Book Review: God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity.’

Abstract

God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity.' By Sarah Coakley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxi + 384 pp. $29.99 (paper).The foundation of Sarah Coakley's unsystematic (p. 60) is contemplative prayer. In this she follows the earliest Christian scholars (the fathers) who believed that their prayer life and ascetical practices shaped their doctrine. To understand Coakley's work, therefore, the reader must acknowledge her position: that the practice of may influence our theological position. Or, as she puts it, The very act of contemplation- repeated, lived, embodied, suffered-is act that, by grace and over time, inculcates mental patterns of 'un-mastery,' welcomes the dark realm of the unconscious, opens up a radical attention to the 'other,' and instigates acute awareness of the messy entanglement of sexual desires and desire for (p. 43). In other words, contemplative prayer is not mere subjective experience, but a practice that requires us to submit to God and thereby ultimately opens us up to the corrective perspective of God that reorders our passions. This leads Coakley, ultimately, to suggest that contemplation presents us with a trinitarian model of power in vulnerability (p. 343).For Coakley, this inextricable link between practice and doctrine is essential because the purpose of theology is-even if only implicitly-a recommendation for life. It is an ascetical exercise-one that demands bodily practice and transformation, both individual and (p. 18). To meet that demand, the methodology of her systematics is intended to be allencompassing: it is, as she puts it, a theologie totale, so named after the method of the Annales School of social history in twentieth-century France. This means that both her theological method and the material she covers are wide-ranging, and this volume on the Trinity has chapters on trinitarian art and Coakleys fieldwork with Pentecostal Christians in Lancaster, England, as well as significant analyses of the trinitarian theology of Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa and postmodern feminist theory.At the heart of the Christian life is a desire for God. Coakley brings that desire for the divine into dialogue with sexual desire, and suggests that theologians such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine understood that interconnection, both experientially in their prayer fife, and intellectually-and it powerfully influenced their understanding of the trinitarian nature of God. Coakley is writing today against the backdrop of rancorous debates about sexuality across most of the Christian churches, and this gives her work another valence, as she acknowledges in the Prelude. In what ways can the early Christian tradition, also struggling with these questions (in ways that have not always been acknowledged), offer the contemporary churches something by way of resource if not answer? Coakleys answer is suggestive rather than definitive, as one might expect from such a questioning theologian. Indeed the answer is in part found in bringing together strands of thought that are normally kept separate: Origen's, Augustine's, and Gregory of Nyssa's views of the ascetical life with their theologies of the Trinity; patristic scholarship and feminist analysis; accounts of plumbers in the north of England laying pipes prayerfully by speaking in tongues while working-all connected with questions of eros and gender roles. …