Description: In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine. God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question: How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God's self-revelation in history is ongoing, when the active manifestation of God is still occurring?
Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. The book's ultimate implication is that Being and Nonbeing mutually participate in an ongoing process of divine coming-to-birth and dying that implicates all things, existent and nonexistent, temporal and eternal. God's continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create ex nihilo.Brief description: Ray L. Hart is professor emeritus of religion and theology at Boston University.
Review Quotes: "God Being Nothing reveals Hart's creative mind at work fashioning an alternative to confessional theologies and pallid forms of theological liberalism--his intelligence is obvious, his mastery of the complex material even more so. Bringing us both back to a moment in theology before the deconstructive turn and forward with an anchoring realism in language, God Being Nothing is a much anticipated and eminently readable book."--Cyril O'Regan, University of Notre Dame