Prayerful vulnerability: Sarah Coakley reconstructs feminism

Christian Century, June 28, 2003 by Mark Oppenheimer

Teaching imprisoned blacks to be silent could sound suspiciously like teaching women to be "vulnerable"--and might draw objections from the same crowd. "Many would say, 'She's teaching oppressed people how to live with their oppression,'" Coakley said. "But there's a dignity in learning to live with their own inner noise in a situation where they're being constantly abused. There's nothing more powerful than sitting in silence with 40 men in jail with all the commotion around you."

Coakley was not the first Christian to figure out that power comes from powerlessness, but it is a lesson that seems curiously remote from our times, one that demands fresh repetition. By saying that English charismatics and imprisoned criminals may be the stuff of theological reflection, and by tying their prayer to the Trinity, the Trinity to Romans 8 and Romans 8 to Origen, Coakley mixes old wine in some very new jugs.

Charles Hefling, an Episcopal priest who teaches theology at Boston College and who in the mid-1970s sang with Coakley in the Harvard choir, identifies a common thread running through all of Coakley's interests, from Troeltsch to Gregory to the practice of the priesthood: "Sarah, like Troeltsch, is interested in religion, in its practices and how they shape both thought and feeling. To use a term from Newman ... it is through the devotional, 'spiritual,' prayerful practice of Christianity that one has a 'real apprehension' (as contrasted with a merely 'notional apprehension') of what doctrinal statements are all about."

COAKLEY'S SCHOLARSHIP is too sound, and her manner too congenial, for her to have sworn enemies. But she would have little claim to a prophetic, priestly voice if she did not make some people uncomfortable. David Ford, Coakley's fellow student at Cambridge and now a professor there, observes that Coakley's views upset "those among her fellow feminists who have written off mainstream Christian faith and churches; theologians who either are unhappy with her way of bringing together systematic theology and contemplative prayer or who consider that the thoroughness of her engagement with philosophy and other disciplines makes her too 'liberal'; and secular thinkers who are surprised by such an intelligent, sophisticated and ethically convincing presentation of Christian faith."

That list of antagonists makes Coakley a significant figure in the theological landscape, especially at a school like Harvard. Deeply informed by the disinterested "religious studies" approach to religion, she remains committed to theologizing on behalf of the church. She is concerned that Harvard does not appear to share that commitment. "The rhetoric is that we're still engaged in the formation of clergy," she observes, but she worries that the school is moving further toward the religious-studies model. It's possible that Coakley's weekly Eucharist, as well as her kind of Christian scholarship, will become marginal to the university. If so, they will be all the more significant for the church.