New York Times Op-Ed: ‘I Shall Be Very Surprised if There Isn’t a Next Chapter’: A Q&A With Sarah Coakley, by Peter Wehner (Trinity Forum):
The Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley is one of the most original and consequential theologians in the world. An Anglican priest and philosopher of religion, she was the first woman elected the Norris-Hulse professor of divinity at Cambridge, a chair she held until 2018, and before that she was the Mallinckrodt professor of divinity at Harvard. She is the author of eight books, including “God, Sexuality and the Self,” the first volume of her projected four-part systematic theology.
I spoke to Dr. Coakley about why she decided, at a young age, that she wanted to be a theologian; the times she has wanted to disbelieve in God but never quite could; and her attempt to reunite academic theology with the life of the church and the practice of prayer. Contemplative prayer, Dr. Coakley said, is a “crucible of purification.” …
1. Origins. Sarah Coakley: From very earliest childhood, in a way that I can’t even now explain, God seemed to me to be an obvious and holy reality. And I’m therefore very much a once-born, as William James put it. I’ve never had a conversion experience. There have been times when I’ve wanted not to believe in God. There are lots of good reasons for not believing in God, and sometimes those reasons have seemed overwhelming. But I have great difficulty in not believing in God.
Peter Wehner: You told Robert Lawrence Kuhn in an interview that you’ve often wanted not to believe in God for a lot of rational reasons, but you found it very difficult. Could you elaborate on that? Is the reason you find yourself wanting to disbelieve in God intellectual? And why did you find yourself coming back to God?
Coakley: The times when I’ve wanted to give it all up had to do partly with frustration with the institution of the church. They’re often very bad institutions, frankly. But the more important theological existential side has been an overwhelming sensibility about the way that God either abandons or oppresses us at times. And it’s that very bizarre combination of oppressive presence but at the same time abandonment. It is described probably more profoundly than anywhere else in Christian tradition in John of the Cross’s second dark night, the night of spirit, but also in Martin Luther’s Deus absconditus, the “hidden God.”
What ultimately this shows you, as you either throw Christianity aside or grow more deeply, is that belief isn’t a one-off achievement. It’s a journey. And of course, that’s obvious, but most of us don’t think about that very much. The idea that signing on to faith might involve stages of development in which very grave doubts arise and very great despair about whether one would have to change one’s whole view of God in order to accommodate what one is going through or what the world is going through, that’s part of the package.
My whole systematic theology is founded on the idea that theology is a journey — in via, as I call it — and that growth into the maturity of faith is one of the greatest challenges of anyone who is a faithful person. Of course, this is profoundly present in the theology of Paul in particular, but also in Jesus’s rather gnomic sayings about losing your life in order to find it. …
2. Prayers. Wehner: Your Gifford lectures dealt in part with evolutionary cooperation and its significance for how we now understand the relation between secular science and contemporary theology and philosophy. What was the main point you were making in those lectures, and what is the cost to the modern university when it treats theology as a matter of private feeling rather than intellectual truth?
Coakley: I hold a view of the modern university that owes a lot to Cardinal Newman and his book “The Idea of a University,” in which the university should be the place of the contestation of all truths. And since theological people make large truth claims, they should be at the table. If their arguments are poor, they deserve not to win. But if their arguments are good, they deserve to be listened to. …
Wehner: … You believe contemplative prayer, prayer that’s vulnerable and wordless, is essential to theology. Prayer isn’t segregated out as a spiritual practice. You believe it’s foundational for systematic theology and a radical reordering of human desire. I wonder if you could explain the main elements of contemplative prayer. How did the practice of silent contemplative prayer transform your thinking and theology? And how has it transformed you as a person?
Coakley: These questions go to the heart of what I’ve tried to contribute. What is distinctive about contemplative prayer? First of all, it’s very important to clear away the idea that there’s something elitist or intellectualistic or unusual or sectarian about this practice. At the heart of the practice is a simple turning to God in which I turn over my selfhood to that without which I would not exist.
It’s surprisingly difficult for educated people to do that, because everything in our upbringing disposes us in the first part of our life to establish our distinct autonomy and identity. That is at the heart of particularly the modern American project: I must have my identity. I must have my freedom. I must have my rights. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if that is being constantly inculcated into you as an individual, questing to succeed, questing to compete, the idea of an absolutely simple turning to that without which you would not be and giving yourself back over to that core is often terrifying.
Often the very first experience that people have if they try to do this is dread. And that’s quite apart from the fact that being silent in that way for about five minutes and not filling it with constant ephemera is a kind of nakedness which opens up the self to the deeper elements in it. That often can reveal wounds and scars and pains. The idea of submission to God — without which we really cannot begin to talk about God — is very offensive to an amazing number of people. And it’s very offensive particularly to feminists, of whom I am one, of course. …
How do I pray? Well, you hand yourself over to the source of your being, and then you ask some things. But the handing over is primary, and learning how to do that. It changes your perspective on God — because when you practice this, even for a very short time each day, simple opening up space in which God is God. You don’t control it. That’s what’s so frightening.
This is not a new skill, like learning how to make a very good omelet or to ride a bicycle. This is a nonskill. It’s an unskilling, an unmastery. It completely changes your view of God, because up to that point you’ve probably subliminally been thinking about God as a very large entity, the largest and the best in a universe of entities whom somehow you’ve got to get on your side or cajole or get to answer your request.
I know that’s a very naïve sounding description, but as a priest I can tell you that’s the God I hear about all the time. All the great theologians of the tradition have slain that God, and they’ve had to slay that God — think of Luther — with great terror. It’s really just opening up to the possibility of grace. So that’s rather a long-winded way of saying that contemplation isn’t special. It’s just very difficult for people who are relatively educated and privileged. For people who are already absolutely broken, as Jesus said, they know about it. …
3. The Heart of Theology. Wehner: What aspects of God do you understand that without Jesus, you wouldn’t see or would not see nearly as well? And why did Jesus win the affections of your heart and your allegiance?
Coakley: Friedrich von Hügel, a Roman Catholic and a philosopher of religion, said Christians tend toward either the more obviously Christocentric or the more obviously theocentric. The ones who find it fairly natural to believe in God but have difficulty with Christ spend their lives trying to get there. And the ones who are naturally Christocentric have other problems with often being able to give an account of the Father.
I am more naturally theocentric. I had to overcome a presumption that Christ was a very good exemplar of human and divine life whom I was required to emulate and instead to enter from another direction, through the practice of prayer. What’s happening in the practice of prayer when you see it through a robustly Christian shape is that the Holy Spirit is inviting you in prayer — which you can’t yourself do; the Holy Spirit’s doing it in you — to stand alongside the person of Christ in Christ’s prayer to his father. So the whole activity of prayer is an incorporation into the life of what came to be called the Trinity.
This is a very different approach to Christ from the one that starts with Jesus as a good person, however compelling. It’s an internalized view of Christ as Paul sees it, as one into whose life we are baptized in order to die and rise again, in an ongoing process throughout our lives.
That doesn’t mean we don’t also learn from what we hear about in the Scriptures, particularly in the Gospels. But if all that remains extrinsic, it doesn’t really do the job that has to be done if we’re able to get to the point where we want to say that Jesus is the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity.
So in a very naïve way, I had to kind of reinvent the Trinity through my practice of prayer in order to understand how it was that the earliest church got to the point where it wanted to say that this Jesus was not just a prophetic figure or even a messianic figure but was actually nothing less than God’s son. I couldn’t get there by simply looking at the historical evidences for Jesus’s marvellousness. I had to get there by this other route of actually being taken into an incorporation into his life. …
Wehner: Could you share with readers some important ways you understand God differently now than in the past? What aspects of his love, his character, his engagement with the world do you perhaps see more clearly now than you did when you started teaching at, say, Harvard Divinity School in 1993?
Coakley: Of course my view of God has changed over the years, and I would be very worried if it hadn’t. As a young liberal theologian, I found it very difficult to get into the idea of the Trinity. But now, for reasons I’ve explained earlier, that is the sort of lifeblood of my perception of how we participate in God, and therefore how this relates to divine providence. As the saying attributed to Teresa of Ávila has it, he has no body but yours. In other words, we often set up the problem of divine providence in the wrong way, and we wonder why God isn’t intervening more often.
But if we get away from that whole false picture of a God who has separated himself from us as a very big entity and then isn’t apparently answering messages, and then instead see God as enclosing and encompassing us willy-nilly, the problem is that we’re so affected by having separated ourselves from God that we can’t collaborate with him. So that’s an enormous mind shift which is very central to my preaching. In all my pastoral work, I find myself listening to people who are devastated by their suffering because they feel so separated from God. And that’s different from being devastated by a God who is so present.
I recently preached on the verse where Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church.” It’s often interpreted as an entirely institutional statement about the future of the papacy. But if you read on in that extraordinary Matthean text, the climax of this is that Peter’s being given the power of the keys to the kingdom, which surely includes the power to forgive. I think that’s the Church’s main job. This is what Jesus gave us, which is where he’s most astonishing in his claims in his own Jewish context. Who can forgive sins except God alone?
What the Church is at base is a church of reconciliation and forgiveness, and that’s our gift to the world. We live in a very unforgiving world. But then our churches are not forgiving places either. It seems to me that reconciliation and forgiveness is our task. …
Wehner: When you think over the arc of your career and the arc of your life, what are the things you most hope to have imparted to others? What would you hope they better understand because they encountered your work and words and life story? To put it another way, what would you like the legacy of Sarah Coakley to be?
Coakley: You never know, because my email is awash with people who write to me about different dimensions of my thinking. But I hope it will be something of this great propulsion to recombine serious systematic theology in the church with its practical and pastoral implications. That’s what I would like to think might have some impact. Because I’ve had a very distressing time in the church, especially with bishops who don’t think that theology is important anymore, especially in the Episcopal Church. Certain political topics become all important, and theology is seen as an unnecessary obfuscation and a sideline.
I think that’s why our liberal churches are dying, actually. Unless we can regenerate the depth of the theological tradition alongside the depth of spiritual transformation, I think our churches deserve to be empty. And I find in the youngest generation this great longing for substance, for real theological substance, and real ascetical demand. People want their lives to be changed. They don’t want a lightweight cultural Christianity with a lot of politics linked to it. They’re looking for the real thing. And if I have any impact on that for the rest of my days, I shall be pleased.
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