We Christians have a love-hate affair with bodies and with desire, or at least that has been true for most of us for most of our history. To be sure, the Bible embraces our embodied existence, but Christian theology and spirituality have been ambiguous, at best, about the flesh and its desires. It is high time to think again about sex, gender and our human bodies theologically.

One of the most brilliant theologians writing in English today is Sarah Coakley. She would change our reticence about these topics.[1] In this new odyssey, begun with her first of five volumes, Coakley grounds her systematic theology in prayer and spiritual experience. Among various types of prayer, she focuses especially on contemplative prayer: prayer without words, images or thoughts. Contemplative prayer is a deep listening to God, a focused attention on the Lord which is found at the center of a whole way of life. This way of life in turn is centered on our spiritual desire for God. Because we seek to know God in a deep and personal way, this gives us a re-orientation of desires and loves that includes God, the neighbor, and ourselves, body and soul. In making this move to fund knowing God theologically through prayer and spiritual disciplines (including our mind, flesh and heart), she re-casts the very idea of a systematic theology.

Hence this is an "unsystematic systematic theology," not a purely academic exercise in organizing propositions derived from Scripture. Systematic theology for Coakley is not a science, either in the contemporary or Scholastic sense. Yet she does not ignore contemporary sciences; in fact, she argues theologians must engage them. She rightly sees Christian theology as something different, a rational and spiritual discipline that is holistic, forming a part of transformed lives and communities, not excluding academia but not narrowly focusing on that either.

In keeping with her focus on contemplative prayer, Coakley argues that theology is never final, never a great logical System of Truth. Rather, we are always seeking after the Triune One who is finally beyond our understanding or grasp, pressing for a theology which is always on the way, in via, and so never fully arrives. She takes contemplative prayer as a central model for theological reasoning, because it never arrives at a full and complete understanding, nor does it seek to do so. And because Christian spirituality and prayer are fully formed only in a life of spiritual disciplines or exercises, so theology must include our whole embodied life. She calls this approach théologie totale, that is, a holistic theology that includes bodies and communities, desires and aesthetics.

Like Ellen Charry and others today, Coakley holds that a living theology is transformative. Sure, theology must include abstract, conceptual reasoning, but that is not its beating heart. What should drive theology is our desire simply to know and love God with all we are, in our ensexed bodies, not as dematerialized spirits. As she points out, in our lives our desire for God has a messy entanglement with sexual desire.[2] In fact, Coakley has long been pushing theologians to engage material history, the natural sciences, sociology, psychology, and contemporary gender theory. All of these force us to confront our embodied, communal, and historical existence in ways too often neglected by theologians in the past.

The Trinity is the doctrinal locus where one hears most often the dusty complaint that theology is a worthless academic game. It is exactly on this doctrine that Coakley takes her stand, but not in the fashionable, modernist mode of denial. Instead, Coakley takes on such rejection, especially in Maurice Wiles' work, by showing how in the Scriptures and the early Church the Trinity actually mattered.[3] It mattered to worship, spiritual experience, and the life of prayer, and thus to the kind of theology that is lived and expressed by the whole Church. For example, this first volume includes a long and fascinating chapter on the Trinity in iconography to support her conclusions. And just as Wiles' argument against the Trinity had a primary focus on patristic authors, so Coakley's argument comes out of a deep engagement with the mothers and fathers of the Church. She has drunk long from the wells of Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in particular, where her apophatic roots are found. Indeed, there is a whole chapter on Dionysius and the "apophatic turn."

Coakley calls her model of spiritual experience and the Trinity a "Romans 8 approach" because it begins with prayer and an experience of the Holy Spirit as a divine Person. This model seems interestingly similar to the work of recent Pentecostal theologians, among other things by prioritizing spiritual experience and the Holy Spirit in thinking about the Blessed Trinity.[4] But scriptural interpretation (like her engagement with Rom. 8) does not take up a large part of this book. When she does engage the writings of Paul or John, it is worthwhile, if brief, reading. I would have liked more of this kind of biblical-theological work here, but she tells me that more will be coming in the next volume. And while not filled with biblical interpretation, the book is grounded in biblical and patristic sources while also being very contemporary. Her Anglo-Catholic roots often show through, but she remains ecumenical and often quite radical. Thus her theology is neither conservative nor liberal in the usual sense.

An example of Coakley's via media can be found in her engagements with French post-structuralism. Coakley has read this material carefully, unlike some critics. Indeed, she has learned from it at several points. And while being a feminist theologian, she is a feminist of a different kind. For example, Christians in general, and Coakley in particular, know that our sexuality and embodied desires can be sinful and broken, a point not always made in our culture. This is why there needs to be a radical re-orientation of our affections, including sexual desire. Spiritual disciplines yield new attitudes and values in our sexually charged world, which can turn sensuality into a false god. The true orientation of all our love and affection needs to be found in love for God and seeking God's love for us, but sex, money, and power remain powerful temptations. This emphatically does not mean a return to the long rejection of sexuality and desire in the Church. But it does mean that thoughtful Christians need to engage more fully and carefully with contemporary thinking about gender, sex, and human bodies, in tandem with a life of spiritual discipline and prayer. If this point alone is one that Christian readers take away from this volume, it will be worth the exercise of reading (and for the author, of writing).

I hope this book is widely read, not just by academic theologians but by all who are interested in Christian thought. It is demanding but never dull or poorly written. The author provides a helpful glossary at the end, as if willing it to be understood better by many readers. After all, it's not often I read an academic theology book that makes me wish I could spend more time in prayer, or better display my devotion to God in my daily life.

1. See further Coakley's book The New Asceticism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

2. A line of thought also embraced by J. Harold Ellens, The Spirituality of Sex (Praeger, 2009) from a psychological point of view.

3. See Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967); and his Working Papers on Doctrine (SCM, 1976), which reprints his famous 1957 article on the Trinity.

4. See e.g. Steven Studebaker, From Pentecost to the Triune God (Eerdmans, 2012), which focuses on historical theology.

Alan G. Padgett is professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a contributor to Faith and Reason: Three Views (IVP Academic), edited by Steve Wilkens, which also includes chapters by Carl A. Raschke and Craig A. Boyd.

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