Theology Volume 18 Number 1

International Journal of Systematic Theology January 2016

doi:10.1111/ijst.12132

God, Sexuality and the Self

A Review Article on
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: an Essay On the
Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xxi +
365pp. 18.99 / $33.00

KATHERINE SONDEREGGER*

It is sometimes said that when the blind receive their sight, they cannot recognize
what they now see, and find the experience dazzling, disorienting. The reader who
opens the covers of God, Sexuality and the Self will see something entirely new; the
landscape of theology is entirely changed; the experience is altogether dazzling. I
have read this mesmerizing book through three times and I believe only now am I
beginning to orient myself in this new land, and to pick out proper waystations,
proper destinations. Of course those readers who have followed Professor Coakleys
writing career closely, as have I, will remember that Coakleys intellectual aim is to
cut clear across old distinctions, forge new alliances and refashion theological
discourse in powerful and imaginative ways. Not many before her would have paired
Gregory Nyssa and Judith Butler, after all, nor the doctrine of resurrection with
post-structural feminism! (For these and many other category-crossings, see Powers
and Submissions, 2002.) But in this book, something greater is here.
This new landscape Coakley terms thologie totale. In title the territory is not
new: it borrows from the Annales school and its lhistoire totale (see p. 35). And like
its Annalist ancestor, thologie totale will make broad use of material culture,
sociological analysis and gritty, everyday life. Some other features of this landscape
will be familiar too. Expect to see much of things entangled, messy and
embodied, honorifics that appear in most post-modern literature, and signal to the
reader that tidy categories form neither the aim nor starting point of this form of
theology. Yet, armed even with these signposts, Coakleys readers will find thologie
totale a new world. Let me begin with the programmatic elements in this field; then
its contours and content.
Thologie totale aims to remake the discipline of theology itself: the claim is
that strong. Just what are theologians entertaining, after all, when they propose books
on Christian doctrine? In the old world, they examine sacred texts, church councils

* Virginia Theological Seminary, 3737 Seminary Rd., Alexandria, VA 22304, USA.

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and creeds, the development of dogma, its application in present-day church and
world. Books of this kind are studded with the technical terms of historical theology
in our case, of Trinity: hypostases, ousia, processions, relations of opposition, real
distinctions and the full range of heterodox positions overruled by Nicene defenders.
Now these terms of art, and the theologians advancing them, are not missing in
Coakleys book, nor are they lacking in its extensive bibliographic essays at each
chapters end. But they are not the main attraction, not by any means. Thologie
totale has renovated the ground of theology in such a way that the subject-matter and
sources of theology have been laid afresh.
In this new theological world we are given a new norm for what counts as a
theological argument altogether. We are to begin and aim for wholeness, a totality,
in which the full reality of creaturely life is held together with the mystery of God.
This does not mean that we simply open theology to a relationalism in which the
creature is understood to be essentially and explicitly related God-ward. No! The
renovation is more extensive than such a conceptual and abstract reworking would
suggest. Thologie totale does not propose a method that remains at heart
additive. We do not simply add to doctrinal or historical theology the creaturely
dimension and practice. The new world Coakley proposes, rather, is synthetic,
organic, integrative (see chapter 1). What counts as a theological argument is the
integrated whole of creature and Creator, a seamless garment of human and Divine
desire. In this new method, we assume that the human creature belongs in a body:
she hopes and desires, runs head-long into self-deception and disorder, rides the
crest of inchoate longing and unconscious drives, exists in gendered difference, in
physical frailty and before impending death. The human creature belongs to bodies:
to language and linguistic practice; to cultural inheritance of identity, gender,
nation; to sociality of all kinds; to the semiotic and symbolic realms; to art-worlds
and high culture; to altar and pew. All these belong to the totale and must be taken
as proper sources and thought-forms for theology. And not just these categories, but
also the modes of analysis and world-views they conjure up and draw upon:
sociological, literary, art historical and feminists methods stand ready for use by a
theology of thologie totale. All these are the totality of creaturely reality theology
is to examine and interpret. But even this broad collation does not capture the
breadth of Coakleys method, for it speaks about the creature, and her world, as
though autonomous and subject to analysis apart from the Creator. But in truth this
cannot be! God is the Source and End, the indispensable Mystery and Meaning of
the creature. The embodied desire of the creature, Coakley tells us, finds its rest in
God Coakley is Augustinian in just this sense but even more, the creature
discovers that desire itself belongs properly and fully to God a se. God is the
Environment in which the creature exists, the One in whom she lives and moves
and has her being. To understand, properly order and heal the painful longings of
this life is to see that life in God is the only full answer. Typical for thologie totale
is the conviction, for example, that painful controversies about human sexuality can
be resolved only by the practice of contemplative waiting upon God (see Preface,
pp. 711).
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Now, readers of God, Sexuality and the Self who have been schooled in other
forms of theology, as have I, might raise some questions about this innovative and
ambitious method. Do we have here a kind of organic wholeness and relationalism
that finds its pedigree in nineteenth-century academic liberalism, in Troeltsch and
ultimately in Schleiermacher? Many things here are wonderfully new, and cannot be
reduced or domesticated by a tired ritual of legacy-tracing. But it is hard to see just
how the aseity of God, God prior to and apart from the creature, can be addressed,
explored and sought out by a theology of this method. Now it may well be that such
a question may strike Coakley as a binary that is to exploded and set aside; that may
be one response Coakley would offer. And two more volumes are in the wings to this
systematics and the next promises to address theological epistemology in the
context, wonderfully, of race. But for a method that aims to set forth and affirm God
as the Ingredient and Telos of the creature, there is far less of standard Doctrine of
God than in conventional systems of theology. Conventional too is the question:
where and in what measure do we find the traditional sources of theological norms:
Holy Scripture or ecclesial teaching? And we might ask, on the other hand, about the
question von Balthasar famously posed to the early volumes of Church Dogmatics:
Can this total method preserve the dignity, relative autonomy and secondary
causality of the creature? Despite the extensive and rich treatment of creaturely
practice and experience displayed in this book, the method outlined here coordinates
the infinite with the finite closely and essentially, such that the logical subject of all
finite being could be just the infinite. In my view, theopanism is among the most
subtle and demanding problems for any theological method to surmount; thologie
totale hardly courts this danger alone. But I am unsure how a relational method of
this kind if such this be preserves creaturehood in its full, finite contingency.
Perhaps future volumes will take up this question explicitly, and demonstrate the full
reach of this new theological program.
God, Sexuality and the Self, however, is not simply a book about method; far
from it! This is an essay On the Trinity under the conditions set out by its distinctive
method. It is no simple task to gather up the manifold of Coakleys exposition in brief
compass; a few compressed summaries will have to do. One tangled thread we
might follow is feminism. This is a book of theological feminism, and it draws on a
full range of North American and European feminist arguments. The arrival of
Nicene Christianity, for example, cannot be properly understood apart from the
embodied contest over gender, authority and sexuality this is standard feminist fare.
But Coakley shows her remarkable range and creative power here. She reads the
Nicenes, from Athanasius to Augustine and the Cappadocians, over against and in
concert with their views of virginity and marriage, their accounts of spiritual and
earthly desire. Nyssas expansive views on marriage and sexuality might corroborate
his rich exploration of the Holy Spirit as equal to Father and Son; yet we may find,
despite these promising beginnings, that Nyssas trinitarian theology is still too
linear, too tied to a hierarchy his treatises on sexuality should have overturned (pp.
27388). In Coakleys pithy summary: From the perspective of a thologie totale,
desire, asceticism, and God as Trinity belong together, all the way down
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(p. 67). These readings, in turn, are embedded in a sociological account of orthodoxy
and heresy in Christian movements, especially as these show the stirring of the Spirit
Montanism, say, or Corinthian enthusiasm in the days of the apostle Paul. Gender
identity, as authority and restraint, is knit into every element of religious yearning,
from charismatics in the Church of England to literary reactions to the Holy Sonnets
of John Donne, to a brisk, often witty, survey of Western visual images of the Trinity.
Bibliographic essays trace Coakleys relation to major feminist theories and
theologies. Not surprisingly, Coakley views traditional feminist fare gendered
language for God, for example from her own original and unexpected angle.
These feminist threads are tied to another long-standing strand in Coakleys
work: the practice of contemplative prayer. Here, the parallels to von Balthasars
work, striking in many ways, stand out with particular prominence. Mystics or to
use the modified Troeltschian term Coakley favors, the Mystic Type serve as source
for trinitarian theology. Trinity, Coakley says, should not be viewed principally as a
linear form, a kind of transcendent unfolding of the economy of salvation. Rather,
Trinity is most properly incorporative, moving from prayer in the Spirit into the
very triune life of God. The Holy Spirit holds pride of place in this dogmatics: the
Spirit stirs up our desires from its own infinite well of desire, and folds us into
the passion of Christ, where our wayward desires are purged and re-ordered, and
leads us to the source of all desire, the Father. In this way, the taxis of the Trinity is
the divine pattern of infinite desire. The Triunity desires to enfold the creature into
pure desire; the Spirit is the lure and chastening of creaturely yearning. Eros, then,
belongs within Agape, a divine seeking that groans within us with sighs too deep for
words.
Now we might expect that in a book of this title, traditional loci of divine
processions and persons would make an appearance. Coakley does not disappoint.
But I think it is fair to say that these loci emerge from the fire of this book
transformed. As much as we can speak about the immanent Trinity a kind of
deliverance of mystical contemplation leads us to say, Coakley tells us, that the
Holy Spirit interrupts, breaks open and fructifies the dyad of Father and Son. Though
such speculation may carry the air of the Victorines, I think it may be better to
consider this a form of psychoanalytic analysis. Freud famously considered lovers an
enemy of civilization: eyes only for each other, turned toward one another, turned
away from society, humans in love build up the world only when ardor or eros
breaks down. This Coakley terms the problem of the two. The Holy Spirit, poured
forth from the dyad, Father and Son, makes three: the enclosure is eternally open,
destablized, alive. Just this labile fruitfulness makes Trinity a feminist doctrine in
Coakleys eyes. In sum, the traditional contours of the dogma of Trinity can be
displayed in compressed fashion:
Were we to to speculate further about the processions, we would not only need
to speak of the Son eternally coming forth from the Father in or by the Spirit
(rather than the Spirit proceeding from the Father merely and, or through the
Son, as in classical Western and Eastern language); but, more daringly, we
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would also need to speak of the Fathers own reception back of his status as
source from the other two persons, precisely via the Spirits reflexive
propulsion and the Sons creative effulgence. Here, in divinity, then, is a source
of love unlike any other, giving and receiving and ecstatically deflecting, ever
and always . . . Here is a desire not of need or imposition but of active plenitude
and longing love. But it is finally only the clarification of the place of the Spirit
in the Trinity which can resist the (ever-seductive) lure back into patriarchal
hierarchy. (p. 333)
Now, what might a new arrival to this theological landscape say about this doctrine
of Trinity? It is ungrateful to say so, but I would like to have more. More of this dense
sociological analysis: the interviews with charismatic parishioners are a slender
sample from several years ago. More art historical and cultural review: the examples,
most especially of an innovative, mystical and feminist sort are tantalizing, but few.
And more, especially more, of trinitarian dogmatics: how should we adjudicate the
debate over persons in modern theology? How to understand procession in light of
traditional notions such as simplicity? How to interpret eternity in the midst of divine
desire? How to ground the passion of Christ in the transcendent life of the Son if
grounding be acceptable in the doctrine of God? Should immanent and economic
Trinity still be honored as viable categories in Trinity? If so, how to move from
creaturely to heavenly desire? Of course it is a lifetime to incorporate and
substantiate such church-type topics, and they do not comport well with a thologie
totale. But it is the particular elixir of Coakleys work to make us hungry for more.

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