, “it is also bad philosophy,” and it is inconsistent with his broader approach to ethics.81 The face, as we saw in Chapter Three, cannot be identified by the subject; it is beyond thematization, fixed form, and characterizations based on representational comparisons made in the mind of the subject. “The Other in question,” Silvia Benso writes of Levinas’ philosophy, “is always a particular, determinate, individualized other who can never be subsumed in the universality, abstractness, or generality of a concept, genus, or species. The Other is never a generic human being but always this specific and determinate human being hic et nunc, the one who is facing me here and now.”82 Yet, when faced with the question of the other-than-human, this is the precise sort of appeal Levinas begins to make in restricting ethics. What Levinas does not acknowledge is that constructing a positive set of criteria for what does not count as a face is synonymous with constructing positive, a priori criteria for what does count as a face.83 If a being is unable to express an ethical summons because of a lack in some capacity—e.g., a lack in neurological power to be able to universalize maxims—it follows that beings with a face are morally expressive and considerable are that precisely because they possess certain characteristics and can be identified prior to their own expression in the horizon of a subject. Outside of the question of the animal, Levinas vehemently denies this idea in all of his writings. One cannot, he insists time and again, know ahead of time who the other is nor define the face by appealing to necessary attributes, essential characteristics, and dogmatic identity markers without obliterating the idea of infinity as the basis for the redemption we have discussed throughout this chapter. Jacques Derrida suggests that this inconsistency threatens “the whole legitimacy of [Levinas’] discourse and ethics of the ‘face’ of the other.”84 The threat, however, does not ultimately ruin Levinas for Derrida, and with others he suggests that the otherwise-than-human is precisely the alterity whom Levinas’ ethic is uniquely equipped to welcome.85 “The face,” Levinas writes “is a hand in search of recompense, an open hand. That is, it needs something. It is going to ask you for something.”86 If such neediness, growing from fragility and vulnerability, is beyond reduction to any capacity, “there are thus no conceptual grounds to support the idea that the Other and humanity are synonymous.”87 To be morally significant one must simply be vulnerable in general, a dynamic implicit in the frailty of an existents incarnate in any form. Does the yelp of pain of a kicked dog say “I am hurt?” or is it merely an involuntary instinctual vocalization? If we compare this to a human who yelps in pain, is it still an involuntary instinctual vocalization

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 95 rather than speech? Why would this expression in either a dog or a human not be a call to ethical action? If we cannot hear the signification of needs by plants, insects, or the ground, air, and water, is that not a marker of our limitations as much as theirs? For those who have the ears to hear, a clear-cut forest is an accusation of greed.88 Following Levinas appears to necessitate a move beyond his unfortunate anthropocentrism. The vulnerability of the face as a face must be allowed to express as it will, without re-inscribing human sovereignty into ethics, and thus opening to idea of redemption to all who seek liberation with the plea for peace implicit in the performance of the divine command. Freeing the human from our damning isolation by eschewing humanist sovereignty is, I argue below, a necessary step in deepening our understanding of divine incarnation and of maintaining any hope at all in the possibility of salvation. A free, and thus redeemed human is necessarily pledged to creation; no species is saved without all the others.

Conclusion: Redemption and the Face of Things Moving back to Christology, I would follow the above lines of thought to re-imagine incarnation and soteriology in a way that extends our understanding and identification of Christ into the depths of the physical world. Such, we have seen is an integral part of current deep incarnation theologies. However, I believe it important to move away from a Christology that views Christ as sympathetic with the suffering of creation and promising an eschatological renewal, toward a liberation-oriented salvation focused on justice and one that further closes the gap on the shared identity between Christ and creation. Following early Pauline Christology and the redemptive nature of the face, potentially present in all vulnerable things, I wish to find redemption in the human proximity to creatures of all sorts, who perform the redemptive role of Christ in the same way Jesus performed this function in his own context. Just as we meet the spirit of Christ the redeemer in the face of Jesus, who saves by means of his solicitation to ethical responsibility, justice, and liberation, so we meet cruciform redemption in the face of all vulnerable bodies that plead for justice and liberation. Salvation continues to be found in Christ, but such is inseparable from the incarnation of the divine face that performs the role-function of ethical solicitation, which is the hope and promise of salvation for the other as well as the same. Thus, Jesus remains Christ because of his liberative performance, but Christ takes on a more expansive identity as the face of anything that confronts sovereign violence through the utterance of the divine command, “you shall not murder.” The face of Christ is thus incarnate in and as an impossibly complex array of physical vulnerabilities, from the yelp of the kicked dog to the desolation of the clear-cut forest. This is not to say that these cruciform performances mediate Christ or a God

96 Deep Incarnation and Redemption beyond the world who calls us to compassionate care for creation. Following Levinas, the divine call for redemptive justice is not merely mediated through others but identified with the face of things. As such, and while it will offend theologically orthodox ears, I am unable to discern any structural difference in the soteriology incarnate in the face of Jesus and the salvation offered in the liberative striving of any other, animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise. For myself, this redemptive face has most powerfully expressed in the lives of cats. Returning briefly to Fargo, whose death I discussed above, it was his suffering and struggle that served as to me most clearly as an incarnation of Christ the redeemer. Fargo was the face of Christ in his desire and struggle to live. His life was redemptive not because anyone sympathized with his pain or promised eschatological renewal beyond death, but because he pleaded to flourish in the presence of pain and drew out this desire for well-being in his social relations, who sought to ease suffering and allow him to live a meaningful life. I believe that both Fargo and I shared a redemptive relationship. He found such redemption in the struggle for life, and I in sharing responsibility for this life and doing that which was within my power to ensure his well-being. Despite the outcome of an inevitable death, redemption emerged in the ethics of this social relation, characterized by compassionate care and love. I have never reached out to touch the wounded side of Jesus, but I have held the dying body of this feline friend of mine. We were redeemed in our life together just as there is redemption in all relationships that strive for peace, fulfillment, justice, and liberation. This position is similar to that taken by ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara, whose ecological theology is directed at the type of colonial violence Earth and its creatures suffer and need for political liberation. “I was bothered,” Gebara writes, “by the excessive centrality of Jesus, a centrality that gave little space for personal initiatives—and especially for women’s initiatives.”89 The problem is not that Jesus remains a central focus within the Christian tradition, but that the origin and actualization of soteriology is often linked exclusively with his experience. There is, in Gebara’s thought, a deep participatory nature to suffering and salvation that allows the divine to become incarnate in the experience of common creatures. Why not pay attention to and honor the people’s resistance struggles— their endless struggles for liberation and a life lived in dignity? Why not shine spotlights on the insignificant actors, and appreciate their daily struggle to survive and maintain their dignity? Why not open up our understanding of “salvation” to a broader process, one that is going on consciously or unconsciously in people’s daily lives, in the midst of the ‘ordinary’ things that make up the fabric of our lives?90 What is soteriologically operative for Gebara is the experience of individuals who suffer violence, especially those suffering under unjust

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 97 systems of power. This is what was operative in Jesus’ own experience, which for her becomes a central metaphor for a more common experience of pain and resistance to oppression that is found ubiquitously throughout creation in the face of humans and other creatures alike. Jesus does not save through some ontological renewal of creation as a result of suffering and being punished for the sins of others, perfectly fulfilling a covenant, or by becoming the perfection of our species. He saves through his vulnerability, resistance to dominant powers, and his plea for an ethics of peace. Salvation then would be found, in Jesus’ context, in caring for his body and resisting, as he did, the powers that feed off of and exist because of violence. Redemption would originate here in Jesus’ vulnerability and be actualized in revolutionary political and economic ethics that resists the violence that dominated his experience. But, rather than focus on this one person, Gebara extends the body of Jesus to all broken bodies allowing them to equally participate in and actualize the performance of redemption. This moves us from absolute emphasis on Jesus as the only redeemer “to the centrality of persons, especially the outcast, and to the need to invest in what we could call our ‘salvation’ in the here and now. Thus we move away from an excessive emphasis on the figure of the savior, the hero, the martyr, the king, the saint—as well as the victorious warrior, the only Son of God. We come to speak of the salvation we offer one another when our hearts open up in tenderness and mercy.”91 Jesus, insofar as he is a symbol of the fulfillment that we and other creatures desire, thus becomes the prime example of the kind of justice seeking that saves us, “a metaphor of the divine presence, the unfathomable mystery the unutterable in the human flesh in which we are all included.”92 It seems then that, for Gebara, we encounter divinity and the redemption it offers whenever we encounter any suffering that can be addressed, even if not alleviated, or injustices that demand an ethics of disobedience to violent systems of authority and power in the name of justice. Not all suffering and death, of course, is as insidious as Jesus’ historical death of the suffering of any under colonial domination. Gebara’s thought, while focused on colonial violence, includes ample room for the victims of evolutionary violence. Insofar as possible—and this is not entirely possible—we may seek peace amidst a world that operates violently, both necessarily and unjustly.93 The only areas I take issue with Gebara is her use of metaphorical language to describe salvation in the life of Jesus and the manner in which Jesus retains the originary and actualizing power in how soteriology operates in the world. “I think it is in this sense that we could speak metaphorically of Jesus as Savior … . He is the Savior inasmuch as he is a living example with which we identify, in order to conceive of our own lives as salvific. It is the process of salvation he represents that can be assumed by women and men whose hearts are filled with mercy and solidarity.”94 Unless I misunderstand her, I am unclear why “metaphor” is indicative of Jesus’ experience. It seems to me that Jesus reveals a literal instance of

98 Deep Incarnation and Redemption salvation coming into the world, though as she says, one that is also met wherever we encounter a similar ethical structure incarnate in vulnerability, resistance, a desire for liberation, and the call to responsibility. Likewise, I am unclear why Jesus retains the originary and actualizing force in other lives who seem to know salvation through comparing their experiences with his. Jesus experience is a bona fide manifestation of salvation in his own way, and we might find salvation literally in him insofar as we are summoned to responsibility by his face. But, I do not feel that this needs to be restricted to Jesus, as Gebara also insists, but contrary to her position, I also do not feel that Jesus originates or actualizes salvation through comparison to his life that provides the soteriological hermeneutic for our experience.95 In the Christian tradition, I see him as the central example of a ubiquitous soteriological structure, the paradigm of a deep soteriology, that erupts whenever the face of alterity expresses vulnerability or demands justice and subjects take responsibility for such via ethics manifest in revolutionary economics and politics. In this sense, Christ the divine redeemer is incarnate in the face of ethics as such and not simply in Jesus. A deeper, ecological vision thus becomes necessary for the doctrine of Incarnation insofar as we find salvation beyond Jesus and beyond the human. Such salvation does not emerge simply because Jesus calls on us to care for others, because he suffers alongside creatures, or changes our being through a sacrificial atonement for sin or perfect covenant fulfillment. Rather, it comes through bodies performing stereologically meaningful actions in pursuit of justice and peace that redeem both themselves and those who join them in taking responsibility for their liberation. Christ, in this role-functional Christology, is incarnate ubiquitously in the face of creation, and for our immediate concern as human, in the redeeming divine command expressed throughout Earth and its creatures. Redemption, likewise, is met in the struggle for justice and peace, not necessarily its actualization, as such an endeavor on a planetary scale—as it is on a human scale—is not possible to fully realize. Going forward, what is needed is a thoroughly public set of creaturely theologies—ecological and animal—that address the salvation of creation in the plurality of concrete, local contexts in which the struggle needs to take place. While there is virtually no limit to where such issues might be addressed, I suggest it is necessary to begin any such project by reclaiming the Christian critique of sovereignty, which necessitates beginning with a critique of empire. Again, following Gebara: Our economic exploitation projects have enslaved the earth and the powers of nature and made them into an object to be used for unbridled profiteering. It is our actions that have put the earth in bondage, that have damaged it, polluted it, and impoverished it. For this reason, it is the earth that is both the subject and object of salvation. We need to abandon a merely anthropocentric Christianity and open ourselves up to a more biocentric understanding of salvation.96

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 99 Although redemption is not restricted to a colonial and capitalist context and should extend into the inevitable struggle with violence and death characteristic of an evolutionary world, for the sake of any chance at planetary flourishing, deep Christology must begin to address neo-colonial cultures of capital and the domination of such sovereignties on marginalized biosystems and creatures. In other words, when Gregersen rightly insists that deep incarnation “is not only about Christ being there in and with the world of creatures but also being there for the creatures,” we need a concrete picture of what this divine solidarity means socio-culturally and politically.97 Such a theology could be nicely summed up in re-imagining the meaning of Matthew 25 to a creaturely depth beyond its historical meaning. When speaking of the Day of the Lord and the inheritance of a just kingdom, the earliest Jesus traditions point to the performance of ethics, structured as the invitation of alterity and the responsibility of the subject, as stereologically effective. Come, you who are blessed, inherit the kingdom prepared for you. For I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked, exposed, and vulnerable and you cared for me. There is nothing indicative of participating in the Kingdom of God beyond the performance of ethics. The object of responsibility is, of course, ontologically blurred and here we can say that Christ is indistinguishable from Jesus of Nazareth or any vulnerable person, an identification of Christ and creation. The deepening of incarnation, however, the extension of Christ into the very ethical structure of creation in the face of things warrants a deepening of the word of God. Truly, to the extent that you cared for Earth or any creature of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.

Notes 1 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1044. Romans 8 is commonly referred to as the principal text in any discussion of the redemption of creation in the Greek Bible. 2 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 44–45. 3 On the “Day of the Lord” and Pauline eschatology and soteriology more broadly, see Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1043–1266. On Paul’s relationship to empire, see Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1271–1319; On empire-critical approaches to Paul that are influential in my reading of the early Christian tradition, see e.g., Horsley, Paul and Empire; Paul and the Roman Imperial Order; Horsley and Stendahl, Paul and Politics. 4 The background for early Christian understandings is rooted in the prophetic language and hope of a return of God to the Jerusalem Temple and thus a complete post-exilic restoration of the covenant community. See Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 75–196. 5 The English often masks the socio-economic and political language of this text. I have included the Greek text of the most obvious markers indicating the socioeconomic and political nature of the passage, but the language of both power and weakness, and wisdom and foolishness, express a common clash between

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classes. For a reading that shows the ubiquitous socio-economic and political character of 1 Corinthians, see Martin, The Corinthian Body. At first glance this appears to be non-egalitarian in the severity of the fortune reversal of the weak and strong. Divine wrath throughout Jewish and Christian sacred texts appears to ultimately relent in favor of mercy. There are many instances in prophetic Hebrew texts where divine judgment is described in one breath while in the next mercy and covenant inclusion is given back to the wicked (compare, e.g., Ps 2 and 22). While Paul’s language, mirrored in some Gospel passages (e.g., Matt 20:16), appears to replace one power dynamic with another, such is likely not the case is his broader thinking and the deep context of prophetic ethics. The day is “primarily a day of judgment … . It will be ‘judgment’ in the more ancient biblical sense: the time when everything gets sorted out, when everything that needs putting to right is put right.” Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1080. Nevertheless, we cannot act as if Paul or the early Christian communities were simply speaking non-violent or that their view of justice is beyond question. As a novice biblical interpreter, I am especially in debt to Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations; Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered. On the idea of indirect assaults on Rome, or the “hidden transcripts of the subordinate” against the “hidden and public transcripts of the dominant,” see Elliott, The Arrogance of the Nations, 25–57. Insofar as there were limited opportunity and possibility of direct, public confrontations with power, Elliott explores “the ‘remarkable sensitivity’ of the Roman populace to oblique commentary on current events,” presented, for example, in Paul’s politically subversive language, applying Roman political terms such as “lord,” “son of God,” “good news,” not to Caesar but to Jesus. Elliott, The Arrogance of the Nations, 42. The Caesar’s of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Neil Elliott argues, are the focus of divine judgment and wrath as the perpetrators and sustainers of the human ungodliness and unrighteousness. “But when Pail juxtaposes divine justice (dikaiosynē …theou) and human injustice (adikian anthrōpōn, 1:17–18), he is not describing plight and solution. He is contrasting two contemporary dominions, two regimes, that stand fundamentally opposed to each other, the relationship between them characterized by implacable divine wrath (1:18–32).” Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations, 73. This, as Elliott suggests, is the recipient of the wrath of God in Romans—not a generic humanity but the specific perpetrators of injustice. This makes sense insofar as Paul is consistently opposing Jesus’ lordship to the unrighteousness of humanity, which is manifest in the oppositional power of Caesar’s gospel. Redemption is from the sin of an unjust political regime and an awakening in a just one structured similarly (i.e., a kyriarchy) but justly. On Paul versus Caesar, see Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations, 59–85. See also Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire;” Jewett, Romans. Res Gestae, 1, in Shipley, Compendium of Roman History. Res Gestae, 3, 26, in Shipley, Compendium of Roman History. See Res Gestae 26–31 for continued boasts of conquest and colonization. See Crossan, “Roman Imperial Theology,” 60. Much has been made of the divine titles given to Caesar that were rhetorically repositioned onto Jesus in Paul’s gospel as well many authors in the Greek Bible. “Before Jesus the Christ ever existed … these were the titles of Caesar the Augustus: Divine, Son of God, God and God from God; Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World. When those titles were taken from him, the Roman emperor, and given to a Jewish peasant, it was a case of either low lampoon or high treason.” Crossan, “Roman Imperial Theology,” 73. Such language is ubiquitous throughout the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties.

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Sextus Propertius, Elegies, 4.6:37, 59–60. Horace, Epistle to Augustus, 2.1, in Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica, 5–17. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered, 37. The burgeoning Christian movement might have spelt trouble for Jewish communities in the Mediterranean world, who were exempt from many pagan practices that were believed to sustain the divine favor of the empire and ensure its smooth running. A disruptive form of Judaism, focused on the lordship and redemptive posture of Jesus, was feared by many to threaten the protected status of first century Judaism. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered, 138. Consider the opening of Romans: “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle … to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles [ἐν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν] for His name’s sake.” Rom 1:1, 5. Construing Romans as a contrast between Jew and Gentile misses the unique context of the letter written in the shadow of imperial Rome. Judea was one nation among many others under Roman rule. A better understanding of “all the Gentiles here” would be “all the nations.” Paul’s gospel is good news for the nations under Roman rule. See Elliott, The Arrogance of the Nations, 46 on the problem of translating tὰ ἔθνη as Gentiles and opposing this generic group to Jewish particularity. This is the idea behind the “righteousness” the New Testament consistently explores. “When Jewish writings, from the Psalms to the apocalypses of the Roman period spoke of the ‘justice of God,’ they were not primarily concerned with spiritual questions of an individual’s right standing before God, but with the end of an unjust social order and the hoped-for vindication of the innocent against their enemies. When the Roman elite spoke of ‘justice,’ in contrast, they spoke it its being already realized in the imperial order.” Neil Elliott, “The Apostle Paul and Empire,” in In the Shadow of Empire, 97–116, at 98. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform, 47. As Gorman suggests, there is an “objective basis” for salvation as a gift outside the self, a “subjective response” that accepts the invitation and effects redemption, which create a “substantive content” of a redeemed, covenant community characterized by justice. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God, 56–57. Salvation is communally and ethically oriented. more on the ethical content of Pauline soteriology one might explore the pistis xristou debates (“faith in Christ” vs “Christ’s faithfulness”), which suggest that for Paul salvation is not a matter of a professing faith in Christ but imitating the cruciform social ethic evident in the faithfulness of Christ. It is the latter understanding of pistis xristou—the faithfulness of Christ—that many suggest is soteriologically operative in Paul through its own merit along with its imitation. Bird and Sprinkle, The Faith of Jesus Christ. See also Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament; Gorman, Cruciformity. I would add that cruciform love need not be restricted to those beyond the self. Christ was too a vulnerable member of a dominated population. As such, Christ’s resistance of violence is a resistance of that which takes away not only the dignity of those around him, but his own well-being as well. There is also the issue of lineage, which Paul mentions in Rom. 1:3. Here Jesus is linked to the royal line of David and if the subtext of the letter is to confront Nero’s Rome, this appears to be an assertion that in Jesus we see a true royal lineage as opposed to the questionable lineage of Nero. Fred Long, for example, is among those arguing that Ephesians at least maintains an anti-imperial perspective. See Long, “Ephesians;” “Roman Imperial Rule Under the Authority of Jupiter-Zeus.”

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27 See e.g., De Wet, “The Deutero-Pauline and Petrine Haustafeln;” MacDonald, “Beyond Identification of the Topos of Household Management.” 28 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” esp. 385–386; “The Extended Body of Christ,” esp. 234–239. 29 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 385. 30 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 386. I am concerned only with deep incarnation here and so will not explore other theologies that would fit this model as well. A more thorough reading of co-suffering and the ecological significance of the resurrection of Jesus could go back to the work of Moltmann, The Coming of God. Likewise, I am not concerned here to engage thinkers such as John Polkinghorne, who insist on eschatological metaphysical renewal to escape the violence of a world characterized by predation and on its way toward heat death. My criticism toward Polkinghorne would be largely the same as it is developed below. See, e.g., Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World. 31 Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 117, 122. 32 Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 245. 33 There is much to add to Gregersen’s discussion of horror in light of the reading of the crucifixion given above. Jesus’ death is a horror not because, as Holmes Rolston would put it, his death fits into the natural pattern of evolutionary violence he wrongly labels as cruciform. Rolston, “Does Nature Need to be Redeemed?”. Instead, Jesus faces a horrible death because he is the object of socio-political sovereignty and violence. Horror should be tied more closely to injustice rather than the inescapability of death in a world driven by evolution. I would not dispute that evolutionary violence is resisted by all creatures and not something to grow existentially comfortable with in our moral theologies. “Natural evil” ought to be resisted insofar as possible, but I would argue that the focus of redemption should be on unjust violence perpetrated by sovereign power. One commentator who has begun to think deep incarnation in this context is Lee, “Historical Crucifixion.” 34 Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 249. 35 Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 121. 36 Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 123. 37 “The promise of the resurrection is that ‘the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom 8:18–25).” Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 124. 38 Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 123. 39 Lee, “Historical Crucifixion,” 895. 40 Lee, “Historical Crucifixion,” 895. 41 I do, however, take the cruciformity to be part of a broader understanding of the vulnerability of the face, which is a desire for fulfillment in opposition to anything that threatens it. If one wanted to argue that such only occurs in the context of unjust political oppression, I would suggest that such a Christology is philosophically deficient in terms of a comprehensive approach to ethics, care, justice, and redemption. While socio-cultural and political injustice remains a priority in terms of a socio-political ethic that aimed to take systemic action in the world, such is rooted in an ethical event that is deeper than this type of suffering. “Natural evil” is unjust from the perspective of the one suffering and cannot be ignored and furthermore rests at the heart of “unnatural” evil. Jesus’ cruciform life and death fit into a larger desire for compassion that eschews any natural/unnatural divide, which if pressed would betray an incoherent dualism. 42 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 201. Edwards says that “human beings are called to participate in God’s love and action toward the wider creation in an ecological

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commitment to the healing and flourishing of the planetary community of life.” Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 124. Likewise, Gregersen writes, “This third form of incarnation can thus be described as the readiness of the divine Wisdom to give life and options of renewal, even in cases where there are not yet conscious recipients of grace, and not yet any willingness to be transformed.” Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 386. Clearly, none of these visions discount the need to work for justice, and Gregersen’s language in particular—“peace and union”—suggests working for non-violence in the world. But this aspect does not seem to feature as prominently as they need to in any narrative of redemption, ecological, animal, or otherwise. Thus, in spite of its muted emphasis, compassionate action is nevertheless implied as something that might begin to transform the world now. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 204. Johnson, “Deep Christology: Ecological Soundings,” 172. She elsewhere mentions “the grievous sins of polluting, profligately consuming and killing other species into extinction.” This ethical dynamic represents the direction any deep incarnational theology concerns with redemption ought to go in the future. Elizabeth Johnson, “An Earthy Christology.” “I am convinced, however, that we can have no clear comprehension or any accurate imaginative picture of the future of all things in God, because the future of all creatures, including that of human beings, is in the incomprehensible mystery of God.” Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 126–127. See also, Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 207–210. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 207. Edwards, How God Acts, esp. 159–166. This approach betrays a humanist privilege and does not account for how physical life could exist apart from the totality of an ecological community comprised of all sorts of creatures. The feeling is that those like us, who care about their future and suffer as humans do, will be resurrected while the rest will be remembered by God. However, perhaps the biggest challenge to such a position is that its Christology assumes that resurrection and eschatology are about a metaphysical transfiguration of the world rather than its ethical and socio-political structure. Resurrection only transitions to ontological transfiguration once the early Christian hope in the immanent return of Jesus in the Day of the Lord is dashed by a delay that should cast doubt on any singular Day that once and for all rights wrongs. There is nothing wrong with eschatological hope, but such becomes problematic when it takes precedence over a cruciform ethic aimed at compassionate care for embodied life in our present timeline. While not a piece of deep incarnation theology, similar points are made in Harvie, “Eschatological Communion.” Edwards, Deep Incarnation, 127. Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 52. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 206. I am under no delusion that we can reach utopia and remain largely skeptical of eschatological hope for resurrection. I do, however, embrace Miguel De La Torre’s sense of hopelessness that recognizes the impossibility of creating a perfectly just world but still strives for justice. De La Torre, Embracing Hopelessness. Euthyphro, 10a. See Plato, Complete Works. Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 13. Note the “use of ‘liberation’ and ‘salvation’ as synonyms, or rather as each other’s reverse-side in the sense that ‘liberation’ suggests especially the ‘redemption from the negative’ while ‘salvation’ rather accentuates the ‘gift of the positive.’” Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 14.

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54 The philosophical context in which Levinas begins his work is the existential turn in twentieth century phenomenology that seeks to “renew the ancient problem of being qua being,” especially in the context of Heidegger’s ontological difference. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 56. Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 14–23, surveys the early context of Levinas’ thought considering the question of salvation and provides a more technical summary than I do here. See also Cohen, “Transcendence and Salvation in Levinas’s Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity.” Levinas’ early work on the topic is found in On Escape; Existence and Existents; and Time and the Other. For his reflections on this period later in life, see Levinas and Nemo, Ethics and Infinity, 35–62. 55 Levinas, On Escape, 51. 56 A detailed description of the il y a is found in Levinas, Existence and Existents, 45–60, and Time and the Other, 44–51; and Levinas and Nemo, Ethics and Infinity, 47–52. 57 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 53 58 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 187. “With essence and being Levinas in no way means, in line with Plato and Heidegger, the plain or merely formal, factual ‘there is’, namely that something exists, but rather the self-unfolding act of being. With that he takes over the qualitative dynamic meaning of the Heideggerian term Wesen (or wesen as verb).” Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 16. 59 Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 18. 60 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 51. This idea must have been extremely early in Levinas’ thought, as he had already abandoned it as a serious path out of being in On Escape (1935) and while he explores it in more depth in his Existence and Existents (1947), it is offered only as an example of a dead-end path that is detrimental to any flourishing life. While his particular escape path is not clearly developed at the outset of his writings, salvation from the horror of the il y a as well as enslavement to subjectivity as “this revolting presence of ourselves to ourselves” remains the underlying theme of all of his writings. Levinas, On Escape, 66. Another early possibility for salvation was pleasure, which because it re-inscribes self-isolation, is also a “deceptive escape.” Levinas, On Escape, 62. 61 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 71. 62 Spinoza, Ethics, 101. See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 127. 63 Levinas, On Escape, 55. 64 Levinas, On Escape, 58–59. 65 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 95. While the escape from being clearly lay in exteriority, these topics are not substantially developed in Levinas’ early work. Nevertheless, in his earliest writings Levinas speaks of escape rooted in the “fearful face-to-face situation … the Other as other is not only an alter ego. He is what I am not: he is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, ‘the widow, and the orphan.’” Levinas, On Escape, 55. 66 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 109–183. “My body is not only a way for the subject to be reduced to slavery, to depend on what is not itself, but is also a way of possessing and of working, of having time, of overcoming the very alterity of what I have to live from. The body is the very self-possession by which the I, liberated from the world by need, succeeds in overcoming the very destitution of this liberation.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 117. 67 “The unicity of the I conveys separation. Separation in the strictest sense is solitude, and enjoyment—happiness or unhappiness—is isolation itself.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 117.

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 105 68 Burggraeve, “‘No One Can Save Oneself without Others,’” 30. 69 Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 104. On the divine command, see also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197–201, esp. 199. 70 “The Other who can sovereignly say no to me is exposed to the point of the sword or the revolver’s bullet, and the whole unshakable firmness of his ‘for itself’ with that intransigent no he opposes is obliterated because the sword or the bullet has touched the ventricles or auricles of his heart.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. The “no” need not be spoken but resides incarnate in resistance as such. The face expresses in the flesh and blood of suffering bodies expressing frailty, vulnerability, and need: “the whole body - the hand or a curve of the shoulder - can express as the face.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 262. 71 Levinas, “No Identity,” 149. This text was originally published in 1970, years after Totality and Infinity, and three years before Otherwise than Being. This sentence, with the soteriological language we do not see much in the later Levinas—though we do see it once again in Otherwise than Being, 161—is followed by a paragraph concerned with escaping sameness reminiscent of not only Totality and Infinity but the early Levinas in On Escape, Existence and Existents, and Time and the Other. The language demonstrates the continuity of Levinas’ thought throughout time and ties soteriology to Levinas’ philosophical concern well into his mature thought. 72 Levinas is not entirely consistent on this issue. One of his more peculiar statements is found in the essay “Transcendence and Evil,” where he speaks of humanity’s “fraternally solidary with creation,” that manifests in “responsibility for everything and for all.” Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” 184. Richard Cohen sees this as “the path to the ethical theory of ‘animal rights’ that certain commentators have found lacking in Levinas’ thought.” Cohen, “Against Theology,” 356, n.17. 73 The question is asked at least as early as 1951 in Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” See also, Totality and Infinity, 73; “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 47–60; “Transcendence and Evil,” 184; “The Name of the Dog or Natural Rights,”151–153. 74 Wright, Hughes, and Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” 171. 75 Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 170–171. 76 Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 172. 77 Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 172. 78 Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 172. This anthropology is further complicated by its ableist sentiment, which is inconsistent with Levinas’ insistence that no characteristics can be assigned the face as a way of identifying it. Thus, as Peter Atterton points out, such a view, if consistently applied, would strip many severely mentally disabled humans of the dignity of a face. See Atterton, “Face-to-Face with the Other Animal?,” esp. 277–279; “Ethical Cynicism;” “Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals;” “Facing Animals.” 79 Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 172. 80 Elsewhere he strongly suggests that certain neurological systems are required for inclusion into ethics, which allow a being to both suffer and speak its sufferings in the form of self-aware, universalized maxims. See Levinas, “The Name of the Dog or Natural Rights,” 151–153. Levinas elsewhere argues that the human face “differs from an animal’s head in which a being, in its brutish dumbness, is not yet in touch with itself.” Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 55. Elsewhere, animals are “wild, faceless.” Levinas, “Freedom and Command,” 19. These are perhaps the most direct violations of Levinas’ own ideas, as apart

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from these instances, he insists that biology or any conceptual schema is inadequate to describe the face. There is a significant volume of literature pushing back on this point using Levinas’ own philosophy. In addition to Atterton’s work referenced above, see e.g., Benso, The Face of Things; Calarco, Zoographies; Clark, “On Being ‘The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany;’” Gross, “The Question of the Creature;” Llewelyn, “Am I Obsessed by Bobby?;”Davy, “An Other Face of Ethics;” Plant, “Welcoming Dogs.” Perpich’s The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is among the few would question this. Calarco, Zoographies, 62. Benso, “Earthly Morality and the Other: From Levinas to Economic Responsibility,” 94. Such is also suggested by Peter Atterton: “I cannot know prior to experience that the Other will be a member of the genus Homo … unless I have already made it a stipulation that all potential encounters with the Other will consist of encounters with human beings.” Atterton, “Facing Animals,” 27. Likewise, Matthew Calarco acknowledges, “for the Other to be a genuine and absolute Other—something that Levinas maintains is essential to the ethicality of the encounter—the Other cannot belong to any genus whatsoever, not even one as broad a “humanity.” Calarco, Zoographies, 65. Finally, Christian Diehm asserts: “an ethic of the body is concerned with the very real possibility of disregarding the structural weakness of a body that can be ignored or destroyed. Hence, if we locate obligation in the claim of an incarnate other, then we would have to say that every body is the face, every body is the other.” Diehm, “Facing Nature: Levinas Beyond the Human,” 57. Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, 109. Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, 107. Wright, “The Paradox of Morality,” 160 Atterton, “Facing Animals,” 26. Davy, “An Other Face of Ethics,” 52. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 177. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 178. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 180. I would highlight Gebara’s “especially the outcast,” as a way of suggesting that despite the inability, suggested above, of coherently separating “natural” violence from the unnatural, our focus in a actualizing soteriology might want to focus on the political dimension of suffering. Thus, even while my main example of encountering Christ is in the inevitable natural death of a creature, our intentional focus might justly skew toward a post-colonial ecotheology. Such pinpoints pressing ecological needs that are crucial for planet-wide flourishing and survival, and while natural death is something to rightly resist, we have limits in our power to do so. I address this in Chapter Six, but such a political theology is beyond the scope of this book. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 185. In an evolutionary context, this becomes extraordinarily tricky. I doubt, however, anyone would suggest simply allowing natural violence and death to continue unabated with no efforts to address or alleviate such violence. Overcoming untimely death and disease is resisted ubiquitously even though they are a necessary possibility in evolutionary creativity. Even religious naturalists who lift nature to an object of religious devotion do not deny the need for compassionate care in the face of inevitable suffering. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 186. Gebara does write: “Within this perspective, Jesus does not come to us in the name of a ‘superior will’ that sent him; rather he comes from here: from this earth, this body, this flesh, from the evolutionary process that is present both

Deep Incarnation and Redemption 107 yesterday and today in this Sacred Body within which love resides. It continues in him beyond that, and it is turned into passion for life, into mercy and justice. In this sense, I am saying that Jesus as an individual person is not superior to any other human being. This is because he is made of the same earth, the same bodily reality that constitutes us all.” But, she continues “on account of his moral qualities, his openness, and his sensitivity, he has come to represent, in a certain sense, the perfection of our dreams and the ideal realization of our desires. And it is precisely this quality that makes the difference. To put it another way: The difference is not metaphysical or ontological … but ethical and aesthetic, because the difference is manifest in his humanity, in the great beauty of the attitudes he expressed and evoked in others.” Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 190. I just do not see reason for perfecting Jesus as the ideal model of redemption, even if it remains central to the tradition. Despite her claims to avoid metaphysics and ontology, this argument seems to rely on some Christological uniqueness in Jesus. 96 Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 183. 97 Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 263. While it is not my intent to engage in public theology in this book, the clearest example of what I mean would be a confrontation with the manufacture and consumption of industrialized meat and other animal products. Such is not only a source of unfathomable horror for animals, whose face humanity recognizes once in the proximity of such horror but is also among the most insidious ways in which neo-colonial cultures of capital are destroying Earth. See Eaton and Harvie, “Laudato Sí and Animal Well-Being: Catholic Food Ethics in a Throwaway Culture.”

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The revelation of God in the Christian tradition can be understood in several ways, from the expression of the book of scripture to the natural theology discerned in the book of nature. The ultimate expression of revelation as the unveiling of divinity, of course, manifests in the life and teachings of Jesus. This chapter wrestles with the idea of revelation in the wake of deep incarnation Christology in dialogue with early Christian theology and Levinas’ philosophy. Once more, I expand on the impulse of deep incarnation to extend Christ’s performance of revelation to the heart of the physical, no longer restricting such to human persons of Jesus in particular. As in the previous chapter, Christ’s performance of revelation is witnessed in the infinite nature of the face, human or otherwise, which connects the tradition with its object of ultimate religious devotion. Thus, the redemptive ethics described in the previous chapter reveals an infinite transcendence that resists subjective sovereignty allowing the human to encounter cruciform divinity in and as creation and creature. Christ thus maintains infinity and transcendence while remaining absolutely immanent and physical. Jesus remains Christ, a divine object of religious devotion who cannot be pinned down by the identifying powers of a subject but does not retain this status absolutely and exclusively. The face of things is a revelation of God, a divine self-expression actively speaking for itself to passive recipients. Below, I outline my understanding of the doctrine of Revelation in dialogue with Johannine Christology and certain early Christian belief in Jesus’ revelation as Christ and a self-expression of God. I subsequently explore the idea of revelation as divine selfexpression in the work of Niels Henrik Gregersen’s deep incarnation Christology, and Levinas’ philosophies of time and infinity. I end with a re-imagined idea of deep incarnation as deep revelation, acknowledging the possibility of meeting Christ, in the strict sense of divine identity, in the face of things as a way over overcoming the anthropocentric impulse common to most Christologies.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-5

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Christ’s Revelation Moving from redemption as a principal role played by Christ in the Christian tradition, this chapter explores the cruciform performance of revelation, the self-expression of divinity in the event of ethics. This is not an altogether separate discussion from the previous chapter; the foundational object of revelation within Christianity is the cruciform face of things, expressed in event of ethics. While Chapter 6 suggests there is more to divinity than ethics and the face, the primary revelation I am concerned with throughout this chapter is Christ, the ultimate object of Christian devotion, who remains a multi-unitary and multi-modal expression of God. Furthermore, my interest in cruciform revelation in the following pages is its peculiar phenomenological and epistemological structure. This must be fleshed out in order to avoid certain pitfalls that undermine essential qualities inherent in divine selfexpression, namely a reduction of the other to the same. Revelation, as I understand it in this chapter, is divine self-expression that speaks for itself apart from and prior to the power of subjectivity, thus resisting identifying divinity as one’s alter-ego.1 Such revelation is the gift of cruciform alterity and not the discovery of a subject; it is the active expression of an infinity passively received as an epiphany that could never be uncovered through subjective power. Such is a critical role-function of Christ, manifest as Jesus or any face reveals the divine, redemptive power of liberation, justice, and compassionate care. In a rudimentary way, I am working with a religious phenomenology and epistemology shared with Thomas Aquinas. There is a twofold mode of truth in what we profess about God. Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. Such is the truth that God is triune. But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like. In fact, such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of the natural reason.2 That which can be known by “the natural light of reason,” I understand as natural theology whereas that which “exceed[s] all the ability of the human reason” I understand as revelation.3 The latter must come from outside of the subject, given by some dynamic activity beyond the self, who is passive in the face of divine self-expression. “For the human intellect is not able to reach a comprehension of the divine substance through its natural power. For, according to its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on the sense for the origin of knowledge; and so those things that do not fall under the senses cannot be grasped by the human intellect except in so far as the knowledge of them is gathered from sensible things.”4 It is the infinite essence of divinity that, for Aquinas, cannot be grasped by the intellect nor through sensual perception because of the inherent difference

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between the subject and divine alterity.5 Knowing God follows divine selfexpression to a recipient who embraces the content of disclosure by faith.6 This is the general sense of revelation I accept and embraced throughout much of the Christian tradition. A divine self-expression is given directly to one who could not otherwise discover alterity through subjective creativity or powers of perception and rationality. Yet, I do not suggest, as Aquinas does, that divine self-expression is withheld from the intellect simply because it exceeds its power, which is expanded by God for an authentic grasp of divinity.7 My suggestion, developed below, is that subjective perception and contemplation is never up to the task of receiving revelation or grasping alterity due to an inescapable transcendence or infinity in the divine face of others. A subject cannot be sufficiently enhanced to perceive and know alterity because the problem with such recognition is not a lack of information or cognitive processing power. Cognition as such necessarily betrays the possibility of adequate representation of alterity. What is needed to encounter revelation as divine self-expression is thus a mode of relation outside of subjectivity itself in a time and space where divinity can express itself apart from the sovereignty of the subject. The solution is not elevating subjective rationality by a more powerful subject, but in abandoning it as the mode of relation that encounters the face-to-face revelation of divinity.8 This does not mean that subjective rationality cannot engage revelatory encounters, but that such encounters occur outside of and prior to the possibility of contemplation. By the time revelation is recognized, it has already occurred. Revelation, of course, may be contemplated, conceptualized, and applied to the life of a community, but such is not, properly speaking, self-expression of divine alterity. The time and space of revelation beyond the horizon of subjectivity is explored in the Gospel of John, which is our entryway into this exploration of the self-expression of incarnate, cruciform divinity. The Beloved Disciple, of course, is not contemplating the precise understanding of time and space that I develop, but his contemplation of revelation through the lens of the classic recognition type scene inspires us to contemplate revelation and its relationship to temporality and transcendence. In John’s Gospel, Jesus states: “It is I who bear witness to myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness to me” (Jn 8:18). The possibility of recognizing such revelation is key to John’s narration. “The whole story,” writes R. Alan Culpepper of John’s Gospel, “is a death struggle over the recognition of Jesus as the revealer.”9 The struggle does not concern the idea of revelation itself or its content, but the relationship between revelation and recognition, a relation that organizes much of the gospel and suggests distance between subjects and divine alterity. Incarnate divinity is not a phenomenon open to the perceptual powers of the subject and is only recognized after the revelatory event has passed. From the early encounters of John the Baptist, Simon, and Nathanael to the Samaritan woman, the man born blind,

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 111 and Thomas’ struggle to overcome doubt, many in the fourth Gospel encounter Jesus but struggle with doubt over his identity. Through a contemplation of signs working to confirm the divine identity, they eventually come to recognize Jesus as one who has revealed God. Such recognition is, however, a cognition after the fact of encounter, setting revelation in the past as something not accessible to the subject in the event itself. Such recognition scenes are by no means unique to the Gospel. They are a common story-telling device used to create an engaging, dramatic story. The most famous recognition-driven drama of the ancient world is Homer’s Odyssey, the narration of the epic homecoming of Odysseus from his imprisonment on the isle of Ogygia back to Ithaca. The drama of Odysseus’ return is driven by his camouflaged identity, hidden to all but Argos, before his gradual recognition, revelation, and restoration.10 While there are significant differences between the Odyssey and the Fourth Gospel, both recount a dramatic tale of suspense driven by recognition scenes. John’s use of the narration device draws out the inherent difficulties with divine incarnation in a tradition where God’s essence is infinite and irreducible to what is given in perception. Kasper Bro Larsen provides a thorough analysis of Johannine recognition scenes through the lens of the Aristotelean notion of anagnorisis.11 Anagnorisis, for Aristotle, concerns the creation of an epistemic drama that drives the plot of a story through the recipient’s discovery of the truth of a character’s deepest identity, especially through recognition or disclosure, plot twists, and reversals of fortune contrary to expectations.12 “A discovery is, as the very word implies, a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune. The finest form of discovery is one attended by reversal, like that which goes with the discovery in Oedipus.”13 A discovery or recognition of another’s identity leads to an emotional response in the reader or listener and provides a payoff for one’s investment in the drama. Such discoveries often require some sort of testimony or sign able to bear witness to the truth of a character’s identity and thus add epistemological weight to the recognition of alterity. Thus, while Eurycleia noted the resemblance of the old man to her former king, authentic recognition of Odysseus required a sign as confirmation of her suspicion. While washing his feet and discovering his scar, Odysseus’ is recognized, filling Eurycleia with emotion and pushing the drama forward. Holding his leg and rubbing with flat palms [she] came to that place and recognized the scar. She let his leg fall down into the basin. It clattered tilted over and the water spilled out across the floor. Both joy and grief took hold of her. Her eyes were filled with tears her voice was choked. She touched his beard and said “You are Odysseus! My darling child! My master! I did not know it was you until I touched you all around your leg.14

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While the stories of Odysseus and Jesus are unique, similarities in plot devices demonstrate the similar ways signs operate to facilitate recognition of those already known and whose fates have changed beyond what is easy to accept. Jesus said to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:27–28).15 Recognition through the presentation of some sort of sign or token as confirmation comes about after a struggle in the recognizer to make sense of what has happened in a past relation. Cognitive discernment and even resistance to certain interpretations is a response to some past communicative event. A crucial element of recognition scenes is thus past relations in which the subject was exposed to some past revelation, which remains hidden to the perception of the subject creating distance between the other and the same. What is discovered is not something new—both Argos and Eurycleia already know Odysseus—but the recognition of an identity with whom one is already familiar. The subject of anagnorisis scenes thus recognizes in the present that a certain alterity has already revealed themselves, clearing up “the epistemological ambiguity—or the complexity, to render Aristotle’s term—of these events and claims,” due to a deficiency of perceptual power in the face a hidden identity.16 Such epistemological uncertainty, manifest in the struggle between faith and doubt, is central to John’s Gospel because the difficulties divine incarnation raises. The struggle to recognize divinity in the flesh concerns the problematic mixture of transcendence and immanence, which are often assumed to be at odds with one another or at least have separate ways of being. The flesh camouflages Jesus’ transcendence in spite of it being inseparable and even necessary for revealing his divinity. Divine identity here is inseparable from the flesh even though this embodied divinity resists any direct, unambiguous perception that would pin down the infinite essence inherent in a Christian notion of God. Knowledge of an infinite, transcendent God through phenomenal perception is thus suspect and requires the epistemic struggle of doubt and faith because such knowledge involves the relationship of the finite to the infinite. The recognition scene with “its inherent game of discovery and cognitive resistance” thus becomes an ideal literary device for a theology of revelation because of the necessary distance between a simultaneously immanent and transcendent divinity and the perception of any subject.17 In other words, despite being a body, Jesus’ divinity cannot be straightforwardly perceived by a finite, subjective horizon. Infinite divinity has no problems expressing in and as a plurality of forms throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, though no form is given as a phenomenon encompassing divine fullness. Divine incarnation assumes that divinity is epistemologically hidden despite its limited phenomenological openness. This idea is found beyond the fourth Gospel, and its centrality to the Judeo-Christian tradition(s) manifest in the incarnate revelation of God to

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 113 Moses. At Sinai after the Exodus, Moses is greeted by a thunderous divine presence, a nature epiphany elementally incarnate, where he is warned not to let the people into the holy place for fear of their deaths from their direct proximity to God.18 After receiving the commands and affirming the Sinai covenant, Moses encounters divine glory, incarnate as thunder and lightning, fire, and smoke-cloud. Seeking affirmation of a continued divine presence as Moses leads the Israelites to Canaan, he requests to know God deeper and ensure divine favor, culminating in the supplication: “I pray You, show me Your glory!” (Exodus 33:19). And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” Then the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.” (Exodus 33:19–23) The difference between the face and the back of God expresses the central difficulty of the idea of revelation. Such represents the possibility of incarnate divinity open to human relationship and physical manifestation, while simultaneously remaining hidden in its fullness and absolute essence. To use an anachronistic idea, such is a coincidence of opposites, the possibility of physical, face-to-face proximity and simultaneous distance preventing a reduction of the other to the same. The glory of God is physical, incarnate, and expressive, but not absolutely; it presents obscurely and remains mystery irreducible to the power of any cognitive horizon. There is thus a real, physical relation between humanity and divinity—mostly elemental in Exodus as thunder, lightning, fire, and smoke-cloud—but real limitations in what can be grasped about a divine alterity that necessarily overflows subjective perception. This need not mean that God’s back is a physical expression while the face is otherworldly, but simply that the face of God is what overflows the possibility of absolute identification. From front to back, God remains physical and incarnate but beyond reduction to any fully identifiable, singular expression. If we multiplied our examples throughout the tradition(s), we would continue to detect theologies going deeper than the monotheistic sky-God myth that eventually comes to power. Such a reading is shared by theologian Mark Wallace, who working with the Mosaic tradition, insists that incarnate expressions of divinity do not mask a divinity in disguise, nor are they figures of speech that poetically transpose transcendence into immanence. “God is feathers and bone, blood and skin, leaves and wood.”19

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John’s Gospel draws on this tradition of incarnate revelation.20 Divine glory, transmuting from the elemental, appears now in the person of Jesus and the drama concerning the infinite expression within the finite continues. For the Gospel writer, just as God settled on Sinai, revealing divine glory and later dwelt in the tabernacle and eventually the temple of David and Solomon, so now God continues to reveal divine glory and reside among the people in the body of Jesus. Thus, “the Word became flesh, and dwelt [έσκήνωσεν—‘tented’] among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).21 The principle change in divine incarnation is the form and appearance taken. Whereas the community of Moses encountered divine glory in elemental form, John’s community witnessed divine glory in a rebellious peasant resisting Roman imperialism. Yet, the presentation of divine glory in human form was not absolute, just as it was obscured previously in its elemental form. Divine obscurity expressed previously in the difference of the back and face of God continues in the Gospel: “For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:17–18).22 Johannine theology is the continuation of Mosaic revelation; it is the incarnate self-expression of divine glory in the elemental and the human, simultaneously given to and hidden from perception so that God remains both infinite and physical. One would suspect that recognizing any encounter with such a God shapeshifting as this and that would run up against significant cognitive resistance, especially in a time where ontic dualism was commonplace and led to a suspicion of a hybridity between divinity and physicality.23 Divinity in such a framework exists as a hybrid of incarnate immanence and formless transcendence that may reveal itself, however obscurely, in a plurality of forms. Returning to the recognition scenes of John, it seems there are good theological and cultural reasons for the use of this literary device as a means of exploring divine revelation. God seems to express in and as flesh, but how does one know for sure when such an encounter has occurred? Larsen specifies five key elements often, but not always, present in recognition scenes.24 Initially, there is some sort of meeting between the narrative’s participants, revealer, and recipient, and an identity is presented. This is followed by cognitive resistance on the part of the recipient that creates an epistemological distance between themself and the revealer, and in order to provide faith a chance to prevail over doubt, we subsequently see the display of a token or sign working to confirm the identity already revealed. After these steps, we come to the moment of recognition, the realization of an identity once revealed, and consequent reactions to the newfound faith overcoming doubt. For the purposes of this chapter, my main interest concerns the necessity of cognitive resistance to revelation due to the way the flesh camouflages divinity—presenting the divine back and obscuring the face—and the resultant spacio-temporal distance created

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 115 between revealer and recipient that protects the physicality and infinity of incarnate divinity. What is communicated in such scenes “is the recognition of a hidden truth,” inaccessible to the recipient in the original encounter with the revealer because of the ubiquitous inability to perceive the identity of divine alterity camouflaged in the flesh.25 Recognition happens after the fact of some encounter, once something has been expressed and subsequent signs or tokens have been presented that offer good enough reason to conclude that the encounter one had was indeed a face-to-face meeting with the divine. Thus, “a ‘move’ of separation is implied in recognition: a sub narrative concerning the spatiotemporal disjunction between the initial cognition and the re-cognition, for example an account of a journey of some sort.”26 The initial, revelatory self-expression of God then, in John, is never immediately recognized and the revealer and the recipient do not meet in the mutual recognition of face-to-face relationships. There is an inherent spacetime separation in revelatory encounters between the revealer and the recipient ensuring that God is not fully perceived at the moment of encounter. It is as if the weight of encountering incarnate divinity is initially too much to bear for the subject and so the claim cannot be processed and is met with doubt and cognitive resistance as the subject pushes the revelation of divine alterity away. Recognition of the event requires spacio-temporal distance and contemplation to sufficiently process what has taken already taken place so that the possibility of recognition emerges.27 The prologue of John sets up the reader for a unique vantage point as they encounter countless characters who grapple with faith and doubt concerning the depths of Jesus’ identity. The reader is let in on the hidden truth that Jesus was the divine revelation of incarnate glory, who exists eternally as the Logos, who was both “with God” but in also some way “was God” (John 1:1). The flesh encountered is more than what appears in perception, but this is not to say the flesh is a false indicator of reality or deception.28 The flesh, whether elemental, vegetal, animal, or human, is inseparable from divine glory and its expression; it is necessary in order to have any communitive relationship at all. In this instance, the Logos is incarnate as this human, though for the Johannine community, it is reasonable to suggest that this is the culmination of a long history of divine embodiments, the historic climax of a polymorphic, shapeshifting God that has consistently dwelt among humanity.29 Such divinity expresses variously throughout the Mosaic tradition as a flaming plant, a medicinal snake, an obscuring cloud, a booming thunderclap, a brilliant strike of lightning, and a consuming holy fire. Now, climactically according to John’s Gospel, divinity incarnates human flesh. Recognition thus entails a diachronic structure with a unique take on a subject’s proximity to God and the obstacles found in perceiving a physical, incarnate divine glory necessarily camouflaged. Believers recognize divinity incarnate in Jesus as the result of some past, personal experience that leads

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to contemplation of what precisely has taken place in the encounter, which is made difficult to comprehend due to the inherent difficulty in perceiving a physical but obscured divine alterity. There is thus always a question inherent in recognition of whether the divine has already revealed itself—no subject simply receives revelation through an immediate perception, as if they were able to comprehend and see what is necessarily mysterious and invisible. Thus, the subject is never, as I argue below, face-to-face with God. It is only recognized after the fact that divine glory had been revealed in some incarnate form manifest in and as this or that but always in an obscured, imperceptible manner. There is necessarily proximity and distance between the revealer and recipient, as if the backside of God was presented while the face remained hidden. Such is the Beloved Disciple’s approach not simply because it is a good storytelling device, which is obviously as anagnorisis is a staple in storytelling to this day, but because it preserves the theological tradition of God’s immanent physicality and transcendent hiddenness, expressed throughout time in and as a plurality of incarnate expressions.

Deep Incarnation and Deep Revelation Moving beyond the structure of revelation in John’s Gospel, which I reimagine and utilize below, our question turns to the possibility of a continued recognition of novel incarnations that similarly reveal divine glory. In other words, does the incarnational tradition from the elemental glory expressed to Moses to the anthropological glory revealed in Jesus continue and if so, how and in what forms would this be recognized? While they could not anticipate the depths to which we take this discussion today, the author of John’s Gospel writes with a reader in mind who will be engaged in the search for divine incarnations and revelations. “The reader is not only a spectator, watching the cognitive struggles of story-world actors, but is from the very beginning invited into the game of recognition.”30 Thus, moving forward, I build upon the structure of Johannine theology of revelation, focused on recognition, proximity, and temporality, to make sense of new experiences with divine glory. Thus, we struggle between faith and doubt concerning the recognition of a deeper, continued incarnation. Deep incarnation insists on a physical, cruciform presence among and inseparable from the world, and thus we return to see how such a Christology understands the relationship between divine revelation and its expansive sense of incarnation. Presumably, it should be open to a more expansive idea of revelation and divine self-expression. Niels Henrik Gregersen explicitly addresses the idea of revelation and weighs in on the specific forms that may be recognized as such.31 In previous chapters I explored the “three senses” in which incarnation can be understood according to Gregersen. The purpose of the senses—broad, strict, and soteriological in nature—serves to specify Christ’s ontic nature and purpose

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 117 toward which the Son works throughout the world. God becomes flesh, according to Gregersen, for the purpose of reconciling humanity with God, and of conjoining God and the world of creation so intensely together that there can be a future also for a material world characterized by decomposition, frailty, and suffering. Accordingly, God’s own Logos … was made flesh in Jesus the Christ in such a comprehensive manner that God, by assuming the particular life story of Jesus the Jew from Nazareth, also conjoined the material conditions of creaturely existence (“all flesh”), shared and ennobled the fate of all biological life forms (“grass” and “lilies”), and experienced the pains of sensitive creatures (“sparrows” and “foxes”) from the inside.32 The specific manner in which Jesus embraces and assumes the identity of the world is not such that each particular thing is strictly speaking, identified as a self-expression of God or Christ. Rather, the incarnation embraces the totality and fate of the material world explicitly through the humanity of Jesus so that this divine humanity, as a microcosm of an evolved world with common heritage, touches all that exists in one particular form. Thus, insofar as Gregersen separates the strict and broad senses on incarnate presence, his view of deep incarnation would not extend the revelation or self-expression of God or Christ beyond the body of Jesus. Such is, I argue later, a mistake. The various senses of incarnation set in place establish certain ontic limitations in Gregersen’s understanding of divine incarnation and thus divine revelation. Thus, while his position represents a pan-incarnate and possibly pantheist Christology, there is not a flat equivalence of Christ’s incarnation throughout the three senses. Christ is incarnate in and as the world, but not in the same ontic sense that divinity incarnates Jesus. “God conjoins with and for the material world at large as a concretely embodied human person.”33 The unique incarnational event, Jesus as a divine human person, represents the “strict sense” of incarnation. This sense allows Gregersen to recognize Jesus as a unique embodiment of the eternal Logos different from the broader sense of incarnation in which Christ exists as a microcosm of the universe, shares in its evolutionary history, and informs it co-creates its manifestations. Thus, “in this sense, there is a distinctiveness or setting-apart of Jesus as God’s self-incarnation in the strict sense of the term.”34 Thus, while Christ is incarnate in and as the entire physical world in a broad sense that I explore below, strictly speaking, Jesus alone redeems the world through his soteriologically effective suffering, and Jesus alone is a self-expression of Christ who reveals God. Before discussing incarnation in the strict sense in detail, I briefly outline the other two senses. The sense of incarnation most intimately related to the physical world as a whole as well as the particularity of its parts is termed

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the “broad sense” of incarnation. Insofar as the human is a microcosm of the cosmos, including all of the evolutionary processes and individual manifestations of phenomena that emerge in its development, it contains in itself the totality of creation.35 Thus, the particular body of the divine Jesus contains the universe within it.36 It follows then that when God incarnates as a human, divinity becomes ontically entangled with all of creation. Additionally, Gregersen’s understanding of the Logos through the Stoic idea of an informational ground of all matter-energy that directs creation in its unfolding suggests that something of a divine mind incarnates in all phenomena.37 As discussed earlier in our exploration of Nickolas of Cusa, this is not simple omnipresence wherein Christ merely exists alongside of creatures or as a craftsman who creates things absolutely outside of oneself. When Gregersen speaks of the divine assumption of the physical, “‘assuming’ the world must also somehow mean incorporating the world into God’s own life.”38 This does not mean that Christ’s fullness and character is manifest in all that exists nor that anything and everything is a cruciform, divine self-expression. It also does not mean that such distinct senses of incarnation warrant a “strict separation between creation and incarnation.”39 The broad sense of incarnation means that divinity is ontically identified as creation insofar Jesus incorporated the universe and its history within his flesh and that Christ resides in and as all things as their creative, informational, and physical ground. There is also a “soteriological sense” of the incarnation that looks at the redemptive implications of God becoming flesh. Divine embodiment serves to aid in a realization of a “peace and union between God and the world” beyond the specific work of reconciling sinful humans with a holy God.40 In his body, Jesus comes to know the suffering of creaturely existence and in his resurrection he promises an eventual new life for the totality of creation, opening the way to what Elizabeth Johnson terms, “deep resurrection.”41 Through divine embodiment and suffering there is compassion and empathy for all things and a promise to somehow renew and redeem creation and at least some creatures from the violence they face as a result of both evolutionary and anthropogenic evil. This aspect of incarnation is the least developed in Gregersen’s theology and any sense of deep incarnation, and as I suggest in my ethics-based approach to Christology, a sense much in need of further consideration. The strict sense of incarnation, reserved exclusively for Jesus amidst a creation otherwise broadly identified as Christ, explicitly concerns divine self-expression. Such is the role-function performed by Christ, the agent of its own self-disclosure and synonymous with the self-expression of God. “For incarnation (in the strict-sense of the term) signifies not only God’s general mode of ‘being there’ … but also God’s self-revelation, selfidentification, or self-characterization.”42 Revelation can only be performed by Christ in human form, namely Jesus even though creation as a whole exists as a different sense of divine incarnation.43 “We arrive at the

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 119 question of the unavoidable particularity of Jesus. It seems that only a human person who exists in full resonance with God, and in a constant attunement to the will of God, could possibly reveal who God is.”44 It is thus only humanity and this one specific, perfectly religious creature, “that incarnation can have a genuine comprehensive scope.”45 Among all divine creatures, the fullness of God is found in Jesus alone, much like it was for Nicholas of Cusa. Like Cusanus, divine identity is so linked to humanity under the assumption that only this species possesses the proper characteristics that bridge creaturely finitude and transcendent infinity, allowing the fullness of God to incarnate as a creature. For Gregersen, such characteristics are moral agency and self-reflexive religious thought. “It seems obvious,” Gregersen writes, “that the identity of God as Love can’t be revealed in a tomato or in a mussel, nor in the birth and decay of stars and galaxies in the macro-scopic realm of the cosmos. The incarnation must take place in a self-reflective religious human person.”46 There is something obviously unique about moral agency and rationality, which the Western philosophical tradition has always assumed and never adequately explained, that is exalted above all other characteristics and must be included in a strict sense of divine identity and self-expression.47 Non-human embodiment may thus incarnate divinity insofar as it contains the informative essence of the divine Logos, but it cannot express the absolute essence of God’s being. It seems then that creation is indeed divine, incarnate as God’s body as in Cusanus, but to a lesser degree than humanity, whose heroic representative, Jesus, alone incarnates God absolutely. Only Jesus fully manifests the morality and rationality proper to both human and divine being. Here resides the implicit ontic claim concerning humanity and divinity making it possible to restrict the strict sense of incarnation to Jesus. God and humanity share an ontic overlap due to the possession of abilities withheld from others and elevated above all other characteristics. The claim situates humanity as the one species bridging the gap between finitude and infinity and insists that this one creature contains identifiable characteristics essential to divine being. Likewise, it establishes a value hierarchy elevating one species above others due to the divinization of moral agency and rational, religious reflection.48 Ultimately then, deep incarnation represents a classic theological anthropology that draws humanity toward divinity through the insistence that God is essentially a self-reflective, agential, moral being. Insofar as humanity. Other creatures may incarnate Christ in the broad sense, but no other creature shares in the moral agency and religious rationality proper to humanity and divinity. Non-human creatures are divine but lack the most cherished characteristics necessary for absolute divine self-expression. The obvious problem, I suggest, is that the assumptions of deep incarnation’s anthropology and Christology restrict the self-expression and identity of divine alterity to the possibilities of the subject and an idealized portrait of the human who reflects on an infinite object of religious devotion

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who necessarily transcends the subjective horizon.49 Such precludes the possibility of alterity’s unfettered self-expression, effectively silencing the possibility of an identity at odds with the subject’s self-understanding. The performance of divine revelation, Christology, and theology itself, appears to be rigged from the start in favor of the subject insofar as divine alterity is incapable of self-expression inconsistent with the subject’s experience. The constraints placed on alterity annihilate its infinite, transcendent essence and lays the foundation for objections that against the human as the imago dei in favor of assertions that God, and in this case Christ, is created in the imago hominum. Thus, beyond its idealized image of the human as the sole possessor of moral agency and rationality, which re-inscribes a value hierarchy among creatures based on erroneous binaries of amoral/moral and irrational/rational, the real problem with deep incarnation theologies is that its anthropology and Christology amounts to a reduction of the other to the same.50 Instead of allowing the possibility of divine self-expression without constraints, deep incarnation, like Cusanus’ Christology, silences the infinity of divine alterity in order to ensure that revelation reflects the concerns and abilities of the religious subject and preserves humanist sovereignty. In the next section I appeal to Levinas’ argument that alterity cannot be identified by the experience and abilities of the subject. This amounts to a reduction of the other to the same, which I suggest represents the logic of deep incarnation’s argument that strictly speaking, God cannot incarnate any form but the human. Such a theology reduces the infinite being of God to finitude of the subject and establishes a value hierarchy ignorant to the ethical concerns of the more-than-human world in its divinization of a certain understanding of humanity. Appealing to Mary Daly’s famous critique of Christian androcentrism—“if God is male, then the male is God”—we see here the anthropocentric correlate: “when God becomes (absolutely) human, the human becomes God.”51 Yet, beyond my concern with human self-divinization and an untenably grand view of itself, my focus in this chapter is how the anthropocentric reduction of the other to the same annihilates the basic essence of alterity as such, as well as an idea at the heart of divinity and Christology, namely the idea of infinity or transcendence. Divine infinity, Christ’s included, is jeopardized in any theology that restricts the divine expression to particular forms resting on an egoist foundation that ultimately returns to the self and silences the possibility that something other-than-human might perform revelation. To return to our earlier exploration of revelation, the insistence that God or Christ is more like this one species than any others and can be absolutely, strictly speaking, incarnate as a human alone, erodes the essential hiddenness and camouflage of an incarnate divinity revealing itself. A transcendent divinity would not be restricted in terms of expression and incarnate form as the absolute ontic makeup of such alterity could never be fixed ahead of time to humanist expression. Inherent with all incarnate encounters with

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 121 the divine is a basic inability to come face-to-face with the divine in the waking consciousness or understanding of the subject or recipient of revelation. Divinity is encountered in the flesh, but the identity and being of God, and in our case, Christ, is always hidden from absolute assertions of identity. Some things are, of course, known; the theologies we have examined have never been absolutely apophatic encounters where silence is the only appropriate response to mystery. Likewise, the flesh is not a false mask that protects the real divine beyond the world; the flesh is constitutive of divine being but irreducible to any singular form. As such, I suggest that deep incarnation’s insistence that divine revelation or self-expression is restricted to a human form consonant with human capacities and coherent within the mind of the subject erodes if not annihilates divine hiddenness, mystery, and transcendence. Clearly, deep incarnation moves well beyond classical Christologies in re-imagining the God-world relationship, but it remains anthropocentric. The infinite divine, hidden and obscured to the subjective horizon, cannot be forced into a specific shape without descending into the alter-ego of the self and rising to a divinized humanity. If revelation comes from outside of the subject, no one is in a position to say ahead of time what the absolute boundaries of divine self-expression and identity might entail. Doing so manifests not insight to the divine but only an enchainment to the self, a brute prejudice against alterity residing within the logic of the same.

Levinas, Phenomena, and Infinity Central to Levinas’ philosophy is the idea of infinity. Such is crucial when wrestling with the difficulties present in communication between alterity and a subject. Furthermore, divinity and alterity—both dynamics inherent to the face—are intimately wrapped up in one another in Levinas’ thought. The face approaches a subject in the integrity and authenticity of its own being from outside of any analytic, subjective horizon. Thus, “the knowing being remains separated from the known being.”52 The subject, upon the initial encounter with alterity, is passive as another expresses itself apart from and before the power of the same to identify and pin it down. This model, following my analysis above, might function akin to revelation, and serves as the basis of my re-imagination of the doctrine in a revised deep incarnation Christology. The revelation of infinity or transcendence, synonymous in Levinas’ thought, is not a rupture of the physical from a supernatural source, but the interruption of the subject’s power to know and identify alterity. Such happens in face-to-face ethical relations that place the other and the same in proximity with one another while maintaining an epistemic distance between the two.53 There is an inherent “surplus” necessary to the infinite, such that an object contemplated always overflows the ideas making sense of it. The infinite transcends the subject and anything that can be said

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concerning it. Such transcendence constitutes the basic essence of divinity and alterity. “Infinity is a characteristic of a transcendent being as transcendent; the infinite is the absolutely other. The transcendent is the sole ideatum of which there can be only an idea in us; it is infinitely removed from its idea, that is, exterior, because it is infinite.”54 Insofar as the infinite is not contained within the subject, its expression takes the form of revelation altogether different from communication between two subjects. The encounter with infinity is a “delirium that comes from God, ‘winged thought … . a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.’”55 The importance of infinity in Levinas’ thought concerns the power structures within face-to-face relations. Transcendence is necessary for ethics, Levinas insists, in order to dismiss subjective sovereignty over others, allowing alterity to express itself. Subjective sovereignty grounds the possibility of control and domination, which Levinas insists throughout his work, is the beginning of physical violence and all forms of socio-political oppression.56 When subject sovereignly identifies another without recognizing the possibility of its self-expression there is “a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.”57 Perception of another’s characteristics, which present themselves for comprehension within a subjective horizon, is thus insufficient to identify and know another. Such a logocentric approach to alterity cannot be avoided entirely, but if approached uncritically threatens to silence alterity. In the shadow of such sovereignty, others who cease to express themselves become subject to the cognitive powers of another who cannot help but identify them as this or that, based on analogies, images, and concepts incapable of doing justice to alterity. All that is “said” concerning alterity then contains an inescapable betrayal of the original “saying” or expression of the other.58 This betrayal is eventually necessary for a reflection on face-to-face experiences and facilitates justice in the socio-political realm.59 But such must come only after a proper understanding if the epistemic and power dynamics unfolding within an ethical relation. Thus, re-imagining the epistemic structure and power dynamics implicit within ethics is an attempt to resist violence and promote justice. This requires dethroning the subject who dominates the Western philosophical tradition through rationality and finding an alternative power structure between the other and the same. The infinite essence of alterity re-arranges power through its authoritative “height,” which questions subjective sovereignty by uncovering its powerlessness in the event of ethics. Anything that is said about another necessarily misses the infinite transcendence of the other who cannot be “reabsorbed in his status as a theme” within an ego’s horizon.60 This begins to articulate my fear when reading deep incarnation accounts of a strict-sense incarnation and divine revelation. I am unaware of how an insistence that “the incarnation must take place in a self-reflective religious human person,” which identifies God absolutely

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 123 through the horizon of the same, can hold to the infinite divine transcendence and be something else than a reduction of the other to the same.61 “The idea of the infinite consists in grasping the ungraspable while nevertheless guaranteeing its status as ungraspable.”62 Transcendence demands a non-absolute approach to the shape of divine incarnation and selfexpression, which “does not consist in giving us the Other’s interiority” in any comprehensive sense.63 Levinas recognizes that ending subjective sovereignty requires a relational structure able to account for this shift in power and envision a different sort of relationship between another and the same. As such, the revelation of divine alterity must occur in a space-time that nullifies subjectivity altogether. Levinas accomplishes this in his re-evaluation of the temporality of ethical relations, envisioning a time in the face-to-face relation where alterity alone is active, and the subject is passive and unable to exercise intentional self-reflection that has not yet awakened. Levinas describes this ethical space-time as “an-archy,” an affective, egoless state of being occurring before and conditioning the “awakening” of an egoist subject.64 An-archy is a temporal space that opens up the possibility of a revelatory relationship; it is a “way of signifying quite different from that which connects exposition to sight.”65 It is not conversation as we think it between two subjects engaged in dialogue where each purposefully and freely express, analyze expression, and respond in symmetrical exchange. Anarchy is space-time altogether prior to the possibility of subjectivity and within it, relationships are a-symmetrical, where only one actively, but nonlinguistically expresses itself to a passive recipient who will eventually awaken as a subject able to think about and respond to an encounter with alterity that has already taken place. It is the space-time where alterity is able to express in its own voice free from subjective sovereignty. The subject’s logos is passive, though its pathos open to feeling, viscerally and affectively, the moral significance of another’s face apart from the analysis and judgment of a cognitive horizon that cannot help but understand the face through its own experience. A relationship in the an-archy of time communicates through an affective exchange, “an event of proximity and not of knowledge,” where feelings communicate before and beyond words and concepts.66 The temporality of these affective encounters transcends the durative notion of time experienced as a sequence of presents occurring one after another, where each moment falls into a past that was once present.67 Revelation of alterity apart from sovereignty of the same thus occurs prior to and beyond the ἀρχή (archē: beginning/origin) of an awakened, subjective consciousness that that births a world understood through language, cognition, and value judgments.68 The ἀρχή is the perpetual, moment-tomoment awakening of a subject into a durative present where time unfolds historically as a continual series of perceived events that are organized, interpreted, and processed within a horizon able to identify others as this or

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that. Awakening, as opposed to an-archy, is the basic temporal framework of Western subjectivity; it is a space-time wherein subjectivity erupts and becomes enchained to a peculiar perceptual horizon and thus unable to embrace a divine, infinite alterity.70 The counter-phenomenal essence of alterity is not beyond cognition because of a privation in human perceptual power, but because this is the precise nature of what it means to be infinite. Any subjective horizon necessarily restricts others to the boundaries of representational schemas that force alterity into reductive characterizations that inevitably silence difference to a degree.71 A subject awakened by ethics, however, becomes aware that its reflections contemplate something deeper than what presents itself in recognition. Levinas’ archaeology of consciousness unearths something that has already happened within passively the subject’s body, the result of a relation beginning prior to the possibility of remembrance and reflection. This pre-subjective relation with the face creates subjectivity itself, Levinas argues, prior to the ἀρχή of self-reflexive consciousness; it is generated within the an-archy of affective face-to-face relationships. An-archic space-time is the plane of physical, affective encounters wherein alterity has the power of self-expression, revealing an existence transcending identification within any subjective horizon. An-archy is the space-time in which the ego is passive but will soon awaken and remember the expression of an infinite, transcendent, irreducible alterity who reveals itself via pathos and not logos. Here, alterity expresses to another who is “unable to conceive of what is ‘touching it,’” and so “the ascendancy of the other is exercised upon the same to the point of interrupting it, leaving it speechless.”72 On the plane of an-archy the same simply lacks the power and the necessary time to identify and judge the one who expresses: “a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality.”73 Prior to the subjective present, bodies are capable of expressing sensually, via an-archic affects.74 Such affects are not synonymous with emotions, which Levinas understands as the remembrance and contemplation of affect but refer to a visceral feeling that suspends subjective sovereignty, “an affectivity which breaks with the form and purpose of consciousness, and leaves immanence, is a transcendence.”75 For the condition for, or the unconditionality of, the self does not begin in the auto-affection of a sovereign ego that would be, after the event, “compassionate” for another. Quite the contrary: the uniqueness of the responsible ego is possible only in being obsessed by another, in the trauma suffered prior to any auto-identification, in an unrepresentable before. The one affected by the other is an anarchic trauma, or an inspiration of the one by the other, and not a causality striking mechanically a matter subject to its energy. In this trauma the Good reabsorbs, or redeems, the violence of non-freedom. Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.76

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 125 Thus, in an-archic time alterity expresses via feelings impressed and even imposed on the subject whose “consciousness is affected, then, before forming an image of what is coming to it, affected in spite of itself.”77 It is in this way that alterity is revealed as infinite and transcendent, expressing itself beyond the power of the same and calling its dominance into question. Ethically, while this might eventually manifest as compassionate responsibility for and solidarity with another aimed at a concrete response to suffering, the originary call to ethics is expressed outside of subjective freedom that may or may not respond to the face. Levinas emphasizes that the way vulnerable bodies reveal their fragility and a desire to escape violence occurs through sharing their pain in a way that directly afflicts the pre-subjective consciousness of another with its own trauma. “This trauma which cannot be assumed, inflicted by the Infinite on presence, or this affecting of presence by the Infinite—this affectivity—takes shape as a subjection to the neighbor. It is thought thinking more than it thinks, desire, the reference to the neighbor, the responsibility for another.”78 In the gut feelings that create the possibility of compassionate responsibility, the pain of alterity and its desire for well-being takes up residence in the subject before it has time to make sense of what has happened. Ethics is communicated by means of a substitution, where alterity’s desire is substituted for egoism. Thus, a relationship if forged wherein bodily vulnerability—“the denuding of the skin exposed to wounds and outrage”—substitutes a desire for selffulfillment alone with desire and responsibility “to bear the wretchedness and bankruptcy of the other.”79 In vulnerability there then lies a relationship with the other which causality does not exhaust, a relationship antecedent to being affected by a stimulus … . Vulnerability is obsession by the other or an approaching of the other. It is being for another, behind the other of a stimulus. This approach is not reducible to the representation of the other nor to consciousness of proximity. To suffer from another is to have charge of him, to support him, to be in his place, to be consumed by him. Every love or every hatred of a neighbor as a reflected attitude presupposes this prior vulnerability, this mercy, this “groaning of the entrails.” Already on the level of sensibility the subject is for the other, there is substitution, responsibility, expiation. But I have not assumed this responsibility at any moment, in any present. Nothing is more passive than this being implicated prior to my freedom, this pre-original involvement, this frankness. The passivity of the vulnerable one is the condition (or uncondition) by which a being shows itself to be a creature.80 Ideally, this feeling for another awakens in the subject and overwhelms consciousness as a compulsion to compassionately love, offer hospitality to, and stand in solidarity with one’s neighbor.

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Whatever form the free response of the subject takes, the face-to-face encounter occurs in the deep, an-archy of time and in a relationship wherein alterity reveals itself through expressions transcending representations, themes, and concepts enchained to the finite experience of the same. While he lacked the technical language to more precisely explore a philosophy of time, Levinas’ thought actually links up nicely with certain contemporary accounts of affective neuroscience. Affect, following, Jaak Panksepp, one of the founders of modern affective neuroscience, begins prior to intentional consciousness and conceptual language linked to the neocortex, originating in the subcortical regions of animal nervous systems.81 Affect flows in a continuum of consciousness, from the non-awareness of unconscious to a pre-reflective but experiential consciousness, to full-blown knowing, self-reflexive subjectivity. Theologically and philosophically, we could say that logos originates from and is built on the foundation of pathos. The two cannot be separated and there is little reason to elevate the former over the latter as the Western philosophical tradition has done.82 Panksepp does not, of course, use the language of “an-archy” and “awakening” in his description of affective experience. Instead, he speaks of a structurally similar conception of affect via “anoetic,” “noetic,” and “autonoetic” consciousness, which roughly corresponds to the categories of Levinasian temporality.83 An-archic, pre-reflexive time include Pankseepp’s “anoetic” affect. These are the “raw emotions” felt deeply and viscerally before we have time to analyze and process what we have experienced. These “are not everyday occurrences for mature humans, but most can remember clenching their fists and turning red in anger, being incredibly scared, and feeling both deep sadness and joy.”84 Such affects are not the result of higher nervous functions interpreting some physiological event, they are the basic, primary-process core feelings that are able to be remembered and reflected on at a later time. Panksepp argues that “primaryprocess core affects are anoetic (without external knowledge) but intensely conscious (experienced) in an affective form (which reflects intrinsic, unreflective brain ‘knowledge’). As we feel our affective states, we do not need to know what we are feeling.”85 There is a lack of freedom and conceptual analysis in the time of anoetic/an-archic affect such that subjective sovereignty is suspended in this plane of experiential but ultimately unreflective consciousness. This mode of relation is thus utterly different than the relation between a subject and an object of knowledge. Anoetic consciousness does not have to be propositionally or conceptually represented; it is pure phenomenal experience that is often difficult to put into words … . Anoetic states involve a direct prereflective state of the nervous system. In contrast, propositional autonoetic awareness is always indirect, mediated by concepts and therefore higher cognitive processing. In contrast to propositional awareness, which is characterized by its intentional and cognitive

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 127 self-reflective character, anoetic states are primarily automatic and relatively independent of voluntary attention.86 We can say then that the self-reflective subject is not present for such experiences, which have always already passed by, having occurred in an absolute past now infinitely out of reach of a horizon awoken by such encounters. From the unknowing anoetic consciousness, however, some animals develop successive degrees of knowing and self-aware subjectivities. These subjects can re-visit the past experiences in the subcortex as they reflect on and re-imagine experiences that have occurred by means of the neocortex. This especially occurs in those cases where the affective encounter was unusually powerful, or in Levinas’ language, in cases where “the Infinite affects thought by devastating it,” and thus awakening it to responsibility.87 In this awakened plane of existence, as subjects transition “from raw experiences to meta-representations,” reflection begins to assign meaning to events and characterize the others they have encountered.88 All of this occurs as memory, explicitly making use of a temporal structure comparable to Levinas’ insight into the space-time of an-archy and awakening and acknowledging the epistemic distance between the immediate primal affect that constitutes face-to-face relations and the subsequent reflection on these encounters. These occur as noetic and auto-noetic remembrances, the former associated with recognition of “the endless categorical features of the world and of oneself, of others and the varied objects that populate our living spaces,” while the later reflect one’s experience of a world becoming existentially meaningful.89 Auto-noetic knowing, “the ability to remember explicitly events as having been personally experienced,” allows one to begin wrestling with the past through memories of feelings and the emotions currently evoked through our relationship with things.90 Thus, as we turn back to recollect, reenact, and even revise the past from the vantage of the present, we begin to assign meaning to our relations. This process is capable of being faithful to anoetic experience to a degree, but the reshaping of past events through our present interpretations ensures that distance between the subject those who face us remains. While we were once face-to-face in the immediate proximity of the absolute past, transcendence and infinite distance mark the present time even if a trace of the past remains. In Levinas’ thought, anoetic experience would be a space-time where face-to-face encounters are possible, where the infinite can express itself to a subject who has not yet asserted sovereign relational power. Theologically, this is a plane where divine transcendence, incarnate in and as the world itself, could reveal itself apart from subjective sovereignty, remaining hidden in a plurality of embodied forms that cannot be determined ahead of time if the ideas of infinity, alterity, and divinity are to be preserved. I am not arguing that neuro affective science says anything philosophically or

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theologically, rather that it allows us to envision the space-time or plane of reality in which the ideas of incarnation, infinity, and revelation as the selfexpression of alterity beyond subjective sovereignty are conceivable and coherent dynamics of physical existence. This pre-linguistic plane allows immanence and transcendence to coincide, simultaneously presenting and hiding itself, and evinces a space-time suitable for the revelation of the infinite that speaks while resisting the categories and concepts of the same. I suggest below that this is where and when incarnate divinity is encountered and revealed, in the an-archic face of things—animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise—that cannot be identified ahead of time.

Conclusion: Revelation and the Face of Things My interest in revelation is to explore the possibility of divine self-expression irreducible to both humanist and subjective sovereignty, something that occurs outside of language and self-reflexive concepts and instead within the anarchic, affective relationship with the face of things. There are, of course, a plurality of affects evoked in an-archic time. I do not want to suggest that literally every feeling evoked is tied to a revelatory divine expression. However, without reducing alterity to its vulnerable expressions of pain, suffering, and weakness, I do suggest that feelings of compassionate care for others do adequately track the authentic self-expression of alterity that I have previously argued express through its redemptive role-function as the cruciform face of divinity. Due to the an-archic/anoetic nature of this relation, the face is the possible expression of divine revelation. For Levinas, as for Gregersen, loving relationships, revealed in the divine command, “you shall not murder,” are central even if not exhaustive of authentic expression of divinity. Thus, while the next chapter suggests the idea of God is irreducible to love, if does include it within its ontic makeup. I thus link the revelation of cruciform divinity to the unveiling of creaturely moral significance. As egoist and speciesist as humans can be, I believe it is obvious that we are capable of deep, inter-species care erupting from feelings evoked by the vulnerable face of things, whether animal, vegetal, or elemental. Insofar as we are concerned with infinity and transcendence as fundamental to the idea and origin of cruciform revelation, something that expresses while remaining always hidden and obscure, I do not think it is justifiable to insist on any a priori restriction on the forms that might express the desire to be and become free of violence. If the face is divine and infinitely other than the subject, caution should be exercised in judgments concerning which bodies can and cannot affectively reveal divinity according to the cruciform role-function of Christ, lest we reduce the object of our religious devotion to our own alter ego and annihilate the mystery of God. Adrain Peperzak asserts this idea in developing his own deep, affective theology in the wake of Levinas.

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 129 Speaking can be understood as a metaphor for all kinds of addressing, even those that originate in non-human phenomena. Dogs and birds, flowers and trees, even things and machines can speak to us, as many fables, myths, and poets have demonstrated. All the phenomena of the universe can be perceived as addressing us, each in its own characteristic way. The analysis of speaking may, therefore, offer us a universal paradigm to clarify the essence of phenomenality as such. If everything ‘speaks’ to us, we are invited to “respond” to such “speech.”91 While responding with responsible, compassionate care for the non-human results from our free analysis and calculation of how we can help, it erupts from those pre-linguistic, an-archic/anoetic affects described above, which express desire prior to and subjective sovereignty. It is thus crucial to recognize that as humans qua our own humanity, we do not relate to others and know the world simply not only through the power of logos but also through pathos. Relation develops far below the emphasis of the Western philosophical tradition and includes “a nonreflective (anoetic) SELF and pure affective forms of consciousness” that grounds the self-reflective and self-conscious being and makes relations with both God and the world possible.92 Feelings of care and grief, solicited by vulnerable face of others, are among the deepest affects experienced in humans, originating in “the ancient circuits that engender caring feelings in all mammals.”93 While there are many affects that shape animal being, and no animal and no human can be reduced to any single one, compassionate care and the expression of grief in the face of suffering are exalted by our own species. Of course, many philosophies and theologies rightly emphasize the egoist tendencies of the species, and I do not deny the perpetual temptation of a return to the self. But anthropological ambiguity does not mean that the ideal existence we collectively envision is self-centered, although exceptions occur, and other objects of ultimate religious devotion exist. However, insofar as I think within the Judeo-Christian tradition, I recognize that it is cruciform love that is divinized, which limits the scope of my interest concerning the content revealed in the incarnations of the divine face. From the divine command, “you shall not murder,” to the constant refrain to care for the “widow, orphan, and stranger,” the divine desire for “mercy, not sacrifice,” to the radical imperative to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” love, compassion, and care are the marks of divinity hidden and incarnate in the faces we meet on a daily basis. While remaining open to other incarnate divinities, I restrict my concern here to the revelation of divine love, thus maintaining dialogue with deep incarnation Christology and Gregersen’s insistence that revelation is the selfexpression of love. The revelation of the face in the an-archy of time remembered later in subjective awakening is “a putting of the Infinite into thought,” says Levinas, “but this is wholly different from what is structured as a comprehension of a

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cogitatum by a cogitation.”94 As such, I suggest that the doctrine of Revelation in deep incarnation Christology should be re-imagined beyond anthropocentric constraints. Thus, the strict sense of divine incarnation would open up to the possibility that cruciform divinity expresses obscurely not only in human form, and not simply through Jesus, but in and as other faces who solicit us to an ethical relation and plead for responsible, compassionate care. Such is consistent with the incarnational tradition we have seen from Moses to Jesus and maintains the mystery of Johannine revelation theology by locating revelation in the pre-conceptual feelings felt in the depths of being, safe from subjective judgment that necessarily erodes divine obscurity. Likewise, it fits the affective nature of our animal existence, making better sense of our own humanity in response to the things that move us. As it stands, I fear that deep incarnation Christology erodes divine infinity insofar as it identified God and Christ through an anthropocentric lens and as the alter ego of the human species. The divine face need not take human form to reveal love and solicit responsibility, compassion, and solidarity with things and only a divinity free of these humanist restraints can express as otherwise than human, untamed and undomesticated by the subject. My understanding of revelation in the face of things remains wholly physical deep while insisting that divinity remains beyond quantification, calculation, and observation, allowing the an-archic expression of another, however strange, to rend the present and take up residence within the subject in a way that redeems the other and the same through the self-expression of cruciform love. I explored the possibility of ethical relations with non-humans in the previous chapter, how they express a cruciform, redemptive role-function akin to Christ’s and do not need to rehash it here as the content of the face’s revelation. I suspect that many of us have personally felt that moral power radiating from the more-than-human when faced by vulnerability and can remember an encounter with the face of things. Our stories of such encounters lack to potency of the experience themselves but are helpful in concretizing the often-obtuse theoretical nature of these discussions. In the last chapter, I wrestled with the death of Fargo, my feline friend, in the context of redemption. Here, I remember another cat who revealed cruciform redemption and love. In the summer of 2018, a year before Fargo would die, I found myself at a nationwide “clear the shelters” adoption event in Washington DC, looking for a new feline to welcome. Hundreds of people had already come, effectively clearing out the kitten selection, which was my preference. A comment I made toward the end of the visit, something to the effect of, “these cats are all too big for Fargo,” was overheard by a volunteer, who informed me there was in fact a kitten available if I was up for a challenging rehabilitation project. Hidden from the rest of the cats, a crate was opened to reveal a two-pound, two-month-old tortoiseshell kitten recovering from an amputation of her front left leg. Presumably she had been hit by a car two days earlier and had surgery the day prior to my visit, and was now cowering in her litterbox, disheveled, scared, and

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 131 exhausted. Before I could process the situation, in the an-archy of anoetic space-time, I felt something akin to the divine command, “you shall not murder,” and felt the responsibility for this vulnerable little thing imposed on me before there was freedom to contemplate the situation and accept or deny the summons. There was no reflecting on her pain, how and why it happened, what her experience was like to her, but such is not the way the cruciform face is known. Her self-expressed trauma nevertheless revealed a redemptive love that remained hidden, obscure, and ultimately infinite insofar as it expressed prior to the assertion of my subjective sovereignty. I awoke in remembrance of a revelation, tearful and anxious to adopt aware that it was in my power to exert a degree of concrete, compassionate care. Within a couple of hours, Maeve, the tiny tripod tortoiseshell, was asleep and recovering in her new home. Perhaps, however, such solicitation was processed because my humanity was primed for such an encounter. Other, non-mammalian, encounters are perhaps more difficult to fit into the revelatory schema I am working with in this chapter. I understand why many might find Gregersen’s assertion that it is “obvious” that divine love cannot be expressed in tomatoes or mussels. Yet, I do remember stranger revelations. I remember the Hawaiian umbrella tree that I tried to tend throughout a frigid winter, its leaves browning and wilting from its former vibrancy. A wilting plant, struggling to survive, solicited grief and care at the quickest glance and held power over my being. I felt deep grief as I watched it die and was strangely affected by its struggle and its death, utterly unable to process its experience but sensing a will to live. I kept the dead tree in a bag in my office for several more weeks until I could bury it in a forest in upstate NY. I remember also the face of something utterly abhorrent to me, a spider who presented itself on the dashboard of my car while speeding down the highway. In this and nearly every encounter I have ever had with a spider, I experienced an altogether different set of affects compared with animal and vegetal relations. As I rained a flurry of blows down on this yellow-orange nightmare, I felt an odd sensation that ended my violence as it dashed to the side, avoiding my blow, and retreated into the ventilation system. My hesitation in crushing the spider arose from feeling of pity in the face of its resistance, reverberating into the remembrance of consciousness as a defiant “No!” to my violence.95 Beyond cats, and trees, and spiders, perhaps everything is deep down a thing desiring to flourish and ready, in its own way, to face those able to feel divine solicitation and self-expression. It would be wise to refrain from any approach to divine identity that confidently announces ahead of time precisely how cruciform alterity will express itself. It is best, I believe, to retain an agnostic openness to the possibility of deeper incarnations. Indeed, it is much easier for me to love humans and cats than trees, spiders, and other livings things, to say nothing of the elements and the non-living, but my memory suggests the possibility of untamed, cruciform revelations incarnate and hidden in the face of things.

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Notes 1 There are of course other ways to understand the idea and content of revelation. For example, if a prophet, dream, omen, or some mantic disclosure predicts a future event, such foretelling could be described as revelation. Other propose salvific events in history discerned by the subject as revelation, the preaching of the Gospel handed down through time, written texts, or some combination of them as divine self-expression. Likewise, in common, everyday speech revelation and realization or discovery are often cognate terms. I am not interested in these understandings of revelation as they indicate a return to the self that I find problematic, nor a comprehensive approach that would survey the myriad of ways revelation may be understood. This also restricts the discussion to the context of deep incarnation, which shown below, works with the same basic idea of divine self-disclosure. A broader approach to the topic and a more classical (i.e., biblical and Euro-centric) approach to the idea can be found in Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 189–257. 2 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.3.2. 3 While natural theology disclosed in the Book of Nature might be construed revelation, it would not qualify as revelatory communication. Natural theology works by human rationality discovering the divine order of things and truth about God that can be determined by human intellect. Such would not be the active and direct self-expression of divine alterity to a passive recipient. For an exploration of natural theology that recognizes the idea of infinity present in all divine encounters occurring in the world, see Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. 4 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.3.3. 5 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.3.4. Aquinas suggests a congruent distance between the subject and any other. “The same thing, moreover, appears quite clearly from the defect that we experience every day in our knowledge of things. We do not know a great many of the properties of sensible things, and in most cases, we are not able to discover fully the natures of those properties that we apprehend by the sense. Much more is it the case, therefore, that the human reason is not equal to the task of investigating all the intelligible characteristics of that most excellent substance.” Summa Contra Gentiles, I.3.5. The inherent transcendence of things I suggest is the infinity common to the entirety of physical existence. 6 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q.1, a.1. 7 Structurally, there seems to be congruence for Thomas when it comes to knowing God by natural or revelatory means—both occur through the light of reason, whether natural or elevated. Yet, revealed knowledge for Aquinas is never perfectly grasped and so it maintains mystery and God maintains transcendence. James Brent notes, “divine illumination is the organizing principle of Aquinas’ who epistemology of theology. Just as the shining sun makes the eyes to see, so God illuminating persons makes the mind to see. God illuminates human beings by endowing us with various cognitive powers and habits, and moving our cognitive powers and habits actually to operate.” Brent, “Thomas Aquinas,” 408. 8 It is important that for Aquinas revelation refers primarily to the disclosure of concepts and propositions about God that also lead to a moral, sacramentally rich, redeemed life. “We can express the conclusion as ‘Articles of Christian faith cannot be demonstrated.’ At this point I should again note that Aquinas frequently refers to what he calls ‘the articles of faith.’ He takes these to be the uniquely Christian teachings: that God is Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), that Christ was divine, and that people shall be raised from the dead.” Davies,

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Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, 12. For more, see te Velde, Aquinas on God, 18–22. I take such concepts and propositions as possible constructive products of revelation, not the content of revelation. Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 84. This struggle is constant in the Gospel, comprising its most basic literary device. “Plot development in John … is a matter of how Jesus’ identity comes to be recognized and how it fails to be recognized … . each episode has essentially the same plot as the story as a whole. Will Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, or the lame man recognize Jesus and thereby receive eternal life? The story is repeated over and over.” Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 251. See also Lincoln, Truth on Trial, 161–162. “As they spoke Argos the dog that lay there raised his head and ears … . So Argos lay there dirty covered with fleas. And when he realized Odysseus was near he wagged his tail and both his ears dropped back.” Odyssey, 17, 290, in Homer, The Odyssey, 396. Kasper Bro Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger. See also Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 77–84; The Gospel and Letters of John, 72–86; “Cognition in John;” Brant, Dialogue and Drama, 50–57; Harstine, “Un-Doubting Thomas.” Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 26–27. Discovery and reversal are separate ideas, but Larsen, following Aristotle, insists that they work best in conjunction with one another. It is easy to begin to see how crucial these ideas are in the Gospel of John and its contemplation of the struggle to recognize that a murdered peasant is a divine savior. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a29–30, in Complete Works. Odyssey 19, 466–477, in Homer, The Odyssey, 439. See, Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 29–31, on the vast possible signs and tokens confirming recognition scenes in ancient literature. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 32. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 34. Exodus 19:18–25; 20:18–21; 24:12–18; 33:9–11; 34:1–9. There is a real sense in which God is incarnate as the elements throughout Exodus. Such accounts are surely mythic, but nevertheless support that idea that the physical, human or otherwise, are possible incarnate expressions of the divine in the Judeo-Christian tradition(s). Given these possibilities, it seems problematic to insist that the tradition(s) preclude the possibility that God might incarnate the more-than-human world and stick to human self-expression. Deep incarnation theologies may certainly argue for a human-only incarnation but cannot suggest that such is the only way incarnation can be understood or has been understood historically. Mark Wallace argues that such expansive incarnations manifest that at one time certain strands of the Abrahamic tradition were unafraid of a unity between the physical and the divine. “In the Bible,” Wallace writes, “it is the Earthen wild places—it is the natural world in all its glory and wonder—that is the interspecies body of God’s revelatory activity. It is in nature where Moses encounters a burning bush—God as a sacred plant—and where God speaks of God’s perfect identity and instructs Moses on his divine mission” (Exodus 3:1–15). Wallace, When God was a Bird, 73. Wallace, When God Was a Bird, 24. On the relationship between John’s prologue and Exodus 33–34, see Boismard, Moses or Jesus, 93–98. Jörg Frey writes: “It is remarkable that in the subsequent line (Jn 1:14aβ) the Johannine prologue itself interprets the ‘incarnation’ in terms of the dwelling of the divine glory in the tabernacle (an idea evident in Sirach 24 in terms of Wisdom theology, but also in other Second Temple Jewish texts in eschatological terms). Thus, it becomes easier to imagine what the idea inherent in the phrase ‘the word became flesh’ might have been: The dwelling is presumably

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considered a continuous one, not only temporary, and the earthly or human aspect is more strongly retained than in concepts of a mere epiphany.” Frey, “‘Docetic-like’ Christologies and the Polymorphy of Christ,” 36. “In 1:17 John gives an obvious contrast between Moses and Jesus. However, he does not necessarily contrast νόμος as a negative with χάρις και αλήθεια as positives. Instead, the gift διά Μωϋσέως has an intimate connection with the gifts of Christ, a connection that the rest of John’s narrative will explore.” Maronde, “Moses in the Gospel of John,” 26. See also Boismard, Moses or Jesus, 96 where Boismard connects grace and truth to the divine name of Exodus 34:6, supporting the idea that John’s Gospel is an intentional continuation of the Sinai revelation of incarnate glory. Without being able to explore the evolution of dualist fears of mixing the immanent and the transcendent, the Gospel of John has often been the center of discussions related to Gnosticism and Docetism. While these terms are vague and anachronistic, we can note the variety of ways the mingling of divinity and materiality might have been dealt with in the ancient world due to the difficulties in conceptually connecting immanence and transcendence. For an introduction to this issue, see von Wahlde, Gnosticism, Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 55–71, esp. 62–71. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 59. “After the observer and the observed have gathered, the move of cognitive resistance is a virtually omnipresent feature in the recognition scenes, often representing the recognizer’s first reaction to a claim or token presented.” Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 64. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 61. Recognition scenes often involve more than simple recognition of the identity of alterity; they often bear the weight of recognizing someone with whom the recognizer has a particular relationship or one who has important social power in the relationship. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 51–55. There are times when Larsen seems to suggest that the flesh hides the “real” reality of Jesus’ identity and offers parallels with other ancient mythic accounts to offer parallels. It is the “glory” of God that expresses differently than his flesh. This is described along with discussions of the necessity of the flesh to communication in light of John 1:5, 9–10, 18. Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 80–82. This is not the case in the Mosaic tradition, where glory and elemental incarnation are synonymous, and likewise, in other examples, the body that hides an identity is not “less real” and participates in expressing something of alterity’s new identity—e.g., Odysseus’ scarred, aged body is not “false” even if it makes it hard to recognize him as the King of Ithaca. This is not to say that John did not hold some docetic-like Christology. This discussion goes back to the debate on Docetism in John, begun with Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Kasemann and is well beyond the scope of this chapter. On polymorphic interpretations of Jesus, see Lalleman, “Polymorphy of Christ;” Foster, “Polymorphic Christology.” Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger, 214. See especially Gregeren, “Cur deus caro;” “The Extended Body of Christ.” Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 375. Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 376. Gregersen’s use of prepositions—“with,” “for,” and “as”—is intentional and prepares us for the three senses to come. They correspond with the broad, soteriological, and strict senses of incarnation. Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. This idea is central in Christological accounts rooted in the theology of Maximus the Confessor. See e.g., Tollefsen, “Saint Maximus the Confessor on Creation and Incarnation.”

Deep Incarnation and Revelation 135 36 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 383–384. 37 Gregersen, “God, Information, and Complexity: From Descriptive to Explorative Metaphysics,” esp. 406–407. 38 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 383. 39 Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation: Opportunities and Challenges,” 365. 40 Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 385. 41 Johnson, “Jesus and the Cosmos.” 42 Gregeren, “Cur deus caro,” 376. 43 I am curious how revelation in this understanding might unfold prior to Jesus’ life and death, something most in the Judeo-Christian tradition would assume, including Gregersen. Gregeren, “Cur deus caro,” 384–385. Likewise, how might deep incarnation theologians engage the idea of revelation found throughout the Hebrew Bible, seen for example in its openness to elemental incarnation. Gregersen briefly mentions the burning bush and Exodus 3 but immediately dismisses the possibility of seeing it as a true incarnation as if it was a docetic event where God “appear[s] only in the flesh in a transitory manner” altogether different from the way in which divinity becomes Jesus’ body. Gregersen, “Cur deus caro,” 383. Unfortunately, there is no reason given for the downplaying of incarnation events in the Mosaic tradition, despite admissions to a pre-Jesus embodiment of the Logos. I am left to assume that this is due to the assumption of vegetal life as amoral and unthinking. Mark Wallace reads the same tradition otherwise, unhindered by anthropocentric assumptions. Wallace asserts an animist-like tradition understanding the God of Israel able to incarnate as a sacred plant, among other elemental, and animal bodies. See Wallace, When God Was a Bird, 23–24. 44 Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ,” 236. 45 Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. 46 Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. 47 I do not deny that cruciform revelation is neatly summarized as love. Love, I can agree, is the essence of Christ’s divinity and inseparable from ethics and redemption and in the content of revelation and cruciform self-expression. I argue in Chapter 6 that God is love, even if divinity is irreducible to such Beyond Jesus, a return to Sinai and the elemental glory of God would likewise reveal ethics as the redeeming structure of a just society characterized by social and economic wellbeing for all, especially the most vulnerable members of a given society—the poor, widows, orphans, and immigrants frequently referred to throughout the Torah. See, e.g., Exodus 22:21–31. This revelation obviously continues in John’s Gospel, in spite of claims that there is little content to Johannine revelation and a lack of ethics. The Gospel’s interpretation of Jesus’ revelation, which governs the entire Gospel narrative, is found in the well-known passage: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). What I disagree with is that love cannot be incarnate and expressed outside of a self-reflexive, moral agent. The divine command, “you shall not murder” resounds regardless of mental power and moral agency, residing in the vulnerability of the face of things and expresses, as I argue below, prior to the subjective horizon of any subject. 48 Interestingly, Gregersen does not restrict moral agency and self-reflection to humans, but only opens this door to anthropomorphic extra-terrestrials, “selfreflective species in all imaginable ET-civilizations … . or in other self-conscious beings with a spiritual relation to God.” Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. Aliens too may presumably incarnate God more fully than tomatoes and mussels, because they too might exercise moral agency and reflect on the infinite. So, while we may say that technically, this is not anthropocentric insofar as it envisions non-human beings beyond Earth as sharing in the

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possibility of divine incarnation, it is still the human who is the normative measure of what divinity is like and how divinity is allowed to self-express. The more-than-human appears as a blanket idea with little to no nuance in Gregersen’s work. The plurality of species characteristics concerning morality and rationality precludes lumping creatures into undifferentiated masses of amoral/moral or irrational/rational. Likewise, as Jacques Derrida points out, there is no such thing as “the animal” that can simplistically be compared to humanity. Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am. Such binaries are not conducive for explorations of theological anthropology or Christology and given our current understanding of evolution they ought to be abandoned. For an introduction to the modern disciplines concerned with animal minds, see Andrews, The Animal Mind for an exploration of all the best indicators that mind is not the exclusive property of humans, see Griffin, Animal Minds. Even if humans were uniquely moral and rational, my argument would hold. As such, I am not overly concerned with the binary logic implicit in classical theological appeals to human uniqueness and separateness from the rest of creation’s amoral, unthinking mass. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 38. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 48. A summary to the idea of infinity is found in a section entitled “Transcendence as the Idea of Infinity,” in Totality and Infinity, 48–52. “Self” might not be the most appropriate term to speak of the ego-less being Levinas has in mind here who experiences alterity face-to-face, but it is a struggle to know what precise vocabulary is appropriate for a being experiencing the world in a nonphenomenological manner. This is discussed in detail below. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49. Levinas understands subjective sovereignty as the basis of all socio-political violence, which despite the abstract and esoteric nature of his philosophy, is his ultimate concern. Specifically, Levinas’ philosophy is a response to racism and genocide, which in his experience is inescapably tied to Hitler. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. The “saying” and “said” represent the temporal structure of ethical communication, beginning in a pre-subjective and pre-linguistic expression of alterity that is later recognized by a subject who has been exposed to the other. Linguistic metaphors do not suggest that Levinas has language in mind as the expression unfolding in ethical relation. Language as normally conceived, expressions via signs and symbols related to concepts, begins, for Levinas, in prelinguistic affective experience. “The beginning of language is in the face. In a certain way, in its silence, it calls you.” Levinas, Wright, Hughes, and Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality,” 174. See also Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 23–60; “Language and Proximity.” Levinas calls the betrayal of alterity “a good violence” insofar as it is necessary for the contemplation of justice. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 43. Levinas, Totality and infinity, 195. Gregersen, “The Twofold Assumption,” 458. Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 19. Levinas, Totality and infinity, 202. Temporality is a central theme in all of Levinas’ thought. The development of this theme is found in Time and the Other; Totality and Infinity, 220–247;

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“Humanism and An-archy;” Otherwise than Being, 99–129; and “Diachrony and Representation,” 97–120. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 100. Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” 116. Levinas draws heavily on Henri Bergson’s discussion of duration. See Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory. Levinas, “Humanism and An-archy,” 127–140; Otherwise than Being, 91–102. The ἀρχή was discussed as far back as Thales of Miletus. Pre-Socratic philosophers spoke of the ἀρχή as the sovereign source from which the world emerged. Levinas plays with this Hellenistic terminology and reimagines it as the beginning of a subjective world rather than the foundation of the physical. See Popper, The World of Parmenides. See Levinas, Existence and Existents, 61–100 for the moment to moment awakening of the subject. Levinas never abandons exploration of durative time. Science, history, and politics occur in this space-time, but such is not adequate in engaging ethics. The temporal structure of ethics is simply “incommensurable with the present, unassemblable in it, it is always ‘already in the past’ behind which the present delays, over and beyond the ‘now’ which this exteriority disturbs or obsesses.” Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 100. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78; Otherwise than Being, 100–101. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 101. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 100. For more see Loidolt, “Levinas on Emotion and Affectivity.” Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 158. See also “The Ego and the Totality,” 43; “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” 56; “Phenomena and Enigma,” 62–63, n.4; “Meaning and Sense,” 81; “Language and Proximity,” 117; “Transcendence and Evil,” 179. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 123. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 102. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 166. Levinas, “No Identity,” 146; Otherwise than Being, 117. Substitution is thoroughly explored in Otherwise than Being, 99–127, esp. 113–118. Levinas, “No Identity,” 146–147. See Panksepp and Biven, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. See also Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience. Panksepp argues against “read-out theories” of affective neurology, which insist that feelings are products of self-reflexive consciousness. In this interpretation, emotions are experienced in self-reflexive consciousness and not prior to or apart from this cognitive experience. This, Panksepp argues, is not consistent with what we know about animal nervous systems and represents interpretations carrying the philosophical (and we could add theological) baggage of the Western preference for logos over pathos. See Panksepp and Biven, The Archaeology of Mind, 13–17, 63–81, and 389–423 for a neuro-affective challenge to the subjective sovereignty of the Western philosophical tradition. The most concise description of these experiential stages of subjectivity see Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness.” Panksepp and Biven, The Archaeology of Mind, 13. Panksepp and Biven, The Archaeology of Mind, 14–15. Panksepp further describes an even deeper and absolutely unexperienced bodily response to the world that acts as the “foundation for the emergence first of an affective form of anoetic consciousness, followed soon or perhaps coincidentally with by a more

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perceptual anoetic consciousness.” Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness,” 1020. Thus, anoetic affect is the beginning of consciousness experience and subjectivity, as it is in Levinas, but there is also an even deeper embodiment altogether devoid of experience. Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness,” 1022. Pankseep uses the language of phenomenology differently than Levinas uses the term. For Levinas, phenomenology implies the analytic, cognitive processes of an awakened consciousness. Pankseep uses the term akin to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology in Phenomenology of Perception. Phenomena here are not only concerned with representation but prereflective sensuality and feeling in the world. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 162. As Panksepp shows, such affects need not be restricted to ethics. There are all sorts of non-ethical experiences a subject might awaken to, though our concern here is ethics. Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness,” 1021. Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness,” 1024. Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness,” 1024. For more on memory and time, see Tulving, “Chronesthesia: Awareness of Subjective Time.” Peperzak, “Affective Theology: Theological Affectivity,” 96. Panksepp and Biven, The Archaeology of Mind, 393. Another take on Panksepp’s relevance for theology and in conversation with Friedrich Schliermacher’s, see Thandeka, The Embodied Self. There are many potential theological interlocutors with whom this approach makes sense. Perhaps the most obvious, besides Schleiermacher, is Otto, The Idea of the Holy. Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind, 284. Panksepp discusses systems of CARE on 283–310 and systems of PANIC/GRIEF on 311–349, both providing the most basic neuro-affective background of the ethics of potential moral agents. I would insist that such systems are unnecessary for expressing as a moral patience. In other words, ethics might be solicited by any vulnerable body based purely on the will or desire to live but acting in a moral capacity does require the possibility of caring and grieving. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 160. This story highlights some complexities that need to be dealt with more fully in subsequent writings. First, my initial affect—fear—emerged differently than how the face and how revelation is expressed. The face reveals as the self-expression of alterity. The spider did not intend a fearsome aura, nor did it solicit hate. My own affects we perhaps pre-conscious, or perhaps rooted in experience or narratives that stick to insects and arthropods, but not cats and trees. There is no guarantee an affect adequately tracks the self-expression of alterity. The way it solicited my fear is other than its self-expression and fear was supplied on my end of the relation. Second, revelation is able to confront and annihilate subjective sovereignty in what we could call a conversion of the same to the other. Because the face of revelation is infinite and cannot be identified ahead of time, it is able to express in ways that confound subjective predictions and inherited prejudice not originating within alterity. In other words, a revelation of infinity necessarily presupposes the possibility that the subject is fundamentally wrong in its assumptions about alterity. Thus, fear and hate were not revealed despite occurring within an an-archic, anoetic, affective space-time. The revelation of the divine, expressed in the defiant “No!” to my violence—“You shall not murder; instead, love your enemy”—questioned my assumptions of monstrosity and converted me to an infinitely expressive divinity.

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Through dialogue with a contemporary theologians and Emmanuel Levinas, I have reimagined deep incarnation Christology to absolutely entwine the face of Christ and the face of things. In this vision, the performance of redemption and revelation is not restricted to the activity of a divine, supernatural agent who accomplishes their goals via physical relations within the cosmos. Christological performance, I suggest, is a fully physical process erupting from the face of any vulnerable body and not restricted to a being ontically differentiated from things. Redemption encountered in the revelation of Christ is the ethical relation itself, which is not simply the mediation between the human and a God inseparable from but ultimately otherwise than the face. Christ is the face of my neighbor, animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise, who redeems existence and reveals the ultimate object of Christian religious devotion. While the idea of God is more than the cruciform face, such is nevertheless fully divine and synonymous with Christ. This chapter concludes my reimagination of deep incarnation Christology by attending to broader concerns in the God/world relationship and specifying the precise, cruciform object of absolute religious devotion. I do so by returning to the idea of religious naturalism, which helps clarify my understanding of the religious ecology in which we exist and to specify precisely where Christ is incarnate, where the cruciform deity ends, and how we may begin to conceive of divinity beyond Christology. As such, this final chapter engages other forms of religious naturalism as a way to address the scope of the relationship between God, Christ, and the physical world and so clarify my understanding of deep incarnation Christology. Beyond this I explore other religious frameworks that may help situate deep Christology more generally within theology, whose notion of divinity cannot be restricted to cruciform performance. Thus, I experiment with thinking Christology in the context of pantheism and polytheism in attempt to make sense of the physical world as a religious ecology inclusive of but irreducible to Christ. I conclude with final thoughts on the structure of Christian faith within such a religious ecology as necessarily ethical in nature and inclusive of the human place within a morethan-human world. Such becomes the foundation for a variety of sociopolitical approaches to the concrete issues the world faces, especially with DOI: 10.4324/9781003287346-6

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respect to issues pertaining to ecological and animal ethics. As such, a path is opened for further studies in public theologies interested in applying the encounter with Christ to broader societal relationships, systems, and structures.

Deep Incarnation and Religious Naturalism In thinking Christology beyond anthropocentric theism, I see no way forward but to demythologize the doctrine in its classical forms while simultaneously remythologizing it in a way that resonates with religious naturalism. Religious naturalism, which I explored earlier in the book, understands religion as a physical phenomenon and a manifestation of comic and biological evolution. As such, nothing in existence is properly speaking supernatural; whatever exists does so within the emergence of nature. The idea and being of God, if such is embraced, is no exception and any divine existence remains a natural, physical phenomenon. This does not necessitate an absence of nonmaterial being, but rather that all that is exists minimally as physical and natural.1 Religion in a naturalist framework thus maintains its deep value and meaning in human experience, although without ties to any super-natural ground of being. Thus, while traces of classical Christology remain within this radical reimagination of deep incarnation theology, Christ in this vision is absolved from otherworldly roots and completely naturalized in the face of things so as to eschew an anthropocentric divinization of the self. Yet, in a world where anything might be Christ incarnate, questions arise concerning the appropriate object of religious devotion in the Christian tradition. These arise mostly in response to the problem of evil, which demands an explanation of right and wrong and evinces our devotion to the former and rejection of the latter. Is devotion to Christ simply devotion to the physical world as such or something more particular? Likewise, is Christ exhaustive of the idea of God or are there more ways in which we might continue to speak of divinity beyond its cruciform expression? As such, the nature Christ as the object of Christian devotion needs precise clarification along with the extent of the God/world relationship. I suggest that there is not a flat equivalence between Christ and nature, but that we do require the possibility of a deeper relation between God and the physical world and perhaps an altogether novel model of divinity as such. I thus turn to two different models of religious naturalism, represented by Donald Crosby and Charlie Hardwick, that help with articulating these clarifications.2 The Depths of Religious Devotion I begin with Donald Crosby’s religious naturalism, which he names a “religion of nature,” which presents an expansive understanding of nature’s religious significance.3 A religion of nature, Crosby insists, understands the totality of being as the proper object or focus for religious devotion and

Incarnate Earth 141 significance. There is a sense in which I concur with Crosby. I am willing to recognize a sacred quality within nature as a whole. I argue below, but for different reasons than Crosby, that all things live and have their being in a deep, religious ecology wherein divinity permeates existence and existents. However, against Crosby, I find it troublesome to approach the totality of being, in all its diverse expressions, as “an appropriate focus of religious commitment and concern.”4 My concern with such an expansive sense of religious devotion is the implicit inclusion of violence and evil into the being of Christ. I am unable to support any theodicy—or “physidicy” in Crosby’s language—that justifies violence and evil to the point of including it within the object and scope of ultimate religious devotion.5 Thus, while I recognize the creative power and necessity of natural violence for any properly functioning world, and while I extend the face of Christ to the face of things, I would not suggest nature as the object of Christian religious devotion due to its moral ambiguity. This does not negate the potential religious character of nature in other regards, it simply disqualifies nature as “the most appropriate object of religious faith,” as Crosby suggests.6 Thus, my understanding of deep incarnation with its view that Christ is potentially incarnate in all that is, does not take Christ and nature as synonymous nor suggest the whole of nature is the appropriate object of Christian devotion. Crosby lays out a robust, performative theory for how exactly nature takes on a religious essence. Theoretically, I agree with Crosby’s perspective that religious essence is grounded in role performance and function. I would insist, with Crosby, that we the physical world performs the roles traditionally assigned to “God, the gods, Brahman, or Tao” within various religious traditions.7 Such a performative argument lies at the heart of both of our thinking in what constitutes the religious essence of something. Crosby’s performative categories for inclusion in a religious ontology include: Uniqueness, Primacy, Pervasiveness, Rightness, Permanence, and Hiddenness. Insofar as nature performs these roles or functions it exists as an object of religious essence, concern, and devotion. “Each is intended to identify an aspect of the distinctively religious function performed, or role played, by religious objects in the life of the religious person and in the cosmos as the religious person views it.”8 Whether nature can adequately account for these is a matter of debate. Briefly, I describe each of these before turning to a discussion of whether nature can perform these roles in light of the cruciform essence of divinity established in the previous chapters. Uniqueness and primacy refer to the difference of the religious object from others and the value it has compared to other things. Uniqueness suggests that a religious object holds a “singular, unparalleled place in the life of an individual” and that the object “contrasts with everything else; it is held in awe as something radically different or set apart.”9 Furthermore, the religious object is the primary object of devotion in religious life; it commands the individual and the community and is set up as the ultimate locus of concern, “taking precedence over everything else in the universe, as

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the root principle, power, or being on which everything else depends or from which all else is derived.”10 As such, “the religious object is not only marked off from everything else, it also is ranked above all else.”11 Such an object is likewise the ubiquitous relation found throughout the religious life. The pervasiveness of the religious object is manifest as that which grounds every aspect of being, and that which connects everyone and everything, thus unifying the differentiated plurality of the world. “The religious object thus permeates and orders personal existence and is seen by the religious person as permeating and ordering the cosmos.”12 Crosby’s fourth performative category is rightness and will become the central focus of my discussion below. Rightness concerns a value judgment of the object in question and aligns this judgment with “the goal of human existence, laying out a path of spiritual progress toward that goal.”13 The rightness of the religious object becomes the model for human conduct and the final judge of how communities ought to act, although this point is complicated and requires further commentary in the coming pages. Nevertheless, “the religious object serves as standard or critic, assessing each human life for the extent to which it fulfills or falls short of the purposes and values characterizing ideal human existence.”14 These values provide the telos for a meaningful life; insofar as the vision of rightness seen in the religious object is modeled in religious life, that life finds hope in finding fulfillment and redemption. Our deepest yearnings are thus found in and fulfilled through the religious object. Such a redemptive source is likewise permanent and not subject to the precariousness and frustration faced in temporal existence. A properly religious object must be “within or behind the cosmos that is immune to the threats and ravages of time” in order to provide “guidance and strength for coping with … [the] problems of temporal existence.”15 Finally, the performance of these all such religious roles will also be characterized with a deep sense of hiddenness, or mystery. Classically understood as transcendence or infinity, a religious object is irreducible to the ideas and concepts of any subject and reflects an absolute overflow that cannot be finally characterized in any reductionist sense. An authentic religious object “can only be spoken of elliptically, with symbols, metaphors, analogies, and stories that point feebly beyond themselves to levels of experience so intimate and profound as to finally reduce the religious person to reverential silence … . To claim ability adequately to characterize it or understand it would be to betray one’s failure to grasp the staggering enormity of its depth and range.”16 The categories, while pointing to the differentiated performances of religious objects, all share a common feature. Each provides a reason for the religious adherent or community to devote itself to the object in question. This seems to be the focal point of the category of primacy, but each function carries with it the assumption that because the object performs this particular role, it is consequently worthy of becoming the ultimate object of religious devotion. For Crosby, nature as a whole is the clear religious

Incarnate Earth 143 object manifest in our experience insofar as it performs Uniqueness, Primacy, Pervasiveness, Rightness, Permanence, and Hiddenness. I believe there are good reasons to ascribe a religious essence to the totality of nature, as Crosby does. I do not, however, believe that all of the roles must be performed in order to assign a religious ontology to the world. The world may fulfill one or more of these and be included in the registry of religious objects. Nature’s primacy and pervasiveness, for example, are enough by itself for me to consider the world as religious, or divine, in essence because such confirms the creative function of the world traditionally assigned to God in the Abrahamic, monotheistic trajectory in which I stand. Likewise, I have no issue with discussing nature as unique, permanent, and hidden in its being, each contributing to its religious essence or divinity through the categorical performances of eternality and transcendence. However, I have a hard time connecting any of these following roles with devotion: Uniqueness, Primacy, Pervasiveness, Permanence, and Hiddenness. It seems obvious that one might refuse devotion to what is otherwise regarded as a religious object and it is of course possible and common for one to simply respect religious objects without devotion, or in some cases decide to reject and rebel against what is believed to be divine. Devotion need not follow one’s recognition of any of these performative roles found in nature because none of these reveal the redemptive element that fulfills human existence. Devotion, I suggest, is necessarily tied to only one religious role suggested in Crosby’s list, namely Rightness. Religious devotion aimed at the ultimate locus demanding total dedication, obedience, worship, and love requires rightness, and I argue that such is not unequivocally and unambiguously embedded in nature due to its ultimate moral ambiguity and its need to sacrifice others for the sake of the totality. I thus recognize the world as a divine milieu or religious ecology because it does carry out some religious or divine performances, but I am unable to consider nature as the proper object of devotion because of the ultimacy that is the face of things. This face reveals the redemptive path forward for the Christian tradition and makes a value judgment on nature out of its concern for compassionate care. An absolute orientation to the face of things precludes, I suggest, anything that would resemble a theodicy that would justify or apologize for the evil and wrongness present in nature and incorporate such into the ultimate object of religious devotion. Any of Crosby’s role-function categories might be sufficient for a religious or divine essence, but without rightness religious devotion becomes a difficult posture to embrace because moral ambiguity eschews the possibility of fulfillment found in the ethical relation. Only the face, which is not synonymous with nature in its totality, reveals ultimate redemptive meaning for the Christian tradition, and thus becomes the object of ultimate concern, power, and significance. Rightness, in Crosby’s reading, is of course unequivocally and unambiguously present in nature. This does not mean that there is no moral ambiguity in nature and Crosby insists that real evil is present throughout

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the world.17 Yet, this ambiguity somehow does not become an ontic property of nature: In order to distinguish the religious goodness of nature from the evils it also contains, I shall henceforth use the term rightness (and its adjectival form right) to refer to the fundamental religious worth I am claiming for nature as a whole. And I shall reserve the terms good (or goodness) and evil to refer to aspects of nature for which these designations are appropriate. Hence, there is no religious wrongness of nature to be contrasted with its religious rightness, but there are evils in it to be contrasted with its goods.18 This claim is confusing since it proceeds according to a logic comparable to classical theodicies in order to remove any complicity with wrongness from the ultimate religious object, who appears to participate in if not take responsibility for such wrongness. Just as God is not implicated in evil in a theodicy, so nature is not implicated in the wrongs, evils, and disvalues present in the world. Such protects the purity of the religious object and allows the human to devote oneself to it without fear of being likewise tainted by wickedness. Thus, the moral ambiguity of being—seen built into the basic structure of things which frustrate and consume other things in order to find their own fulfillment—does not contaminate nature in spite of the seriousness Crosby otherwise devotes to the violence of natural evil. If it did, we would have a perspective of nature which was neither right nor wrong, but ontically ambiguous in terms of its value or moral significance—nature would not ultimately be right or wrong, it would be ambiguous. Such would significantly hinder the possibility of setting up nature as the ultimate object of religious devotion. As it stands, however, for Crosby nature is right, and we can see through the apparent ambiguity of nature’s emergent properties toward the ontic reality of nature’s final, absolute, and unambiguous rightness. The consequence of this is that all talk of moral ambiguity begins to fade from significance and perhaps even ontic reality insofar as wrongness and evil appear to be annihilated in the final ontic assessment of nature’s essence. We are left wondering how to reconcile the apparent seriousness and reality which he devotes to the possibility of evil and the lamentable suffering of creatures with the simultaneous dismissal of such evil as having any significant consequences or lasting effect on the ontic, ethical, or religious essence of nature. On the one hand, Crosby insists that we cannot dismiss the evil and violence suffered by creatures and that these are genuine disvalues that humans should work to avoid and alleviate on any to the degree it is possible. Yet, these precise disvalues are contained in the essence of nature and are built into the foundation of why nature is an object of absolute religious significance, effectively erasing the significance of evil and the reality of actual wrongness.

Incarnate Earth 145 When I speak of the religious rightness of nature, I am referring to its splendid appropriateness as the object of wholehearted religious reverence and devotion. Nature is fully entitled to this reverence and devotion, and hence is religiously right in its mixed character of nature natured and nature naturing. It is so entitled, not merely in spite of the ambiguities this intermingled character entails, but because of these ambiguities.19 Evil and wrong have no residence in the essence nature, while goodness and rightness do—ambiguity is erased in the ultimacy of nature, and we are left questioning whether it is real within creaturely experience of merely an interpretive distortion of being. We are devoted to nature in its totality, in such thinking, because of its goodness and value as well as its evil and disvalues, which ultimately seems to erase any significant difference between these two value judgments. What we think of as evil or disvalues is just as integral to the religious telos, fulfillment, and redemption as goodness and value. What is evil and disvalue to the creature is real to the creature, but such is erased by the judgment of something higher up on the hierarchy of being. The disappearance of the significance of evil and wrong is apparent in the fact that it has no essential weight in judging the appropriateness of nature as the ultimate object of devotion and reverence. I am sure Crosby will maintain that evil and wrong carry significant weight within creaturely experience, but it seems to lack any relevance in determining the rightness or appropriateness of a community or individual devoting itself to a possible religious object. Thus, if the category of rightness concerns our valuation of the appropriateness of being devoted to a religious object, and our most fundamental ethical relations do not carry any significant weight in this valuation, we should question whether creaturely alterity and suffering has not been completely silenced in a religion of nature. If the suffering of the creature in the face of evil is robbed of any real significance or power to question the appropriateness of a system that consumes it, its significance is rendered essentially voiceless as its cry has no chance of finding compassion. Ethics has become subservient to a more sovereign judgment. The problems at the heart of theodicy are commonly known and so we need not go into detail. Whether we characterize natural evil as wasteful and cruel or simply as the inescapable violence necessary for the world to be and become we must try to make sense of the pain, suffering, and death ubiquitous to creaturely existence. After dismissing charges of waste and cruelty within nature, Crosby recognizes that this does not dispense with the heart of the problem theodicy embraces. We need not posit a system as wasteful and cruel to recognize creaturely resistance and lamentation to the inevitable frustration and death of being. Beyond intent, the brute fact is that things commonly rebel against the destructive creativity of nature, and such becomes the locus for any discussion of theodicy: the face of things themselves as a judge of the system that allows being to flourish. Yes, the

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world exists and is created through violence, but such life-giving violence is not welcomed by anything when confronted with its time to be consumed. Crosby clearly acknowledges this ambiguity within creativity insofar as the gift of being is achieved through the unwelcome use and consumption of beings. Any goodness within nature is always “qualified, restricted, partial, ambiguous goodness. It is interwoven with elements of irremediable pain and loss that have to be recognized and taken fully into account.”20 Crosby’s assessment on ambiguity is among the strongest I have read in ecologically minded religious studies or theology. The system of nature that makes these wide-scale intrinsic evils necessary is to that extent an evil system. It is not totally evil, but the point I am making here is that it also is not totally good. Whatever positive instrumental value such sufferings and deaths may have, they are intrinsically evil. We should never forget this fact, nor should we in any way minimize or downplay it. The nature that is the focus of a religion of nature has a radical ambiguity, as far as considerations of good and evil are concerned. It is partly good but also partly evil. It contains rampant disvalues as well as rampant values … . Hence, a religion of nature contains elements of irreducible mystery, stupor, revulsion, and terror within it, just as traditional theistic religion does. There is no adequate explanation or resolution for the large amount of intrinsic evil in the world, whether we are talking about the human or the nonhuman part of the world.21 Yet, despite this real, intrinsic evil being essential to nature, he nevertheless insists that such a system is unequivocally right or appropriate as an object of religious devotion. Rightness, he insists, is not synonymous with goodness and includes evil, but despite its ambiguity, nature is upheld as worthy of devotion as the object of ultimate religious significance. Moral ambiguity, discovered through our ethical experiences, has no bearing on our judgment of nature as appropriate as an object of religious devotion. It is possible, Crosby insists, to subordinate the pathos of our moral convictions to the logos underlying nature’s essence to the effect that nature is religiously right and never wrong. There are two interwoven ideas implicit in the justification of Crosby’s position: ontological dependence on a necessarily ambiguous cosmos and a consequent hierarchy that values existence over existents. First, the cosmos cannot be otherwise than it is and this way of being provides everything with the ground of its being and the possibility of creaturely goods. Goods such as “creativity, a profuse diversity of life forms, and human freedom” could not exist, Crosby suggests, without the possibility of natural evil within a morally ambiguous existence.22 Second, it seems that the notion of dependence necessitates the idea of rightness and a subsequent appropriateness of religious devotion. The logic of the relation seems to be a sort

Incarnate Earth 147 of gratitude from the existent to the source and structure of existence. That is, the cost of being is so worth the price, and the value of existence so outweighs its necessary disvalues, that the structure producing being becomes worthy of religious devotion for the creative gift it bestows. “In a naturalistic perspective nature is the root principle, power, or system from which all things spring and by which they are sustained. It is the final reality, the ultimate, all-encompassing context within which other realities have their being. And viewed religiously, it is unambiguously right or good. Nature is therefore entitled, in these respects, to be the focus of religious faith.”23As such, religiously speaking, nature is good and right not in spite of, but because of its moral ambiguity. Such ambiguity is the essence of creativity, and the goodness and rightness of being consume its opposite; there is nothing religiously evil or wrong with the world that could question its ultimacy and worthiness for religious devotion. What is good about nature? “Everything,” is my answer, at least if we mean religiously good … . there is no religious wrongness of nature in my version of religious naturalism. Nature is unqualifiedly right or good in the distinctively religious connotations of these terms and therefore richly deserving of our deepest reverence and devotion. This is so in spite of and even because of the systemic natural and moral ambiguities of nature.24 We can see underlying Crosby’s religious naturalism then is an appeal to power and hierarchy rooted in dependence on an ultimate source for existence. What is religiously good and right and worthy of devotion is that sovereign power to which things depend on and to which they owe their existence. There is indeed a great price to pay in order to be, but such is deemed worth the cost. From a perspective rooted in ethics, however, such an appeal to sovereign power is questionable. Crosby understands that real evil exists and cannot be dismissed simply because it has a good effect. Yet, his judgment that such amorally ambiguous system is appropriate for religious devotion is problematic in view of a theology that grounds revelation and redemption in the cruciform face of ethics. In a religion of nature, the face of things has no say in determining the nature of the relationship with the sovereign—they owe fealty to the source of their values and disvalues. Insofar as the sovereign cannot be questioned and the good gifts given necessarily outweigh the evil burdens imposed, religious devotion betrays its rootedness to ontological dependence on a sovereign power and a value hierarchy that elevates existence over existents. Pathos cannot question these logos and thus despite abandoning God, the logic of domination implicit within classical western theism is reinscribed in Crosby’s religion of nature. Devotion is demanded by the sovereign power upon which the world depends and the creaturely sacrifice that upholds creation cannot be questioned.

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I do not deny that we are dependent on a metaphysical ultimate that is morally ambiguous, and I do not deny the religious significance of such creative ultimacy. I simply do not follow the logic that we are obligated to revere and devote ourselves to the ground of our ontological dependence. especially when this means dismissing nature’s ambiguous essence and the experience of our face-to-face relationships. Again, while Crosby takes ethics seriously, he refuses to use it to judge nature’s religious essence. Yet, it is the ethical relation, insofar as it reveals a redemptive escape from the self, that provides the logic necessary to criticize nature and direct our devotion to the face of our neighbor. Thus, I am not able to join the hierarchical logic elevating the totality of existence over the face of existents. I too “am convinced of the need for a thoroughgoing perspectivist conception of nature that makes it impossible to draw the kinds of clean, unambiguous lines between good and evil” without insisting on a consequent moral value hierarchy. Perspectivist morality, even if it leads to a paradoxical context for ethics because the good of one is evil to another and vice versa, cannot ignore the revelation of the face and the redemptive promise it holds for Earth’s communities. The key here is the difference in religious and moral valuation for Crosby, for whom the latter is subservient to the judgment of the former. Ethics is of limited value in judging the religious rightness of nature. While natural evil is real and a serious disvalue in the perspective of creatures subject to violence, it has no power to judge the system that makes being and becoming a possibility. Such is possible because of the underlying mix of humanist, deontological, and consequentialist logic of Crosby’s ethics. An ethical action is “one that is intentionally performed or allowed, in accordance with moral principles and moral reasoning, and that produces as much moral goodness in a particular situation as possible” and immorality “is one that could have been avoided or prevented by a human being but that is nevertheless performed or allowed to take place, and that produces a significant amount of harm.”25 Ethics here is nothing more than a human judgment about intentional actions and the harm weighed by a subject against others. There is no time or space here for the face of alterity. Ethics is not tied to the face of things who question subjective sovereignty from a place of divine authority but a limited dynamic of existence. For Crosby, “morality relates only to a part of life and the universe, while religion relates to the whole of life and the universe.”26And thus any “object of religious valuing is different, therefore, from that of moral valuing. It is a distinctive end in itself and is not subservient to some other end.”27 When ethics is subservient to a humanist religious judgment, it becomes possible to make sense of, justify, and ultimately embrace the violence and evil experienced by others and devote ourselves to a morally ambiguous nature. The face is thus cast aside for a religious framework that makes sense of the world by embracing creaturely sacrifice, the primary task of all theodicies. While I agree with the notion that religion is irreducible to morality and there are a number of nonmoral concerns in any religious vision, I have

Incarnate Earth 149 suggested that such follow from ethics as the singular relation capable of revealing a redemptive path beyond the return to the self. Theodicy represents an egoism that enthrones the self as the revelation of redemptive possibilities, maintaining the imprisonment and isolation of selfsovereignty. Insofar as theodicies apologizes for violence and suffering from a perspective other than of the one who is crushed under the weight of nature, they return to a logic of the same open to the sacrifice of others. The implicit value hierarchy at play in the justification of another’s suffering cannot help but silence alterity for the sake of an egoist judgment that aims to cope with, make sense of, and find positive meaning in the real frustration and pain ubiquitous in all being and becoming. Theodicy amounts to a reduction of the other to the same, and egoism is unveiled as the real object of religious significance. A perspective that understands the moral significance of the face as infinite cannot appeal to economic metaphors that measure the value and worth of one in light of another. If things are infinitely significant, we cannot compare them, weigh them, or assign value that would justify violence and find a positive meaning such that allows us to determine that the cost of sacrifice is worth the price paid. Even if a world without violence is impossible, the infinite significance of things prevents any justification of another’s suffering through a declaration of nature’s absolute rightness untainted by any sense wrong. This is not to doubt the good that comes from nature but precludes a conclusion that such is unqualifiedly right or good in a religious sense. Nature is not right but is not for this reason wrong; it is ambiguous, and I am suspicious that the human can be religiously devoted to an ambiguous object and find adequate revelation of redemption. Furthermore, I fear theodicy has a more insidious side. In his essay, “Useless Suffering,” Levinas rejects the premise of theodicy that we can find positive meaning in suffering that allows us to overcome a ceaseless lamentation in the way things are and justify the cost of existence.28 Theodicy, for Levinas, is the “the justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality.”29 As such, it not only fails to recognize the infinite significance of things, it actively participates in evil insofar as it justifies and finds positive meaning in the suffering of another, absolutely isolating them, leaving them alone as a sacrificial offering to benefit another.30 When, against the feelings of compassion present in moral consciousness, another’s suffering is intentionally incorporated into a positive, meaningful conception of the world because it is useful in creating such a world, we have annihilated any semblance of the dignity of others; they have become objects of utility unable to speak out against the violence of a cosmic sacrificial system. While we might find positive meaning in selfsacrifice on behalf of another that takes the form of substitution, the compelled, necessary, and inescapable sacrifice of things cannot be incorporated into any meaningful religious framework. It is not just the absurdity of anthropogenic evils, violence committed by willing, intentional

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subject that falls into this meaninglessness. Natural evil as well fits into Levinas’ framework, which ignores the frustration and pain of things for the sake of some transcendent telos determined by a God or some natural power who exercises sovereign domination against any protests. Significance in such a system is extrinsic to creation and creatures and ultimately reduced to the sacrifice they are forced to make for a future that merely perpetuates a world whose goodness rests on the back of evil. Following Levinas, I would insist that the face is the basis of morality, ecological or otherwise, that creation and creatures cannot be reduced to their utility value and left alone to be sacrificed for the sake of a future world, even if this is the only way a world can exist. This vision insists that religion proceed differently, “in a faith more difficult than before, in a faith without theodicy,” physidicy, or whatever we might use to assuage our grief when facing the useless suffering of anything.31 Ultimately, the business of theodicy is the justification of another’s suffering, which I suppose is possible if the moral significance of anything is finite and rooted in an extrinsic, sovereign power. If, however, moral significance is intrinsic to the face, imposing itself on the subject and denying the sovereign power of its logic of domination, theodicy loses its ground and collapses under the infinite weight of the suffering, pain, frustration, and all forms of resistance toward violence. Sacrifice, even if it has a good effect, is not justifiable in the face of others. We must find new ways to live within our various sacred histories, however difficult and no matter the cost, to cast aside our willingness to sacrifice others, being devoted to compassion in the face of things.32 Given the centrality of ethics in my Christology, the ambiguity of nature that produces and annihilates infinite significance leans more toward a judgment of its absurdity than toward an ultimate sense of meaningfulness and rightness or a correlate opposite which would declare the creation of infinite moral significance meaningless and wrong. “The evil of pain, the deleterious per se, is the outburst and deepest expression, so to speak, of absurdity.”33 Of course, suffering produces the world and allows the good to emerge, but only in violation of the incalculable significance of things. We are stuck; infinite significance erupts through a process which unceasingly annihilates the face of things. I am happy and grateful for being, but the cost prevents me from declaring the system right in an unqualified, absolute sense. Yet, because the face of things reveals the possibility of redeeming relationships, I am not in a state of despair and not suggesting that nature is evil or wrong. My devotion rests with the face, which performs the cruciform role-function of revealing a path to redemption, and not the natural system that demands sacrifice and leaves me isolated and apart from others. Interestingly, Crosby often enough speaks of ethics in a similar manner despite claiming a final devotion to nature. These statements appear to betray a deeper ethical devotion in his own religious practice. There is no obligation, he insists, to imitate nature in one’s moral life. Ethics has an autonomy, he

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argues, that is not shaped by nature. He insists that “we should not slavishly follow the nonhuman part of nature in all of its aspects but critically distinguish those aspects of its functionings and potentialities that are worthy of our allegiance and work to maximize them in the world.”35 Rooted in human rationality, we ought to “align ourselves with the forces for good in nature and in our own nature, forces that have produced so much that is undeniably exemplary and excellent in human life and experience. It is these forces that we affirm and these forces to which we are finally committed in a religion of nature.”36 This does not feel like religious devotion to nature in its totality but to a part of it, something Crosby has clearly denied elsewhere. Here, religious devotion and ultimacy appears tied to an emergent, ethical quality erupting within the world. Ethics seems to function as the highest priority in the religious life, even if there is more to it than morality. How is nature in its totality religiously ultimate if we find an alternative means of fulfillment in ethics and aim to cultivate a specific set of virtues over corresponding vices to provide ultimate meaning in life? Does his ethic, devoted to “altruism, not egoism; compassion, not hate; helpfulness, not hurtfulness; knowledge, not ignorance; tolerance, not bigotry; benevolence, not indifference,” not push back against nature as an appropriate object of religious devotion and rightness?37 Thus, at times, Crosby speaks as if he does uphold a sense of religious ultimacy that is rooted in and synonymous with ethics. We humans have an eros, a striving, a conatus, a wistful, irrepressible longing for that which is noble, exemplary, virtuous, healing, integrative, constructive, helpful, and saving, and in our best moments we desire these values, not only for ourselves or for those closest to us but for all peoples and all creatures. We are not satisfied with what is but ardently yearn for what ought to be. The whole history of human civilizations—especially in their religious, moral, and legal aspects— reflects the workings of this impulse toward goodness and its persistent struggles against those forces, also sadly active within our species, that impel us toward the base, the inhumane, the selfish, the destructive, and the wicked. The moral ambiguities of nature are mirrored in the moral ambiguities of human nature and human history. But the point I am emphasizing here is that nature has implanted in us a powerful impulse toward the creation, maintenance, and furtherance of goodness, showing in yet another way why it can be aptly characterized as the ultimate source of goodness in the world.38 At times then, we are left to wonder as to what the ultimate object of religious devotion truly is in a religion of nature. In actual practice, it seems that devotion to compassionate care perhaps betrays the real, deepest object of religious ultimacy, which cannot be found in the totality of nature but in that part of it that pleads for mercy, an end to suffering, and some idea of justice.

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The Cruciform Face of Nature My approach to Christology thus does not locate the ultimate object of religious devotion in the totality of things and does not see the incarnation of Christ in literally any and every physical existent or event. Christ, the ultimate object of religious devotion in the Christian tradition, is met only in the face of creation and creatures. As messy as this will become in a diverse, morally ambiguous world, the cruciform face has no a priori restrictions in its formal expression, revealing the possiblity of redemption in an impossibly complex array of embodiments. For our purposes and longterm planetary survival, it is perhaps easiest to concentrate on the cruciform face expressed within the meshwork of Earth’s ecosystems, which lack the sort of individual personhood that we might typically ascibe to a face. Ecosystems, however, may express as a unified, vulnerable collectives that will and desirewell-being and fulfillment. Yet, the face likewise expresses in and as particular creatures existing within and comprising the parts of these broader systems.39 There are of course cosmic implications that flow from this Christology that recognize the possibility of concerns beyond an incarnate Earth, but our immediate relations within our own planet are enough to focus on at this time. Locating the depth of Christ’s incarnation in the face of things, as specific value laden expressions of nature and not its totality, is a form of religious naturalism that has significant, but not perfect congruence with the thought of naturalist theologian Charley Hardwick. A brief engagement with Hardwick helps further clarify my Christology. Following an existentialist and naturalist path in conversation with thinkers such as Rudolf Bultmann and Henry Nelson Wieman, Hardwick’s Christology focuses on embodied “events of grace”—i.e., moments when value or meaning is created between individuals and among a wider planetary community.40 We might simplify Hardwick’s extraordinarily rigorous and robust theology by invoking his idea of “valuational theism,” which focuses on the creative, relational transformation of persons.41 Hardwick’s valuational theism says that divine being is a physical relationship among persons who reveal existential meaning and redemptive value. This theology rejects the existence of a personal, agential God existing as a being beyond the world and ontologically transcending creation; all that, including God, exists within and as the physical emergence of the world.42 Christ, for Hardwick, is not the totality of the basic physical processes that ground reality, but a physical emergence within a more fundamental physics, identified within the boundaries of value-laden relationships.43 Hardwick’s position, like my own, denies that God as the ultimate object of religious devotion is the totality of nature or a being beyond the world, and ties divinity to performance and function of a relation that creates existential meaning and value among beings. “This requires arguing that the very meaning of ‘God’ is valuational rather than ontological. If we

Incarnate Earth 153 could establish that the values that endow ‘God’ with meaning are true, then ‘God exists’ would be restored to truth through a valuational theism.”44 While I would substitute “Christ” for “God” in the preceding quote because in my thinking God takes on a deeper plurality of roles or functions than the assigning of the value Hardwick has in mind, our approaches share a structural similarity in identifying a Christian understanding of divine incarnation as a particular emergence of relational meaning. Such meaning was expressed in the historical Jesus but is not ontologically restricted to this person. Jesus is, Hardwick would say, a representation of a divine expression that exists more fundamentally among creaturely relations and inextricably bound up with the basic possibilities of our world. Meeting Christ is not necessarily an encounter with Jesus; it is a meeting with the emergent existential and historical meaning established among things capable of transforming the world in the direction of love.45 Jesus remains, for the Christian, the paradigmatic model of such meaning, but the meaning becomes incarnate in many other unique ways. Each incarnation finds its place metaphysically and morally grounded in the physical relation itself, not a restrictive historical expression of such. Thus, we may remain fundamentally agnostic about when and where Christ is incarnate insofar as we cannot perfectly predict the shape of cruciform expression. Hardwick, like myself, thus denies that any and every expression of the world is an incarnation of Christ and the object of ultimate religious devotion. I draw on Hardwick to offer a naturalist model of Christology that insists on a particular rather than universal expression of the ultimate religious object. In his reading, as in my own, Christ is not incarnate ubiquitously in and as the totality of nature, but in a specific expression of it. Yet, while Hardwick’s Christology is inextricably linked to the creation of meaning and value, and thus like my position, there are distinctions. Briefly, for the purpose of clarifying my own Christology, I note two key differences between Hardwick and myself. First, divine meaning and value is discovered in Hardwick’s Christology through an existential analytic heavily influenced by Rudolph Bultmann. As such, Christ is not incarnate in and as the expression of a face as I understand it but is bound up within the relational event itself. Christ exists in and as this relationship and while this may involve the more-than-human creation or a creature as dialogue partner, it requires a human subject able to recognize and intentionally embrace the creative transformation called for in such events of grace. The existential reliance on the subject essentially equates the eruption of the divine with an interpretive “seeing-as,” that cannot occur without a human-like subject who reads certain relations as events of grace.46 Such an existential analytic cannot coincide with my approach to divinity as an infinite, affective, and asymmetrical relation between alterity and the subject. While there is a sense in which alterity takes up residence in the same as a trace or the substation of an egoist will

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for the will of another, Bultmann and Levinas seem incompatible here. As a transcendent but necessarily physical expression wholly outside of the self, Christ in my theology originates and expresses beyond any subjective temporality and does so affectively, prior to the possibility of existential analysis.47 Without this we risk the perpetual reduction of the other to the same, and the reduction of theology to egoist anthropology. So, while Hardwick’s Christology is existential, mine is ethical. The existential, of course, has its place in my Christology as the trace of alterity haunts a subject who remembers the an-archic relation.48 In this way the other takes up residence within the same and creates each differentiated person as a hybrid of self and other.49 But, for the sake of maintaining the essence of Christian redemption and revelation, which rely on the transcendence of the divine infinite, I insist that Christ remains ontically prior to and outside of the subject, incarnate in the face of vulnerable alterity that may afterwards take up residence in the same. Second, and directly connected to this existential analytic, Hardwick has a weaker understanding of incarnation than I do insofar as his Christ follows the path of “nonreductive” physicalism, which allows divinity to exist physically, but not materially. Christ, for Hardwick, extends into the relational and emergent events of grace that are rooted in but transcend any identical ties to material phenomena. As described in the preceding paragraph, Hardwick’s divinity is incarnate in the way the subject sees or understands transformational events of grace. When this is coupled with a nonreductive physicalism that rejects an identity theory between body and mind, an existential “seeing-as” transcends the material while remaining physical. As such, the relational event of grace that is the meaning of divinity does not take up residence in materiality as a thing with referential, inventory status.50 The divine, or Christ, remains fully physical without appeal to the substance dualism of classical theism, while maintaining a distinct and autonomous nonmaterial existence. In this appeal to property dualism, divine transcendence is maintained, but in a way that is incompatible with my understanding of transcendence understood within a monistic Christological physicalism explored later in the chapter. This topic is far too complex to comment on extensively, let alone attempt solve.51 Briefly, I simply admit that I find any physicalist Christology insufficient if divinity does not take up ontic residence in the material, even if we admit to the emergence of the nonmaterial within the physical.52 Nonmaterial things—e.g., abstract objects such as numbers, species, words, or minds—I would argue, are ontically entangled and grounded in material bodies, possess no independent existence or agential qualities independent from their material incarnations, and thus always exist within the registry of things even if they cannot be pinned down to a particular expressions and are irreducible to the unique tokens they incarnate.53 Even something as complex as a relationship that extends beyond an atomic individual will possess such material, incarnate reality if we understand identities more

Incarnate Earth 155 akin to mycelium fields than isolated actants. A Christ estranged from the material, even if physical, is not only questionable ontologically, but also ethically and consequently theologically. What purpose does the idea of a nonmaterial Christ, who could not act, could not reveal, could not redeem, even possess? The real work of the Christ would always necessarily descend back into the material bodies that originated such acts and I am hard pressed to not ascribe Christic identity to those bodies who perform the Christological role.54 We need not resort to nonreductive physicalism and a consequent property dualism to maintain a sense of divine transcendence. I thus locate Christ not only physically, but materially within the plurality of faces that perform the revelation of redemption, each being ontically entangled with and identical to this highest object of Christian devotion. While Christ is irreducible to any individual face, the unified Christological phenomena is reducible to physical and fully material events of grace expressed in and as the face of alterity.55 To summarize the naturalist Christology I am constructing, Christ is not synonymous with nature nor is Christ the existential analytic that recognizes meaning given by another. Neither can be the proper object of religious devotion in the ethical framework explored throughout this work that sets the standard for the Christological performance of redemption and revelation. Christ is the face of alterity, incarnate in and as anything that resists the violence that annihilates its flourishing and pleads for justice. Christ expresses as an infinite possibility of forms indeterminable ahead of the experience of the face-to-face encounter that solicits feelings of compassion and the possibility of responsible solidarity in pursuit of goodness insofar as such is possible. In this relation, the trace of alterity, what we might call the spirit of Christ who continues to work in the world to establish justice, takes up residence in the same in its recognition and remembrance of the face-to-face relation that has already revealed redemptive possibilities. The face of Christ then is identical with the physical, including the material body that expresses its desire to flourish, even if the face refuses enchainment to any singular form. Christ is identical with the body’s cry for justice, an infinite, informational form of expression which redeems the world and reveals the object of ultimate religious devotion. We may be devoted to the token expressions of Christ as the ultimate object of religious devotion. Yet, when not directly confronted by the face, the Christian might nevertheless remain devoted abstractly to the irreducible cruciform pattern of Christ’s expression. Even if the cruciform pattern retains its infinite essence and refuses to be absolutely defined by a set of characteristics, the possibility emerges of recognizing Christ apart from the token expressions of the face within the haunting lure that remains after the event of the concrete ethical encounter that orients us toward responsible solidarity. Such is the inspiration for continued, variegated forms of religious practice. Insofar as we relate with this abstract, cruciform object originating from the divine face, we can posit a nonmaterial, abstract dimension to this object of

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ultimate religious devotion that exists in ontic unity with the concrete bodies of Christ. I suggest then that Christ’s essence is simultaneously concrete and abstract, an infinite religious object, identical to is unique, material tokens as well as the abstract, nonmaterial cruciform spirit that emerges and continues to act beyond the concrete vulnerability of a body in pursuit of justice. To reimagine common Christological vocabulary, we could speak of the unity of the incarnate flesh of Christ and the cosmic cruciform pattern of Christ in these concrete and abstract senses. While differentiated, they cannot be ontically separated insofar as the latter cannot exist without the former. The result is a unified, infinite religious object that serves as the ultimate object of Christian devotion. To be clear, what I am suggesting is not a roundabout way to reinscribe the priority of spirit over flesh, nor is it a way to return to a Platonist or Aristotelian view of form as a nonmaterial intelligence that precedes, informs, and acts upon accidental, passive, inert matter. The way form, or spirit, erupts in my thinking owes much to the natural philosophy of Giordano Bruno, for whom the world is divine, an “eternal corporeal substance … the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable, and incorruptible.”56 Commenting on Bruno’s The Torch of the Thirty Statues, Hilary Gatti states: “Bruno reaffirms here his complete reversal of the Aristotelian equation, making matter into the active substance that underlies an infinite world of finite objects and contains within it the total potentiality of all forms: a potentiality that precedes the single form with its acts of motion, and on which all motion logically depends.”57 While there is a necessary place in Bruno’s thought for spirit as the “inner artificer” of matter—the world-soul, Universal Apollo, or laws of physics if you prefer—which orders the cosmos and individual existents, such operates entirely within and originates from matter, the minima or physical ground of being that possesses its own power or energy to re-create itself as an infinite plurality of extended bodies.58 Spirit as such is discerned by the human mind as the recognition of form, but this informative structure is not imposed on creation from a creator outside of and prior to materiality; it originates from the creative potency of matter itself and cannot be separated from materiality. “Corporeal beings are composed of matter and form, as in the case of incorporeal beings … . For Bruno, there is one matter: one single active potency, which applies equally to corporeal and incorporeal realms.”59 Flesh and spirit, matter and form, constitute a monistic substance unity in spite of the difference entailed in the coincidence of these opposites.60 Matter, from its infinite potentiality to become, contracts into emphasized, recognizable shapes governed by an informative pattern that unifies everything that participates in such emergent forms.61 Finite things are the incarnation of the material ground of being as that matter creates organizational patterns and laws that allow the

Incarnate Earth 157 world to take its specific shapes. Two key passages from Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity summarize his thinking. Averroes understood this in part … . He says that matter, in its essence, comprises indeterminate dimensions. By this, he wishes to convey that they come to be determined – taking on now this figure and dimension, now others – according to the modification of natural forms. In this sense, we see that matter produces forms from itself, so to speak, and does not receive them as from outside. In a way, this is what Plotinus, prince of Plato’s school, also understood. In establishing the difference between the matter of higher things and that of lower, he says that the first is everything at the same time and that, since it possesses all, there is nothing into which it changes, while the second, by means of a certain renovation at the level of parts, becomes everything, and becomes successively one thing after another—always, therefore, in a state of diversity, alteration and movement. In consequence, neither the one nor the other matter is ever formless, although each is formed differently; one in the instant of eternity, the other in the instant of time; one in simultaneity, the other in succession; one by way of enfolding, the other by way of unfolding; one as a unity, the other as multiplicity; one as being all and each thing, the other individually and thing after thing.62 We are, therefore, correct in affirming that being – the substance, the essence – is one, and since that one is infinite and limitless, both with respect to duration and substance, as it is in terms of greatness and vigor, it does not have the nature of either a principle or of what is principled; for each thing, coinciding in unity and identity (that is to say, in the same being), comes to have an absolute value and not a relative one. In the infinite and immobile one, which is substance and being, if there is multiplicity, the number which is a mode and multiformity of being by which it comes to denominate things as things, does not, thereby, cause being to be more than one, but to be multi-modal, multiform and multi-figured. So, following closely the reasoning of natural philosophers and leaving the logicians to their fantasies, we discover that everything that causes difference and number is pure accident, pure figure, pure complexion. Every production, of whatever kind, is an alteration, while the substance always remains the same, since there is only one substance, as there is but one divine, immortal being.63 The flesh is the polymorphic incarnation of possibilities resident in matter, shaped through an intelligible spirit—i.e., patterns or forms—determined by this materiality. While differentiated—the former corporeal and the latter incorporeal—flesh and spirit are nevertheless fully physical in their essence,

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bound together as the single substance that unites everything even as it unfolds throughout time as a multiplicity of shapes. Such existence rejects a sense of an atomic individuality wherein things are separated by hard, impenetrable boundaries from one another and the ground of being. Things are unique expressions of infinite matter, which is able to unfold and become each thing, but such is part of the one material substance continually shapeshifting itself as this and that throughout time.64 Differentiation is part of the essence of the one, divine substance; the world is both one and many, existence and existents, creator and creation—an impossibly complex and entangled monistic web that constantly polymorphs as a unified mass of informed, divine matter. In this cosmology, which is temporally eternal and physically infinite, matter and spirit coexist and share the adventure of creating and being created as each actualizes its own power even while they are acted upon and shaped in return. Flesh and spirit coexist and coincide, even though the latter proceeds from the former, and together co-create the world by transfiguring and polymorphing itself, the one, universal substance that they are. The recognition of the eternity, infinity, and creativity of inspirited matter has significant religious implications for Bruno, as we saw in the above quotations. Insofar as eternity, infinity, and creativity comprise the essence of divine being and performance, Bruno is drawn to the view that nature is a divine ecology in which all things live, move, and share their existence; it is the multi-unitary and multi-modal web of inspirited flesh that is, in the broadest and fullest sense possible, God.65 “Rather than saying that matter is empty and excludes forms, we should say that it contains forms and includes them. This matter which unfolds what it possesses enfolded must, therefore, be called a divine and excellent parent, generator and mother of natural things – indeed, nature entire in substance.”66 This monist, divine ecology exists as a coincidence of opposites, an ontology where seemingly incommensurable modes of being coexist and create one another as the world, inclusive of the physical ground of being, individual creatures, and the collective totality things.67 “Through nature, God flows into reason; through nature, reason is raised up into God. God is love, active, brightness, and light. Nature is attractive, object, fire, and flame. Reason is a lover, a certain kind of subject, which is inflamed by nature and illuminated by God.”68 While Bruno is primarily concerned with motion and physics in a postCopernican universe as “a pantheistic manifestation: that of the internal efficient in matter as a principle of motion, life, order, measure, determination,” he likewise holds that ethics and virtue are discerned in a structurally similar manner.69 Yet, while Bruno’s God exists “intimately in everything that the form of everything can be imagined to be,” such divinity is for the most part understood as the physical power of creativity present in and as each thing.70 As I have argued above in the context of Donald Crosby’s religious naturalism, this is not a sufficient basis for Christian

Incarnate Earth 159 theology, whose Christology is devoted to justice and compassionate care. So, while I see no problem incorporating the notion of creativity into a broad notion of divinity, I do not think Bruno’s God is sufficient as the object of Christian devotion, even if I would follow him in acknowledging the wider religious significance of the totality of nature. Nature is, I would argue, the religious ecology in which we live and move and exist. Christian devotion, however, is more narrowly focused and must ultimately rely on ethics and not the mere recognition of creative power. The devotion we seek is inseparable from the revelation of a redemptive draw within existence. While there may be a plurality of redemptive possibilities revealed as being unfolds, ethics alone is sufficient for the Christian tradition. Thus, if the Christian tradition is devoted to the redemption found in the face of others as a particular revelation of the divine ground of being, a naturalist Christology might take shape in which Christ is revealed as essentially physical, unity of the two natures of flesh and spirit, and infinitely incarnate in and as the face of things.71 Christ exists, I suggest, as this monistic unity of flesh and spirit that is the world’s cry for justice and compassionate care, irreducible to any specific embodiment of such expression while ontically identical to each. Christ, as the ultimate object of Christian devotion, is the eternal potency of the cry for compassion resident in matter, the form of justice and compassionate care, the face of the creature who speaks the divine command “you shall not murder,” and the cruciform spirit that shapes the church and the rest of the world in the wake of ethics. There is thus a clear spirit which characterizes Christ’s cruciform essence, but there are no acceptable limits on the shape of its incarnations.72 Anything might express the cruciform face of Christ; anything might be the incarnation of Christ: “You come no nearer to commensurability, likeness, union and identity with the infinite by being a man than by being an ant.”73 The possibility of discerning the cruciform pattern that resides in the substratum of material potency, incarnate in the face of things, and continuing as spirit in the haunting trace we continue to feel, reflect, and act on after the event of ethics comprises this naturalist and ultimately pantheist Christological pursuit. None of this, however, suggests that Christ exhausts the idea of God. Christ is a specific expression of God or nature, one with our divine, religious ecology, yet entirely particular and potentially incommensurable with other divine expressions. God may become things other than Christ, incarnate forms that are not cruciform but nevertheless divine expressions, revealing other possible redemptive paths or divine dynamics not associated with redemption at all. Pantheism, as I argue below, need not be understood as the annihilation of difference within God nor restrict itself to the undifferentiated ground of being or the collective totality of all beings. Pantheism is able to recognize that “there is unity in the multiplicity, and multiplicity in the unity, how being is multi-modal and multi-unitary, and how it is, finally, one in substance and in truth.”74 As queer as the thought may be, the naturalist, pantheistic Christology such as I am suggesting may

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in fact require a congruent polytheistic articulation because of the potentially incommensurable differences by which divine incarnations express. So, while I insist that Christ is God and the ultimate divine object of Christian devotion, I suggest below that the cruciform face and spirit is but one of many such divinities incarnate within our multi-unitary, multi-modal religious ecology. Christological pantheism thus gives way to what can be essentially understood as polytheism or some other model for divine multiplicity recognizing a restricted devotion within the wider pantheon, such as henotheism or monolatry.

Multi-unitary and Multi-modal: Christology, Pantheism, and Polytheism Multi-unitary Christology: Pantheism Insofar as anything—animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise—has the potential to express as the face in its desire to flourish, living peaceably and justly, it exhibits a divine, cruciform essence. Additionally, if we follow Bruno and insist that such divinity resides eternally within the ground of being in the amorphous, undifferentiated unity of things prior to extension as this or that, the face is eternally there within the absolute fullness of being. Christ is mixed up within the physical ground of being in the basic potency of matter and consequently flows into the heart of each particular thing that express the cruciform will to live. This is, I suggest, a pantheist dynamic implicit within the deep Christology I am advocating. Christ resides within the undifferentiated ground of being as well as in the face of each thing, a coincidence of opposites identifying Christ in the unified totality as well as the plurality of being’s creative modes. Such pantheism, however, need not view the entire cosmos as synonymous with Christ nor see our monistic religious ecology as a static, undifferentiated totality.75 The pantheist impulse to identify God and the cosmos need not do so by restricting divinity to the one—either the ground of being or the mereological totality of beings— without recognition of the differentiated divinity expressed in and as the many things that take shape. There is a sense in which pantheism embraces the divinity of both the one and the many. Basic definitions of such views of divinity are difficult to pin down as there are no canonical or orthodox pantheisms authoritatively defining such a framework.76 We might define pantheism as a vague adherence to the idea that ontic unity exists among all things, and that such unity constitutes divinity or an ultimate object of religious recognition. This does not necessitate a form of monism where differentiation and distinction among things is somehow unreal, but it does deny that divinity is absolutely other than the world.77 God is everything, and everything is God, but the precise meaning of this idea and the interpretation of unity and divinity is unique to the individuals and traditions holding to this vague concept. The most we can say is that unity

Incarnate Earth 161 and divinity are overlapping ideas in pantheism, and while the relation between them is debated, the “two aspects mutually involve one another with neither being more central.”78 Pantheism then is a religious, metaphysical horizon in which the one and the many are in some sense unified and divine—beyond this, we are reliant on the particularities of individual or traditional religious approaches to divinity to specify the precise character of a given pantheism. The nature of unity and the essence of divinity need to be unpacked, as I have been doing in engaging deep incarnation, Levinas, and most recently Giordano Bruno.79 Some further categorical specifications of pantheistic thought should be noted on the way to clarifying how the deep Christology presented here fits into a pantheist schema. We might divide perspectives on pantheistic unity and divinity into two broad camps, which need not be mutually exclusive. Following Graham Oppy, we note that “there is a distinction between distributive pantheism—the view that each thing is divine—and collective pantheism—the view that the thing of which all things are parts is divine.”80 Beginning with the latter, which is the more common nuance assumed to characterize pantheism, we see cosmic unity and its unique existence as a collective thing or universal order as the typical focus of pantheistic divinity. This sort of “collective pantheism” stresses the divinity tied to the totality or unity of being, the divine One that from which the many proceed. The divine One in such pantheisms is a unique thing or informative patters—e.g., the substance or form that grounds and gives rise to the world and perhaps identical to the mereological totality of all that exists. The One, in which the many participate, is alone in its divinity.81 The whole, whether the minimum or the maximum collective, is “a unique thing of which all things are parts,” and this thing possesses a divine essence not shared by the parts.82 Distributive pantheism might exist in opposition to collective pantheism, but such is not necessary. Distributive pantheists, and I would count myself here, may have no problem admitting to the collective dimension of divinity—there is a creative, informative substance that becomes all things including a collective whole containing parts—and there are performative and experiential reasons for ascribing this a divine status.83 Regardless of its view of the collective, these perspectives are more generous with the essence of the sacred and extends such status from the amorphous One to the polymorphic Many. The precise reason for assigning divinity to the Many varies among different perspectives. The focus of this work has been to highlight the ideas of redemption and revelation for reasons we might designate various cruciform expression as divine incarnations of the face but, as I have suggested and explore below, there are other, potentially incommensurable, divine incarnations that are noncruciform and offer other paths to redemption and revelation.84 Redemption and revelation performed in the ethical relation is my focus, but there may be other criteria sufficient for other religious perspectives.

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With this broad background in place, I set my Christology within a pantheistic horizon, recognizing the divine unity of the substance that creates and becomes all things, but insisting on the extension of this divinity into multi-modal and multi-unitary expressions of nature. My Christology is thus set within a collective pantheism rooted in the One, a divine material substance that becomes all that is as it contracts, emphasizing itself as various shapes within the world, which is our religious ecology—a multiform and multi-unitary divine incarnation of unique, differentiated things. These Many things are dialectically identical with the One, though not synonymous; they are one and the same thing, even though a distinction remains between the One, the All, and each of the Many.85 The collective, all-inclusive One and All maintains a divine essence because it exists eternally and necessarily, apart from reliance on another, and expresses and orders itself as an infinite plurality of forms amounting to a unity without formal emphasis or specificity. In other words, it is divine insofar as it performs the eternal creativity at the heart of the Christian tradition’s understanding of God as creator.86 Christ, as a mode of the Many emphatic shapes taken by the One, is inseparable from this collective and proceeds from it as a unique, divine expression. It resides inseparably within the eternal creativity of the One, while taking its unique shape as substance contracts and time unfolds. While the collective, all-inclusive One can be viewed as sacred divinity and worthy of respect and even reverent awe, it is not, as I argued above, worthy of absolute religious devotion because such is not unambiguously good and right. Creativity deserves to be called God, deserves respect because of its power to being life into being and because of everything’s dependence upon it. It is worthy of gratitude and nature ought to be maintained as part of the quest to allow things to fulfill their desire, but is not worthy of religious devotion, which in the Christian tradition should be directed to the particular revelation of the cruciform redemption found in the face of Christ. This is mostly consistent with Levine’s understanding of pantheism, though there are clear differences in terms of the object of religious devotion and in the way in which I specify the idea of God. Levine insists that “The view that since God is everything God therefore is each thing—the ocean, the toaster etc.—is not pantheism.”87 With Levine, I am not suggesting that each thing—take my cats Maeve and Maurice as examples—are the divine, amorphous, all-inclusive material substance that contains infinite potency to become all things. I do suggest, however, that they are polymorphed substance, material contractions of the One into two unique incarnations of feline emphasized shape. Maurice and Maeve are not pure potency or the amorphous expression of all forms, but they are the One incarnate as some of the Many shapes the infinite has the potential to emphasize. In this sense, they are divine and coincide with the One. Yet, insofar as things are substance and the universe incarnate as this or that shape, their emphasis of some unique form differentiates the Many from the One, while maintaining a dialectic

Incarnate Earth 163 identity. “You must conceive,” Bruno insists, “that everything is in everything, but not totally or under all modes in each thing. Understand, therefore, that each single thing is one, but not in the same way.”88 There is complete or total expression of the divine as the One; there is contracted or modal expression of this same divine as the Many, inclusive not simply of the mereological sum of things viewed as a divine All, but of the individuals composing the cosmos. Each—the One, the All, and the Many—is infinite and unified, material and spiritual, coinciding in a multi-unitary and multimodal fashion: “the universe is in all things and all things are in the universe, we in it and it in us: thus, everything coincides in perfect unity.”89 If Levine wishes to reserve divinity for the One in its all-inclusive, amorphous possibilities, the difference between the two of us would follow the structural difference between Bruno and Cusanus described in an earlier chapter. Such is the same difference as I believe exists between myself and Gregersen. The difference, I think, between Levine and myself mostly concerns the object of religious significance and devotion and not necessarily our understanding of ontic unity.90 For Levine, as for Crosby and I think Gregersen to a degree, the all-inclusive unity of the One is privileged as appropriate for the designation divinity, the object of religious devotion, and the fullness of God. The Many are subordinate to the One, even if their divinity is embraced. There is in Levine, as we saw in Crosby, a nontheistic monotheism that drives religious devotion that reinscribes the sovereignty of the One over the Many. Levine’s pantheism “is a form of nontheistic monotheism, or nonpersonal theism. It is the belief in one God, a God identical to the all-inclusive unity, but it does not believe God is a person or anything like a person.”91 Neither divine identity nor religious devotion, however, need be reduced to the sameness of Pan’s “all-inclusive unity” mediated through the flesh—the One without explicit shape and not yet incarnate as this or that or the All who embraces and is all incarnate forms. This is of course not to say that each expression of the Many is, by contrast, worthy of religious devotion. Rather, there is room to question the subordination of contracted divinity for the sake of the sameness modeled on monotheism. Following Levinas and now Bruno, I want to take Christology beyond monotheism, and beyond pantheism, into the even more transgressive territory of polytheism.92 Multi-modal Christology: Polytheism Nature, unified as One and All, is divine but not worthy of absolute religious devotion. However, this does not mean we must look naively to the plurality of the Many and devote ourselves to each and every incarnate, divine expression. Each thing is infinity contracted into something unique and divine in its own individuated expression. Such multi-unitary but nevertheless multimodal incarnations are bound to confront one another because of this specificity, resulting in incommensurable and incompatible expressions that

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cannot each be the focus of religious devotion.93 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matt. 6:24). Insofar as things reveal alternative paths to meaningful redemption, the vision outlined above seems compelled to admit that our religious ecology must be incarnate with the performance of all sorts divinities. Surely, if we link Christ’s divinity to a certain performance of revelation and redemption, we can point to many others who express in structurally similar ways toward different and potentially irreconcilable ends. While we meet Christ in and as nature, we are bound to meet other gods, some of whom may be friendly with the object of Christian devotion, but still others who demand that we sacrifice cruciform justice, compassionate care, and ethics for the sake of an alternative soteriology. Moving beyond monotheism and pantheism as exhaustive theological metaphors for religious life requires an exploration of other models. I suggest polytheism, or perhaps henotheism or monolatry, as possibilities because while there are multi-unitary and multi-modal cruciform expressions, there are, of course, a plurality of noncruciform expressions that we may deem more or less worthy of religious devotion. The recognition in the Gospels that there are a plurality of worldly powers asserting their sacred character is not abstract poetic theology but a recognition that incarnate performance constitutes real divinity that demands and receives religious devotion. Insofar as Mammon or wealth commands the loyalty and devotion of subjects, revealing a certain redemptive path in the world, it becomes divine and competes with others, including the cruciform expression of Christ. Such ideas are not uncommon in the Western philosophical tradition, and a finds clear expression in the modern era in the work of Max Weber.94 “Weber … makes the social into a religious mirror, pointing to the religious nature of all social institutions. Weber, who famously proclaimed the modern world’s ‘disenchantment,’ asks us to think of the social order as composed of a multiplicity of ‘value spheres,’ each a domain of a ‘god.’”95 Weber’s gods are tied to the unique, material sources of ultimate human significance. These might be classically established religious institutions, but also the sacred “life” or “value-spheres” of ultimate human significance: economics, politics, art, sex, and natural science.96 Social institutions, not exactly phenomenal objects, nevertheless become incarnate and express a unique divinity, each soliciting devotion through the revelation of its own redemptive path.97 Their divinity is implicit in their performance of the roles of the gods classically experienced; they create worlds, reveal a redemptive significance to existence, and solicit devoted followers who exhibit faith in their way. This is not to simply suggest, as a superficial reading of Nietzschean polytheism might present, that we simply create and name the gods as some sort of poetic assertion “to have one’s own ideal,” in a moment of selfsovereignty.98 The gods are not simply our ideals; they possess ontic weight

Incarnate Earth 165 and agency of their own even if employed to assert self-sovereignty. They are not mere poetic fictions, a façon de parler, to help us make sense of our own feelings and thoughts. Polytheism is the recognition that we are compelled by powers outside of the self and that we find in various times and places and a plurality of revelations of redemptions that promise to create a life of significance. Polytheism recognizes that numerous and oftentimes incommensurable powers and principalities—i.e., gods—have become incarnate and express via a common religious structure. Each god offers a soteriological possibility even if each unique divine form traces its genealogical lineage to a single, all-inclusive substantial ground. Our religious ecologies reveal so many possible redemptions that we are bound to experience conflict among the divine. It is well and good to speak of how the cruciform face summons us to compassionate care and love, but we need to recognize the plurality of religious expressions, affects, and allegiances that populate the world. Many of these, felt in experiences such as rage, hatred, lust, directly confront our devotion to love and compete for our devotion by directing our allegiance to various religious objects or structures. These irreconcilable incarnate expressions of the Many, though they are the polymorphed, unified One, require a theological framework beyond monotheistic pantheism, even if such remains useful in its own way. Laurel Schneider similarly recognizes the need to move Christian theology beyond monotheistic logic of sameness and all-inclusive unity. While not employing pantheist metaphors and rejecting the idea of polytheism, Schneider speaks of a divine promiscuity that transcends a reduction of God to a simple understanding of either One or Many in a way that I find helpful.99 “The logic of the One is not wrong,” Schneider argues, “except, ironically, when it is taken to be the whole story. Rather than false, it is incomplete. The logic of the One (and the concept of God that falls within it) is simply not One. There is always less, and more, to the story.”100 Schneider’s solution to the problems arising from a logic of the One that annihilates diversity in divine expression is a recognition of a more radical understanding of incarnation that when “taken seriously, voids all numerical reckoning.”101 Schneider insists in the plurality of divine incarnation, a sacredness entangled in all bodies, “a divine reality not only implicated in but explicated out of the very fabrics of the worlds we inherit and incorporate.”102 Divine incarnation is not mere appearance of a deeper divine reality or a mediation of transcendence outside of the world, it is the polymorphic tissue of the cosmos. Such incarnations cannot be reduced to a logic of oneness or sameness; they always originate in and are unique to the flesh that speaks directly: “Literally meaning ‘in the flesh,’ incarnation is about bodies and so already cannot be reduced to oneness without withdrawing, again, from actual bodies in their necessary particularities. The challenge of thinking multiplicity is therefore, in part, one of thinking bodies against abstraction, against universals and generalizations.”103 As such, “Divine multiplicity is

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first and foremost characterized by fluidity which means it is characterized by change,” and thus cannot be reduced to the totality of universal sameness whether in the logic of sovereign monotheisms or all-inclusive pantheisms that emphasize unity above diversity.104 As in apophatic understandings of God, theologies of multiplicity can never say absolutely and precisely what it is to be divine. Schneider’s God, like the God of Jacob, refuses to be pinned to the ground and definitively named as if it were not continuously polymorphed, shape-shifting substance. While Beyond Monotheism will not reject a certain understanding of unity among the divine, such is not sovereign just as no specific form among the divine incarnations is exalted above the rest.105 Assuming we refuse to exalt either model as sovereign over the other, I see no reason why we might not follow Schneider’s thought and imagine our religious ecologies as possessing a unified, pantheist essence that simultaneously contracts into variegated, polytheistic expressions. Considering a plurality of incarnate encounters, each performing more or less competing revelations of redemptive paths, a polytheistic dynamic within the cosmos begins to make sense. Unless we fall back into a logic of the One and assume that incarnate divinity must be cruciform or fit some other definitive shape—and this is precisely what Schneider rejects throughout Beyond Monotheism—it is difficult to not recognize that the reality of differentiation is serious enough to warrant a polytheistic model. The face of Christ offers one such revelation of enduring, redemptive significant to existence, but our religious ecology is obviously far more than cruciform; we encounter a number of expressions and powers that compete for devotion and at least some are utterly irreconcilable. As an obvious example, we might continue to draw on the Gospel tradition’s insistence that one cannot be devoted to both wealth and love. Mammon, the god of rapacious wealth and greed willing to devour others for personal gain, better known to us by his contemporary name, Capital, exists in absolute conflict with Christ. Or we may recall Paul’s Christology, in which Christ cannot coexist with Empire, again because of an irreconcilable difference in ethics. While I am not as confident as Weber and the Gospel writers that all of the gods are locked in an inextricable and unceasing war, Christ, Capital, and Empire at least do seem to embody an “unceasing struggle’ … [a] struggle that can never be brought to a final conclusion.”106 Capital and Empire are divine and while irreducible to an absolute set of characteristics, they become incarnate in the individuals and institutions that crave domination and devour the world for the sake of wealth and power, reducing everything outside of itself to a resource. They are their own end and reveal this way to their devotees as the path to redemption. Christ cannot abide Capital, Empire, Nature, or any other god who thrives off the domination, consummation, and sacrifice of others: “thus it is necessary to make a decisive choice.”107 Schneider’s clearest eschewing of polytheistic language appears predicated on a sense of ultimate ontic unity present within incarnate expressions of

Incarnate Earth 167 divinity even as it takes on a plurality of embodiments. Rejecting mono- and polytheistic logics, she considers the idea of “Ogbonnaya’s ‘communotheism’ [which] may be a good alternative [to monotheism and polytheism]. It is a multiplicity that cannot be reduced to the One, nor can it be divided into separate ones, or the many.”108 Building on Trinitarian logic allowing a dialectical identity inclusive of difference, divine multiplicity cannot equate a logic of the Many because of the “ontological sociality” of a plurality of incarnations—“Each is because they are. Each belongs, and, therefore, is.”109 I agree that this recognition of unity is crucial and may eschew a polycentric polytheism where each divinity is its own substance that stands on its own outside of relation to others.110 Yet, we can think of polytheism otherwise if we recognize that as the One divine substance becomes this and that, emphasizing a plurality of form to the point where significant conflict arises within the One as it takes shape as the Many. Unless a cruciform shape somehow dominates the One, reinscribing a logic of the One within substance, Christ, even if expressed in a plurality of incarnations, cannot be taken as the exhaustive identity of God. There may be an underlying assumption here that cruciform justice and compassionate care is the only thing worthy of religious devotion, but I do not see how it follows that such can exhaust the idea of God outside of a logic that reduces difference to sameness. A refusal to consider polytheism does not go far enough to recognize the irreconcilable religious affects and affiliations that do arise in our religious ecology and the implications of divine infinity expressed in both the One and the Many. God includes Christ and Capital, among its other multi-unitary and multi-modal expressions. Of course, this should not be taken to enshrine polytheism as the sovereign theological framework. No theological model is sovereign; each express something useful about our religious ecology even while failing to exhaust religious truth. Thus, just as the limits of monotheism and pantheism prevent enshrining them as the only theologically useful model, so too the limits of polytheism prevent its rise to sovereign power. It would be helpful then to develop a vocabulary indicative of divine plurality within an inclusive unity, something Bruno approaches on occasion but does not ultimately embrace. If our religious ecology is inhabited by irreconcilable divinities, we might borrow a phrase from Eve Sedgwick and speak in a polytheistic manner of inhabiting a world full of “queer little gods.”111 A world usefully but inadequately described in both pantheist and polytheist language envisions the possibility of a Christianity “within the same gestalt as paganism.”112 Amidst our religious ecology, Christ exists within a world inhabited by countless other divinities revealing variant paths to a redemptive future. These “queer little gods” are “ontologically intermediate figures [persons or beings] that are somewhat superhuman. […] But still they’re not omnipotent, not omnipresent, not universal.”113 They “lack the somber sublimity of monotheistic deity” but create and direct human life as the gods have always done.114 Furthermore, as they emphasize their unique forms their significance varies; some are

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“tutelary […] protective. Though they might also be demonic.”115 These gods “generate this world that’s so filled with them” and exist alongside of the wider ecology, whether human, plant, elemental, or otherwise.116 They are physical realities that also transgress hard material boundaries insofar as their infinite nature allows them to flow between bodies, communities, and systems, as they incarnate multiple forms, expressing a multi-unitary and multi-modal essence. They are “loosely attached […] to places, persons, families, substances, ideas, music, buildings, machines, emotions, and natural elements.”117 The gods are not other-worldly subjects or idealist constructs of faith, but corporeal beings with a dialectical identity comprised of flesh and spirit who share in the performance of a certain form without being reducible to a set of essential characteristics of embodied types. They inevitably become the various objects of religious devotion as we cling to those little gods that affect us most deeply.

Conclusion: The Limits of Ethics and Learning to Weep In summary of the religious imagination developed in this chapter, I affirm a reality in which “we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense.”118 This abundance of divinity metamorphosizes from a unified physical substance into the plurality of the world’s religious performances, each seeking and perhaps competing for allegiance, intentionally or otherwise. The Christology developed here thus laments the loss of a world whose essence is mystery, transcendence, and infinity, permeated with inexhaustible religious significance. While such a paradigm shift will likely not avert the ecological disaster that looms on the horizon nor end the demonic violence that humanity inflicts upon Earth’s creatures, it is a necessary step in this direction. Christianity remains a potent force in the shape the future will take, and none of its dogmas, theologies, or actions has significantly worked to mitigate its role in the ecological crisis or the anthropocentric domination of creation. Christianity must continue, as always, to transcend itself and transmute through its relations with other perspective that offer a wisdom it lacks. If possible, the Christian tradition ought to embrace a re-enchantment of the Earth and the wider cosmos as a means of overcoming its devotion to the human perpetuated in the creation of God in human likeness. The idea of re-enchantment for those interested will of course take on many forms. I suggest that the divinity of the One is real but not as static and simple as monotheism or monotheistic pantheism insists and that the Many are both angelic and demonic. Christ dwells within the unity as much as the plurality, abiding in and as the cry for cruciform justice and compassionate care. Christ is God, residing inseparably within the One, but is simultaneously a god among gods, necessarily and variously incarnate within a deep religious ecology. This religious ecology is a multi-unitary and multi-modal incarnation of the divine in which we meet Christ as a particular revelation of

Incarnate Earth 169 redemption amidst countless others who disclose alternative promises of salvation. This cruciform revelation of an existence dedicated to justice and compassionate care is worthy of ultimate religious devotion and forms the foundation of Christian tradition.119 Such devotion is directed to both the incarnate and cosmic Christ, the creaturely flesh revealing such redemption as well as the cruciform spirit that refuses to be pinned down to this or that shape. Humans and cats, mussels and oysters, flies and spiders, tomato plants and red oaks, the sun, moon, and the elements are divine in many ways, and each is Christ incarnate according to the needs, desires, and vulnerabilities expressed in its flesh. The spirit of Christ is infinite and irreducible to any single form; its incarnation is ubiquitous. Ethics is first theology and from this foundation the Christian tradition might build its aesthetic, institutional, and ritual manifestations. Faith includes all such dynamics, but its ethical structure grounds the subsequent architecture built upon its moral foundation. Thus, Christian devotion to Christ as the ultimate object of religious significance is devotion to justice. Such is manifest with compassionate care directed to the one who suffers, naturally or otherwise. Compassionate care could be directed to both individual creatures and larger ecological systems whether the violence done to them is part of the natural, necessary order of things or takes the form of unnecessary domination by those with the power and will to exercise violence. The impossibility of ascribing any necessary form of suffering or set of specific characteristics to the voice of those calling out for justice annihilates restrictions on the recipients of moral action. There is necessity in being open to animal, vegetal, and elemental faces. Anything that solicits compassion through its will or desire to live, move, be, and become might express the divine face. There can no longer be restrictions on Christ’s incarnation to forms that reinscribes human normativity. Such restricts the infinite deity to an interpretation of human normativity, a reduction of the other to the same. The ultimate object of Christian devotion cannot remain human; it must extend to the infinite, a multi-unitary and multi-modal body and spirit. Of course, such an expansive reimagination of the Christology leads to a significant problem, namely the impossibility of addressing each and every face. This is not limited to religious devotion of course; this is the impossibility of any comprehensive embrace of ethics in general. Compassionate care to one may inevitably entail the sacrifice of another. Such need not be the case when addressing justice due to the other dominated by insidious manifestations of violence that can be avoided, are not necessary, and exist simply for the sake of hatred, revenge, profit, or control. But, as we saw in our analysis of Crosby’s religious naturalism, there is violence without which the world cannot proceed. I respond the hunger of my cats, Maeve and Maurice, with the sacrifice of other animal bodies who willed a fate other than they received. Were a cat to starve to death for the sake of the chickens and salmon they eat, the sacrificial structure would simply be reversed. Either way, the face of Christ is simultaneously met with compassionate care and sacrificed. This analysis is far

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too brief, and this issue deserves sustained treatment in the future. Suffice it to say for now that the situation in which we find ourselves, and which will likely always exist, some evils can be overcome, and others sadly cannot. The possibility for justice remains, but imperfectly. There is merit to accepting a life lived in ambiguity, but not at the price of baptizing sacrificial violence as good and worthy of devotion. We must refuse the temptation to reinscribe value hierarchy into the world or re-construct an ecological theodicy that embraces evil and includes such in our religious devotion. Nevertheless, advocating the goodness that remains possible in the extension of compassionate care for the sake of justice is the telos of the Christian tradition. It is good to feed a hungry cat even if such goodness fails to live up to some absolute, Platonic Good, and even if the act is evil when experienced by chicken and salmon. This does not mean that all sacrifice is part of a dialectic inclusive of good and evil. In the face of situations where sacrifice only furthers some demonic lust to dominate alterity and fails to contribute to the vulnerability of a being desiring fulfillment, ambiguity vanishes and no compromise with evil ought to be accepted. Nevertheless, as Levinas admits, the Good, ethics in absolute form in any and every situation that demands a moral response, is impossible. “Justice is necessary,” but this may necessitate “comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, and thematization,” actions that betray and sacrifice alterity.120 For Levinas, justice is related to but finally different than ethics as the former seeks peace that will necessarily be tainted by violence to some degree, even in the most virtuous political ecologies.121 I do not believe that justice must always be tainted with violence, nor that it is an idea simply connected to the responsibility of the state, but the frequent ambiguity present in manifesting justice through compassionate care in the face of the other is a reality we cannot ignore. This is expressed in Levinas’ reference to Vassily Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate. Drawing on Grossman, Levinas writes, “‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’—which is also my thesis.”122 Acts of compassionate care, no matter their scale or scope, remain meaningful and recognize the infinite significance of things. Actions that comprise this “little way of love” may be necessarily imperfect and often seem insignificant considering the insurmountable violence of being, but such goodness is all we can hope for in the absence of the Good.123 Living with such ambiguity is necessary, though it need not lead us to the reinscription of hierarchies, theodicies, or concepts of sovereignty. Following the little way of love, of course, is more of a normative ethical principle rooted in an originary ethic of compassion and does not say much about how to live out one’s devotion to Christ as a sociopolitical ethic. The translation of this Christology to normative ethical theory or sociopolitical, public theology has not been my task through this work but should be carried out as a deep incarnation theology blended with a reimagined, deepened pneumatology. The Christian myth embraces the Spirit in its addressing life

Incarnate Earth 171 lived socially and politically in community. Thus, public theologies of religious devotion following the cruciform Spirit in the wake of deep incarnation are desperately needed. These will be deeply context dependent and grounded in the experience of specific communities. In other words, given the bio-regional, political, social, and economic contexts of a given community, there is no one-size-fits-all public theology that includes concern for the morethan-human. Nevertheless, public theologies of the Earth are the muchneeded future of systematic, philosophical, and ethical theologies concerned with a life lived within a deep religious ecology. Any public theology is certain to face difficulties like those described above, namely the inadequacy and impossibility of ensuring justice for all. Levinas writes: For me, the negative element, the element of violence in the State, in the hierarchy, appears even when the hierarchy functions perfectly, when everyone submits to universal ideas. There are cruelties which are terrible because they proceed from the necessity of the reasonable Order. There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the Other.124 While moral decisions, public or otherwise, are bound to eventually and inevitably prioritize, compare, and pit some against others, such could be done in a way that avoids a metaphysical grounding of the apparent hierarchies and sovereignties created in pursuit of justice. Unfulfilled desires, abandonment, and injustices are the painful and morally unacceptable realities of being and I am not confident they will be avoided in any enactment of justice. As such, even while love continues in our encounters with Christ as we desperately grasp for justice, a tragic sense of life persists, and lamentation speaks the last word. Miguel de Unamuno reflects the tragedy of our inescapable existence within a world of infinite significance. “In the world of living beings,” Unamuno writes, “the struggle for life establishes an association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten, between the devourer and the devoured?”125 The inescapability of violence within the intimacy of being set in relation with another captures the lament of those who long for peace but remain caught up in the violence of our religious ecology, a violence that both emphasizes and spoils the incalculable, inescapable, and infinite significance of creation and creature. For Unamuno, the wise person does not simply analyze existence in an objectivizing sense that erases the aporia of being and becoming, but also wrestles with the irresolvable contradictions of existence in a way that preserves the ambiguity without succumbing to hierarchy, theodicy, and sovereignty. Lamentation is the distinction between the analysis of the pedant and the wisdom of the sage.

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Incarnate Earth A pedant, who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, “Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?” And the sage answered him, “Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.” It is manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon’s reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common. A miserere sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.126

The weeping of lamentation need not be construed as despair. While the lamentation necessary in the face of the cruciform existence does not allow an unambiguous hope or any guarantee of absolute goodness, justice, or fulfillment, it is not a hopelessness that strips being of meaning and wishes for an escape from the world. The precise reason we lament the loss of the world is because everything—creation as a whole and its unique, individual creatures—is infinitely significant. Nothing can annihilate this essential dynamic of being. Lamentation is the deepest expression recognizing the infinite significance of things as it contains the complete spectrum of affects included in our religious devotion to the cruciform shape of things. The sadness of weeping follows and accompanies an enduring joy inseparable from things lost and an unshakable resolve to be. Lamentation expresses as its own coincidence of opposites. Religious devotion to Christ, who is incarnate in and as Earth, revealing cruciform divinity and redeeming those embracing goodness, laments the inevitable and necessary loss of things, while refusing to give up on the perpetual and always incomplete pursuit of the little way of love. Such love proceeds not because utopian justice will be achieved, or because it is commanded by an otherworldly sovereign, but because of a feeling of devotion to cruciform alterity, to Christ incarnate in and as the face of things.

Notes 1 The idea of physicalism, as opposed to materialism, is engaged below and was discussed earlier in the book. For a discussion of the history of thought concerning nonmaterial, natural things, see Brown and Ladyman, Materialism, 83–135. 2 These are prominent issues among all religious naturalists. An overview of these and other issues is found in Stone, Religious Naturalism Today, 193–209.

Incarnate Earth 173 3 See especially Crosby, A Religion of Nature. 4 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 117. 5 Crosby, “The Ultimacy of Nature.” I maintain the use of theodicy to avoid confusion. Likewise, despite the removal of a personal God from the equation, physidicy and theodicy are structurally synonymous, asking how we make sense of being in light of evil. While eliminating the presence of a completely good personal being does simplify the problem in a way, it is an overstatement to argue that classical “theology founders on the problem of evil in a way that a religion of nature does not.” Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 146–147. The same issue remains: can we revere and devote ourselves to anything inescapably bound to evil? 6 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 118. 7 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 117. 8 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 118. See also Crosby, Interpretive Theories of Religion. 9 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119. 10 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119. 11 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119. 12 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119 13 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119 14 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 119. 15 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 120. 16 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 120–121. 17 One of the great strengths of Crosby’s writings is his willingness to admit genuine evil present in the world from the perspective of any creature whose fulfillment is frustrated. I take issue the idea that such evil not find itself into the ontic characterization of the world, but Crosby does not shy away from the genuine evil, or disvalue ubiquitously present throughout being. See Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 57–87; Living with Ambiguity. 18 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 22. 19 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 22. 20 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 137. 21 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 138. 22 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 31. 23 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 48. 24 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 43. Crosby’s attempt to retain the language of religious “goodness” outside of moral “goodness” deeply confusing if not incoherent. I argue below that there is no separation of religious and moral good. “Religious rightness and moral goodness do not come down to the same thing, but they are closely connected and each can contribute significantly to the other, as we shall see in a later chapter.” Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 50. There seems to be an underlying conflation of goodness with economic ideas such as value and worth, which I suggest undermines authentic goodness, which cannot be rooted in economic metaphors that undermine the infinite depths of the significance of things. 25 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 80. 26 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 82. 27 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 83. 28 Levinas, “Useless Suffering.” 29 Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 99. 30 The reason I insist that this is a reduction is because the sovereignty of the sacrificial system renders any creaturely protest against sacrifice null and void of adequate power to match the necessity of violence for the sake of the whole.

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Incarnate Earth We might recognize the lament of creatures, but a theodicy refuses to side with the other and thus leaves them isolated in their suffering. The evil of such willing isolation is a significant theme found throughout Levinas’ work. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 100. I anticipate the rebuttal that compassion to one will inevitably involve a willingness to sacrifice others. There is no existence without violence, but we need not for this reason baptize violence with the logic of theodicy as a religion of nature does. As I describe in greater detail below, we can acknowledge that even compassion may participate in evil through the shear impossibility of embracing each and every face. The admission of evil and the inconsolable posture of lament this entails allows us to refuse devotion to a morally ambiguous nature for the sake of what compassion we might participate in, even if such is incomplete and far short of an absolute vision of goodness. The key is that in such instances of sacrifice, we confess the evil of our violence, recognize the unanswerable and eternal judgment of the thing sacrificed, and live in perpetual lamentation even for the good we are able to sustain. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 93. “In a religion of nature, there is no directive to emulate the ways of nature in one’s moral life. It is not anticipated that we should reverence nature by imitating it. There is an important disconnection between the object of faith and moral policies, principles, and practices. Nature as the object of faith can provide context and support for moral living but should not be expected to supply its specific precepts. The autonomy of morality is thus safeguarded in religion of nature.” Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 85. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 165 Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 165. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 165. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, 165–166. I have in mind here Tim Ingold’s understanding of personhood as a meshwork with permeable rather than impenetrable boundaries. Ingold opens up personhood beyond atomic individualism to a messier, entangled model where persons are hybrids of larger webs of being. Persons, as I understand them, are differentiated things but possess pluralist, relational identities that mingle with and are constituted by others as opposed to personhood models likening beings to atomic individuals or actants within broader networks. See Ingold, Being Alive, esp. 63–94. Hardwick, Events of Grace. For a brief introduction to Hardwick’s complex approach to theology and Christology, see Hardwick, “Religious Naturalism Today.” See especially Hardwick, Events of Grace, 61–71; 209–253. See Hardwick, Events of Grace, 3–32. For Hardwick’s understanding of nonreductive physicalism, see Events of Grace, 33–71. Hardwick ascribes to a branch of physicalism that does not work with an identity theory between emergent phenomena, such as events of grace, and the physical elements that ground their being. Everything is indeed physical, but there are nonmaterial entities in such physicalist interpretations of the world, mind being the principal example for such thinkers. This is an area where Hardwick and I would be at odds, as I would argue against nonreductive physicalism in favor of an ontological entanglement or equivalence between emergent realities and their physical ground. The problem with sorting through such physicalist positions is that there are many and the discussion among them is complex and constitutes its own discipline of philosophical inquiry. For an introduction to physicalism see Stoljar, “Physicalism.”

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I would follow the thinking of scholars such as Jaegwon Kim. See Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Hardwick, Events of Grace, 54. Hardwick is deeply indebted to theologians such as Henry Nelson Wieman and Gordan Kaufmann. See Weiman, “The Need of Philosophy of Religion;” Kaufman, In Face of Mystery. See especially Hardwick’s engagement with Schubert Ogden for more on this issue. Hardwick, Events of Grace, 222–228. On “seeing-as,” see Hardwick, Events of Grace, 64–69, 158–179. Hardwick’s “seeing-as” is identical to divinity and Christ. “Faith acknowledges God as God and this means as creatively transformative. But since God can only be known as creativity in a transformative moment, the content of what is recognized (God as God) is identical with the very moment of recognition (the transformation).” Hardwick, Events of Grace, 151–152. The simultaneous time of revelation, redemption, and recognition, allowing the subject to become identical with the divine, shows the importance of Levinas’s philosophy of time is for this discussion. Theologies such as Hardwick’s that establish revelation and redemption as occurring in the present time of the subject result in the same reduction of the other to the same I suggest in present in deep incarnation Christology. On the “trace,” see Levinas, “The Trace of the Other.” See Ingold, Being Alive, 63–94. On adding the divine into the ontic messiness of existence see Rubenstein, Pantheologies. The statement “‘God exists’ functions within a valuational matrix. In this sense, it functions nonreferentially to articulate a seeing-as appropriate to that valuational matrix which is itself understood existentially in terms of modes of human existence: openness to the future, readiness for transformation, the giftedness of life, trust in being, and the love of God. In other words, theologically considered, “God exists” functions nonreferentially to express a theistic seeing-as within a valuational matrix.” Hardwick, Events of Grace, 288. See also the appendix, “On the Referential Status of Transformative Events,” 288–290, in Events of Grace for a brief but direct engagement with this issue. For an introduction to the many ways philosophers speak of the essence of material and nonmaterial relations within causally closed physical systems relying on the idea of supervenience, see McLaughlin, “Varieties of Supervenience,” 16–59. This is a similar issue with some versions of Christian materialism that locate Christ in the “virtual” but not the material. See Christopher, Thomas, and Reader, A Philosophy of Christian Materialism. This position is likewise physicalist, but progressive Christian theologies such as these are often deeply indebted to nonreductive physicalist interpretations of existence for one reason of another. While I agree that there are nonmaterial dimensions to existence—e.g., abstract objects—I am closer to identity theorists regarding the emergence and existence of these sorts of things. Hardwick and these other theologians, of course, follow the well-known and reasonable approach to physical events taking place within the human brain as emergent and irreducible to material events. I cannot solve this dilemma here and simply note that we each follow variant and perfectly reasonable, though debated, options within contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics On abstract objects, see Wetzel, Types and Tokens, esp. 25–51. “We see a pair of turtle doves and a trio of French hens, hear the quartet of calling birds, feel a quintet of golden rings, smell a sextet of geese a-laying, and so on.” Wetzel, Types and Tokens, 39. The number two, or any of the pluralities in the above example, are abstract entities but nevertheless have ontic status because of their

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Incarnate Earth material manifestation as given pairs of things. Numbers are abstract and find residence in the registry of things. While there is some comfort in maintaining a transcendence closer to classical theism as Hardwick and others do, I believe that the account of infinity given in previous chapters is sufficient for maintaining ethical, theological, and philosophical transcendence. There is no set of characteristics that is sufficient to qualify the precise parameters of a type, or abstract object, to realistically characterize the tokens of their expression. They remain infinite in this regard. See Wetzel, Types and Tokens, 54–103; Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, 121–148; 161–170. For the idea that action and causality are excluded from supervenient properties, which would preclude them from being part of a property dualist metaphysic granting them distinct and autonomous being, see Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, 32–69. If abstract objects or types draw their being and their power to act from something always material that informs and makes emergent nonmateriality possible, I do not understand how we could posit a separate ontic matrix the way nonreductive physicalism seems to do. There is no existence independent of the matter than informs and births the still physical immaterial; abstract objects, types, the virtual or whatever nonmaterial essence that emerges is necessarily entangled in and dependent upon its ground. There is no way, as far as I can understand, how something could reside purely and simply in the abstract, the type, the virtual without residing simultaneously in the material body or bodies that ground such transcendence. As such, on the basis of metaphysical grounding and a strong closure argument for physical causality I would place the face and thus Christ within the registry of things. On the issue of multiple realization and its connection to reductionism see Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction.” The one thing, for Kim, that cannot be reduced are the qualia of experience—i.e., what is it like to be in a certain state such as pain—but such would not be candidates for a divine Christ. Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 75. Gatti, “The Natural Philosophy of Giordano Bruno,” 121. For studies in Bruno’s understanding of matter, cosmology, and physics, see Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science, 99–142; Essays on Giordano Bruno, 70–90; Stamatellos, “Plontius’ concept of matter in Giordano Bruno’s De la causa, principio et uno.” The most accessible and important primary source on this issue in English is Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, especially the fourth dialogue, 70–86. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 38. Despite the origin of spirit in matter, is the essence of both matter and spirit to be both active and passive, each creative and created. “God is the mind over all; implanted within all nature and pervading the whole system. God speaks and orders; Nature executes and acts.” My translation of the original Latin: “Mens super omnia Deus est. Mens insita omnibus natura. Mens omnia pervadens ratio. Deus dicant et ordinat. Natura exequitur atque facit.” Giordano Bruno, De triplici minimo et mensura ad trium speculatiuarum scientiarum et multarum actiuarum artium principia libri V, in Opera Latine conscripta publicis sumptibus edita, vol. 1, part ii, (Florence: Le Monnier, 1889), 136. On the minima, or the foundational and physical substance of infinite potency from which all things are created see Schettino, “The Necessity of the Minima in the Nolan Philosophy.” The minima would include the basic material building blocks of physics, what Bruno would call atoms and we might perhaps call strings in certain contemporary understandings of physics, and the information emerging from its

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physical properties—i.e., its mathematical essence and metaphysical unity. The minima is not empirical or sensible phenomena, though met in the “accidents” or composite forms that are grounded in the minima, which are ontically unified and multi-formed expressions of the minima. Stamatellos, “Plotinus’ concept of matter in Giordano Bruno’s De la causa, principio et uno,” 21. Bruno’s substance is what is ontologically primary, the physical ground of being that contains all forms, which are generated from the dynamics of matter itself. Substance is the world, becomes the universe in all its shapes and sizes, expressing simultaneously as this and that and the totality of all the subjects that emphasize particular form. Substance is the ground of being and beings, constitutive of all that is, and exists infinitely, i.e., eternally, necessarily, and inexhaustively. It is physical insofar as it is a unity of matter and form, corporeity and rationality existing inseparably even if the former generates the later. It might be more useful for us to think of substance naturalistically as the basic stuff that is the universe (or multiverse) and the physical laws generated by the time, shape, and movement of such. Substance, of course, can be understood otherwise, especially in Aristotelian terms, which Bruno eschews, or more radically as in perspectives whose monism insists that the reality of the One erases difference, which is mere appearance. On the idea of contraction, See Catana, The Concept of Contraction in Giordano Bruno’s Philosophy. Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 80–81. As always, we assume this statement, made by Teofilo in the dialogue, speaks more or less for Bruno. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. “You must conceive,” Teofilo insists, “that everything is in everything, but not totally or under all modes in each thing. Understand, therefore, that each single thing is one, but not in the same way.” Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. The proclivity for speaking of the divine in naturalist terms and the typical naming of the divine in reference to Roman deities should not lead to the conclusion that Bruno is speaking poetically or that he is an atheist. His thought radically reimagines the God of the Western philosophical tradition as being identified with nature. Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 83–84. This includes not simply the infinite substance that grounds all beings, but beings themselves, “since all forms are contained in [matter], produced by it … they have no mode of actual existence in sensible and intelligible being other than through accidental existence.” Cause Principle, and Unity, 9. The coincidence of potency and act, flesh and spirit, the minimum and the maximum, is found throughout Bruno’s work, including Cause, Principle, and Unity, 96–99. For a book length treatment of the coincidence see Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence. While the coincidence is most apparent and emphasized in the shared identity of the minimum substance that grounds all that is and the maximum totality of the infinite cosmos, coincidence also appears to be dynamic of individual things, which while exist as modes of the one substance are identified as unified with the infinite minimum and maximum. “For, if you wish to speak of part of the infinite, you are obliged to call that infinite as well; if it is infinite, it coincides in one and the same being with the whole: therefore, the universe is one, infinite, indivisible. And if in the infinite you cannot find any difference as of part from whole, nor any difference as of one part from another, the infinite is undoubtedly one. There is no smaller part and greater part within the infinite’s comprehension, for any part, however large, comes no nearer the proportion of the infinite than does

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Incarnate Earth any other, however small. In infinite duration, an hour is no different from a day, a day from a year, a year from a century, a century from an instant, because neither moments nor hours exist any more than do centuries, and because none is more commensurable with eternity than another … . You come no nearer to commensurability, likeness, union and identity with the infinite by being a man than by being an ant, or by being a star than by being a man, for you get no nearer to that infinite being by being the sun or the moon than by being a man, or an ant. This is because, in the infinite, there is no difference between those things - and what I say of them applies just as well to all other existent particular things.” Bruno, Cause, Principle, Unity, 88. See also Bruno, The Cabala of Pegasus, 56. Here everything—whether a human, a fly, an oyster, spider, or plant—is the one, divine substance rearranged as this or that with “diverse degrees and capabilities of mind and function.” Bruno, De triplici minimo, 136. “Influit Deus per naturam in rationem. Ratio attollitur per naturam in Deum. Deus est amor, efficiens, claritas, lux. Natura est amabile, obiectum, ignis et ardor. Ratio est amans, subiectum quoddam, quod a natura accenditur et a Deo illuminatur.” God, nature, and reason in this passage are not complimented through opposition, but rather identified with one another through Bruno’s parallelism. Schettino, “The Necessity of the Minima in the Nolan Philosophy,” 313. Bruno’s ethics is also tied to his philosophy of religion. Everything that is, from the minima or the undifferentiated potency of matter and form at the foundational level, to the maximum or the unified, composite collection of infinite things, as well as each thing in between, is divine expression. As such, everything is sacred and possesses inherent moral significance. On the necessity of including the minimum and maximum in Bruno’s philosophy, see Schettino, “The Necessity of the Minima in the Nolan Philosophy,” 299–325. Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 10. Bruno continues: “(because [Jove] is the essence through which all that exists possesses being, and since he is in everything, each thing possesses the whole even more intimately than it does its own form), we may infer that all things are in each thing, and that, consequently, all is one.” Later in his book, Bruno’ mouthpiece, Teofilo, asserts that it is “not for nothing is it said that Jove fills all things, inhabits all parts of the universe, is the centre of everything which has being: one in all, and that through which all is one, and is that which, being all things and comprehending all being in itself, causes everything to be in everything.” Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 89. The major sticking point with classical Christology here will be the order of divine procession, which following Bruno, I would insist moves from matter to spirit. Such insists that logos, spirit, information, form, or rationality is coeternal and ontically inseparable from the flesh, but matter is primary. The divine has always been enfleshed and there is not an ontic gap between creator and creation. Christ in my theology is part of a monist cosmology that cannot separate matter and spirit even if the former proceeds from the latter; both exist as the unified being that shapeshifts to become the world and all its differentiated existents. Matthew Calarco, a prominent interpreter of Levinas and the more-than human, insists that we must remain agnostic when it comes to an openness to facial expressions. Calarco, Zoographies, 57–77. Given Levinas’ rejection of any reduction of the face to specific characteristics, and the infinite nature of the divine, we cannot, as I argued in previous chapters, reduce the cruciform expression to any specific embodiment, including the human form. We must remain agnostic and open to the mystery of the divine, cruciform expression of Christ.

Incarnate Earth 179 73 Bruno, Cause Principle, and Unity, 88. 74 Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 10. 75 In the context of Christology, such a misunderstanding is represented in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Pantheism, Teilhard fears, is an ultimate annihilation of particularity as “being is dissolved in the Homogenous.” Teilhard de Chardin, “The Universal Element,” 292. The problem for Teilhard is not simply an identification of God and the world, which he unequivocally embraces, but the idea that this identification annihilates difference. Ontic homogenization is not an essential tenet of pantheism even if some do hold that difference is, in a sense, unreal. Interestingly, Teilhard does use the idea of pantheism in a positive sense later in his writings, of a cosmic situation where God and the universe are completely unified while maintaining distinction. See Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, 211. 76 Michael Levine’s Pantheism is one of the more comprehensive studies of pantheism. 77 Many pantheisms hold to a real distinction between the divine unity that constitutes the world and the individual existents populating it. While I would suggest the world is monistic in a sense where everything shares a dialectical identity, many would posit a nonidentical relation between the one and the many. I do not think this would necessarily constitute monism, but perhaps a nonreductive, property dualism. In these forms of pantheism, there is a real ontic separation between God and the world even though divinity would not transcend the cosmos absolutely. I am curious whether this is essentially what many today would label panentheism, which would be a type of pantheism contrary to what is usually claimed by Christian panentheists. I wonder if Levine actually fits this model as his view of divinity seems tied to absolute unity similar to Nickolas of Cusa’s neo-Platonism, discussed earlier in the book. On the types of panentheism, see Clayton, “How Radically Can God be Reconceived before Ceasing to be God?” Regardless of our interpretation, Levine rightly argues that monism is not synonymous with pantheism. Levine, Pantheism, 72–92. Some pantheists are monists, but pantheism is not monism. Monism, of course, carries its own internal debates. While I would posit a shared identity between the totality and each thing, as Bruno and Cusanus do, distinction and differentiation is real, unlike perspectives like Berkely or Shankaracharya and the Advaita Vedanta school, where difference seems to be more apparent than real. See Levine, Pantheism, 73–84. 78 Levine, Pantheism, 46. 79 It is also common for pantheism to deny divine personhood or agency. While I support this to the point of rejecting a restrictive model of God as a human-like agent with intentions and freedom, it seems problematic to wipe personhood from divine potency and incarnation. Personhood, agency, intention, and freedom would be included within the potency of divine substance and incarnate in personal modes. This issue is further complicated by the usual assumption that personhood must be interpreted in human-like terms. If we were to expand our understanding of personhood in ways done by contemporary animist thinkers or go back to nonanthropocentric models of “will” found in the likes of philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, we might further question the allergic reaction many have to the idea of divine personhood. 80 Oppy, “Pantheism, Quantification and Mereology,” 321. For a robust exploration of all the ways collective unity has been understood in the history of pantheism, see Levine, Pantheism, 25–47. 81 It is rare that unity simply means all the things that exist, the collection of things or parts that make up a whole, apart from some underlying principle

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Incarnate Earth that unifies the collective. For Levine, the world as God “means that God is the all-inclusive whole, the ‘everything’ that is appropriately unified. Apart from a unifying element (e.g., substance, Tao, Geist etc.) the all-inclusive whole would not be God.” Levine, Pantheism, 34. Oppy, “Pantheism, Quantification and Mereology,” 323. Given time I would describe the performance of creativity ubiquitous in the Judeo-Christian vision of divinity in addition to the sort of affective response, awe-inspiring response to the cosmos that gives rise to religious feeling. Such could take many routes, perhaps through critical engagement with the likes of Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, or Rudolf Otto. For a start, see Byerly, “The Awe-some Argument for Pantheism.” Oppy notes that beyond criteria for divinity, there will be disagreement between “liberal” and “strict” pantheisms, of both the collective and distributive sorts, over what precisely counts as a things and parts. Is every differentiated existent a unique thing and a part of a more complex thing? Or are there robust, strict criteria for what constitutes haecceity? Furthermore, there are the mind-numbingly complicated issue of concrete versus abstract objects, and whether these count in the pantheist framework. Such questions are far too complex for this chapter to explore. See Oppy, “Pantheism, Quantification and Mereology,” 321–323. Other examples of dialectical unity relevant for Bruno would be Nicolas of Cusa and Baruk Spinoza. For each there is an identity relation between God and nature while a simultaneous distinction. Identity need not mean synchrony and each of these works out the relation of creator, creativity, and creation in their own unique ways. Thus, I do not suggest that substance is divine simply because it is substance, but because it performs a creative role that is recognized as unique and significant after some sort of affective feeling of participation in, dependence on, and gratitude toward the foundation of existence. It is not necessary that such dynamics become divine, but this is a common religious move performed after the numinous is affectively experienced by humans who become caught up in a sense of unity with the world and an assessment of the significance of such unity. The association of divinity and creativity is present in many religious traditions, from pantheist Taosim to Abrahamic monotheism. On feeling as the basis of pantheism relevant for the discussion here, see T. R. Byerly, “The Awesome Argument for Pantheism.” Levine, Pantheism, 35. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90. In discussing ontological models of unity Levine recognizes views, such as Bruno’s: “Where Unity is regarded as an entity (e.g., the “One”) it can be taken to include any of the following: (i) its proper parts, if it has any; (ii) entities that are independent of it in the sense that they could exist on their own; (iii) entities that cannot exist apart from it.” 38. For Bruno, iii is the case as nothing exists on its own apart from substantial unity, and each of the many things is an expression, mode, transmutation of the one, identical but not synonymous. Levine, Pantheism, 3. Bruno also tends to fixate divine unity at the expense of plurality. Finding meaning in existence is mostly focused in recognizing one’s place among the totality of things and reconciling the ever-changing pain of being with the simultaneous participation in the single ebb and flow of being in life and after death. For more see Mendoza, “Metempsychosis and Monism in Bruno’s nova filosophia.” Bottom of Form Further study could potentially draw on Bruno more substantially for the sort of polytheistic approach within a larger pantheist framework. In the Expulsion

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of the Triumphant Beast, Bruno suggests that the worship of creatures and creation as diverse expressions of the divine should not be frowned upon and rejected. This is not exactly the sort of ethical polytheism I suggest, but it is not without similarities. An explicit analysis of this is required for greater clarity. Unless we intend to take pantheism and monism to the most radical extreme and bifurcate the world into reality and appearance and thus deny the ontic status of things, we would admit that real difference is created in the many faces we meet out of the one, unified ground of being. I am not going to explore such ideas here; I will simply assume that the things we perceive are real and not synonymous with all-inclusive unity of the minimum or maximum. I maintain a Brunian dialectical identity theory that allows things, whether cats or spiders or trees or anything else, to possess reality that mingles and mixes among the one and the many. Each is the one substance emphasizing some size, shape, and form. On these problems in a pantheist context see Levine, Pantheism, 73–80. See for example, Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” and “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.” We could just as easily draw on other modern thinkers such as William James or Friedrich Nietzsche, but Weber’s recognition of the incommensurability and conflict among the gods is more in line with the perspective taken in this chapter. Likewise, we could draw on ancient sources, such as Lucretius, who takes a more poetic position on the gods expressed in and as nature. Friedland, “The Gods of Institutional Life: Weber’s Value Spheres and the Practice of Polytheism,” 16. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” 331–357. Friedland expresses this is terms of nonphenomenal substances transmuting and becoming incarnate in all sorts of material practice. “Institutional logics, in other words, require a more Catholic deity, transcendent and immanent, capable of incarnation—not just in a savior’s sacred body, but in the object of the host—produced and accessed in and through material practice.” Friedland, “The Gods of Institutional Life,” 20–21. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 127. “The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen of all kinds, as well as deviant or inferior forms of humanoid life, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils, was the invaluable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods one finally gave to oneself in relation to laws, customs. and neighbours.” Nietzsche, Gay Science, 128. Jordan Rodgers clearly demonstrates that Nietzche recognizes that the gods, while often used to establish self-sovereignty, likely originate beyond the self. See Rogers, “A Modern Polytheism?” Schneider, Beyond Monotheism. Schneider explicitly eschews both polytheist and pantheist labels, so our ideas are not precisely the same. The apparent motivation here is the inadequacy of either model to function in a sovereign, absolute sense that captures the full picture of divinity. I agree with this sentiment entirely but see no reason to not employ the theological models in their limited capacity to say something meaningful about the paradoxical coincidence of opposites that is the divine One and the Many. Indeed, polytheism fails if it cannot recognize the dimension of unity in divine expressions. Likewise, pantheism fails if it cannot recognize real plurality and differentiation. Neither polytheism nor pantheism, however, fits these portrayals, which are nothing but caricatures of the frameworks. Even polycentric polytheism recognizes a deeper unity among the gods and pantheism cannot be reduced to those versions of it that absolutely reject difference between reality and

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Incarnate Earth appearances. Thus, I think there is deep agreement between Schneider and myself, even if the portrayals of polytheism and pantheism in Beyond Monotheism leave something to be desired. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 1. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 4. The problems with monotheism or the reduction of religious truth to all-inclusive unity without difference and conflict are well known. Such a logic assumes the power of a sovereign over alterity; it disallows transgressive bodies to have a say in what worlds are like—a reduction of the other to the same. Within monotheistic theologies, or religions that reduce religious significance to all-inclusive unity, this logic demands that “there can be only one specific revelation. The logic of the One insists that truth is one, and so the one revelation also sets the truth of divinity against all falsehoods.” Beyond Monotheism, 193. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 5. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 142. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 154. “A logic of multiplicity is not opposed to unity (the inclusive sense of One) or oneness (the exclusive sense of One), which means that divine multiplicity does not exclude either unity or oneness except in their absolute or eternal sense. Oneness and unity are proximal and partial aspects of the divine; they are true in any given space-time occurrence or center, but they are never the ‘whole’ story of divinity and reality.” Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 198. This relation to unity is how I understand what we could call Brunist pantheism driven by a coincidence of opposites and dialectical theory of identity. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 152. God and Mammon are irreconcilable, but I am not sure that all gods are locked in combat. I do revere Nature with all due respect, awe, and obedience manifest in an embrace of a dependence on others along with an amazement toward being and gratitude for life and the goodness it makes possible. Likewise, I find meaning in other aspects of life that fill life with relational meaning from source outside of myself. Beauty, felt in the presence of the paintings of Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, or others of the Blue Rider; Song, in which I become lost when listening to Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or Mono; Sport,that fills me with both ecstasy and crushing disappointment each baseball season. I see all of these as divinities with whom I am caught up in and devoted to for a time. While I love each of these in their own space and time, however, I do remain fundamentally and absolutely devoted to Christ outside of contextual and temporal restrictions. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 152. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 67. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 67. See Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion.” Polycentric polytheism does not discount a unity among the gods, hence the slight hesitation in discounting this position too quickly. Sedgwick, “Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods;” Sedgwick and Snediker, “Queer Little Gods: A Conversation.” Sedgwick, “Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods,” 59. John Thatamanil argues convincingly in Circling the Elephant, esp. 108–151, that it is common for faith to express through a variety of frameworks that colonial logic separates into separate, impermeable religions. Synchronism, such as I suggest here, is far more common that colonial Western logic supposes as Thatamanil in his robust analysis. As such “religions are no more natural that races. Genealogical treatments of religion show that persons had to be taught to believe that they belong to religions, that they can normatively belong to only one religion at a time, that

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to belong to a religion is to belong to a tightly knit and relatively unified community of belonging, that some aspects of their lives count as religious and others as secular. There is nothing natural or timeless about these assumptions.” Thatamanil, Circling the Elephant, 119. With Thatamanil, I wish to move away from neocolonial policing of religious identity and reflection because it represents a logic of the One and a reduction of the other to the same. Sedgwick and Snediker, “Queer Little Gods,” 209. Sedgwick, “Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods,” 15. Sedgwick and Snediker, “Queer Little Gods,” 209. Sedgwick and Snediker, “Queer Little Gods,” 211. Sedgwick, “Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods,” 45. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 148. This is by no means restricted to Christianity and the religious devotion I call cruciform need not be understood through a Christian lens. Multi-unitary and multi-modal divinity provides a clear foundation for a deep religious pluralism capable of recognizing unity and difference across religious traditions. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 157. Levinas insists that “the negative element, the element of violence in the State, in the hierarchy, appears even when the hierarchy functions perfectly.” Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 23. This may be a bit unfair to Levinas as this explicitly concerns his political philosophy, which he would not necessarily treat as he treats smaller scales of human interaction and morality. I am being a bit looser with the ideas of justice and ethics and using the terms more synonymous that Levinas does and would likely make stronger connections between smaller communal interactions and larger political organizations. Levinas and Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be?, 89. Pope Francis, recognizing such difficulties with ethics, writes: “Saint Therese of Lisieux invites us to practice the little way of love, not to miss out on a kind word, a smile or any small gesture which sows peace and friendship. An integral ecology is also made up of simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness.” Pope Francis, Laudato Sí, 230. Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 23. de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 106. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 17.

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Index

affect 62, 67, 124, 126–129, 131 all-inclusive unity 163, 165 alterity 57–61, 63, 65–67, 69, 91–92, 110, 113, 115, 120–126, 128, 131, 155 ambiguity 144–147, 150, 170, 171 anabaptism 4 Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) 5–7 anabaptist soteriology 6 anagnorisis 111, 112 androcentrism 40, 120 anthropocentrism 9–11, 17, 18, 21, 57 Aquinas 109, 110 Aristotle 111 a-theism 63–68 auto-noetic knowing 127 bad religion 3 baptism 2, 3 being of God 40, 120, 121, 140 Benso, Silvia 94 “broad sense” incarnation 35, 118 Bruno, Giordano 20, 41, 44, 161, 163 Buber, Martin 7 Burggraeve, Roger 90 Calarco, Matthew 94 “Called to Unity” 32 Christian devotion 109, 140, 141, 155, 156, 159, 160, 164, 169; object of 140, 141, 159, 164 Christian ecofeminism 20 Christianity 4, 5, 8, 16, 18, 27, 36, 45, 83, 167, 168 Christian myth 16–17, 170 Christian soteriology 77, 79, 82 Christian theology 14, 32, 35 Christian tradition 4, 5, 8–10, 13–15, 19–21, 39, 143, 159, 169

Christological paradigms 36–40 Christology 1, 8, 10–14, 19, 21, 27, 28, 33, 57, 68, 78, 83, 95, 120, 152, 153, 162 Christ’s redemption 78–84; see also redemption cognition 69, 110–111, 123, 124 compassionate care 96, 128–131, 159, 164, 165, 167–170 consciousness 121, 124–127, 129, 131; anoetic 126; awakened 38, 58; intentional 58, 126; moral 149; selfreflexive 124; unreflective 126 contemplation 110, 111, 115, 116, 124 1 Corinthians 5, 78 co-suffering 61, 84–89 creativity 13, 14, 30, 31, 63, 146, 147, 158, 159, 162 creatures 6, 10, 18, 30, 34, 36, 38, 40–42, 85, 87, 97–99, 118, 119, 144, 145, 150 Crosby, Donald 5, 18 Crossan, John Dominic 80 “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World” 32 cruciform divinity 77 Culpepper, R. Alan 110 Cusanus 41–45, 119, 163 deep incarnation 8, 18–20, 27–56, 85, 108, 140–160; Christology 19, 32, 36, 71, 77, 84, 86, 93, 108, 129, 130, 139; contemporary theologies of 8, 18, 20; idea of 28, 35; proponents of 38, 85; and redemption 77–107; and revelation 108–138; theologians 20, 87; theologies 17, 28, 35, 40, 41, 71, 85, 87, 95, 120, 140; understanding of 32, 141; see also individual entries

Index 199 deep incarnational theologies 8, 9 “Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology” 33 deep redemption 84–89 deep resurrection 87 deep revelation 116–121 Derrida, Jacques 94 devotion 13, 14, 140, 141, 143, 145–148, 150, 151, 163, 165, 169, 170 disvalues 144, 145, 147, 148 divine alterity 39, 110, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123; identity of 39, 115, 119; revelation of 115, 123 divine/divinity 6, 7, 9, 10, 12–13, 17, 18, 29, 37–40, 43, 57, 64–68, 70, 80, 92, 110, 112–115, 119, 121, 122, 128, 160–163, 166; Christ 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 30, 39, 41; creativity 29, 30; ecology 158; embodiments 115, 118; expression 1, 6, 38, 42, 58, 64, 69, 71, 153, 159, 162, 163, 165; glory 114–116; identity 37, 43, 108, 111, 112, 119, 131, 163; incarnation 16–18, 31, 33, 111, 112, 114, 116–118, 160, 161, 165, 166; infinity 9, 11, 17, 19, 21, 28, 68, 120, 167; ontology 7, 19; personhood 7, 12; reality 165; revelation 37, 38, 40, 114–117, 120–122, 128; selfexpression 37, 40, 108–110, 116, 118, 120, 121, 128; self-revelation 37, 38; sonship 80; transcendence 127, 154, 155 early Christian soteriology 77, 79, 82 early Christian theology 77, 108 Edwards, Denis 35, 85, 87 Edwards, Rem 11 Epistle to Augustus 80 ethical relations 58, 59, 61, 65, 66, 70, 121–123, 130, 139, 143, 148 ethics 3, 7, 8, 20, 58–71, 83, 88, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 109, 122, 148, 150, 151, 159; limits of 168–172; performance of 99 events of grace 152, 153 evolutionary world 32, 99 face 58–63, 92 face-to-face revelation 110 Feuerbach, Ludwig 9

flesh of Christ 30, 156 freedom 58, 63, 82, 84–86, 92, 93, 125, 126, 131 Gebara, Ivone 96–98 Gibbs, Robert 67 “God and Philosophy” 69 God/world relationship 44, 45, 139, 140 goodness 36, 89, 144–147, 150, 151, 155, 170, 172 Gorman, Michael 82 Gospel of John 20, 110 Gregersen, Niels Henrik 27, 32–35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 85, 108, 116, 117, 119 ground of being 10, 158, 160 Hardwick, Charley 11, 12, 152–154 Heidelberg Disputation 33 hierarchy of being 8, 9, 145 historical debates: resurrecting 40–45 Horace 80 humanity 7, 9, 18, 32–38, 78, 83, 87, 93, 119 Iafrate, Michael 2 identity 30, 31, 40, 41, 43–45, 58, 59, 61, 63, 90, 111, 114, 121 incarnate encounters 1–26; constructive task 14–17; early encounters 2–10 incarnations 8, 17, 18, 27–32, 35–37, 63–68, 78, 84, 116–119, 152, 165, 169; of Christ 8, 96, 152, 153, 159; of divinity 32, 33, 78; doctrine of 8, 10, 17, 18, 21, 27, 29–32, 35, 36, 68; ethics and 58–71; of God 31, 43, 45, 67; idea of 57, 66, 67; language 66, 67; plurality of 167 infinite religious object 156 infinite significance 149, 170–172 infinity 39, 40, 44, 45, 58, 59, 63, 64, 69, 108, 120–128, 158 Jesus and Creativity 14 Jesus Christ 10, 18, 20, 28–31, 33–35, 37–38, 42, 43, 77, 78, 82, 84, 87, 89, 96–99, 111, 114, 117–119; life and death 20, 34, 86 Johnson, Elizabeth 87, 118 Judeo-Christian tradition 71, 92, 112, 129 justice 77, 78, 82, 86–89, 95, 97, 98, 122, 155, 159, 169–171 justification 82, 146, 149, 150

200

Index

Kaufman, Gordan 7, 13–14 knowledge 38, 60, 65, 92, 109, 111, 112, 123, 126, 151 lamentation 145, 171, 172 Larsen, Kasper Bro 111 Lee, Michael 86 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 7, 12, 18, 20, 57, 64–71, 89–95, 121–128, 139 Long, Fred 4 Lopez, Davina 81 materiality 7, 28, 31, 33, 35–36, 57, 64, 154, 156, 157 Matthew 25, 64 mediation 63–68 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 7 Merold Westphal 68 metaphysical anthropocentrism 18, 27, 28, 36–40 monotheism 163, 164, 166–168 moral agency 38, 119, 120 moral ambiguity 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 151 mortality 61–63 Mosaic revelation 114 multi-modal Christology 163–168 multiplicity 44, 45, 157–159, 164, 166, 167 multi-unitary Christology 160–163 mutual transcendence 30, 42 natural events 11 natural evil 85, 87, 144–146, 148, 150 naturalist Christology 18, 21, 155, 159 natural reason 109 natural selection 32–34 nature: cruciform face of 152–160 Nature is Enough 11 Nicholas of Cusa 41, 44, 118, 119 Panksepp, Jaak 126 pantheism 21, 29, 139, 159–164, 167 pentecostalism 4 Peperzak, Adriaan 70 pervasiveness 141–143 phenomena 121–128 physical world 13, 32, 34–36, 67, 95, 117, 139–141 polytheism 14, 21, 139, 160, 163–168 power 3, 59–61, 63, 66, 78, 79, 97, 110, 113, 124, 131, 147, 166 primacy 141–143

public theologies 21, 140, 170, 171 punk music 2 recognition 110–112, 114–116, 124, 155, 156, 158–160, 164, 165, 167; scenes 111, 112, 114 redemption 77–107, 139 redemptive path 143, 149, 164, 166 religion of nature 17, 140, 145–147, 151 religious devotion 17–19, 84, 108, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 155, 162–164, 169, 172; depths of 140–151; object of 10–13, 18–21, 42, 43, 146, 162, 163 religious ecology 139, 141, 143, 159, 160, 162, 164–168, 171 religious life 141, 142, 151, 164 religious myths 15 religious naturalism 10–15, 17, 21, 139–160 religious naturalists 12, 18, 20 religious objects 19, 141–145, 153, 165 responsibility 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 89, 92, 93, 98, 99, 124, 125, 127 revelation 19, 20, 71, 108–138, 161; idea of 108, 110, 113, 116 Rom 6: 12-14 81 root metaphors 14–16, 21 Rue, Loyal 11, 14–17 sacramental communion 28 sacrifice 129, 143, 147–150, 166, 169, 170 salvation 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89–92, 95–98 self-expression 109, 110, 114, 117, 119–124, 129–131 self-incarnation 35, 117 self-sovereignty 91, 92, 149, 164, 165 Sittler, Joseph 32 solidarity 63, 81, 85–88, 92, 93, 97, 125, 130 Son of God 1; see also Jesus Christ soteriology 77, 78, 82–84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95–97 Southgate, Christopher 88 sovereign power 3, 63, 147, 150, 167 space-time 123, 124, 127, 128 spirit of Christ 95, 155, 169 Stone, Jerome 12 “strict sense” incarnation 39 struggle 77, 82, 86, 89, 92, 93, 96, 98, 110–112, 116, 166

Index 201 subjective rationality 110 subjective sense perception 67 subjective sovereignty 58, 91, 92, 122–124, 126–129, 131 subjectivity 58–60, 91, 109, 110, 123, 124 Talmud 66 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 29, 31, 32 Thatamanil, John J. 18 theodicy 32, 36, 141, 143–145, 148–150, 170, 171 Tillich, Paul 10 Totality and Infinity 64, 69 transcendence 39–41, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66–68, 92, 121–123, 128, 154

uniqueness 124, 141, 143 unity 30, 31, 41, 44, 45, 156, 157, 159–162, 166–168 value 8, 9, 12, 15, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151–153 Vedder, Eddie 2 violence 6, 32, 33, 61, 63, 79, 92, 97, 131, 141, 144, 148, 149, 169–171 The Visible and Invisible 7 Wallace, Mark 113 world of creatures 31, 99 xenophanes 9, 17, 39