A God We Could Believe In
by Rosemary Radford Ruether
Our creation stories define what kind of creator gods we believe in. The God of patriarchal monotheism was defined by a dualistic, hierarchical universe. Reality was divided between spirit and matter, mind and body, and the power of the first to rule over the second. God was a disembodied male Ego who dwelt in the transcendent spiritual realm and shaped the bodily realm from beyond. Whether this God made the universe from some preexistent unformed "matter" or out of God's own substance is the unresolved dilemma of monotheistic creation theology, but the assumption is that the embodied world is radically "other" and under the dominion of its patriarchal "creator."
Today science is giving us a very different creation story, although also one that emerges through historical stages. But these historical stages are now vastly longer -- fifteen billion years, not six thousand -- and the universe that emerges is vastly larger: hundreds of billions of galaxies, not one solar system. This universe story finds its most evocative telling as a moral and aesthetic drama, not just a scientific one, in Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's The Universe Story (1992). Is it possible to speak of God in relation to this universe story? Significantly the term "God" is never used by its authors, who instead refer to "deities."
Swimme and Berry define a number of basic principles for this creation story. There is no "outside" of this emerging universe. From the original "flaring forth" comes all the energy that will ever exist in the entire course of its unfolding. It creates space and time as its unfolds. There is no place for a deity "outside" from which to shape it. It itself is the self-organizing energy that generates its own ongoing process: a process not of a smooth flow, but rather of dramatic self-destructions from which emerge new creative configurations. Yet the unfolding is exactly calibrated: the tiniest instance either slower or faster, and all would have been wholly different or nothing at all.
Three interacting processes define each emerging stage of the universe: differentiation, autopoiesis, and communion. Each stage of emergence is shaped by a process of rapid diversification balanced by self-generating creativity of each of the entities, which exist in an interconnection that relates them to each other from subatomic to universal levels. This dialectical trinitarian process has prompted one Latin American ecofeminist theologian, Ivone Gebara, to suggest that this should be the way to make sense of the Christian concept of God as trinity.
Yet if this self-organizing, differentiating, and interconnecting process is God, it is not the God of dominion from outside, but a deity who is wholly internal to the process of creativity through death and re-creation itself. This idea seems incompatible with patriarchal monotheism, yet it is one suggested by St. Paul's famous evocation of the "unknown God" as the one "in whom we live, and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). It is a God who both sustains what is and yet is endlessly transformative, opening up new possibilities; a God that transcends the split of subject and object to embrace all that was, is and may be; a God who connects us with the whole universe in its fifteen-billion-year unfolding, and yet also calls us to stand shoulder to shoulder to resist the systems of economic, social, and military violence that are threatening the very basis of planetary life. This could be a God we could believe in.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is professor emerita from Garrett Theological Seminary and from the Graduate Theological Union. She currently teaches at the Claremont Graduate University. She is author or editor of forty-six books and numerous articles on religion and social issues.
Radford Ruether, Rosmary. 2010. A God We Could Believe In. Tikkun 25(2):55 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010ruether
