Foreign thinker
Catherine Keller
Catherine KellerConstructive Theology, Process Theology, and Feminist TheologyAmericanb. 1953
Life and Thought
Catherine Keller (born 1953) is an American theologian and Professor of Constructive Theology in the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. Combining process theology, feminist theory, and poststructuralism, her book Face of the Deep offered a fundamental critique of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and proposed a theology grounded in becoming and in the world's entanglement with the divine.
Catherine Keller was born in 1953 in the United States. She studied at Eden Theological Seminary, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and finally at Claremont Graduate School — the principal center of process theology in America. Keller is now the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University, where she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology.
Keller regards herself as a "constructive" theologian: one who, rather than merely interpreting tradition, seeks to rebuild theological concepts in light of contemporary questions. Her work revolves around three axes: social and ecological justice, poststructuralist theory, and feminist readings of scripture and theological tradition.
Her most significant work, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003), centers on the Hebrew word tehom ("the deep") in the second verse of Genesis. Keller argues that the orthodox doctrine of creation ex nihilo is not a reading of the text itself but a later construction that erased the chaotic primordial deep from the text and opened the way to a conception of God as omnipotent, transcendent, and detached — a conception she links to patriarchal and hierarchical structures of power. In its place she proposes a "tehomic theology": creation not from nothing but from a boundless and indeterminate deep, and a God intertwined with that deep, in process and in interaction with the world. In this book she draws on Whitehead and process theology, Kabbalistic mysticism, negative theology, and also on Derrida, Deleuze, and Irigaray.
Her other major works include Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (1996), God and Power (2005), On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (2008), Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2015), Political Theology of the Earth (2018), and Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (2021). In her later work, her focus has increasingly turned to the climate crisis and its theological and political implications. Since the turn of the millennium, Keller has also served as executive director of the Drew University Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, which has yielded numerous edited anthologies.