21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

than just ‘nothingness’) is always attempting to gain a foothold in human life. We need to be doing a bit of work to keep order in place and chaos at bay.

Grace Jantzen, from whom more will be heard in later chapters, contrasts the usual word for a person — ‘mortal’ — with ‘natal’. In suggesting this name, she is asking us to consider: Are we beginning just to die or are we born in order to become?

Theologian Catherine Keller has written extensively over this contrast of something out of nothing and order out of chaos. She says:

‘Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet laboured and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed “in the beginning”. But if such talk-talk of the beginning at the end has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of becoming, then theology had better get out of its own way.’

Catherine Keller — Face of the Deep — A Theology of Becoming.

Keller goes on to talk of becoming as a process emerging from chaos:

‘If we discern a third space of beginning — neither pure origin nor nihilist flux — its difference translates into another interstitial space; that between the self-presence of a changeless being who somehow suddenly (back then) created; and the pure nonbeing out of

32