Closer than Kissing: Sarah Coakley's Early Work

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2008 by Byassee, Jason

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 Tn 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 Pubhshing, 1991), 17-38.

"Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine 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 Swaüowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), 82-111.

Late twentieth-century theology brought us a deluge of suggestions on how to "fix" the Trinity. Many of these attempts are born out of feminist critiques of patriarchal Trinitarian language. Some suggest we should simply turn in "Father" and "Son" language for more feminine metaphors such as "mother, lover, and friend" (Elizabeth Johnson). Others, perhaps more modesdy, would suggest we refer to the Holy Spirit as a feminine member of the Trinity, since "she" demonstrates essentially "maternal" characteristics, such as nurture and care (Yves Congar and many others).

Sarah Coakley agrees with the diagnosis, but not the cure. The Malhnckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Coakley has criticized the above options for not taking feminism's critique of Christian patriarchal language far enough. Further, such options are not sufficiendy attentive to what the church fathers have actually to say about the relationship between God 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 difficult-and more rewarding.

As Coakley leaves Harvard next year for the Norris Hülse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, she has already established herself as a theologian of the first order, with few peers in the Anghcan world, or indeed in any church. She is about to do what few theologians dare anymore: publish a multi-volume system, the first part of which, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity,' is due out soon from Cambridge University Press. Her historical work in patristics continues to break new ground: an edited volume on Gregory of Nyssa helped engineer a major rethinking of that figure in 2002 and a forthcoming work on Dionysius the Areopagite promises to do the same. In advance of these pubhshing endeavors and her move to Cambridge, this is a particularly opportune time to review Coakley's early work. Several interrelated themes emerge from surveying that work, which I wish to highhght here, each of which shows Coakley 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, Christology, and the hfe of prayer and progress into God.1

Paul as Feminist Trinitarian Theologian

Romans 8 is a passage close to the heart of Coakley's early work. It appears in one of her early articles, and reappears in many early essays more often than any other biblical text. She sees here what she 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 elaborate description of the irreducibly triadic character of God. And these three are not simply three. As Paul's notoriously confusing slippage between "God," "Christ," and "Spirit" in Romans 8:9-11 indicates, 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 that 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.2 This is significant as Coakley argues that the only way in which 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 themselves almost hopelessly distracted, or at least in obscurity and darkness, as the Christian contemplative tradition, both ancient and modern, unanimously promises. Yet in stillness and by pushing through that obscurity, something may happen: