Prayerful vulnerability: Sarah Coakley reconstructs feminism

Christian Century, June 28, 2003 by Mark Oppenheimer

SARAH COAKLEY came to Harvard in 1993, hired as part of then-dean Ronald Thiemann's plan to bring more religiously committed faculty to Harvard Divinity School. (Jon Levenson, an Orthodox Jew, was hired at about the same time.) If Thiemann wanted someone who embodied the soul of Anglicanism--both its theological commitments and its style--he could hardly have chosen better. Coakley is quite English, and therefore quite unlikely to raise her voice. Her clothes are as well tailored as her sentences. Her theological interests--patristics, feminism, the Trinity, charismatic prayer--bespeak the Anglican ability to love both tradition and the free-wheeling questioning of it.

Her work has had a growing influence, and she is embarking on a four-volume systematic theology which will be the first major systematics attempted from a feminist perspective. A more unusual niche may be that of priest-scholar at Harvard, where once a week the recently ordained Coakley celebrates an ecumenical Eucharist (following the Anglican rite) that regularly draws about 25 students and faculty, sometimes as many as 60. In the role of teacher and pastor, she feels closest to her Anglican roots.

Anglicanism should not be confused with its American branch, Episcopalianism, Coakley says. "I began the ordination process in 1998," Coakley told me as we sat in her small office at Harvard, appointed with a Persian rug and a plush red sofa. ("It was too small to be a library, so I turned it into a boudoir.") "I had to decide whether to offer myself as an Episcopalian or an Anglican.

"I think Anglicanism has many faults, but also strengths. One of its strengths arises from its own muddle. What arose from the conflict between Henry VIII and the pope was a church that had to honor both Catholic and Protestant Reformed tendencies. Now in our postmodern condition, the incoherence in Anglicanism that has been scoffed at as a joke can instead be seen as a tendency to sit at a table with someone with whom you disagree and find a way to get along.

"Anglicans know they'll have to bring together people who fundamentally disagree--from almost-Calvinist Protestants to high-in-the-sky Catholics. At its best, Anglicanism really does moderate between extremes. It unites a strong Reformed sensibility with a strong Catholic sensibility. It shows a postmodern respect for difference. I'm an Anglican not because I enjoy incoherence. I'm an Anglican because of respect for the tradition of the priest-scholar."

Born to a family of lawyers, Coakley decided at age 13 that she wanted to be a theologian. "I think many people have an intensely religious puberty," she told me. "It was a time of spiritual intensity and burgeoning intellectual questioning." She read from her mother's bookshelf the letters of Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican spiritual director of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote in a mystical vein about prayer and contemplation. She also read John Robinson's Honest to God, a "1960s rational purgation and critique of what Robinson saw as an idolatrous and outmoded view of God."

After high school at the Black Heath School, founded in the 1860s by protofeminists "to produce women who could beat men at their own game," Coakley entered Cambridge, where she studied with Robinson and "chucked out prayer and the ritual dimension" of faith. Robinson defeated the Underhill of her adolescent reading; the rational triumphed over the mystical.

Until she came to Harvard in 1973 on a fellowship. In the new-world Cambridge, Coakley sang in the ecumenical Harvard University choir and participated in the Eucharist at the regular weekday service celebrated by the Cowley Fathers, an Anglican order with roots in the Oxford movement of the 1830s. "I rediscovered the Anglo-Catholic tradition with them," Coakley said.

Coakley and her husband, Chip, a Syriac scholar, took jobs at the University of Lancaster, where she finished her dissertation on the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (hardly anybody's idea of an Anglo-Catholic). That unpredictability and catholicity of interests was common at Lancaster in the 1970s. Lancaster was home to England's first "religious studies" department, in the sense that theology was taught there from a critical rather than a confessional perspective. John Milbank, the theologian of "radical orthodoxy" who now teaches at the University of Virginia, was there. So, too, were scholars of Islam and Buddhism.

Teaching Christianity disinterestedly, as a subject for inquiry rather than as a faith commitment, was tonic for Coakley, whose own Christianity was deepened by the Lancaster approach, as well as by the school's democratic atmosphere: "It was such an equal place. There was this small coffee room, and everybody would come in, the staff, too. There was this cleaning lady who would come in smoking fags and say things like, 'Who's this Derrida?'"

Coakley's most important articles have been collected in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Blackwell, 2002). It's not an easy read, not as a whole nor in its various parts. She tosses off Greek terms and German concepts with such aplomb, in intricate prose, that even on the page her voice resounds with a toff's accent. If theologians like Gordon Kaufman and Stanley Hauerwas are plainspoken Americans, reared on Strunk and White, then Coakley is the George Eliot of theologians, whose theology always comes in the most syllables possible.