These quotations are taken from Catherine Keller's 2008 book On the Mystery.
"Theists and atheists more often than not share the same smug concept of God. For example, they presume that what we call God is omnipotent and good, that He proved his love by sending His only Son to die for us...
Can we stop right there?
Do you see how loaded with presuppositions just that little sentence is: it presumes that love and dominance work smoothly together, and that nothing that happens to us, however horrible, happens apart from the will of God. It presumes that divinity should be addressed as 'He'. It presumes a Christian monopoly on the truth. Moreover, most folk will assume that these presuppositions are simple 'biblical'. Yet there is, for example, no biblical term for 'omnipotence'. The closest notion, 'the Almighty', is actually a mistranslation of El Shaddai, 'God of the Mountain' - literally in Hebrew 'the Breasted One'!"
"Revelation is not the dictation of some unquestionable piece of knowledge. Rather, it resists knowledge in that sense, the top-down knowledge that masters its objects, that confers power on those who possess it: what the cultural critic Michel Foucault calls 'knowledge/power'. How ironic that Christian theology would become the ideology of the rules. Even now."
"Theology is not better or truer than other disciplines of thought. Indeed, it has over its complex and conflictual history legitimated more violence than any other -ology.
Those who involve themselves in theological questions seek wisdom only as we relinquish any pretense of innocence. Wisdom has always already outgrown innocence. The biblical prototype - the divine Sophia - precedes all creation, after all (Prov. 8:22-23)."
"Often what is called 'mystery' (as in 'Don't ask questions, it is a holy mystery') is mere mystification, used to camouflage the power drives of those who don't want to be questioned."
"Process... means becoming: it signifies the intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being - but an immeasurable becoming. Indeed the word genesis in Greek means 'becoming'."
"The traditional unchangeables of God may prove to be points of theological fixation rather than fixities of a divine nature. They may be the false fronts of our cultural immobilities: 'God as Unchangeable Absolute' functions as 'Sanctioner of the Status Quo' - even if that status quo is unjust and unsustainable."
"Putting theology in process means freeing it from a deadly mirror game I will call the binary of the absolute and the dissolute. In this polarization, the desire for absolute certainty reacts against the fear of a nihilistic dissolution, a relativism indifferent to meaning and morality."
"This book proposes a way for theology to avoid the garish neon light of absolute truth-claims, which wash out our vital differences. Yet this way will just as firmly elude the opaque darkness of the casual nihilism that pervades our culture - the 'whatever' of indifference."
"Mystery is not a stagnant pool but a flowing infinity."
And that's just the prologue! This book is truly an ocean of treasures!
