Sarah Coakley::God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity
Review: God, Sexuality, and the Self (Sarah Coakley)
Sarah Coakley. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Sarah Coakley has written a noteworthy work of systematic theology for any Christian who cares deeply about both doctrine and spiritual formation. As the first volume in her projected systematic theology, it invites us not merely to argue our way into trinitarian speech but to read—and pray—our way into it. For a book group or for personal study, it functions as a call to slow down: to let the doctrine of the Trinity press upon our habits of attention, our language about desire, and our pastoral instincts, especially when church conversations about sexuality turn reactive or brittle.
Coakley offers an integrated, ascetic, and incorporative vision of theology (théologie totale). Thinking about God cannot be sealed off from the purification of desire, the life of prayer, engagement with culture, gender, and the body. She draws appreciatively on Troeltsch and Max Weber for social analysis while remaining thoroughly theological. Her project refuses the modern habit of sorting “doctrine” on one side and “context” (sex, gender, power, politics) on the other. Systematic theology, she insists, is always implicitly “a recommendation for life.”
Theology, therefore, involves not only the metaphysical task of describing God, world, and humanity, but simultaneously the epistemological task of cleansing, reordering, and redirecting our own thinking, desiring, and seeing. This makes systematic theology without contemplative and ascetical practice in danger of rending itself void. Coakley is no naif about the risks: she carefully addresses how contemplation can avoid collusion with abusive power and how its silence must be a voluntary “power-in-vulnerability” rather than another form of silencing.
Coakley is doing a “deep tradition” move. She’s arguing that the Fathers, Paul, and the mystics already refused to split doctrine from prayer, desire from dogma, Spirit from formation. The biblical material she uses doesn’t just illustrate her theology; it generates the method. Thus, she takes seriously that the Spirit leads into all truth (John 14-16) but begins with the encounter of the Spirit with us, which then leads to the message of the Spirit concerning Jesus. Desire is theological epistemology (Psalm 63:1, 42:1-2, and Song of Solomon). I also find myself impressed in Proverbs with a recurring theme of the Lord honoring the desires of the heart. She highlights power in vulnerability, reflecting the self-emptying theme of Philippians 2:5-11. A patristic theme that we become partakers of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4), which for her means desire seeks ecstatic participation in trinitarian life. In all this, theology becomes more than information about God. it becomes incorporation into the Trinitarian life of God.
Core Thesis and Method
At the heart of the book is Coakley’s conviction that right contemplation of God, right speech about God, and the right ordering of desire are inseparably linked. This places the Christian mystical (St. Ignatius, Carmelite such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, Thomas a Kempis, Walter Hilton, and many others) as an important dimension of how one practices theology. While I have read extensively in that tradition, I have succumbed to the temptation to keep such reading in its place, and academic pursuits in a separate place.
Coakley distinguishes two kinds of orthodoxy: propositional assent versus a demanding, ongoing spiritual project in which the creeds are personally and progressively assimilated. Her project is the latter. Theology, for her, is in via—on the way—and requires ascetic transformation. She proposes a total or integrated theology that refuses the modern sorting of “doctrine” on one side and “context” (sex, gender, power, politics) on the other. Systematic theology, she argues, is always implicitly “a recommendation for life,” and thus its intellectual operations cannot be sealed off from the purgative and illuminative work of God in the theologian. This methodological claim is sharpened by her insistence that systematic theology without contemplative and ascetic practice risks “rending itself void.” Yet Coakley is not naive about the political hazards of “submission,” silence, and spiritual discipline. She asks how contemplation avoids collusion with abusive power, how it is socially mediated, and how its silence is not simply another silencing. Her answer is to construe contemplation as voluntary, Spirit-enabled “attention” that can become a distinctive “power-in-vulnerability”—a posture capable, precisely in oppressive settings, of resistance rather than capitulation.
She explicitly inverts Freud: it is not that sex is basic and God a projection, but that God (and divine desire) is basic, and human erotic longing is a clue to our created dependence and telos. She is arguing that the evolutionary account of sexuality is not basic to understanding desire. Women may well desire to be the object of affection of a man, to have the man adore her, because she needs one to assist in raising children. The man cannot fulfill this female desire because the man may well have the desire to spread his genes as far and wide as possible. These sexual desires conflict. In fallen human beings, male and female desires really are often in conflict — precisely because they are disordered by sin, evolutionary history, trauma, culture, and self-centeredness. Men’s drive toward variety and women’s drive toward secure attachment can both become idolatrous. Coakley would say: yes, these patterns exist, but they are not ultimate. They are symptoms of desire gone awry, needing chastening and reordering. For such reasons, desire is the clue “woven into the crooked human heart” that tugs the self toward its source. Desire is more fundamental than sex because it is, in the first instance, an ontological reality, the longing for union, for completion, for ecstatic participation in something greater. This ontological desire is a matter of “belonging primarily to God,” and only secondarily to humanity as imago Dei.
This is where her Trinity theology becomes practical. The Holy Spirit is the one who “breaks” and purifies sinful and misdirected desires through contemplation, vulnerability, and participation in Christ’s passion. The goal is not the repression of sexuality, nor its unchecked expression, but its transformation and incorporation into the life of the Trinity.
- Male desire to “propagate” finds its true telos not in endless genetic spread but in self-giving, generative love that images the Father’s gift of the Son.
- Female desire to be cherished and loved finds its true telos in being incorporated into the beloved Son, loved by the Father with perfect, non-exploitative delight.
In other words, Coakley does not deny the tension raised by evolutionary biology. She says the tension is real, painful, and common — and precisely for that reason it must be brought into the contemplative, ascetical, and ecclesial life where the Spirit can do its incorporative, reordering work. In God, desire indicates no lack, but the plenitude of love by which God draws creation into “full and ecstatic participation” in trinitarian life.
She would likely argue that both the evolutionary account and many modern romantic ideals are too thin. They treat desire as ultimately about human fulfillment (whether genetic or emotional). Coakley says the only thing big enough to integrate and satisfy the full range of human longing — including its sexual dimension — is participation in divine desire, which has no lack and is purely self-giving.
This is why she keeps returning to Gregory of Nyssa and the mystics: desire is endless because it participates in God’s own infinite desire. Sexual desire is a powerful signpost, but it is not the destination. When it becomes the destination, it inevitably frustrates — whether through objectification, boredom, domination, or codependency.
This is an Aristotelian move, I think. In God, desire signifies no lack but “plenitude of longing love” that seeks ecstatic participation of creatures in trinitarian life.
Her methodological tool is théologie totale, which privileges contemplation while remaining in critical, non-reductive conversation with feminism, the social sciences, philosophy, and art. She uses the metaphor of “Wigan Pier” (the mocked, fake seaside jetty in industrial Lancashire) to critique theological positions that look like they have reached the water of lived faith but remain cut off from the messy realities of desire, gender, power, and embodiment. She diagnoses three contemporary versions of this false arrival: neoconservative, Radical Orthodox, and certain liberal/feminist approaches. All, she argues, need the chastening of contemplative practice.
Prayer is where this theology becomes concrete. Coakley portrays the Spirit as the one who interrupts and “breaks” sinful desire “in and through the passion of Christ,” not as an end in itself but as the necessary prelude to the re-ordering and transformation of longing so that human desire may become one with God’s. Importantly, this is not a separation of divine persons into different “jobs”: the Son’s and Spirit’s work are indivisible in God’s outward action. Rather, it is an account of how creatures are drawn—pedagogically and spiritually—into the triune life by being incorporated into Christ through the Spirit’s purgation and allure.
Patristics, the Spirit, and the Incorporative Model
Coakley retrieves a neglected patristic strand that begins with the Spirit’s role in prayer (especially Romans 8) and uses it to challenge the more common “relation-focused” model that privileges the Father-Son dyad. She argues that fourth-century conciliar orthodoxy, while a great achievement, carried an ironic spiritual danger: the potential to re-subordinate the Spirit even while affirming full equality. Biblical language itself (especially Johannine) can tilt toward a dyad with the Spirit as secondary communicator.
In contrast, she lifts up an “incorporative” model in which the Spirit is the primary point of entry, drawing believers into the life of the Son and thus into the Trinity. This aligns powerfully with Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians. As I have been studying that letter (with Conzelmann and others), I see Paul doing something very similar: he affirms ecstatic gifts of the Spirit but firmly grounds them in the corporate body of Christ, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, resisting individualistic or sectarian misuse. Coakley’s own fieldwork with charismatic Anglican renewal groups embodies this Pauline instinct—she takes real experiential encounters with the Spirit seriously while testing them against ecclesial, liturgical, and ascetical criteria.
Coakley’s reading of the Fathers is both appreciative and provocative. She acknowledges the achievement of fourth-century conciliar orthodoxy but argues that it carried a spiritual danger: the potential to re-subordinate the Spirit even while affirming equality. Biblical language itself shows ambiguity in the “ordering” of Father, Son, and Spirit, and John’s Gospel can tilt toward a dyad with the Spirit as secondary communicator. My recent study of the writings of John would confirm her consideration of this danger.
One of Coakley’s recurring claims is that the church’s conciliar achievement in fourth-century trinitarian grammar carried an ironic danger: the Spirit could be rhetorically affirmed yet practically re-subordinated, especially when a Johannine Father–Son dyad becomes the controlling imaginative template. Against this, she retrieves and re-describes a “prayer-based” patristic tradition that gives priority to the Spirit in the act of prayer and in the formation of Christian participation (“sonship”). Whether or not one accepts every contour of her historical reconstruction, she convincingly exposes how easily pneumatology becomes the doctrine everyone says they believe while few can narrate with spiritual specificity.
Against this, she lifts up an “alternative” tradition that gives priority to the Spirit in prayer—an incorporative model in which the Spirit draws believers into the life of the Son and thereby into the Trinity. This aligns powerfully with what I have been noticing in 1 Corinthians. Paul affirms the ecstatic gifts of the Spirit but insists they serve the building up of the body of Christ, grounding them in baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Although I only skimmed this portion, Coakley’s fieldwork with charismatic Anglican groups serves the same Pauline instinct: she takes real experiential encounters with the Spirit seriously (avoiding the academic tendency to dismiss charismatic renewal) while testing them against ecclesial, liturgical, and ascetical criteria to guard against individualism and sectarianism.
Her comparative reading of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine is especially rich. Both link their trinitarian thought analogically to views of gender, prayer, and spiritual ascent, yet both contain “maverick” elements that press toward a deeper integration of desire for God and human desire. Gregory’s apophatic turn into darkness and Augustine’s effusive delight in the later books of De Trinitate become resources for Coakley’s constructive project. My own statement on the Trinity is rooted in Greggory and Augustine as well.
Imagination and iconography
Coakley gives concrete expression to the insight Paul Ricoeur offers in his philosophical anthropology that the symbol gives rise to thought, through which he would expand the role of imagination in philosophical reflection. All this I would like, given how much Ricoeur has meant to me. I will admit that skimmed much of the chapter to which she devoted to icons. The work of Han Urs von Balthasar in aesthetics and theology is significant here. The way she has integrated all this with her theological reflection shows the way to do theology from this perspective. In this chapter, she insists that no trinitarian language is innocent of sexual, political, and ecclesial overtones, and therefore that one test of theological honesty is whether these overtones are brought to critical consciousness rather than denied.
Her long chapter on iconography is a striking example: Christian art often professes that God “qua God” is beyond gender while repeatedly presenting gendered trinitarian scenes, and (more importantly for her thesis) frequently marginalizes or omits the Spirit. Coakley reads this not only as a feminist problem but as a Nicene one: when the Spirit fades from view, the Father–Son dyad is tacitly privileged, with downstream analogical effects on how power and gender are imagined in church and culture.
Her constructive instincts here are cautious but important: she commends the recovery of “destabilizing” symbols (not least fire), warns against crass male anthropomorphisms, and suggests that a certain “sketchiness” or gender indeterminacy can function, not as a flattening androgyny, but as a sign that women and men alike are incorporated into divine life. Likewise, the use of circular or dynamic movement in trinitarian representation can resist the rigidity of linear, hierarchical models—without collapsing Creator and creature into a single continuum.
Desire, Gender, Hierarchy, and the Apophatic Turn
Philosophically, Coakley engages Platonism (re-evaluated for contemporary challenges), Pseudo-Dionysius, Levinas, and others. She defends a nuanced account of hierarchy—not as worldly power but as ordered values oriented toward God—while fiercely resisting hierarchy within the Godhead. She handles this carefully, arguing that modern discomfort often reduces hierarchy to domination, whereas it can also name an ordering of values needed to “orient” desire toward God. Yet she simultaneously “resists the notion of hierarchy in the Godhead,” guarding Nicene equality even while describing the Spirit’s leading role in human transformation. On this basis she critiques the complacent ecumenical claim that East and West are simply “complementary,” and she reframes trinitarian threeness as that which continually “ambushes” the “stuckness” of binary twoness (male/female, us/other, East/West)—not by erasing difference, but by opening creaturely difference to participative mystery in Christ by the Spirit.
The apophatic turn undermines gender stereotypes and opens space for ever-changing modellings of desire. Naming God “Father” is not a patriarchal concession but a radical act that slays human patriarchy at the root when done in contemplative submission. In all this, what I was hearing was a critique of feminist theology that could appreciate some of its concerns while considering some of its larger themes as shallow thought.
Her treatment of the filioque is daring. Rather than simply mediating East and West, she proposes a more radical mutual ontology of desire in which the Spirit is “first” in human encounter precisely so that paternal source language is purged of rivalry or domination. Processions become expressions of perfect mutual ontological desire.
Coakley takes feminist concerns seriously, engages them generously, and believes they have exposed real problems in traditional theology (especially around power, idolatry, gender, and the unconscious). However, she offers a strong internal critique of much feminist theology, arguing that some of its common strategies are ultimately shallow or self-defeating.
She includes feminism as one of the essential dialogue partners in her théologie totale.
- Feminism rightly highlights the dangers of false reification of the divine (turning God into a projection of male power), totalizing power, and the suppression of material connected to gender, the body, and desire.
- It has exposed how classical Christianity has often been entangled with patriarchy.
- She values the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that feminism brings — it forces theologians to examine hidden power dynamics and unconscious biases.
However, Coakley also considers it problematic and shallow.
She argues that many feminist approaches remain trapped on “Wigan Pier” — they look like they’ve reached real water (authentic liberation and theological renewal) but actually stop short, cut off from the deeper spiritual and ontological realities. Her main criticisms include:
- Surface-level linguistic fixes (e.g., replacing “Father” with “Mother,” “Parent,” or gender-neutral terms). Coakley sees this as superficial. It doesn’t actually slay patriarchy; it often just repackages the same human power dynamics under new names. She insists the real issue is not the word “Father” but the idolatrous human projections we attach to it.
- Rejection of vulnerability, submission, and hierarchy as inherently oppressive. Many feminists (especially post-Christian or radical ones like Daphne Hampson) treat any language of kenosis (self-emptying), submission, or contemplative surrender as dangerous for women who have already been culturally pressured to submit. Coakley counters that true contemplation offers a different kind of vulnerability — “power-in-vulnerability” — that is Spirit-led, not culturally imposed. It can actually become a source of resistance and transformation rather than oppression.
- Over-reliance on secular power analysis. Some feminist theology reduces theology to politics or sociology. Coakley believes this flattens the transcendent and fails to take the transformative power of prayer and ascetic practice seriously. It remains stuck in “secular” categories rather than allowing the triune God to reorder desire at the deepest level.
- Binary thinking that resists the Spirit’s “third”. By focusing so heavily on male/female binaries and trying to overturn them, some feminist theology gets stuck in “twoness.” Coakley argues that robust trinitarianism (with the Spirit as the destabilizing, incorporative reality) continually “ambushes” stuck binaries — including rigid gender ones — without erasing difference.
Her Positive Proposal: “Can a Feminist Call God Father?”
This is one of the most striking lines in the book:
“Can a feminist call God Father, then? One might more truly insist that she, above all, must; for it lies with her alone to do the kneeling work that ultimately slays patriarchy at its root.”
Her argument is profound and counter-intuitive:
- The true meaning of “Father” comes from the Trinity itself, not from flawed human patriarchal fathers (“Call no man father except God alone” — Matt 23:9).
- Contemplative prayer before the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, purifies our distorted images of authority, masculinity, and power.
- Women who have experienced patriarchy most acutely are in a unique position to do this “kneeling work” of re-naming and re-imagining divine Fatherhood in a non-idolatrous way.
She pairs this with a nuanced defense of hierarchy:
- She rejects any hierarchy within the Godhead (strict Nicene orthodoxy).
- But she defends hierarchy in the created order as an “ordering of values” oriented toward God (drawing on thinkers like Louis Dumont and Mary Douglas). Without it, we cannot properly orient our desires.
- Modern discomfort with hierarchy often reduces it to “power-over” domination. Coakley says this is a mistake — true hierarchy serves love and participation, not control.
Coakley believes much feminist theology is right in its diagnoses but too shallow in its remedies. It often fights patriarchy with tools (linguistic revision, suspicion of vulnerability, flattening of difference) that don’t reach the ontological depths where desire is actually healed and reordered. Only a Spirit-led, contemplative, incorporative trinitarianism can do that — and paradoxically, this may require feminists to go deeper into classic Christian practices rather than abandoning them.
In a similar fashion, using the image of Wigan Pier, she deals with radical orthodoxy. She is appreciative of some of its strengths but ultimately sees it as a sophisticated dead-end that fails to reach the living water of genuine transformation. What especially struck me was that it is overconfident in overcoming secular reason. It claims that theology can completely out-narrate and overcome secular modernity and liberal philosophy. For her, this is triumphalist and insufficiently ascetic. It risks becoming another form of intellectual mastery rather than humble, contemplative submission to the Spirit.
In a similar fashion, she deals with the neoconservative movement, such John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI (John Ratzinger). She thinks it nostalgic and reactive, has authoritarian tendencies, and has insufficient engagement with modernity. In contrast to her theological project, it risks leading away from contemplation and prioritizing external compliance and propositional orthodoxy, leading away from true spiritual incorporation into the life of the Trinity. It builds a beautiful pier that looks like it reaches the water of real faith and orthodoxy, but it never actually gets there because it bypasses the messy, Spirit-led, contemplative work of reordering desire that Coakley sees as essential.
Strengths, Questions, and Pastoral Value
Coakley’s greatest strength is integration. Questions of Trinity, sexuality, prayer, and ecclesiology illuminate one another. The six theses on contemplation in the Coda are particularly worth repeated meditation:
· The contemplative acknowledges the “messy entanglement” of sexual desire and desire for God.
· The contemplative guards the distinctness of the Spirit.
· The apophatic turn undermines gender stereotypes and opens new modellings of desire.
· Contemplation expands the self and subverts disengaged reason.
· It reorders the passions.
· It offers a trinitarian pattern of power-in-vulnerability.
For readers steeped in patristics and now immersed in Paul (as I am), the book feels both deeply traditional and refreshingly disruptive. It resonates with the mystical tradition (Ignatius, John of the Cross, Teresa, Hilton, etc.) that I have long read but sometimes kept in a separate mental compartment from academic work.
A few friendly questions remain. Does the incorporative model sufficiently safeguard the eternal distinctions within the Trinity, or does it risk blurring economic and immanent realities? How does the strong emphasis on contemplative asceticism translate for busy people for whom extended silence is difficult? And while Coakley’s desire language is rich and consistent with Gregory and Augustine, I wonder whether she gives enough weight to the vividly physical, eschatological body language of 1 Corinthians 15.
Nevertheless, Coakley does not offer easy answers or trendy revisions. She offers a costly, prayer-shaped orthodoxy that seeks to draw the whole self—body, desire, intellect, and community—into the life of the triune God. The payoff on desire as an ontological category is profound and deeply Pauline: the Spirit who groans with us and in us is the same Spirit who conforms us to the Son for the glory of the Father.
Comments
Post a Comment