It would be impossible to do justice to recent theological conversation about creation and creativity without giving serious attention to the offerings of process theology. Characterised by a privileging of creativity within both the world and the godhead, and offering an attractive connection between human and divine creativity, process theology provides what seems to be a promising avenue for the theological work required. Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep represents the most compelling and influential recent articulation of a process theology of creation and creativity. Its careful, daring, and imaginative engagement with scripture, and the literary and philosophical traditions presents the best of the process theological tradition. By a close examination of Keller’s Face of the Deep, however, I demonstrate how, despite its manifest attractions to a theology of mythopoiesis, Keller’s process theology is unable to account for the novum of human making while preserving the witness of the creedal tradition of Christian faith or falling into a dangerous nihilism.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

By distancing creation from nature Christianity rejected freer notions of nature as pagan or pantheist, while imposing a gender hierarchy that rivaled in orthodox fixity creation-from-nothing. Despite the advance of scientific rationalism, Enlightenment culture did not overthrow Christian gender hierarchy. While the ecofeminist movement seized on the liberation of women to bring about ecological change, its agenda stagnated when its activism decreased. Applying a critical-theological reading, this article sees gender hierarchy as subtly read into the Christian exegesis of Genesis rather than flowing from biblical revelation. Acknowledging our current culture as interreligious, it points to two movements forwards, pertaining to gender and creation. First, by locating gender roles in the Trinity, we can loosen the ties with creation and link them to the issue of difference. Second, based on the medieval theological parallelism of nature and scripture one can argue that, in an era where scriptural literacy has lost much of its force, nature can assume a prophetic role. This allows us to reconceive the nature complex insofar as it calls not only for the unity of all creatures as well as of all genders, but ultimately also for the unity of creation with the Creator, what Eriugena called, the unity of all natures.