Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-298) and index.

Part I: Creation now and then -- Mystery of the missing chaos -- "Floods of truth": sex, love and loathing of the deep -- Part II: Orthodoxies of nothing -- "Tears of Achamoth": the fathers' ex nihilo -- "Mother most dear": Augustine's dark secrets -- "Sterile waters": Barth's nothingness that is -- Part III: Monsters of hermeneutics -- "Sea of heteroglossia": return of the biblical chaos -- "Recesses of the deep": Job's comi-cosmic epiphany -- "Leviathanic revelations": Melville's hermenautical journey -- Part IV: Creatio ex profundis -- Bottomless surface: when beginning bereshit -- The pluri-singularity of creation: created God bara elohim -- Strange attractions: formless and void tohu vabohu -- Docta ignorantia: darkness on the face pne choshekh -- Ocean of divinity: deep tehom -- Pneumatic foam: spirir vibrating ruach elohim merahephet.

"Face of the Deep is the full theology of creation from the primal chaos. It proposes a creation ex profundis - creation out of the watery depths - both as an alternative to the orthodox power-discourse of creation from nothingness, and as a figure of the bottomless process of becoming." "From within a dangerous and crowded postmodernity, Catherine Keller's impassioned, graceful meditation opens up an ultimately hopeful space within the magnetic depths of cosmic origin. As a landmark work of immense significance for Jewish and Christian theology, gender studies, literature, philosophy and ecology, Face of the Deep stretches our originary story to profound new horizons, rewriting the starting point for western spiritual discourse."

Description based on print version record.