God and Difference interlaces Christian theology with queer and feminist theory for both critical and constructive ends. Linn Marie Tonstad uses queer theory to show certain failures of Christian thinking about God, gender, and sexuality. She employs queer theory to dissect trinitarian discourse and the resonances found in contemporary Christian thought between sexual difference and difference within the trinity. Tonstad critiques a broad swath of prominent Christian theologians who either use queer theory in their work or affirm the validity of same-sex relationships, arguing that their work inadvertently promotes gendered hierarchy. This volume contributes to central debates in Christianity over divine and human personhood, gendered relationality, and the trinity, and provides original accounts of God, sexual difference, and Christian community that are both theologically rich and thoroughly queer.
Author(s): Linn Marie Tonstad
Series: Gender, Theology and Spirituality, 17
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 312
City: London
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prelude
Beyond Genealogy
Technical Trinitarian Theology and Its Problems
Outline of the Book
PART 1
1 Dramas of Desire
The Theodramatic Nature of Difference
The Order of the Trinitarian Committee (God’s Agenda)
What Then Is Sexual Difference?
Balthasar and Difference
2 Suffering Difference: Graham Ward’s Trinitarian Romance
Difference, Desire, and Excess
The Triune God and Creation
Sexual Difference, Transcorporeality, and the Womb-Wound
Allegorical Sexes, Theological Tropes, and Trinitarian Difference
Suffering Difference
3 Speaking “Father” Rightly: Kenotic Reformation into Sonship in Sarah Coakley
Contemplation, Patriarchy, and Feminist Fatherhood
Kenotic Feminist Selfhood
Kenosis and the Christ
The Suffering Body: Evolution, Incarnation, and Finitude
Attentiveness to the Other
Interlude
Undoing the Match: Death and Trinitarian Taxes
Trinitarian Origins
Disaffiliation and Disfiliation
PART 2
4 Patterns of Personhood in Three Variations
Economic Exchanges: Christology beyond Obedience and Death
The Trinitarian Patterns of Jürgen Moltmann’s Spatial Persons
Making Room for the Father’s Deity: Reciprocal Self-Constitution in Wolfhart Pannenberg
Kathryn Tanner’s Trinitarian Hinge
PART 3
5 A Topography of the Trinitarian Imaginary: “Through a Critical Mimesis” to God
The “Heresiological Imperative” and the Foundation of Trinitarian Theology
Mimetic Trinitarian Speech, or How “He” met “Her”
He “Calls [Him] ‘Father’ in a Sense that Bursts All Analogies”
Even Though He Has Come Forth from the Father (and Where Did the Spirit Go?)
6 The Lord of Glory
Clearing the Ground Again: The Work of Trinitarian Theology
Starting from the Spirit
Sons, Not Slaves
Banquets without Borders
7 Apocalyptic Ecclesiology: Temporality, Futurity, and the Reproduction of God’s Body
Ecclesiology, Reproduction, and Christ’s Present Body
Resurrection’s Memory
Apocalyptic Futurity
Ecclesiology, Abortion, and Christ’s Lost Body
The Sex of Resurrection
Postlude
Index
