God Being Nothing

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.

Ray L. Hart is professor emeritus of religion and theology at Boston University. His books include Unfinished Man and the Imagination and Religious and Theological Studies in American Higher Education.

— Cyril O’Regan, University of Notre Dame

— Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

— David Tracy, University of Chicago Divinity School

— Choice