Closer than Kissing: Sarah Coakley's Early Work

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2008 by Byassee, Jason

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, but from the womb of the Father (de utero Patris)" 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."23 Prayer to a "literal" Father would be mere idolatry. Apophatic language shocks us into remembering the allusive and indirect manner in which Scripture'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 turned 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 the same thing.24 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 literal 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 eternity, stirring us forward into God.

As Coakley takes on this journey from early church fathers to contemporary philosophies of religion (especially those inflected by feminist sensibilities) and back again to theological sources, she insists on attending to the lived reality produced by theological language. No less than 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 modern sociology. In doing this she knows she will raise the ire of both moderns (such as her teacher Maurice Wiles) and postmoderns (she mentions John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alasdair MacIntyre). 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 theology, such as Milbank's, out of an enormously sophisticated and now highly influential theological critique. Coakley insists, over against both, that talk of God and human desire cannot be intelligibly or helpfully conducted without examination of presuppositions and ramifications on issues surrounding gender and sexuality-and both modernist 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, Coakley elegantly narrates the charismatic spiritual experiences of her interview subjects through the language of the church's contemplative tradition. She compares the current crisis over charismatic experience in the Anglican Church with medieval Byzantine squabbles in which such figures as Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas controversially affirmed robust theologies of the Spirit's presence and work in "divinizing" believers. She compares the diligent prayer routine of one husband and wife in tandem with Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises and Luther's "simple way to pray"-comparisons which startled charismatics who thought they were using the Bible alone. She compares the experience 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 Experience," 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 God to '"paint the divine likeness on the divine image in us' with the 'luminosity of love' " ("Charismatic Experience," p. 34).