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Intercarnations
Exercises in Theological Possibility
Catherine Keller
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Intercarnations
Exercises in Theological Possibility
Catherine Keller
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About This Book
Intercarnations is an outstanding collection of provocative, elegantly written essays—many available in print for the first time—by renowned theologian Catherine Keller.Affirmations of body, flesh, and matter pervade current theology and inevitably echo with the doctrine of the incarnation. Yet, in practice, materialism remains contested ground—between Marxist and capitalist, reductive and postmodern iterations. Current theological explorations of our material ecologies cannot elude the tug or drag of the doctrine of "the incarnation." But what if we were to redistribute, rather than repress, that singular body? Might we free it—along with the bodies in which it is boundlessly entangled—from a troubling history of Christian exceptionalism?In these immensely significant, highly original essays, theologian Catherine Keller proposes to liberate the notion of the divine made flesh from the exclusivity of orthodox Christian theology's Jesus of Nazareth. Throughout eleven scintillating essays, she attends to bodies diversely religious, irreligious, social, animal, female, queer, cosmopolitan, and cosmic, highlighting the intermittencies and interdependencies of intra-world relations. According to Keller, when God is cast on the waters of a polydoxical indeterminacy, s/he/it returns manifold. For the many for whom theos has become impossible, Intercarnations exercises new theological possibilities through the diffraction of contextually diverse multiplicities.A groundbreaking work that pulls together a wide range of intersecting topics and methodologies, Intercarnations enriches and challenges current theological thinking. The essays reach back into feminist, process, and postcolonial discourses, and further back into messianic and mystical potentialities. They reach out into Asian as well as inter-Abrahamic comparison and forward toward a political theology of the Earth, queerly entangling climate catastrophe in materializations resistant to every economic, social, and anthropic exceptionalism. According to Keller, Intercarnations offers itself as a transient trope for the mattering of our entangled difference, meaning to stir up practices of a better planetarity. In Intercarnations, with Catherine Keller as their erudite guide, readers gain access to new worlds of theological possibility and perception.
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LittératureCHAPTER 1
Returning God: Gift of Feminist Theology
Doubling Back
In Christian culture there is something menacing about a return, a second coming. The Lord should not have had to come twice. He was nice the first time, he tried love, he healed and fed us, and see what happened to him. We threw his gift in his face. The Book of Revelation warns of what a different mood he will be in when he comes again: He is gonna kick some butt. The storm will not stay in the desert this time, it rains shock and awe upon Babylon, that whore. Her beasts of terror are everywhere; this war must go to the ends of the earth. The re-coming one, the revenant, has eyes “like a flame”; its protruding tongue is hard, “a sharp two-edged sword” (Rev. 1:14, 1:16).1 Or word. This Word is a WMD. It will cut down the enemy empire. But first it will penetrate and destroy the traitors within the churches, like that Jezebel, that woman who dares to lead and prophesy. “I am throwing her on a bed . . . and I will strike her children dead” (Rev. 2:22). Was she teaching too free a love?
“Love” does occur in John’s Apocalypse, once: “I reprove and discipline those whom I love” (Rev. 3:19). The last letter of the New Testament apparently counterbalances the excessive love not just of Jezebel but of Jesus. And yet we have to admit that the difference between the love gospel and the apocalyptic rage, the différance between the love unreserved and the love deferred, has been politically indispensable. That tense messianic expectation has charged the revolutionary movements of the West, democratic and socialist, as Ernst Bloch magisterially demonstrated, with threat and hope.2 The apocalyptic utopia also encodes certain movements Bloch does not discuss, movements of women, such as the Saint-Simonniennes of the early nineteenth century, with whom Claire Démar founded a journal with other working-class women announcing (in her upper case): “The word of the WOMAN REDEEMER WILL BE A SUPREMELY REVOLTING WORD.”3
Let me then admit that the first religious icon that really got my attention was a bit of feminist apocalypse. I was sixteen. It was a poster tacked up in a Massachusetts coffee shop, featuring a formidable female with long red hair, minimally covered by a bearskin and holding a staff. The caption (capitalized) read: GOD IS COMING, AND IS SHE PISSED. The full force of the pronoun hit me for the first time and forever; I knew that She was pissed because He had usurped her place, He and his armies of butt-kickers. (I was spending time at anti-Vietnam demonstrations.) I did not know that Her Coming presaged the coming of feminist theology, let alone of my going to seminary to assist Her return. I sensed she had been around before. She had given love, she was nurturing, she fed and healed and embraced. And see what happened to her, to her incarnation in and as woman, women. Oh, the menace of her return was exciting: a second-wave feminist apocalypse, rocking with sex and rage. Of course this returning she-God soon settled into more dignified theological and ecclesial debates. But she never enjoyed unambiguous status, not even as a pronoun, not even within feminist theology.
If feminist theology exists as such, if it is not just the residual oxymoron of an enthusiastic explosion, it lives by the begrudging tolerance and the avowed need of theology. And therefore it lives—so ambivalently—by the grace of its institutionally durable, textually deep, not altogether inflexible but certainly masculine theos. The attempt to spell ourselves thealogians was half-hearted. Its difference does not preach any better than, say, the Heideggerian distinction between theology and theiology. Besides, no effort at feminization quite frees itself of its patriarchal mirrors. And of course the specter of a female divinity—a ghostly revenant of mythic goddesses—has necessarily provoked feminist ambivalence about any possible symbolic content, historical antecedent, fabricated icon, let alone archetypal and indelibly straight essence of femininity. “The feminine” projected to infinity—She spooked feminists almost as much as she spooked patriarchs, or as patriarchs spooked us. Feminist theological ambivalence always wielded its own double edge.
Looking back and forward, I do not hope to avoid the slashing tongues/word of the apocalypse, only to disarm it temporarily. Might its double edge then morph into the ambiguity—grammatical, sexual, theological—of “the return of God”? Is it God returning or being returned? Like a gift unwanted? Does the double genitive symptomatize the problem and the possibility—the menace and the hope—of religion itself? And might this exercise in return, as first of all a return of, or to, a feminist theology that has long taken itself for granted, prove at least therapeutic? The grant may otherwise run out. As the politics of a “gender” so densely problematized, complicated, intersectional, embodied, planetary—feminism in and around theology may still be giving its gift. As is every tradition that recognizes in itself “the very historicity that presupposes a tradition to be reinvented each step of the way, in this incessant repetition of the absolute beginning.”4
To Return: Transitive or Intransitive?
What, then, is the relation of the “returning God” of a half century of feminist theology to the return of religion? Feminist theology, where an intensive secularization meets an ancient discourse, surely counts as one symptom of the so-called postsecular. But is “God” returning or getting returned? Might we now receive the gift of a return, a coming again? Or do we perform the return of the gift to its religious givers? Is our returning God, who comes by way of a few decades of creative struggle about His/Her/Its names and effects, a blessing and a renewal of the language of God? Or a symptom of its demise, of a final dissolution played out in the projection of theological language for progressive political ends? A transformation of God-talk or a late modern form of its well-intending manipulation? What kind of gift is She?
Of course from the start, feminist talk of God was confronting the limits of language. And transgressing them. We—and I am pronominally possessed in this paper by the ever faltering “we” of feminist theology—have tried altering those pronouns: She rather than He? The hiccup S/he? Alternating She and He? Or: “God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.” Thus Alice Walker’s classic para-scripture: “Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock.”5 Amen. Go to the nonhuman. At the same time, we did not want to forfeit the chance, after not centuries but millennia, to glimpse our own female faces in the imago dei—which is to say, as actually human. The experiment in inclusive language allowed us to renegotiate the biblical stories, to retell them with higher-pitched voices and more laughter. The returning God of feminism was never just an apologia for women’s leadership. It was not just the return of divine Daddy in drag. Or as Nelle Morton put it three decades ago, “Yahweh in a skirt.”6 Beyond God the Father, sisters in the wilderness, new woman, new earth—we wanted new ancient metaphors. Spirit Sophia, Mother Sophia, Jesus Sophia by the eminent way of negation and affirmation.7 But with the quiet blessing of his post-oedipal, protofeminist potentiality? No doubt we wanted the impossible. Which is to say: a metonymics of the possible.
All of this intensity about the naming of God was cannily cultural, practical, liturgical, political. But it was at the same time altogether theological. It surely counts as evidence for an unexpected return. Among one subset of progressive thinkers, it energized with its argumentative passions a return not just of a vague religiosity but of an engagement with the old thematic and disputatious questions of theology. It effected a renewal of God-talk just when thinkers intent on speaking truth to power, or on deconstructing the truth of power, had deemed God truly dead. Whatever His liberalizations and deliteralizations.
In this way can feminist theology be said to have infused a few decades of life force into the God question, into God him/her/itself? This would be a great gift to theology: a gift of life. But the gift retains—along with the German word for poison, Gift—its double edge.8 The interruption here and there of progress toward atheism by feminist theology not only complicated cutting-edge solidarity among secularists. It could at the same time work like poison on mainstream Christian male defenses—sometimes neo-orthodox, sometimes liberal, sometimes even liberationist—of the God of the tradition.
Indeed, if the grammar of the returning of God turns on itself, in the double genitive, then of course one might doubt that feminist theology really promotes the coming or coming again of any God. Have we in fact been giving God back? Returning God to the shop, like a dress that does not fit? Perhaps demanding a refund? Returning him to his producers? (As Calvin said, the human heart is a factory of idols.) We feminists in theology tried to feminize, womanize, neuter, queer, or pluralize God. We have fought with each other and with the lords of patriarchy to open a space for the gifts of women within theology and in the pulpit. But as both sisters and patriarchs sneered knowingly from the start: no matter how much we adjust and supplement and deconstruct and reconstruct God, He will remain pretty much He. Even when there is a generous willingness to use only inclusive language about the deity in newly written texts, prayers, liturgies—and that is a huge and rare concession—still God brings with him/her/itself the archive: the historical trove of scriptures, prayers, creeds, songs, doctrines. Theologies. And that archive is punctuated percussively, in relentless elegance, with its Hes, Lords, and Fathers. In every new class of seminarians someone will say (not meaning to reprise Mary Daly’s sarcasm): “but the masculine language about God is just metaphoric. We know He isn’t a man.” I do not break into tears or laughter; I love my students, they have come far and grow further. And exactly what supersession would I lay on them? Communicating around the turn of the millennium with an Austrian friend just learning about the minefields of the US feminist theological discourse, he emailed back in mock exasperation: “Holy she/he/it!”
After all, after generations, after so many fresh starts and subtle transgenderings, is the aporia of feminist theology just an oxymoron: God remains a guy no matter how we dress him, double and triple him homoerotically? Does not the leadership of church, synagogue, and mosque still, overall, compose a boys’ club for those made in His image? Is the impossible dream a low-grade nightmare, the kind one grows accustomed to, full of familiar clichés and family poisons? In this impasse, many of us who are feminists in theology quietly—sometimes so quietly we can hardly hear ourselves—have said thanks but no thanks. We return the gift. The verb becomes transitive. We may be performing an honorable role, not unlike that of death of God theologians; we are exposing the idol of monotheism within His own household.
We do not then return the gift out of ingratitude but out of exhaustion—as though our alchemy had finally failed to transmute the poison. As though the gift was always after all the “gift of death”—of an Abrahamic sacrifice that, as Derrida notes, remained, though the public drama was played out between males, “at its very basis an exclusion or sacrifice of women.”9 Does this return of the gift that is the gift of death happen always too late? Or is it interrupted by the grace of a ram? But no substitutionary suffering has long mitigated the organizing violence of the patrilineage.10 Another return on the sacrifice is demanded, another double return: The Christian God demanded payback for human sin, to be paid back in the human blood of his divine Son; and the believer who receives its gift of salvation is in it precisely for the final payback, in heaven if not sooner.
From this mournful vantage point, the religion that has been returning across much of the planet appears to be pretty much what it appears to be: the return of this or that patriarchy with a vengeance, whether it is militantly imperial or militantly anti-imperialist. The inviting exceptions at the self-deconstructing fringes of old-line religions would prove only to be proving the rule.
So it should not be surprising to remember that some of the first voices of feminist theology were carefully keyed into the death of God movement. Naomi Goldenberg, for instance, recognized in 1971 that “we women are going to bring an end to God.” Yet she felt “there was a magnificence attached to the idea of watching him go” and returned with glee to “graduate school to study the end of God.”11 And it is in a curt salute to Thomas J. J. Altizer and company that Mary Daly’s crucial chapter in Beyond God the Father is named “After the Death of God the Father.” Is it the death of the deified male, we were asking? Or of God Himself? What is the difference?
In the rhetoric of the death of God and its intellectually fecund aftermath, ambiguity persists. Is the dying God any God that is person-like enough to be called and called upon as God? Or is the dead One precisely the opposite, the impersonal, immutable abstraction? Or then again a fusion of the God of the theologians and the God of the philosophers? Feminists in religion were quick to recognize in the classical fusion of a disinterested abstraction (ontos) with an invasive nearness (theos) the Western hypostasis of a self-interested masculinity. Also, we soon recognized the indifference of death of God theologians, absorbed in the thanatological grandeur of their task, in the gender difference, and, ipso facto, in the particular struggles—institutional, grammatological, sexual, political—of women.
More to the point, we were not declaring the death of just any God. We were particular indeed. We were preoccupied with difference. At least this turned out to be the case for those of us who had variously effected our own return of religion, often even of Christianity. Unconvinced by Daly’s total feminist “exorcism,” haunted by unrealized promises, we exposed ourselves to a theological revenant.
Wavering Women
Within Christianity—with at best inexact parallels among the other branches of the Abrahamic patrimony—a spiritual gulf opened early between those feminists who ma...