Transgressive Devotion

Theology as Performance Art

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780334059479
• eBook ISBN: 9780334059493
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Academic theology is in need of a new genre.In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear.Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves.A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling 'boxed in' by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.

Salvation

Throughout the duration of both the Sunday night courses I taught at First Baptist church, the belief that no one can ‘earn their own salvation’ was continually reconstituted as a theological border that everyone took shifts to guard. Like any limit, though, this one proliferated multiple possibilities that could lead us to deeper insight. That is, if we pursued them.

The group tended not only to worry that a particular theologian we studied was perceiving their work – spiritual or otherwise – as able to accrue them righteousness, but also that the work could initiate the process of salvation itself. Indeed, these two different ideas often seemed conflated for them.

Therefore, any description of things we might ‘do’ – even, or perhaps especially, when it was something like Beatrice of Nazareth’s ‘doings’ of self-negation and detachment – immediately raised the group’s hackles and brought the theologian under negative scrutiny. I had to wonder, was it the doing that bothered them, or the ecstasy that the doing seemingly did?

It’s true that teaching Beatrice in a church basement full of Baptists is difficult because trying to describe her wildly erotic language to the crowd of over-65s makes me break out into the sweats. Finding a way to convince the group that she is one of us, a part of our history, someone whose own faith then somehow shapes ours now – that she was a ‘real Christian’, as they so often put it – comprised an even trickier task.

I wanted to show them, somehow, that being a ‘real Christian’ isn’t just about believing in and professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. The fullness of the Christian life – the abundance that comes not just with, but as, the gift of salvation – is about so much more than that. It’s about being overcome by the overwhelming, interpenetrating presence of Divinity: being in Christ, as he is in us, as we are both in the Father bonded by the Spirit who is love. So much more than just faith as cognitive assent, this ascent has the potential, at least, to be ecstatic. Dissolution into all that is beyond us and unknown.

Initially I greet the group’s resistance by trying to explain that Beatrice’s practices are common in the history of Christianity, that even St Augustine and his mother, Monica, sought the path of mystical ascent. Initially, then, I arrogantly sidestep their concerns to get to mine. But what is authoritative for me is not for them. They care not for whatever mischief this father of the Western church got up to. Likewise, neither his mum.

So, as I failed to lead the group into a willingness to engage, it was Ann – feisty, chatty, curious, 82-year-old Ann – who got them to open up by asking, ‘What is the connection between this mysticism and salvation by grace through faith?’

Both the group and I had been bracketing off what scared us or even, simply, what we did not like. Ann built a bridge. Acknowledging, ‘of course, that’s our terminology,’ she left space for the slippage that occurs between Beatrice’s theological descriptors and her own. And in that space we begin to move.

Ann is really pressing to get the order right with her questions. ‘It begins to sound like we’re talking about salvation by works. But can we settle that [Beatrice] is a professing Christian? Has she already put her faith in Christ, and this comes after that?’

I trust Ann implicitly, love her in fact. So while I sometimes get annoyed when class members try to impose their own theological categories onto historical figures whom we’re studying, when Ann somewhat inappropriately imposes her post-Reformation, distinctly Baptist view of salvation onto this Medieval case, I swallow my overly academic objections and let it play out. I trust that she’s trying to open up potential exploration, not shut it down. I trust, in fact, that what she is doing is not so much imposition as it is translation. By reordering the pieces of our theological imaginary, she makes it possible for us to perceive and perform them anew. My trust in her lets her loosen me up and begin to work with that possibility.

‘Oh yes, absolutely she is a Christian,’ I say, quite simply because she is, but more complexly because by admitting she is being loose with her language translations, Ann allows me to do the same. She isn’t just opening up space for others to participate. She’s opening up space for me too.

‘Mystics don’t think they’re doing this of their own power,’ I tell the group, but rather, they’re describing what it ‘feels like to be lifted up by God’. When she beats her flesh, I continue, ‘it’s kind of like us singing songs. We all do different things to connect with God.’

I intuitively deploy phrases that I know will resonate with them to contextualize Beatrice’s seemingly foreign practices, noting also that Beatrice believes – or at least hopes – that her actions might be ‘pleasing to God’. I know this language will resonate with them, make what is foreign feel familiar. The opening Ann has made creates trajectories of performance, multiple possibilities to deploy.

And things immediately begin to unravel out into something good. Playing off of the language of ascent, Peter slaps the table with a grin and sings the words to a familiar hymn, ‘I’m pressing on the upward way’. Ann laughs and gestures toward him, adding, ‘New heights I’m reaching every day’.1

Their playful duet unravels the tension a little bit further and catches up the rest of the group in the game as we all start sharing which of our own everyday practices facilitate a sense of transcendence to the Divine. Elizabeth – who was initially so critical of Beatrice for wanting ‘selfishly’ to escape her physicality – even wonders if there are similarities between Beatrice’s contemplative prayer and her own practice of gardening. ‘That’s where I lose all sense of time,’ she says. ‘Perhaps that’s mystical enough for a Baptist.’

Sacrifice

Mystical enough for a Baptist. Within Elizabeth’s phrase hides a particular kind of failure that we can seek and find throughout Christianity’s historic, traditioned and contemporary thought and practice.

Enough for names a limit, the extent to which one is willing to go. Enough for just what is needed or, perhaps, slightly less, but certainly not more. Perhaps that limit is the borders of one’s safety, the borders of one’s body or one’s self, the borders of a family unit, one’s class or one’s country. Enough for is decent, not ecstatic. It requires that we give up far too much or, rather, not quite enough. Which makes it almost always a little bit of a disappointment.

Enough for demarcates space on the safe side of obliteration. Poised at the edge of Divine waters, enough for dips in but a toe, never a full-bodied plunge in the deep dive of God’s abyss. Jesus tried to warn us about the dangers of enough for when he told us that whoever wants to save their life must lose it. There is pleasure in oblivion but, of course, there’s violence too.

Contemporary soteriology is often pre-occupied with these questions of limits, with shoring borders up or with tearing them down, with who is out and who is in, with God’s forsaking and God’s forbearance. We are reaching here towards the realm of the cross, where we gaze up at the one forsaken to wonder, perhaps, if we might be too.

The cross, though, has fallen on hard times. Since Brown and Parker’s pivotal article, ‘For God So Loved the World?’, it has become commonplace for liberal feminists in particular to outright deny the cross’s significance for Christian faith.2 We live with enough violence and suffering in our lives. Only a barbaric religion would expect that we take on more.

In our culture, the classical feminist argument rightly goes, women are daily convinced that our duty in life is self-sacrifice. And no matter how you interpret it – whether through Anselm’s satisfaction theory, Abelard’s moral exemplar theory, or the third in the classical triad, Christus Victor narratives – the cross is the location of a similar kind of sacrificial suffering.3 Therefore, the call to emulate Christ within the Christian traditions falls especially hard on women, who become convinced that our self-sacrifice and, by extension, suffering are not only culturally required, but demanded by God’s will as well.

As a result, Christianity is not only complicit in sustaining cultures of oppression, but it also explicitly forsakes victims of abuse.4 Rita Nakashima Brock famously honed this line of thought to one devastating image: the cross amounts to a form of ‘cosmic child abuse’.5 The Father not only willingly forsakes the Son, but also demands, and even personally inflicts upon him, the torture and death he endures.

Despite the widespread value placed on inter-relational understandings of subjectivity with feminist theology, when it comes to the cross there is often an implicit return to the values of autonomy. Fair enough. Millenia of hetero-patriarchal abuse might mean that when the plane is going down, we should probably put on our own oxygen mask before helping others.

Take, for example, Elizabeth Johnson’s critique of Anselm’s satisfaction theory – that is, the pinnacle of sacrifice imagery vis-à-vis the cross – as being ‘repugnant to contemporary sensibilities’.6 Satisfaction theory, she argues, denies the fact that any act of self-giving requires a ‘personal subjective centre from which to give’.7 The self, for Johnson, must be coherent before it can care for another, and that care must not diminish that coherence.8 ‘Woman’, therefore, must be autonomous prior to her inter-relationality if she is to avoid risking self-harm. A gift can be a dangerous thing to give.

The desire for non-violence, Kent Brintnall argues, is not itself a non-violent desire, however.9 Violence cannot be removed. At most, it can be redirected. Denial is really only a deflection, and when I shore up my own autonomy, it comes at the cost of someone else’s. Because the plane isn’t always going down.

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Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introductory text
• Opening
• Disable
• Father
• Indecent
• Spirit
• Disfigure
• Son
• Broken
• Church
• Ecstasy
• Salvation
• Care
• Humanity
• Closing
• Repeat. Rupture. Rearrange. Perform. Displace. Consolidate. Repeat. Etc.
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography