Theologies of Creation
(In this paper I explore the theologies of creation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Catherine Keller. How do their theologies of creation compare and contrast?)
It was the beginning of the Third Reich when a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer graced the halls of Grosser Saal of Unter den Linden to lecture on the beginning–the genesis of creation. Over the next several months of his lectures, discontent, mass revolts by Nazis, and an ushering of Adolf Hitler disrupted Germany; for the nation state it was a new beginning (albeit one they would regret). In addition to the time when Bonhoeffer delivered these lectures on the book of Genesis, within three weeks of his dictatorship, Hitler opened the first concentration camp for enemies of the state. A decade after these lectures on the beginning of creation, Bonhoeffer would eventually find his end by being executed as an enemy of the state by the Nazis. These lectures were truly not just about the beginning but a beginning–a beginning for Bonhoeffer, Germany, the capacity for evil in humanity. Yet in the face of these new beginnings, Bonhoeffer found it fitting to reflect, perhaps because of the hope found within the narrative, upon the genesis of creation.
In some sense that beginning seems strikingly different from our present beginning. Yet, it also feels far too eerily similar. In the wake of the emergence of process theology, post-structuralism, feminism, queer studies, new revelations in physics, and much more, Catherine Keller materializes to offer hope for our new beginnings in the face of rampant oppression, inequality, and ecological destruction by reflecting on the first beginnings, the genesis of creation, just as Bonhoeffer did over 70 years prior. Just as Bonhoeffer found reflection upon the creation narratives apropos in the wake up of the rise of the Third Reich, Keller finds it befitting to dive deep (pun intended) into the tehom of Genesis 1:2 in her acclaimed book The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming.
In this paper I will compare the theologies of creation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Catherine Keller. While I will assuredly exhaustively analyze their differences, I will also extract the few commonalities in their theologies of creation. More specifically I will contrast their differences in metaphysics and ontologies of God and creation, understandings of tehom, and compare the similarities in their theology of imago Dei.