God and the Meaning of Matter: Theological Engagements with the New Materialisms

Abstract

Post-structuralism and feminism have been uneasy allies in feminism’s third wave. Critics of feminism’s cultural turn are calling for a critical theory and emancipatory politics that takes materiality as its starting point, without losing the central insights gained in radical attention to the operation of power through language. This thesis explores the promise of the “new materialist” turn for addressing the crisis of post-structural emancipatory politics, and seeks a theological engagement with the ontological propositions of some central figures implicated in this theoretical shift, including Diana Coole and Karen Barad. Taking up Jane Bennett’s argument that Christianity is inherently dualistic and that divine transcendence supports a life/matter binary, this thesis uses Rowan Williams’s articulation of the doctrine of creation to respond to the implication that the Christian understanding of divine transcendence is incompatible with non-dichotomous accounts of culture and nature or meaning and matter. The doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine transcendence (which assert a fundamental dichotomy, rather than a dualism, between God and creation) prompt us to think of creation as a material, finite, and vital whole. Williams’s theology of language moreover suggests that reflection on the non-dichotomy of matter and meaning may be one way into a reflection on the existence of a transcendent God.