Prayerful vulnerability: Sarah Coakley reconstructs feminism

Christian Century, June 28, 2003 by Mark Oppenheimer

"But whilst risky, this practice is profoundly transformative, 'empowering' in a mysterious 'Christic' sense.... If, then, these traditions of Christian 'contemplation' are to be trusted, this rather special form of 'vulnerability' is not an invitation to be battered; nor is its silence a silencing. (If anything, it builds one in the courage to give prophetic voice.)"

COAKLEY ADUMBRATES a feminist corrective to feminism: power can come from vulnerability--from prayerful vulnerability, which is not, say, submission to a Mother Superior. This formulation is vintage Coakley: she takes a feminist concern--the vulnerability of women--examines it with the scholastic tools of an Anglican scholar, and finally arrives at a conclusion sympathetic with the whole range of Anglican devotion, from charismatic prayer to a more cerebral, Quaker-style attentiveness.

Coakley's approach has the advantage of locating feminist interpretation within a specific religious tradition, observes Amy Plantinga Pauw, who teaches theology at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. "The unmasking of the false universalism of 'women's experience' in the so-called 'third wave' of Christian feminism has complicated appeals to the 'liberation of women' as the goal of feminist theology," Pauw says. "Liberation of which women, and from what?" By infusing her feminism with an identifiably Anglican set of concerns (patristics and ecclesiology, for example), Coakley points the way for black Baptist feminists or Pentecostal feminists to do work that elevates their own traditions.

Most important is Coakley's reminder that such prayer "builds one in the courage to give prophetic voice." At first, that seems a bit of an add-on, but Coakley is deeply interested in how prayer can transform not just the self, but society. ("The idea that St. Teresa was just having a private orgasm is a [William] Jamesian idea.") Her theological investigations have a pastoral component, one that introduces her to more actual Christians than many theologians get to meet.

Coakley's projected four volumes are on, respectively, the Trinity, the "positive side" of a Christian anthropology ("What does the human life look like if you're on the road to the beautiful vision?"), the negative side of a Christian anthropology (sin and atonement), and finally Jesus Christ. "You need to be clear on God and man to be clear on Christ. He's the most mysterious problem."

In this project, Coakley is attempting to write a theologie totale, in homage to the French annaliste school of historians who used varied disciplines--economics, sociology, philology, history--to answer historical questions. "For every question I investigate," Coakley said, "I use a novel method, like artistic criticism, or [sociological] fieldwork." Each book, for example, has a "pastoral investigation."

The first volume will incorporate her findings among Anglican charismatics, based on work she did for the Church of England's Doctrine Commission. The second and third will draw on the semester she spent teaching silent contemplation to young black criminals in a Boston jail. These theological tactics pay homage to her early love of Troeltsch, with his concern for social "types" and their relation to different sorts of theological forms. "I'm trying to see how various forms of trinitarianism (and antitrinitarianism) flourish in different social and ecclesial settings."