self-sufficient—has risen among us as a beautiful, marvelous, and unmerited gift. We welcome it, throwing open our windows and doors with a joyful yearning to the brisk Wind who bathed the mutilated body of the crucified Jesus with abundant life and gathered the church.
I could never simply lay claim to this book. It is truer that they wrote it—my friends and lovers, my teachers and students, my parents and children, and Elesha, the love of my life—than that I did. In this, too: Te Deum laudamus!
It is with joy that I think now back over the faces of all the people named and unnamed in this preface. But I think in particular of the faces of my parents, and I think of them in the roomy, disclosed countenance of the Slaughtered Lamb in whose future theirs, too, will forever vigilantly shine. It is to them that this book is dedicated.
The Feast Day of Ignatius of Antioch, 2012
1. Bultmann, “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden?”
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
