Enfleshing Cosmos and Earth: An Ecological Theology of Divine Incarnation

Building and expanding upon contemporary Christologies of deep incarnation, this thesis re-imagines the doctrine of Incarnation and the depth of the ontic unity between God and materiality. While contemporary deep incarnation Christologies have contributed much to contemporary theology, I suggest that there are nevertheless shortcomings within the paradigm as it is predominantly understood today. My aim in this work is to deconstruct the anthropocentric impulse that drives much of today’s deep incarnation theologies, calling this bias into question beyond previous critiques. I set about this task by using a posthumanist reading of Emmanuel Levinas to critique and re-imagine the idea of deep incarnation Christology, arguing that Jesus of Nazareth is a paradigm for an ontic unity between divinity and materiality that extends deeper than the unity between God and humanity. I argue that God, Earth, and the rest of the cosmos mixes and blends, forming an inseparable, albeit non-reductive unity. In this panincarnate religious ecology, humans encounter God in all things within a temporal matrix that unfolds prior to the awakening of the subjective horizon, in an affective and sensuous space that exists prior to and in-spires the possibility of theological thought. God, in this thesis, is not understood as simply mediated in the flesh of bodies, nor united to materiality as a distinct, personal agency existing beyond the confines of Earth and the rest of the cosmos. Instead, the incarnate God is inseparable from materiality, expressing as a plurality of material bodies in a way that simultaneously preserves divine infinity. Such divinity, insofar as God is irreducible to any one expressive form, escapes the singularities which it incarnates in an event of radical kenosis where the divinity of any one is always called into question by the divinity of another. God is thus finally envisioned as the power of an-archy, calling the sovereignty of any singular power into question in an existence that paradoxically embraces and yet transcends all materiality.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD