In Let the Bones Dance, ordained theologian-in-residence at University Presbyterian Church (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) Marcia Shoop produces a constructive theology (revised from her dissertation submitted to Emory University under the supervision of Professor Wendy Farley). The project is constructive in several respects. First, Shoop recovers the Schleiermacherian paradigm mostly ignored in conservative circles since Barth’s devastating critique of Schleiermacher’s use of feelings in theology. In Shoop’s recovery, she combines the mapping of feelings with subjectivity, physicality (of the body) and consciousness for the purposes of articulating a theology of the redemption of bodies. Second, Shoop reflects on how she dealt with her personal experiences of sexual trauma, pregnancy and motherhood. Her goal is twofold: to explore the relationship of the feminine body and theology, and to show where existing theological models of conceiving post-traumatic disorder, pregnancy and motherhood in the church fall short of what these experiences can potentially become – a witness for the healing of bodies and for reconceiving a theology of redemption and a theology of the church. Third, Shoop’s project cuts an interdisciplinary edge when she brings her feelings and experience of tragic bodies, relational bodies and ambiguous bodies to bear in proposing a theology of embodied redemption, ecclesiology and worship.

Reflecting on her experience as a woman who has survived trauma, lived through pregnancy and overcame the ambiguities of motherhood, Shoop proposes to see feelings as “a grammar of our body language” (p.11). Through feelings, one understands one’s body. Feelings are not limited to emotions and sensations. Rather, feelings as a mode of experience are the ground of all primal and embodied experiences. Feelings define, shape and condition us in ways that also beyond the realms of consciousness. Shoop’s notion of feelings differs from Schleiermacher’s gefühl (of God-consciousness) and Whitehead’s conception (as universe’s structure/function) in that she conceives of feeling as the mechanism for the redemption of the bodies. The redemption of the body entails attending to feelings and bodily functions and responding to the body. The redemption of the body occurs also by paying attention to how relationships build up through simple feelings and consciousness.

Shoop reminds her readers how impossible it is to retell one’s story fully; a narrative is by its nature an activity that both conceals and reveals. The limits of language, thought, memory, analysis, listening and speaking all point to this reality that no narrative can ever be exhaustive.

1. For instance, the experience of trauma makes it difficult for the victim to synthesize and articulate the event clearly. Sexual assault carries a sense of loss, of harm and of grief, which are impossible to report objectively. As a result of tragic events, the body instinctively produces mechanisms for the rejuvenation of bodily health: feelings become the body’s mechanism for surviving the tragedy and for the redemption of the body especially in the aftermath of trauma.
2. In another instance, pregnancy becomes the ground for connecting God’s promises of life with the reality of our bodily finitude within the relational web of “contorted subjectivity” and “entangled subjectivity” (p.79). Feelings connect the woman with God (and God’s creativity) and with others in the midst of labor pains, thereby demonstrating the capacity of pregnancy to function as an icon for connectivity (p.90). During the course of pregnancy, the woman responds to bodily changes even as she discovers her entangled relations with the baby in her womb.
3. And in the third instance of motherhood, a woman encounters ambiguity with promises and perils lurking at its door. Motherhood is not just about nurture and self-sacrifice (roles commonly associated with good mothers) but motherhood entails also the prospect of negotiating open spaces and possibilities for cultivating hope amidst ambiguity, indeterminacy and multiple other roles mothers play in a relational web. The “intense rhythm of mothering” (p.103) includes sensitivity to the layers of meanings behind frenetic activities dealing with the “everydayness of human life” (p.103) – the fusion of the sacred with the mundane in the embodied functions of motherhood.

Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 170 pages, ISBN 9780830839582. Thomas McCall writes this book primarily for pastors, students, and a general audience, unlike his previous sophisticated academic study on the Trinity. In Forsaken, the professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School focuses on Jesus’ cry of dereliction and felt abandonment by God the Father on the cross. Typically, we would hear this message in conservative and evangelical-type churches: on the cross, the Son was totally abandoned by God the Father, so that God the Father (in rejecting the Son having borne the weight of our sins on his shoulder and having paid the atonement for our sins as our substitute on the cross) would accept sinners as God’s beloved. Although the Bible seems to say that Christ was indeed abandoned by God the Father, McCall calls this trajectory the pitching of God the Father against God the Son. McCall addresses some of the most thorny questions about the trinitarian faith: a) whether Jesus was ever abandoned by God the Father on the cross, b) what is the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and c) how this trinitarian account (especially Jesus’ death and cry of dereliction) relates to the Christian life?

To be sure, Jesus’ cry of dereliction raises some of the most challenging problems for Christians who accepts the authority of the Bible. Simply put, if God the Father did indeed forsake the Son on the cross, then if God is Trinitarian, the Son’s divinity is in question. This is because at that point, the Son loses the intimacy and contact with the other persons of the Trinity, and if so, based on the logic of the inseparability of the Godhead, the Son can no longer be divine when he was forsaken. Furthermore, to hold that the Trinity was rent asunder at Jesus’ cry of being forsaken contradicts an ancient trinitarian formulation that the Trinity operates indivisibly, at every moment, and thus runs the risk of embracing a heretical conception of the Trinity. Consequently, if the Son is not divine, but only merely human, the efficacy of the Son’s promise to save and redeem his disciples is in doubt. More importantly, if God is love (steadfast and not subjected to fluctuation), why did the wrath of God come upon Christ? Was Christ’s death and forsakenness necessary for God to accept sinful humanity? And if so, does that not reveal a God whose love is only passable and whose justice is rather inexact (or laughable, using McCall’s language)? And if Scripture tells us that Jesus must die for our redemption, would we have to recourse to embrace divine determinism—the divine necessity of a predetermined plan of God to accomplish his will and purposes? And if not, was the death of Jesus a meaningless tragedy?

Those interested in the answers to these questions ought to read Forsaken, even if they possess only an elementary understanding of Christology (i.e., the doctrine of the nature, person, and works of Christ). Written in simple, non-technical manner, McCall draws from a range of biblical, historical, and theological materials. And when technical jargon is used (e.g., social trinitarianism, divine impassability, divine simplicity, divine determinism, and primary and secondary concepts of justice), these are plainly explained. Overall, the Evangelical theologian McCall defends the classical view, with some modifications.