God Being Nothing

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of "theogony,” "cosmogony,” and "anthropogony”--an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book’s ultimate import is that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closure--something that every orthodox theology requires--thus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart’s insights open the potencies of "the nothing” to the actualization of freedom--the freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothing--it is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend.