¹ Mircea Eliade has explored this theme in mythologies of diverse religious traditions; see his Patterns of Comparative Religion (New York: New American Library, 1958) 188–215Google Scholar . Berger, Peter L. discusses the place of chaos in traditional religious symbolism in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1969) 26–27Google Scholar , 39-40 . Anderson, Bernard W. treats the subject in the Judeo-Christian context; see his Creation Versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987)Google Scholar.

² Rumrich, John Peter, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1987) 3.Google Scholar

³ Boehme, Jacob, The Way to Christ (trans. Erb, Peter; New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 18, 24, 178–81.Google Scholar

⁴ Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 49–92.Google Scholar

⁵ In general the Christian tradition has been less likely than others to accord chaos a positive function. For this reason, we would do well to learn from such traditions as the Taoist, in which the concept of chaos (hun-tun) has played a central philosophical role, and the Buddhist, in which the notion of emptiness (sunyata) has been most fully developed. For a full discussion of the role of the concept of chaos in Taoist thought, see N. J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The notion of sunyata has a long heritage in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. For a treatment of the concept by a modern Buddhist philosopher, see Nishitani's, KeifiReligion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar . In the present article, I have borrowed from the notions of hun-tun and sunyata to construct my concepts of chaos and emptiness, yet important differences do remain (see nn. 15, 39, 48). Thus, this essay is not designed to provide an inclusive theology that incorporates Christian and Eastern concepts, although it does furnish common ground which may point to one way in which such a theology could be constructed.

⁶ To name just a few instances: Charles Dyke has applied the insights of chaos theory to the discipline of history in his article “Strange Attraction, Curious Liaison: Clio Meets Chaos,” Philosophical Forum 21 (1990) 369–92Google Scholar ; Barnsley's, MichailFractals Everywhere (Boston: Academic Press, 1988Google Scholar ) explores the artistic possibilities of fractal geometry; and Katherine Hayles has correlated chaos theory with deconstructionism in her article “Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science,” New Literary History 20 (1989) 305–22Google Scholar . Each of these is briefly discussed by Steenburg, David in “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” HTR 84 (1992) 447–66Google Scholar.

⁷ , Steenburg, “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 447–66.Google Scholar

⁸ Poole, Robert, “Chaos Theory: How Big an Advance?” Science 245 (1989) 26–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁹ , Steenburg, “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 448 n. 3.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For such a discussion of emptiness see Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (trans. Dych, William V.; New York: Seabury, 1978) 33–34Google Scholar ; Tillich, Paul employed “non-being” as the opposite of being in Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963) 1. 187–99Google Scholar ; finally, Karl Barth defined the concept of nothingness as that which is in opposition and resistance to God's dominion of the world; see Church Dogmatics, vol. 3 : The Doctrine of Creation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960) part 3. 209–368Google Scholar.

¹¹ Kaufman, Gordon, An Essay on Theological Method (1975; rev. ed.; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979).Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., 44.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ This marks a significant difference between my notion of emptiness and the Mahayana Buddhist concept of sunyata: I utilize “emptiness” as a limiting concept that designates all that is beyond human experience, and thus we can only arrive at the concept indirectly. For Buddhists sunyata is the term that describes the transience of all phenomena. Although this truth goes unrecognized by the majority of people, who are mired in ignorance and sloth, through proper training and rigorous practice it can be directly realized. While it is an experience that only a select few have actualized, it is, nonetheless, something within the grasp of all of us.

¹⁶ , Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 44.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid., 47.

¹⁸ Ibid., 48.

¹⁹ Ibid., 49.

²⁰ Ibid., 45.

²¹ Ibid., 51.

²² Ibid., 76.

²³ The “butterfly effect” is given this name because, in theory, a butterfly flying over Tokyo may initiate a chain of events which eventually produces a storm over New York City. The more technical designation for the principle is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” See Gleick, James, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987) 8Google Scholar.

²⁴ , Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 13.Google Scholar

²⁵ Ibid., 7.

²⁶ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) 1. §373.Google Scholar

²⁷ , Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 9.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 46.

²⁹ Ibid., 43.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Liberation theologians have not been the only ones to develop the theological possibili-ties of chaos and emptiness. Any theology that emphasizes either the absolute mystery of God or the presence of God in a plurality of experiences is basically one that draws its strength from these concepts. Karl Rahner was such a theologian. He defined transcendental experience as the subjective, unthematic, and unfailing consciousness of the knowing subject that is co-present in every spiritual act of knowledge. This experiential knowledge is always present; it is operative in all the multiplicities of cares, concerns, and hopes of the everyday world. Such “original knowledge” may thus be said to be the foundation of our world, but not in our world as we construct it. To arrive at an understanding of the nature of this knowledge, one may begin with a concept of the world, but the locus of God is where the individual experiencing self opens up to the infinity of all being (, Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 20–35).Google Scholar

³² Segundo, Juan Luis, The Liberation of Theology (trans. Drury, John; New York: Maryknoll, 1976) 81–90.Google Scholar

³³ Chopp, Rebecca S., The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God (New York: Cross-road, 1989) 15.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid., 23.

³⁵ Ibid., 25.

³⁶ Ibid., 27.

³⁷ Ibid., 28.

³⁸ , Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 45.Google Scholar

³⁹ This notion of the paradoxical interplay of the world and emptiness is similar to the teachings of the Madhyamika Buddhist tradition, in which reality is held to be both not-existent and not-inexistent. For an introduction to this school of Buddhist thought, see Robinson, Richard H., Early Madhyamika in India and China (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Niebuhr, H. Richard, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, with Supplementary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 25.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 28.

⁴² Ibid., 122.

⁴³ Ibid., 32.

⁴⁴ There are other words in our language that act in this fashion: “sheep” and “deer,” for example. Furthermore, considering God as simultaneously singular and plural is not as foreign to the Christian tradition as one might initially think. After all, there is a long trinitarian heritage in the tradition. What I am suggesting, however, is much more radical, for in my model God must be viewed as the infinite, all-embracing, and thus radically polytheistic one.

⁴⁵ , Chopp, The Power to Speak, 23.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ibid., 30.

⁴⁷ Cobb, John B. Jr, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Christian God,” JAAR 45 (1977) 15.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Both Cobb and I owe our understandings of the concept of emptiness to the Buddhist notion of sunyata, although we emphasize slightly different aspects. He bases (Ibid., 14–16) his concept of the Buddhist notion of dependent co-origination on an interpretation by Alfred North Whitehead. Everything is thus empty in that the aggregate parts of every whole are in continual flux. The emphasis is on the inability to identify any particular elements as stationary parts of a particular whole. I, however, have stressed the ultimate emptiness of even the most fundamental parts. This step-by-step reduction from whole to part parallels the method of division found in the Satyasiddhisastra (Treatise on the Completion of Truth), in which all objects are reduced to molecules, then particles, then atoms, and finally, in one last great leap, to emptiness.

Other aspects of my methodology also have precedents in the Buddhist tradition. For instance, both a critique of concepts of order and a stress on the ultimate value of all phenomenal manifestations of existence were foundational concepts of the sixth-century CE Chinese Buddhist group known as San-chieh-chiao (Sect of the Three Stages).

⁴⁹ , Cobb, “Buddhist Emptiness and the Christian God,” 17.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ , Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 56.Google Scholar

⁵² , Steenburg, “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 462–64.Google Scholar

⁵³ Stewart, Ian, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos (London: Penguin, 1990) 2.Google Scholar