can be traced to von Rad’s (1966: 131–143) exclusion of creation theology from Israel’s earliest formulations of its faith. (Brueggemann later modified his position on this; 1997: 159–164.) Gunton (1993: 22–24) has shown, in the context of Greek philosophy, how the attempt to understand the world as a unity, in a challenge to the plurality of traditional gods, gave rise to the danger of seeing ‘god’ simply as ‘an unchanging principle of order’. In politics, a ‘unitary deity, whether theist or deist,