ATR/m.

Closer than Kissing: Sarah Coakley s Early Work

JASON BYASSEE*

Articles discussed
"God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer," in We Believe in God:
A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the
Church of England (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1987),
104-121.

"Charismatic Experience: Praying 'In the Spirit,'" in We Believe in the

Holy Spirit: A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the General
Synod of the Church of England (London: Church House Pub-
lishing, 1991), 17-38.

"Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doc-

trine of the Trinity," in The Making and Remaking of Christian
Doctrine: Essays in Honor of Maurice Wiles, ed. Sarah Coakley
and David A. Pailin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 29-56.

"Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of 'Vulnerability' in

Christian Feminist Writing," in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist
Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (Lon-
don: SPCK, 1996), 82-111.

Late twentieth-century theology brought us a deluge of sugges-

tions on how to "fix" the Trinity. Many of these attempts are bom out
of feminist critiques of patriarchal Trinitarian language. Some suggest
we should simply tum in "Father" and "Son" language for more femi-
nine metaphors such as "mother, lover, and friend" (Ehzabeth John-
sOn). Others, perhaps more modestly, would suggest we refer to the

Jason Byassee is Assistant Editor at Christian Century magazine.

139
140 Anglican Theological Revieu)
Holy Spirit as a feminine member of the Trinity, since "she" demon-
strates essentially "maternal" characteristics, such as nurture and care
(Yves Congar and many others).
Sarah Coakley agrees with the diagnosis, but not the cure. The
Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Coakley has criticized
the above options for not taking feminism's critique of Christian patri-
archal language far enough. Further, such options are not sufficiently
attentive to what the church fathers have actually to say about the re-
lationship between Cod and humanity. None seeks to enter more
deeply into the biblical and patristic texts themselves to find there
potential answers to feminism's questions. Quick answers are simply
too easy. To speak a genuine word from the Lord for our time is more
difficultand more rewarding.
As Coakley leaves Harvard next year for the Norris Hulse Chair of
Divinity at Cambridge, she has already established herself as a theolo-
gian of the first order, with few peers in the Anglican world, or indeed
in any church. She is about to do what few theologians dare anymore:
pubhsh a multi-volume system, the first part of which, God, Sexuality,
and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity,' is due out soon from Cam-
bridge University Press. Her historical work in patristics continues to
break new ground: an edited volume on Gregory of Nyssa helped en-
gineer a major rethinking of that figure in 2002 and a forthcoming
work on Dionysius the Areopagite promises to do the same. In ad-
vance of these publishing endeavors and her move to Gambridge, this
is a particularly opportune time to review Goakley's early work. Sev-
eral interrelated themes emerge from surveying that work, which I
wish to highlight here, each of which shows Goakley to be unusual sort
of feminist: one who would have us enter more deeply into, and not
shrink from, the church's traditional teaching about Trinity, Ghristol-
ogy, and the life of prayer and progress into God.^

Paul as Feminist Trinitarian Theologian

Romans 8 is a passage close to the heart of Goakley's early work.
It appears in one of her early articles, and reappears in many early es-
says more often than any other biblical text. She sees here what she

1 For more on her life, see Mark Oppenheimer, "Sarali Coakley Reconstmcts
Feminism," Christian Century, June 28, 2003, and Rupert Shortt's interview with her
in God's Advocates (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 141

likes to call an "incorporative" model of the Trinity. We clearly do not

have in Romans 8 the working out of a Trinitarian
doctrine with anything like the philosophical sophistication of the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed. But we do have a surprisingly elab-
orate description of the irreducibly triadic character of God. And
these three are not simply three. As Paul's notoriously confusing slip-
page between "God," "Christ," and "Spirit" in Romans 8:9-11 indi-
cates, an "experience" of each of these three is not different in kind
than of the others. For Paul, "What the 'Trinity' is is the graced ways
of God with the creation, alluring and conforming tliat creation into
the life of the 'Son'" ("Why Three?" p. 37).
The "linear" model of the Trinity, by contrast, receives its biblical
support from John and Acts and overwhelming instantiation in the
church's liturgical year. This model marches in sequence from the top
of the Trinity to the bottom with little emphasis on any relationship
between the three persons and, perhaps correlatively, little on prayer
or worship.^ This is significant as Coakley argues that the only way in
vyhich God's "triunity" can be shown to matter is in the Christian life
of contemplative prayer. Romans 8 shows that such prayer has a
specifically Trinitarian shape. It is "ecstatic," in the etymological sense
of "going out from oneself." It is a silent, "relatively wordless" form of
prayer, not reserved for leisured or cloistered elites, but meant to be
descriptive of anyone who spends even a little time in "quiet waiting
upon God" ("God as Trinity," p. 108). Most who do will find them-
selves almost hopelessly distracted, or at least in obscurity and dark-
ness, as the Christian contemplative tradition, both ancient and
modern, unanimously promises. Yet in stillness and by pushing
through that obscurity, something may liappen:

Usually it dawns bit by bit on the person praying that this activity,
which at first seems all one's own doing, is actually the activity of
another It is the experience of being "prayed in," the discoveiy that
"we do not know how to pray as we ought" (Romans 8:26), but are
graciously caught up in a divine conversation, passing back and
forth in and through the one who prays, "tlie Spirit himself bearing
witness with our spirit" (Romans 8:16) ("Cod as Trinity," p. 108).

^ This observation comes from the manuscript of the second of her unpublished
Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge in 1992, "Praying the Trinity: A Neglected Tradi-
tion?", These lectures provided the seed of the upcoming four-volume system.
142 Anglican Theological Review
Romans 8 is clear in its insistence that our primary, or at least ini-
tial, experience of God is pneumatological. We are "in the Spirit" since
the "Spirit of God dwells" in us (Rom. 8:9). We have received a "Spirit
of adoption" (Rom. 8:15), and strain forward toward the day in which
"the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead" will give life to our
mortal bodies also (Rom. 8:11). We who have the first fruits of the
Spirit now groan inwardly as we await the redemption of our bodies
(Rom. 8:23). The priority in our prayer and our salvation is this work-
ing, active Spiritwho "whilst being nothing less than 'God' cannot
quite be reduced to a metaphorical naming of the Father's outreach."
Christian prayer is not meant to be a distant relationship between two
fixed entitiesone named "God" and the other "creature"but
radier a "movement of divine reflexivity, a sort of answering of God to
God in and through the one who prays (Rom. 8:26-27)" ("Why Three?"
p. 37). This "profound, though often fieeting or obscure, sense of en-
tering in prayer into a 'conversation' already in play, a reciprocal di-
vine conversation between Father and Spirit which can finally be
reduced neither to divine monologue nor human self-transcendence,
is our best scriptural description of an irreducibly triune experience"
("Gharismatic Experience," p. 36).
With this Trinitarian model, we see clearly that we cannot say that
the Spirit alone works on the one praying. This experience of contem-
plative prayer is "ineluctably tri-faceted. The 'Father' is both source
and ultimate object of divine desire; the 'Spirit' is that (irreducibly dis-
tinct) enabler and incorporator of that desire in creationthat which
makes the creation divine; the 'Son' is that divine and perfected cre-
ation" ("Gharismatic Experience"). Here, the relationship into which
we are dravm is, perhaps surprisingly, that between the F&ther and the
Spirit (Rom. 8:27). As we are so drawn we become part of the very life
of the Son, the redeemed creation which began in Ghrist and is work-
ing its way out in all of the cosmos. We address the Father as the Son
did, and become part of his very divine life, heirs with him to all the
Father has promised (Rom. 8:15-17). This experience of prayer brings
us to "become nothing other than 'other Christs' in the particularity of
our lives, not by any active merit of our own, but simply by willing that
which already holds us in existence to reshape us in the likeness of his
Son" ("Cod as Trinity," p. 109). We are not alone in this experience, of
course. All creation is being taken up with us into this "Trinitarian
flow." Though it is yet in "bondage to decay" and "groaning in labor
pains" (Rom. 8:21-22), it also anticipates with us its transformation
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 143

upon entering into the divine life of the Son (Rom. 8:19) ("God as
trinity," p. 111).
: This is quite obviously Trinitarian, but how is it good news on par-
ticularly feminist grounds? Perhaps all of Goakley's work can be seen
as an answer to that question. One fascinating answer is given only in
piassingany theology that fails to be robustly Trinitarian falls into
Mary Daly's famous critique of phallocentric idolatry: "an effective
Unitarianism, where God is Father (and so the 'male is God').""^ Ro-
mans 8 goes quite a bit beyond Daly's charge with its Trinitarian in-
corporation of the believer, for eventually all of creation will be swept
up into the divine hfe and made resplendent with glory. Paul's "vision
of the 'Son,' bursts beyond what can be pinned back into Jesus' male
incarnate life.'"* Then Coakley makes the suggestive, but undevel-
o'ped, observation that in 8:22 it is "not a coincidence that this whole
extraordinary passage in Paul is fired by the metaphor of birih-pangs,
of God's creative laboring into hght of the divine intentions for the
cOsmos, through the bearing forth of the 'Son'."^ Not accidental, we
presume, because all of creationmale and female and even inani-
mate matteris jointly swept up into the divine life. Coakley also
finds hope in the very bodiliness of this Pauline passage. If it is the re-
demption of our bodies that is being promised here (Rom. 8:11, 23), if
everyone is being saved, then salvation must include "all aspects of our
sexuality, both bodily and emotional" ("God as Trinity," p. 110). Fi-
rially, and most imporiantly for Coakley, this and other Pauline pas-
sages invites the one praying to intentional self-divestment, an
offering of self in vulnerability (can we even say "submission"?)^ to
God, a waiting until the Spirit comes and offers us a "cooperative,
willed energizing from within, a means of unleashing divine power in
human vulnerability" (Rom. 8:15-16).^ This passage is good news for
women because it invites them, and all of us, to the self-emptying of
kenosis.

3 "Seeing God? Trinitarian Thought through Iconography" (Hulsean Lecture 4,

Cambridge University, England, 1992).
'' "Praying the Trinity?"
^ "Praying the Trinity?"
^ Her collection of several of the essays cited here was provocatively entitled.
Powers and. Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2002).
^ "Praying the Trinity?"
144 Anglican Theological Review
This should set off alarm bells. Surely, of anything in the Christian
tradition, kenosis is the least likely candidate to be good news in
women's ears. How can you pour out a self you never had? Perhaps, as
Daphne Hampson suggests against Coakley, kenosis could be helpful
for the typically male sins of hubris, pride, and violence, but for
women it can only be a harmful legitimating of violence. Coakley is
not so sure. Why should Hampson continue to assume that "vulnera-
bility" and "self-effacement" are essentially "female" characteristics,
while power and dominance are specifically male sins? ("Kenosis and
Subversion," p. 98). Do not female university professors lord their so-
cial status over those who clean their offices? We all live somewhere
between power and vulnerability. Such passages as Romans 8 and
Philippians 2 invite us to disavow any narcissistic setting of our own
agenda in order to "make space" for God to be God, even in us. This
quiet, self-outpouring making of space is the "practice of the presence
of God," the "subtle but enabling presence of a God who neither
shouts nor forces, let alone obliterates." Kenosis, waiting for our word-
less entry into the triune conversation that is prayer, is actually a
putting off of our false and sinful self to await our true self, as we are
in the presence of God. "Self-emptying is not a negation of self, but
the place of the self's transformation and expansion into God" ("Keno-
sis and Subversion," p. 108).
Here we catch a glimpse of Coakley at her most autobiographical.
Although Hampson and Daly see such passages as Romans 8:15-16 as
an invitation to a violent male God to take over and possess female
bodies and souls, Coakley cannot but bear witness to the contrary. For
her critiques on this point,

any sort of "dependence" on God, and any kind of sexual meta-

phor used to evoke this dependence, can be nothing but "het-
eronomy." Whereas for me, the right sort of dependence on God
is not only empowering but freeing. For God is no rapist, but the
very source of my being; God is closer than kissing (I am happy to
put it thus, metaphorically); indeed God, being God, is closer to
me even than I am to myself.*^

Coakley is quick to acknowledge that a retum to a spiritual tradi-

tion of vulnerable waiting on God can be open to serious abuse. She

"Kenosis and Subversion," 107.

 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 145

can only suggest a more constant and vigilant hermeneutic of suspi-

cion over all our theology and practice. Yet her words here show that
sjie can only bear witness to her post-Christian friends that the God
upon whom she waits, and who comes to meet her desire with divine
desire, is a God who can be trusted.

The Trinity in the Fathers to Postmodern Philosophy and Back Again

Coakley has been advancing the "incorporative" model of the
Trinity throughout her publishing career. More recently she added a
bold historical thesis about what happened to Paul's incorporative
model during the patristic age. Key to this thesis is the development of
a:rigidlyhierarchical model of church, which prompted questions con-
cferning who may properly prophesy or speak the word of the Lord
publicly. If a woman is as fitting a vehicle for the inner-triune conver-
sation to run through her as a man, can she also speak in church? Per-
haps, Coakley suggests, such radical practices were being suggested or
even taken up in the earliest decades of the Christian eraa possibil-
ity for which we have some New Testament evidence. But before long,
incorporative views of the Trinity and their correlative social practices
became the purview of fringe and "heretical" groups. Hippolytus for
example reports that some communities built upon prayerful ecstasy
propelled "wretched women" into positions of power and authority,
women whose expanded visions of Christ included envisioning Jesus as
a woman ("Why Three?" p. 43).
Coakley finds furiher evidence for her thesis in a significant shift
in Origen's work. Early in his career, he wrote of God and our incor-
poration in terms similar to Romans 8. In his Exhortation to Martyr-
dom he praises those willing to "yield place to the Spirit," so that one
rnay "gladly accept the sufferings of Christ that overflow in us." Yet his
monumental On First Principles shows him reining this view back into
a'more rigid linear model, in hopes that the work of the Spirit could be
disciphned and controlled by a more predictable Logos theology. Any
discussion of the Spirit's work in us is carefully disciplined by an ap-
peal to "reason" ("Why Three?" pp. 44-45). The result is not only dis-
astrous for women, but for the church in general: only occasional
mystical figures since Origen's shift attend to the incorporative model
of the Trinity.
Coakley admits that this historical thesis is merely "speculative."
Yet in her "fieldwork" among contemporary charismatics in England,
146 Anglican Theological Review
Coakley noted that a robustly incorporative account of the Spirit does
not necessarily lead to more leadership opportunities for women. The
established Anglican Church seems to do better than the charismatic
fellowship group she examined, in spite of its close guard on the Spirit's
potential for breaking out of otherwise rigid institutional structures.^
Significantly if not also surprisingly in some respects, Coakley
takes these historical and contemporary observations into a dialogue
with analytic and postmodern philosophies of religion. Appreciative of
the critique offered by feminist philosophers of the "context-free"
male as the "generic human," Coakley nevertheless insists that theol-
ogy offers equally important critiques of Enlightenment-styled hu-
manity. In an article on kenosis, Coakley wrestles with some rather
conservative philosophers of religion and their attempts to give ratio-
nal accounts for the Incarnation and the problem of evil. With regard
to the Incarnation, they argue that a perfect human would be subject
to no lack, no form of weakness. Therefore the incarnate Christ must
be, in some way, lacking. Goakley responds: what if the actual proto-
type for humanity is Ghrist Jesus? Rather than some mythical lack-less
being, should not our prototype be the one who pours himself out for
the life of the world? The Enlightenment "man of reason," robust,
strong, independent from all weakness, sufferer of no ills, would actu-
ally then be lacking as a human being. Regarding the problem of evil,
some analytic philosophers argue that God must back off, get out of
the way, so that humans can have freedom. We then abuse that free-
dom and bring evil upon ourselves. Thus is the problem of evil emp-
tied of any mystery. This view of freedom (only God or we can be free,
not both) assumes that, to be free, human beings must be unencum-
bered by any other, such as God, parents, children, or spouses. Goak-
ley draws on French feminist theory to point out that this fantasy
of^ independence is a "typically male" one, driven by a "rejection and
repression of the maternal."^''

^ "Charismatic Experience" (Hulsean Lecture 3, Gambridge University, England,

1992) details these fieldwork investigations. Goakley's willingness to talk to actual
Ghristian lay people is distinctive among theologians presently working, and a boon to
her work.
^*' For these last two observations see Goakley's response to William Alston's "Bib-
lical Griticism and the Resurrection," in The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Sym-
posium on the Resurrection of Jesus, ed. Stephen Davis, et al. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 190.
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 147

Coakley's form of feminist and biblical theology can have pro-

found ramifications for theological anthropology: a prototypical per-
son is one poured forih toward God. What does it do to a person to
grow up into the life of the God who can call women to prophesy, who
can humble the proud man of reason (or proud feminist professor),
and who can appear to the one praying in female form? What epis-
temic significance does it have that it was women, loyally setting off to
attend to Jesus' corpse, who were the first to witness his resurrection?
On this ground, even Thomas Aquinas thought tliat women would
more quickly share in the beatific vision, because of their (obviously
stereotyped) greater "capacity for love." What does it mean that the
tradition of the spiritual senses of Scripture, which writers hke Origen
and Gregory of Nyssa exemphfy, requires that even men take on a
"feminine" role in relationship to Ghrist? What if our own growth into
God, described in the incorporative model of the Trinity, is funda-
mentally fueled by eros, by divine and human yearning"that infinite
desire of God for God which we call the Spirit, and in which we are
drawn into union with Christ?" ("Charismatic Experience" [Hulsean
Lecture]).
Coakley turns to Gregory of Nyssa to help explicate the blurring
of lines between gender roles as humans advance in desire and prox-
imity to the divine life. Gregory actually subveris much of his inher-
ited Platonism on Christian and even proto-feminist grounds in
several places. Gregory reads Genesis 1:27 as indicative of a two-pari
creation: the first a spiritual, angelic, a-sexual creation; then the sec-
ond"with a view to die fall"witli sexual differentiation." Had we
not fallen, we could have reproduced spiritually; yet after the fall we
need gender differences in order to procreate. For Gregory "ulti-
mately, and originally, we are . . . all humanoid, rather than sexed at
all," and as Galatians 3:28 and other scriptures attest, eschatologically
we shall be shorn of gender binaries once more.'^ This is tlie reason
why Gregory advocates virginity over marriage. He shares none of Au-
gustine's anxiety over the crass materiality of sexual intimacy. Gregoiy
himself was married, and his wife may still have been ahve when he

' ' "Batter My Heart? Feminist Reorientations of Trinitarian Thought" (Hulsean

Lecture 5, Cambridge University, England, 1992).
'2 "Batter My Heart?"
148 Anglican Theological Review
wrote On Virginity .^"^ Indeed the primary attraction of sexual intimacy
for Gregory was not the sating of lust, but the chance to bolster his
family hne, to take on the life of a wealthy Cappadocian aristocrat, and
to grow in social power and prestige.^'' A further goal of this disciplin-
ing of fleshly procreation is that of becoming "spiritually fecund," a
telos which excludes physical fecundity.^^ Sexual asceticism repre-
sents for Gregory a living into that aeon in which we neither "marry
nor are given in marriage, but are hke the angels in heaven" whose
fecundity is the praise they hft toward God.
Why is any of this good news for feminists or women? If the es-
chaton features our loss of gender distinctions, does this not simply
mean we shall all be a Platonist version of the "rational male," a fate
not appreciably better than being a generic male of the Enlighten-
ment ldnd? Coakley thinks not. In support she points to Gregory's fa-
mous description of ascetic and contemplative ascent in his Life of
Moses. At the top of Mt. Sinai, precisely where we would expect a Pla-
tonist to describe a passing away of obscurity into a dazzhng Hght of
clarity, Gregory describes the one praying as entering into the divine
darkness, in the midst of the cloud of God's presence. The man of rea-
son stands humbled. Although much of Gregory's "ascent" language in
this treatise features echoes of male sexuality ("the mind . . . pene-
trates the invisible and incomprehensible"), at the end of its ascent
"masculinist eros tips over into what we might call a womb-like recep-
tivity."^^ Here in the divine darkness which our intellect cannot pene-
trate or comprehend, we wait for Ghrist, whom we can only
apprehend with a new set of "spiritual senses"hearing, touch, smell,
taste (not sight)in a deeper, sub- or super-noetic intimacy.^^ Now
Gregory's use of imagery becomes almost entirely feminine. Ascetics
who have climbed this high toward God, whether male or female.

'^ See SanJi Goakley "Pleasure Principles: Toward a Gontemporary Theology of

Desire," Harvard Divinity Bulletin 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2005).
''' "Batter My Heart?" drawing on Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men,
Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1988).
1^ Sarali Coakley, "The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God,"
in Modem Theology 16 (January 2000): 68.
I'' "Batter My Heart?"
^' Sarali Goakley," 'Persons' in the 'Social' Doctrine of the Trinity: A Gritique of the
Gurrent Analytic Discussion," in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the
Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 142.
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 149

become, in the words of Vema Harrison, "receptacle[s] created to be

filled with the life of God and in response to pour forih that life both
to God and neighbor."^^ At this point in our spiritual ascent we are
transformed from an ardent young male courter of the female Sophia,
into (again Harrison) " 'the more mature character of the bride who
actively seeks, yet is still more open to receive, the divine bride-
groom.'"'^ Our prototypical human has gone from being male to fe-
male.
So we see that Cappadocian ascetical rigor and eschatological ra-
tionale can have a major impact on our understanding of gender roles,
perhaps rendering them entirely fluid. The very words and scripted
performances of "maleness" and "femaleness" are not now fixed
essences in which one is superior and the other inferior. They are
rather both signifiers drafted into Gregory's theological vocabulary for
describing ascent into the divine life. Switches between "male" and
"female" imagery are meant both to confuse and to illuminate by stok-
ing our imaginations and kindling our hearis to grow in love for God.
This process of growth into the divine will continue throughout eter-
riity, since Gregory managed to make the move of defining "perfec-
tion" as infinite progress into the divine. Because God is eternal and
infinite, we finite and temporal creatures can grow infinitely toward
him, ever satisfied with the divine fullness without ever becoming
sated. We should say too that this is not merely a spiritual growth. It is
also bodily: "Gregory's eschatological body is an ever-changing one,"
growing indefinitely like the seed of 1 Corinthians 15.^'' We see that
we have a radical anthropology in which our very being is notliing
more than an ecstatic calling forih toward God. God called us from
nothing toward Godself and, as we make this unending movement we
grow ever more full of the divine love, sensed with only spiritual
senses. Over against this understanding of humanity as that which
ever grows into God, modemity has lost any capacity for "fiuidity into
the divine." Its understanding of what makes up a person has shrunk
down to individual fleshiness. Left with nothing but bodies and their
irresolvable, unmediated differences, we worship them, resolved to

"* "Batter My Heart?"

'" " 'Social' Doctrine of the Trinity," 142, quoting Harrison's "Cender, Generation,
and Virginity in Cappadocian Theology,"7o(/mfl/ of Theological Studies 47 (1996): 38-
68.
2" "The Eschatological Body," 67.
150 Anglican Theological Review
keep them "alive, youthful, consuming, sexually active, and jogging on
(hterally) for as long as possible."^^ Gregory's suggestion is for an as-
ceticism not less arduous, but ultimately much more peaceful.
One better-known example of the feminist fruit of the contem-
plative patristic tradition is the handful of examples in which the Holy
Spirit is spoken of in feminine terms. Coakley is less than impressed
with this tradition, which was notoriously uncharitable toward women
and sexuality. It nibbles around the edges of a more radically incorpo-
rative and f^eminist-friendly doctrine of God, but fails to get to tlie
heart of things. Coakley prefers the more mainstream patristic tradi-
tion that insists on the "ultimate unknowability of Cod, transcending
all categories of gender." If God is unknowable and transcends our
gender distinctions, then a humanly adequate perception of God re-
quires our alternating between masculine and feminine images for the
entire Godhead (again, not just the Spirit) ("God as Trinity," p. 120). If
God is unknowable and no language directly describes him, tlien our
language must not claim to describe what God is like "chez God." It
must rather attempt to "stir the imagination, or direct the will, beyond
the known towards the unknown, prompting 'hints half guessed.' "^^
Paradoxically perhaps, our language will grow more apophatic as we
ourselves grow in love and desire for God.
Coakley points to a dogmatic statement from the Council of
Toledo in 675: "We must believe that the Son was not made out of
nothing, nor out of some substance or other, hutfrom the womb of tlie
Father {de utero Fatris)." Wait a minute, we think, fathers don't have
wombs. The image is "so obviously incongruous that it reinjects and
also protects the metaphorical status of the Father image,"^"^ Prayer to
a "literal" Father would be mere idolatry. Apophatic language shocks
us into remembering the allusive and indirect manner in which Scrip-
ture's language describes God. As we grow into God the apophatic
language abounds, especially in such treatises on the erotic Song of
Songs as those written by Origen and Gregory. In one homily on the
Song, the text's description of the bridegroom's mother is tumed into
a reference to God the Father. Because of Galatians 3:28, Gregory can
insist that whether we use "mother" or "father," we are saying much

21 "The Eschatological B o d y " 62.

22 "Seeing God?"
23 "Three-Personed God: the Primacy of Divine Desire, and the 'Apophatic T u r n ' "
(Hulsean Lecture 6, Gambridge University, England, 1992).
 SARAH GOAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 151

the same thing.^'* Throughout such passages we are confronted with

image after image after image. Eventually our mind stops, emptied of
its own thoughts, attentive to a conversation it has been allowed to
Overhear. Just as soon as we are tempted to think that Father is a lit-
eral or crassly physical description, a maternal or feminine image for
God will come down the pike, shocking us out of our idolatry. These
examples of prophecy always throw us back more deeply and loyally
on our tradition. The panoply of images will never cease, unto eter-
nity, stirring us forward into God.
As Goakley takes on this journey from early church fathers to con-
temporary philosophies of religion (especially those inflected by fem-
inist sensibilities) and back again to theological sources, she insists on
attending to the lived reahty produced by theological language. No
less dian her great project of archaeological excavation into the layers
of patristic theology which rest beneath our feet, Coakley has also
sought to dig into the actual thoughts and practices of contemporary
Christians by using the tools of modem sociology. In doing this she
knows she will raise the ire of both moderns (such as her teacher Mau-
rice Wiles) and postmoderns (she mentions John Milbank, Jean-Luc
Marion, and Alasdair Maclntyre). While her work bears a striking
affinity with both camps, she argues that both turn away from the
messy reality that sociology seeks to explore: modernist theology in
Britain perhaps out of simple snobbery; postmodernist tlieology, such
as Milbank's, out of an enormously sophisticated and now highly in-
fluential theological critique. Coakley insists, over against both, that
talk of God and human desire cannot be intelligibly or helpfully con-
ducted without examination of presuppositions and ramifications on
issues surrounding gender and sexualityand both modemist and
postmodernist theology are strangely reticent toward this claim.
Based on her "fieldwork on the Trinity" in an Anglican parish and
a charismatic fellowship group in Lancaster, Goakley elegantly nar-
rates the charismatic spiritual experiences of her intemew subjects
through die language of the church's contemplative tradition. She
compares the current crisis over charismatic experience in the Angh-
can Church with medieval Byzantine squabbles in which such figures
as Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas controversially

^ " 'Social' Doctrine of the Trinity," 142, commenting on the seventh homily of the
Song of Songs.
152 Anglican Theological Review
affirmed robust theologies of the Spirit's presence and work in "di-
vinizing" behevers. She compares the dihgent prayer routine of one
husband and wife in tandem with Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises and
Luther's "simple way to pray"comparisons which startled charismat-
ics who thought they were using the Bible alone. She compares the ex-
perience of speaking in tongues to descriptions given in Augustine and
Teresa of Avila, in whose prayer " 'the soul longs to pour out words of
praise . . . many words are then spoken . . . but they are disorderly'"
("Charismatic Experience," p. 27). She records comforting a man who
lamented that the gift of tongues had passed him by with a saying from
Cassian's Conferences:" Wonders and powers are not always necessary,
for some are harmful and not granted to everyone" ("Charismatic Ex-
perience," p. 29). And she summarized her findings on this charismatic
renewal in her small university town with a quote from Diadochus.
Her subjects had invited Cod to "'paint the divine likeness on the di-
vine image in us' with the 'luminosity of love'" ("Charismatic Experi-
ence," p. 34).
Human experience is here lovingly and illuminatingly narrated
with figures and stories in the greater Christian tradition. Yet the theo-
logical work here does not simply run in one direction. Coakley also
glosses Paul's admonition to "pray ceaselessly" in 1 Thessalonians 5:17
with the life of a local plumber who prayed in tongues while working:
"'there are some very prayerfully laid pipes in this area,' he remarked"
("Charismatic Experience," p. 26). Elsewhere she has noted that her
work as a chaplain in a prison setting has unalterably shaped her epis-
temology, and will have a profound effect on her forthcoming system.^^

Conclusions: Theology after Coakley

Sarah Coakley's work represents a sort of third-generation femi-
nist theology, akin to the third generation of an immigrant family. The
first generation struggles to survive in its new home, keeping bits and
pieces of the culture it has left behind and trying, perhaps clumsily, to
integrate them into their new one. Much first-wave feminist theology
left standard confines of Christian orthodoxy to some degree, while
keeping parts of it intact, in effect re-creating their "home" culture

25 See Sarah Goakley, "Jail break: Meditation as subversive activity," Christian Cen-
tury, June 29, 2004.
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 153

(Christianity) within their new one (feminism). The second genera-

tion can be quite embarrassed at their parents' foreignness. These
might attempt to blend in so thoroughly to their new culture tliat any
vestige of the one their parents left behind disappears. Foreign as tliat
original culture is to tliese children, it is seen only as an embarrass-
ment. Finally, the third generation of the family may sense that some-
thing has been lost in its parents' attempt to cover up their immigrant
identity. A new sense of pride may erupt in these children as they at-
tempt to recover something of the identity shorn from them without
their consent. The results can be extraordinarily creative.
Coakley represents this third-generation recovery of new forms
of the old identity within the new culture. But here it is difficult to tell
whether feminism or Christianity is her first and more basic home.
She reads sources (such as Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Julia Kris-
teva) the hkes of which many self-proclaimed "orihodox" theologians
would not have come near until recently. Yet she speaks in the lan-
guage of a mystic, commenting on Scripture and the experience of
Trinitarian incorporation in ways that would have made Gregory or
Origen proud. She appears to have so successfully challenged the pro-
posed dichotomy between "feminism" and "faithfulness" or "ortho-
doxy" that the very presentation of those two as opposite poles not
Only seems wrong, but incoherent.^*^
One result of this creative combination is that both "homes" are
enriched. Coakley's orthodox home, furnished as it now is by feminist
resources, actually receives the chance to become more orihodox. It is
reminded of things it has long forgotten, and likely could not have re-
membered any otiier way. For so long, western Christianity especially
has lost any sense of metaphorical attribution in the language of fa-
therhood and sonship in relation to God. Michaelangelo's Sistine
Chapel and our largely unthinking post-Enlightenment description of
God as "father" generally, rather than as the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, has confused us into thinking that our understanding of tlie
word "father" directly and irreplaceably describes Cod. No ancient

^^ I take this description from a seminar. Feminist Approaches to Biblical Theol-

ogy, with Professor Katharine Grieb at Duke Divinity School in the spring of 2001.
Her comments strengthened the paper greatly. See also Kathryn Greene-McCreight's
comments on Coakley in her Feminist Reconstructions of Christian Doctrine: Narra-
tive Analysis and Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63.
154 Anglican Theological Review
church figure who approached God in rigorous contemplative prayer
ever found there a cosmic daddy. And no "orthodox" theologian who
mindlessly parrots orthodox Trinitarian formulation without exploring
the metaphorical and elastic quahties of those terms, as well as their
capacity either for great harm or for firing us toward deeper descrip-
tions of God as we grow toward the triune life in prayer, is actually
being faithful to the fathers themselves. As Goakley writes, "our trou-
ble, as feminists, is precisely this: not that God is called 'Father' as
such, but that such language has lost its charge of metaphoricity."^'^
Goakley has here worked to recover this pre-modem tradition,
with the help of such writers as Dionysius, Gregory, Origen, Augus-
tine, and others, in order to be put to use in modem questions over
language and gender. She suggests that a retum to this apophatic tra-
dition might not only break through the impasse of the boring conser-
vative/liberal distinction on Trinitarian language. It could also "mark a
breakthrough in the churches' understanding of the complexity of
what we are doing when we dare to speak of God, and of the interre-
lationship of prayer and praise vwth that speech."^^ The results, I sug-
gest, are more interesting than anything else currently being proposed
to deal with feminist concerns over Trinitarian language.
This enrichment does not work only in this one direction, from
feminism toward the Christian tradition. The two can be mutually cor-
rective. Coakley's feminist home is also decorated with orthodox fur-
niture. She sees the Christian spiritual tradition as an offering to the
vexed antinomy in feminist theory between autonomy and relational-
ity. The way to have the strengths of both is the self-outpouring that
invites in the presence of an Other. Elsewhere she suggests Dionysius'
description of the mutually ecstatic relationship between Cod and hu-
mans as an image for human mutuality that allows for both equality
and difference.^^ While deeply problematic statements about gender,
relationships, and power run throughout the patristic tradition, Coak-
ley thinks there are also untapped resources there for our own faithful
living today. And that is a fairly radical claim.

27 "Three-Personed God."
2^ "Doing Theology on Wigan Pier? Or Feminism and the Theologie Totale"
(Hulsean Lecture 1, Cambridge University, England, 1992).
29 "Three-Personed Cod."
 SARAH COAKLEY'S EARLY WORK 155

Perhaps the most important element of integration offered by

Coakley is that between the theological academy and the life of faith.
Since her ordination to tlie Anglican priesthood in 2001, her firsthand
experience of liturgical presidency has entered more deeply into the
pores of her work, to great effect. A woman presiding at table was not
even thinkable until just recently (including such supposedly mun-
dane questions as what sort of clerical dress to choose and whether to
wear any makeup or jewelry while presiding). Only more recently still
are we leaming the radical theological ramifications of that ecclesial
decision: a closer marriage between the fathers and feminism, oriho-
doxy and sociology, the theological academy and the prison, the rigors
Of Christian thought and the joys of the life of faith. That we are doing
so is largely due to tlie work of Sarali Coakley.