| This dissertation invokes a Christian constructive theological agapology. It addresses how the misconstrual of love in the dichotomy between agape and eros lets us fall into estrangement between the divine and the creaturely love, God and the world, with a concurrent devaluation of nature, women, and the body. In the theological discourses based on the anthropocentric, patriarchal, and imperial notion of God in classical theism and the modern Western thinking-subject, love is described as giving something. However, Love is here construed as the stream of a theo-cosmic force of life that is poured out by the Spirit of life and runs through every planetary subject that inhabiting the planet. In the human ethical dimension, love is a kenotic responsibility that is a self-limitation and opens a space for life within the self on behalf of the other, participating in the compassion, communication, and life of the triune God manifest in the cross of Christ. Kenotic love therefore precedes and envelops giving love, because benevolent action without kenosis often turns out to be the egocentric and colonizing process of a dominating power. Kenotic love lets the theo-cosmic love counter-apocalyptically flow through the self and the creation toward more fullness of God's love in all. God and the world are interconnected through the mystery of (im)possible love in a cadence at once pneumatological and eschatological. With a poststructural, postcolonial, and ecological critique of globalization, of our market-centered society, and of the epistemic violence heightened by interne and information technology, this dissertation theorizes a just and aesthetic love for every ethical singularity. Planetarity is introduced as a new paradigm and value with which to overwrite globality, locality, and ecology. The arguments proceed through engagements of Jurgen Moltmann, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Catherine Keller, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and through integrating biblical, trinitarian, cosmological, ecofeminist, and socio-political horizons. This dissertation advocates a planetary theology of love as a robust, prophetic theological response for the integrity of life and the planetary community of life. It also proposes new possibilities of theology through an Asian conception of love and on the analogy of love, of 'love seeking understanding.'. |
