2. Barth, “Answer to Professor Harnack’s Open Letter,” 178.
3. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “weird, n.,” “Etymology.”
4. Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence, 63: “George Steiner handles, with impressive honesty, the difficulty—in our supposedly ‘post-religious’ culture—of giving intelligible expression to the recognition that the possibility of speech is grounded in the possibility of prayer.’ . . . If, then, there is a sense in which the fundamental form of speech is prayer, response, our words’ acknowledgement that all things come into being through the Word that is with God in the beginning, the Word that God is said to be, of what kind of prayer are we speaking?”
5. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 238.
6. The words of this phrase are capitalized as a way of acknowledging the presumption of each of them alone and of both together. The phrase is taken as a name, comparable, say, to Church of Scientology or Manifest Destiny or Victor Mature.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following for permission to reprint material from previously published essays.
Thanks to the Wesleyan Theological Journal, especially editor Barry Callen, for permission to reprint, with minor changes, the essay “The Root from Which They Spring: Presidential Address,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 42 (2007) 148–59.
Another, only slightly different, version of this address and an earlier version of the Prelude, under the title “After Crucifixion: Unhanding Metaphysics in the Liturgy of the Eucharist,” appear as well in the volume The Transgression of the Integrity of God: Essays and Addresses, edited by Thomas J. Bridges and Nathan R. Kerr (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012).
Thanks to Eric Severson for permission to reprint portions of the essay “Deferral: A Response to John D. Caputo’s The Weakness of God,” from I More Than Others: Responses to Evil and Suffering, edited by Eric Severson (Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
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Prelude1
Those seers who keep their devices booted and their eyes fixed on global trends tell us that the center of gravity of what they call “Christianity” is shifting, socioeconomically and geographically. If one could survey the bodies assembled as local churches half a century from now, they say, the features that would most recur would not be Euro-pale, mature, male, and healthy, but dark, young, female, and marked by poverty. And so, if you happen to find your way through times and places to a land across which by then little churches will have been abundantly strewn, and you come face to face with one of their faithful, odds are good that her eyes will meet yours in her native Nigeria, say, or Brazil. Churches made up of the noticeably prosperous, classy, Caucasoid progeny of European forebears are expected to have generally declined significantly in number. Of course, even if population flow turns out to yield much more massive changes than expected, not all formal categorical textbook descriptions will need to be altered for all locales. Newer inhabitants may well carry with them patterns of life discarded by their well-established neighbors. Populations to the north of the Rio Grande, e.g., are expected to remain strongly “Christian,” but largely because of what will have traveled with more recent immigrants, both the “documented” and the “undocumented,” as they carve out living space alongside the grandchildren of the immigrants of another era.2
And what will have traveled with these newer arrivals? It is tempting to call it “belief.” And yet, that word is too easy, too familiar, too casual to be of much help here. It inclines us to gesture presumptively toward a vaguely untouchable inner life of discrete and discretionary private individuals.3 Certainly, as a devout woman with a history among ecclesial people holds her baby close, as they cross the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean or the Sonoran Desert, powerful memories and hopes carry her.4 Perhaps these are “beliefs” in some archaic sense of the word.5 However, to the extent that she is savory, to the extent that she does believe, she is moved otherwise than by psychic acts that might be graphed on a Divided Line or by electrochemical events some centimeters behind her anterior cranium or by “subjective”6 impulses racing down tracks laid by habitual association amidst the welter of sense impressions; she is moved otherwise even than by her “meu bem,” toward whom she travels and for whom she aches.7 The memories and hopes journeying with her north, say, from Brazil, are not her private property, as if they could be counted among her assets on a credit application. One would speak more faithfully, both of them and of her, were one to say that she is in them rather than that they are in her.8 These are the memories and hopes of a work that over disrupted time aligns by hospitable anticipation (even if unevenly) all she is about to think, perform, and speak, one in which she has come to live and move and have whatever goods she carries in the mochila on her back and the plastic grocery bag in her hand.9 And so if, under the glaring, bare bulb of cross-examination,