After Crucifixion. Craig Keen

Not only a writer’s pride or her humility may lead her to settle on the conviction that the book she has written is extraordinary. Pride and humility are, of course, complicated phenomena that not uncommonly rub off on the work in which they are complicit. Both do sometimes come in handy in the course of carrying out prolonged and difficult tasks, like writing books. Still, neither is always and everywhere helpful even in this particular line of work, perhaps especially because they contend so bitterly with each other in both happy and unhappy memories and hopes. I am pretty sure that, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently, I am and have been both mortally humble and proud. I confess that, because I do find myself against myself comparing myself to others and find that my level of energy is affected by the way they and I appear to measure up. Consequently, in the writing of this book, I have felt alternately good and bad about a word choice, the turn of a phrase, and the way phrases tumble together to make paragraphs and sections and chapters and then a whole book. Still, I have not set out to write a book that has measured up and even when I have been worried about whether or not it has, I have found that I have written otherwise. In other words, though quite a large number of subjects are discussed here—from immigration to education, from the history of metaphysics to the Gospel of Mark, from urban planning to martyrdom, from brain physiology to ecclesiology, from wounded bodies to the forgiveness of sins, from hard work to hard, hard death, from time to resurrection, from theological method to the doctrine of the Trinity, and too much more—this is not a book about certain ideas or practices. This is not actually a book about anything (über etwas, Bultmann might have said). It is rather a book of something (von etwas).1 What I have written, more particularly, is a prayer, a prayer I have prayed precisely in the writing. This is a book that prays and prays in particular that its “speaking voice” would “also be [its] hearing ear.”2 It prays performatively, as an act, as a movement that perhaps without presumption might be called a dance, a perhaps perichoretic one, if the epiclesis of God’s good pleasure happens to be answered. It is a dance, though, that calls for a partner. Which means that this is that awkward moment when I stand before you, having crossed the wide well-waxed hardwood floor, and ask with downcast eyes if you would dance with me.

An extraordinary book, however, is not necessarily a good book. I would not claim that this is a good book—or its opposite, for that matter. I don’t know how I would even begin to make either judgment. It is, it seems to me, simply different, different from ordinary books, and especially those shelved near it in the theology section of university or seminary libraries. Indeed, when asked about what I’ve been writing, for some time now I have typically reached for a harsher adjective: “I am writing a weird introduction to theology,” I have said. Now, as anyone who has been to a junior high school dance knows, the surest way to strike out after that long walk across the dance floor from your side to hers is to be labeled by her and especially by her friends as weird. Still, this book, it seems to me, is just that, in part because it does not secure a defensible position, i.e., it will not stand still long enough to stake a claim.3 Of course, neither does a child’s guilty confession or the barely audible moans haunting the aftermath of battle or an exhausted smile in a labor and delivery unit—or a charging bull, for that matter.

On the other extreme, the phrase “introduction to theology” leaves the exact opposite impression. To encounter someone or something weird may at least at times be interesting. Of the items on the long list of academe’s most perfunctory undertakings, “introduction to theology” has one of the lowest sexiness quotients. Simply utter the phrase and you can feel the room’s net hormone level drop. And yet, I would still say, right out in public, that this book is an introduction, i.e., if it is by way of introduction that one person might invite another to dance. After Crucifixion is an invitation to you, an invitation to dance, to think, to pray, to hear an extraordinary, weird, uncanny beat and move to it—with me.4

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