Modern Theology 30:4 October 2014 DOI: 10.1111/moth.

12132
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

RESPONSE TO REVIEWERS OF GOD,

SEXUALITY AND THE SELF

SARAH COAKLEY

My first task in this response is to express profound gratitude to my five

reviewers and interlocutors for the care and insight that they have displayed
in their reviews and assessments of God, Sexuality and the Self (hereafter,
GSS). I shall do my best in what follows to answer some of their concerns.
1. Lacunae. An obvious first response to some of their queries is thatas
the reviewers themselves realizeI plan to deal with substantial theological
matters which are only lightly sketched in this first volume in later parts of
the systematics (four slim volumes are planned in all, if life and health
endure): so, to put it in the languid terms of a well-known poem by Robert
Graves (A Welsh Incident): I was coming to that. Let me however specify
just some of these lacunae for which I already have plans in the remaining
volumes, so that I can then move on to the more substantial issues raised
about vol. 1 itself.1
First, Rogers raises the important issue that my Christology appears muted
in this volume, at least in comparison with the primary emphasis on the role
of the Spirit within the Trinity. Does the incarnation of the Word in Jesus of
Nazareth play a critical role, he asks, or is it just a signal instance of the
making christoform that the Spirit always works?2 He goes on, presciently:
Perhaps Coakley will say that only after we train our eyes to see Christ in our
neighbour are we really able to see Christ anew in Jesus,3 and here he already
supplies a partial answer to his own question. Yes, I am entirely aware of the

Sarah Coakley
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9BS, UK
Email: sc545@cam.ac.uk
1
I shall here reiterate some points made lightly in GSS about the unfolding of the systematics
and why I have chosen to deal with both classic and novel loci in the order that I do. See GSS,
xivxv, and ch. 2, esp. 8892.
2
Eugene Rogers, Prayer, Christoformity, and Herself, page 552560.
3
Rogers, Prayer, Christoformity, and Herself, page 552560.

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592 Sarah Coakley

apparent oddity (especially to any modern, Barthian reader) of a systematic

venture which does not start from a fully-fledged Christology. But the order-
ing of my systematic venture here is entirely strategic and intentional, follow-
ing implicitlyalthough of course in infinitely more modest compassthe
older exitus-reditus pattern of Aquinass Summa. I begin in vol. 1 with God the
Trinity and our incorporation into the life of God through the Spirits trans-
formative interruption in contemplation and in ecstatic response to the
Other. I then move on in the diptych of vols. 2 and 3 to the doctrine of the
human itself (the anthropology), in all its moral ambiguity: its tragic con-
striction through sin and blindness (misdirected desire, idolatry) on the one
hand, and yet its capacity for renewal and regeneration through the sacrificial
and atoning death of Jesus, and the slow, graced, recovery of spiritual sense,
on the other. Vol. 3 will give particular attention to these anthropological
themes as they are worked out in the public realm of the polis and the
institutional realm of the church, while vol. 2 will focus more on the indi-
vidual epistemological implications of sin and redemption. Only then in the
last volume, vol. 4, will I attempt my formal Christology as such (for here God
and the human uniquely intersect); and this Christology will be worked out
within the lived, liturgical context of a theology of the eucharist. In short, the
delayed Christology dares to follow a pattern well-known from the opening
sections of Thomass Tertia Pars: everything that goes before it implies it, and
everything that is unfolded within it has a form of retroactive verification.4 So
I plead guilty to Rogerss current critique; but I also plead forethought and
intent! To be sure, some of the distinctive christological themes that I shall take
up in vol. 4 are already sketched in some preparatory published essays,5 but
my main interest in vol. 1 is deliberately to destabilize any complacent sense
that we can get our hands around Jesus without prior pneumatological
displacement.
In similar vein, I must respond to Bordeianus request for a richer account
of ecclesiology, and Hilkerts rightful insistence that I provide a clearer analy-
sis of the economic and political dimensions of church and society (and their
relation), by pointing forward to the planned contents of these future
volumes. Hilkert would also, understandably, like to see me place my
account of contemplation and gender within a wider discussion of liturgy
and its public enactment, a matter on which I have also so far delivered only
hints half-guessed;6 so again I thank my readers for their promptings.

4
See Aquinas, ST III, Prologus.
5
See, esp., The Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor, in eds. Beverly
Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays, Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 30119.
6
See, e.g., The Woman at the Altar: Cosmological Disturbance or Gender Fluidity?, The
Anglican Theological Review 86 (2004), 7593; and Beyond Belief: Liturgy and the Cognitive
Apprehension of God, in eds. Tom Greggs, Rachel Muers and Simeon Zahl, The Vocation of
Theology Today (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 13045.

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 Response to Reviewers of God, Sexuality and the Self 593

Perhaps the important thing here is to stress again that the arrangement of
classic systematic loci in this book and its successors is deliberately freed up
from standard modern arrangements: I deliberately superimpose a number
of traditional loci (God/Trinity, prayer, revelation, pneumatology, and ele-
ments of ecclesiology in vol. 1) onto one another within the course of each
volume; but at the same time I cumulatively add new ones (gender in vol. 1,
race and class in vols. 2 and 3, for instance), even though none of these issues
can ultimately be disentangled from one another in the complete vision.
Thus, while my broader structure is more redolent of the scholastic exitus-
reditus scheme of Aquinas, the individual orderings of topics is perhaps more
reminiscent of Schleiermachers expressed freedom to follow an unpacking
of contemporary ecclesial concerns. But my project cannot be exactly equated
with either of them, as will be obvious (see again GSS, chs 1 and 2).
2. Contemplation and Its Implications. Both Rogers and Hilkert ask a number
of probing questions about the place and role of contemplation in my
systematic task. I must give a certain pride of place to answering these
queries here, albeit briefly, since the claims I make about contemplation in
GSS are clearly vital to the whole vision of systematic theology I am essaying
and perhaps constitute its most controversial dimension.7 Hilkert simply asks
about . . . what constitutes right contemplation, to whom it is available, and
how wordless contemplative prayer intersects with . . . study, radical atten-
tion to the neighbour in need, and communal worship and celebration.8 And
whose side is it on in the church, she adds, if kneeling theology can be so
happily co-opted in favour of magisterial conservatism? Rogers raises a
cluster of related questions about the supposed litism of contemplation, its
possible tilt towards Pelagianism, the problem of its relation to other forms of
prayer (especially intercession), its presumed connection to a theology of
experience, and the particular problems raised for LGBT folk by lifting the
lid on the sexual unconscious in the way that this form of prayer does
especially when conservative elements in the churches are urging them pre-
cisely to force that lid down again.
Let me therefore insist once more: in defining contemplation as prayer or
communing with God that . . . rests in silence or near silence (GSS, 346), I
deliberately open the door to a wide range of practices of un-mastery, or of
willed submission to the Spirit, and explicitly deny that contemplation is
either an litist or arcane act, but rather an undertaking of radical
attention to the Real which is open to all who seek to foster it (GSS, 88).

7
I do deal with most of these issues in GSS, but perhaps too fleetingly (the index, under
Contemplation, supplies the references); and I particularly refer the reader to my discussion of
John Chapmans spiritual direction of contemplatives in Power and Submissions (Oxford, Black-
well, 2002), ch. 2. In what follows here I am obviously drawing on a variety of sources from the
Christian tradition, especially the Carmelites and their modern interpreters, who will be the
focus in my promised vol. 2.
8
Mary Catherine Hilkert, Desire, Gender, and God-Talk, page 575581.

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594 Sarah Coakley

In fact one might say that anti-Pelagianism is its defining feature; any false
sense of human control immediately undercuts its divine workings. As John
of the Cross himself insists in The Dark Night, book 1, the call to such a simple
wasting of time before God comes to most, if not all, Christians who
seriously seek God, and often quite early in their journey; but they may not
easily recognize its signs, not least because the intellects facing a blank
(Dom Sebastian Moores memorable phrase) initially seems so preposter-
ously weird and unproductive.9 Yet many peoplerich, poor, advantaged
and disadvantaged (according to Luke, Jesus promises that the poor here are
uniquely advantaged: only consider the Magnificat)are indeed drawn into
such activity through multiply varied and unexpected interruptions of the
Spirit; and this may include those who do not yet confess Christ or even
know initially where they are being led. The Spirit does indeed blow where
it wills, as Rogers rightly reminds us, and blows in the most unexpected
places. I take that as read.
But the problem, as Rogers also so rightly underscores, is that this prac-
tice over time comes with what we might call a government health
warning, potentially costing, as T. S. Eliot once put it, not less than every-
thing. This is because, amongst other things (and as many exponents in
the tradition testify), it rapidly launches one into a maelstrom of conflicting
desires, including of course erotic desires, demanding that they somehow
be sorted and purified in the divine light;10 it also painfully hollows out,
over time, an attention to the suffering or marginalized other (in the light
of its peculiar attention to the divine Other), which goes beyond any fiat
of mere political goodwill. At the same time, its effect on study and rational
reflection, perhaps unnoticed at first, is curiously releasing and transforma-
tive: it is as if consciousness and reason itself were being slowly and cre-
atively expanded in the Spirit: hence theology in via. And that is why this
practice (to answer some of Hilkerts queries) is at least potentially capable
of creatively destabilizing expected political diremptions between liberal
and conservative parties in the churches: it can change the conversation, if
space is allowed for its special form of mutual-attention-in-God. (Of course,
if that space is foreclosed, then the predictable battle-lines reform: it is the
easiest thing in the world not to heed the divine invitation to this special
form of un-mastery.)

9
But many forms of simple gazing, attending or waiting on God, or of charismatic resting in
the Spirit, also take this un-mastering form. One of the main problems here is a semantic one:
contemplation can be defined either as acquired (Augustine Bakers term) or infused; the
tendency, however, to make these two possibilities disjunct, and to restrict contemplation to a
spiritual lite, was to be a modern Western development which John of the Cross would himself
have found puzzling.
10
By purification of desire I emphatically do not mean repression of non-straight desire;
contemplative purgation in this sense invites precisely a demanding way beyond the false
modern alternatives of repression and libertinism, as GSS repeatedly stresses.

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 Response to Reviewers of God, Sexuality and the Self 595

But how do we know all this? Are we talking about an experience, then
(so Rogers query), that somehow provides raw data for epistemically-
validated outcomes? This simplistic conclusion I resist,11 since to speak of
contemplation, so described, as an experience already misleads, as if it
were a Jamesian event that could be isolated out for inspection, or a subjec-
tive consciousness purely individual, without subtle implications and conse-
quences for a wider community and an ongoing tradition of interpretation. It
might thus be better to describe contemplation as an activity than an experi-
ence (strictly speaking a divine activity but one willingly consented to
humanly). And its relation to an existing web of scriptural and other authori-
ties remains complex and endlessly renegotiated: it is neither wholly manu-
factured by those authorities (witness its elements of surprise, and its
capacity to draw non-believers into its train); nor can it be sustained
without some significant relation to a tradition, both hermeneutical and
intra-personal. What may initially seem a lonely enterprise, however, rapidly
turns out to be the least lonely activity imaginable, an ever-deepening inti-
macy in the mystical body in which the boundaries of selfhood are mys-
teriously expanded.
Finally, what has this all to do with petition and intercession? After all,
Jesus gave his followers some very specific things to ask for when they asked
him how to pray (Matt. 6:713), and does not this elusive talk of contem-
plation obfuscate and unnecessarily complicate his entirely practical instruc-
tions? Further, is not Pauls account of inchoate prayer in the Spirit in Romans
8 in implicit tension with Jesuss teaching on this point? Not, I submit, if
precisely the (contemplative) giving over to the source of all Being is what
animates all prayer at the outset: seen in this light, the Lords Prayer is wholly
compatible with such un-mastery, and indeed inculcates it: Thy will be
done. It probes therefore to the depths of the mystery of Jesuss relationship,
in the Spirit, to his own Father. Likewise all liturgical prayer at its best
evidences this same, shared, quality: if there is a stillness of such un-mastery
binding the worshippers, kenotically disposing them in the Spirit to Christs
presence, then that is the two or three gathered together which Jesus
himself promised.
I trust this goes some way to answering Rogerss and Hilkerts important
questions. I can only promise that vol. 2 will say much more. But I must insist
once again: contemplation is neither litist nor Pelagian. Indeed, one might
say that it is the ultimate undoing of both these false tendencies.
3. Apologetics and the Systematic Task. Rogers, like many contemporary
theologians (and perhaps especially those trained in the Yale School), is
suspicious of apologetics as a theological enterprise. Hence he chides me for

11
I explain this critical approach further in my Dark Contemplation and Epistemic Trans-
formation, in eds. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the
Philosophy of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 280312.

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596 Sarah Coakley

my recent, related, work on evolutionary biology and sacrifice: the science

seems to obtrude,12 he says; and passing fashions in evolutionary theory
should never serve as evidences for faith. I do not expect to convince Rogers
easily of the value of such apologetic undertakings, given his fundamental
theological presuppositions; but the one thing I wish to clarify here is that,
while the apologetic genre of my recent Giffford lectures is to be distinguished
from my systematic theology per se (Sacrifice Regained is principally con-
cerned to relate to those outside Christianity who have falsely rejected the faith
on the grounds of its supposed incompatibility with scientific method), this
adjunct apologetic undertaking is fully compatible with a principle of my
systematic theology enunciated in GSS (8889). In what I call there the
counterpoint of philosophy, science and thologie totale (one of the key hall-
marks of thologie totale), I argue that even the domains of secular science and
philosophy must remain important contrapuntal conversation-partners
with a theology in via, since it [theology] cannot rule out the possibility that
here, too, it will need to learn something by which it may be changed. In other
words, the same pneumatological principle that the Spirit blows where it
wills applies here too, without conceding any priority to a correlation with
contemporary secular scienceon the contrary. This makes apologetics an
essentially complex and contested undertaking, always probing critically to
the assumed metaphysical underpinnings of secular thought; but it is none-
theless an absolutely necessary one for Christian theology. Its avoidance in my
view would signal both a failure of Christian metaphysical courage and an
implicit restriction of the Spirits range of action.
4. Christian Trinitarian Exclusivism? This leads on well to Hectors main
critique of the rhetoric of GSS. He queries the exclusivist overtones of two
central, and connected, claims I make in this book, viz., that only in the
context of a rich theology of desire more generally can secular anxieties
about sex and gender be properly adjudicated; andmore specifically
only in connection to the doctrine of a trinitarian God can these problems
be resolved. This language sets off alarm bells for Hector, who associates it
with a Milbankian form of Christian triumphalismalthough he freely
admits that my method as a whole exhibits none of Milbanks negative
polemics against non-Christian or secular sources. Hector then offers me two
alternatives: either (a), a liberal back-off, which in effect would defuse the
exclusivist claim (and it seems clear that he would prefer that I tick this box!);
or (b) a retained trinitarian exclusivism, which Hector takes to involve the
extra claim that I know in advance . . . that nothing else will do the trick (my
emphasis). In response I think I would like to duck through the horns of this
dilemma, and at the same time make an important new distinction which
may partially answer Hectors qualms.

12
Rogers, Prayer, Christoformity, and Herself, page 552560.

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 Response to Reviewers of God, Sexuality and the Self 597

First, I certainly do not know in advance (if by this is meant in advance

of intensive study of secular gender theory, on the one hand, and an equally
intensive engagement with Christian thought and practice, on the other) that
an ascetic and theological approach to the problems of desire might creatively
change the current discussions on human sexuality and gender. That is not a
blinkered Christian pre-judgement, in other words, but a conviction born
already of much sweat and blood: I stand by it and can only invite its careful
consideration. It could in principle be worked out within the contexts of a
number of different philosophical and religious worldviews. Secondly,
however, the specifically trinitarian claim is clearly more daring: it is specific
to Christianity (even if fascinating parallels of some sort can be found in
Jewish and other religious traditions), that God answers to God in a particu-
lar way in Gods dealing with us, and that the ineluctably threefold nature of
this encounter that is claimed in Christianity impinges on the supposedly
fixed duality of gender in strange and mysterious ways which even main-
stream Christianity has traditionally been reluctant to concede. The only
that I use in this context is I think therefore of a subtly different sort to the one
used in the first claim; and although I still want to defend it, it is fully
consistent with my espoused method (and here Hector is completely correct)
that a fascinating discussion could be opened up as to whether secular or
non-Christian religious resources could deliver the same (or at least
similar) results. Let me leave that as an open question for now, to which I
invite further response.
5. The Trinity, the Filioque and Eastern Orthodoxy. Bordeianus generous
response opens up some interesting points of contact between my thought
and that of Staniloae, on whose work he is himself a considerable expert. I
look forward to pursuing those connections further, as well as the potential
link between my pneumatology and Orthodox traditions of divine energy.
Bordeianu also raises critically, though lightly, the radical approach to the
filioque problem that I sketch at the end of GSS, in which I suggest that this
should never have become a dividing issue in the first place if both East
and West had fully embraced the radical equality of the Spirit with Father
and Son. Bordeianu appears to agree with me that grasping this nettle would
involve a revised understanding in the East of the language of paternal
source or origin (arche), and that would be in no way easy to achieve;
thus I am aware that there is a great deal more work on my part to do to
demonstrate, historically and theologically, how the filioque breach could now
be mended in substance (as opposed to remaining a merely friendly agree-
ment to disregard it as church-dividing).
6. The Trinity, Feminism and Gender. Finally, I come to a cluster of questions
from Hilkert and Abraham who seek further clarification on the nature of my
gender theory and its relation to previous options in feminist theology.
And Bordeianu too wants to hear more about how I justify my approach to
divine Fatherhood. I think I could have anticipated these queries! Although
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598 Sarah Coakley

I do hint in GSS at my main theoretical differences from various illustrious

feminist forebears, I deliberately do not turn aside to indulge in hostile
polemics against them. So a few further words of clarification may be in order
here. Hilkert wants to know how my position on divine Fatherhood differs in
detail from that of McFague, Johnson or Soskice. Abraham compares my
trinitarian strategies to those of LaCugna, Johnson and Beattie, but then
heavily implies, in closing, that my attempted feminist ressourcement of the
notion of hierarchy is unacceptable from a post-colonial perspective. With
little space left to answer all these questions in detail, let me nonetheless
attempt at least a brief response to both feminist interlocutors.
First, I hope it is clear that the theological approach to gender that I wield
in ch. 1 of GSS is not merely a borrowing from one or another versions of
secular feminism. That, I think, has been a strategy that has ultimately
proved fallible in the latter decades of the twentieth century, as liberal
feminism (with its central concern for female equality, andsometimes
complementary gender balancing in the deity), radical feminism (with its
hypostatization of alternative female deities), and post-Lacanian French
feminism (with its thoroughgoing analysis of phallocentric society and
its call to a feminine/semiotic riposte) were successively challenged by
American post-modern gender theory, which swept any remaining distinc-
tion between sex and gender away and declared both a matter of deep-
seated cultural performativity. If we add to this story the crucial way in
which race and post-colonial studies then complicated the picture by declar-
ing gender an issue impossible to disentangle from questions of ethnicity,
race, class and subaltern status, it becomes clear how seductive it has been
for successive generations of feminist theology simply to roll with the latest
punches. If I have a crucial differentia from these various insights to declare,
then, it is that the anxieties about sex and gender in the contemporary
West (which all these theories display in one way or another) are largely
dislocated from traditions of askesis which in the pre-modern era provided
at least the potential for transforming fixed patriarchal assumptions. In par-
ticular, instead of freely re-making our notion of God according to a con-
temporary agenda (McFague), or adjusting it so as to compensate for the
heavy predominance of masculine categories on the grounds that trini-
tarianism, per se, is happily relational (Johnson), or simply watching to see
how Father metaphors for God develop and change in the future
(Soskice), I urge that the very life of God-as-Trinity, when deeply engaged
with in disconcerting practices of ascetical transformation, provides an
intrinsically theological means of critiquing fixed, repressive binaries of
gender and of sustaining resistance to them.13

13
Biblical views of gender (which are of course varied) then have to be interrogated afresh in
the light of this ascetical trajectory of creative engagement with Scripture, tradition, philosophy

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 Response to Reviewers of God, Sexuality and the Self 599

Finally, in partial answer to Abrahams points of interaction, I must

acknowledge again that I have strategicallyand thereby somewhat artifi-
ciallyleft discussion of the vexed modern categories of race and class
(as well as the complications of post-colonial agency) until slightly later in my
systematic story. But there is a reason for this: by first exposing the short-
comings of successive forms of feminist theology, I seek to open up a horizon
in which race and class can also be reconceived, and thus drawn also into
a specifically theological account of projective sin and blindness. This is, to be
sure, an unfamiliar approach, and therefore likely to be misunderstood or
misleadingly aligned with existing models. Thus, I must end by protesting,
pace Abrahams otherwise sensitive and illuminating analysis, that I neither
dogmatically presume a given trinitarian orthodoxy (that is precisely what
ch. 3 sets out to complicate), nor, most emphatically, do I align myself in any
way with New Catholic Feminism.

and practice. Such was already the strategy of some early theologians and monastics, as I discuss
in some detail in GSS.

2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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