This is a dense, intense, fierce, ambitious, tour de force of a book. It packs more into its 292 pages than I would have thought possible—by a factor of at least two. It’s not only that Linn Tonstad manages to cover a great deal of ground, in terms of thinkers and interwoven themes, though this is certainly true, but also that her insight and analysis comes so thick and fast. At times I found myself underlining a sentence in each paragraph, thinking every time “here’s the pivotal point, the absolutely decisive moment in the argument” or “here’s the key insight articulated so trenchantly that it has to be quoted in the review.” It’s a relief that the Syndicate protocol discourages any attempt to sum up and comment on a book as a whole.

I greatly enjoyed God and Difference: as an analysis of what has gone wrong in contemporary trinitarian theology (which is only part of Tonstad’s agenda) it is unparalleled. I found that the more I knew about the figure and theme under consideration, the more impressed I was. On the other hand, the dense intensity of the book means that if one doesn’t already know the material under consideration, it will be tough to follow. Tonstad doesn’t leave out any steps, but her thought moves so quickly that if the territory is not already well known it will not be easy to keep up.

As Tonstad herself realizes, in fact, the group of readers who will feel equally at home in all parts of her book is vanishingly small. Even had she confined herself to the relatively staid systematic side of her argument, it wouldn’t have been a large crowd—people who have come to terms with the whole oeuvre of Ward and Coakley, who know their way around Balthasar and are also at ease with Pannenberg, Moltmann and Tanner are not so thick on the ground. The fact that in addition Tonstad engages with queer theory, that she deliberately brings the two disciplines, with their two very different genres, together, means she has written a book which will likely prove baffling at one point or another to nearly all her readers.

Personally, after having read God and Difference, I find myself wrestling with two puzzles, one relating to the part of the book with which I am most at ease, where I know my way around, and the other relating to the elements of the book which, as one “accustomed to the sedate genre conventions of most dogmatic theology,” I am most out of my depth.

Part 1 deals with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Graham Ward and Sarah Coakley, all of whom have “intentionally connected gender, sexuality and desire to the trinity” (17). The treatments of Balthasar, Ward and Coakley are detailed, closely argued, and generally devastating. While acknowledging various strengths (especially in Ward and Coakley), and various kinds of good intentions (especially in Ward), Tonstad diagnoses a whole series of problems in the trinitarian proposals of these three. What puzzles me is not whether Tonstad is right or not—almost always I find myself agreeing, and admiring the clarity and force with which she identifies the problems. What puzzles me, rather, is the question of what lies at the heart of the various criticisms she makes—where the center of gravity lies.

The obvious answer would be that it is something to do with the way these thinkers weave together God and sexual difference. This is what the shape of the book as a whole seems to point to, and it is what bringing these three together in Part 1 more particularly seems to indicate. And yet it is not quite so clear as one might think. Let’s consider some of the criticisms Tonstad levels against Balthasar, Coakley and Ward.

A major issue is the tendency to import what properly belongs to a world of finitude and sin into the Trinity. This includes the intimation of competition between Trinitarian persons built into claims that they make space for one another, or give way to one another, or surrender or make something like sacrifices for one another. Tonstad cites a passage from the fifth volume of Balthasar’s Theodrama associating the Father’s self-giving in the immanent Trinity with a “super-death,” and comments, quite reasonably, “The shock of this passage is difficult to mute” (36).

There are also failures to distinguish between finitude and sin found in both Ward and Coakley, and an unfortunate tendency to confuse the nature of divine-creaturely relations with the nature of relations between one created being and another, so that, for example, dependence on God is supposed by both of them to entail vulnerability. All three figures want to ground the cross in the Trinity, and all of them in one way or another associate love and closeness with suffering and sacrifice. These problems are associated with an insufficient attention to the resurrection and the fact that Christian faith is all about the defeat of death.

A more general criticism, directed at least against Ward and Coakley, is of projection. Projectionism is by now a familiar critique of social trinitarianism, but Tonstad makes the case that the phenomenon is not limited to the social theorists, and that “corrective projectionism” (a useful coinage) is more widely practiced by contemporary theologians: I diagnose whatever I think is wrong in, say, contemporary capitalism’s way of understanding the self or persons or relations, and then I project the exact cure for this onto the trinity. So Tonstad argues that for Coakley, “finding the solution to a distinctly human problem of relationships in the constitution of the trinity remains at least as crucial” as it is for the social trinitarians she criticizes (104), and that “Ward’s trinity is a corrective projection based on what he believes is necessary to generate the ethically and imaginatively constituted human subjects he hopes to produce” (83). More generally still, lying behind the problem of corrective projectionism is what Tonstad argues is the misplaced impulse to make trinitarian theology practical.

The criticisms I have touched on in the last few paragraphs can all be articulated without reference, or at least without explicit, overt reference, to issues of sex or gender. Of course this is not all there is to Tonstad’s assessment of Balthasar, Ward and Coakley. There is also a vigorous and to my mind persuasive demonstration of a range of problems quite specifically related to their efforts to tie together trinity, sex and gender. But my puzzle is how to see the relationship of the two kinds of problems. Is the proposal that, in our thinking about contemporary trinitarianism, we should see issues around sex and gender as lying at the heart of all that is amiss? Or are these an added strand of problem, one which interacts in complex ways with other distortions? Or are they one expression among others, one inflection among others, of the fundamental problems (the practicality of the Trinity, corrective projectionism, forgetfulness of the difference between God and creation)? Or is there something wrong about the very way I am posing the question? I expect the answer is already present somewhere in the book, but in amongst the profusion of intensely woven analysis and critique, I find I can’t quite come to a settled reading of where Tonstad stands on this issue.

The second thing I find myself puzzling over is the combination of the two genres, systematic theology and queer theory, and the question of how well it succeeds. I’m not in a position to pronounce confidently on the matter, of course: I belong very much on one side of the genre divide, and Tonstad expects those like myself who are not literate in queer theory to be baffled, shocked, unsettled. Ultimately the judgment to be made about the success of this way of introducing queer theory and its conventions into systematic theology may rest more with theologians younger than Tonstad than it does with those older.

Still, I can perhaps say at least a couple of things: first, if one is going to take a stance against widespread current enthusiasm for “sexing the Trinity” (to borrow D’Costa’s phrase), it’s very useful to be proficient in queer theory. It helps in the detailed analysis—to be able to see exactly what’s off key in various thinkers’ attempts to ground gender fluidity in the Trinity, for instance. And it helps for the overall credibility of the position: neither Tonstad nor her readers need worry that she might be resisting the latest exciting trends in trinitarian theology because she’s just too narrowly conventional or theoretically unsophisticated to keep up with the proposals.

And even where one finds oneself left in the dust by the faster moving queer theoretical portions of this book, it’s still possible to sense, I think, tools in the making which in the end, once the rest of us catch up, may help give fresh purchase on some of the oddest and most frustrating features of theological language and argument. Tonstad goes most of the way towards persuading me that queer theory has something illuminating and analytically powerful to introduce into the theological conversation, even if there’s still quite a bit of work needed (another book, perhaps?) before I am likely to really understand what it is.

Consider, for instance, Marcella Althaus-Reid, an important figure for Tonstad. My (brief) encounters with Althaus-Reid’s work in the past never inclined me to turn towards her as a source, and I have to confess Tonstad’s book has not converted me. Even mediated by Tonstad, Althaus-Reid does not make things clearer to me. On the other hand, because often Tonstad herself does make things clearer to me—because at other points I find her analysis powerful and acute—her respect for Althaus-Reid is enough to give me pause, to make me wonder about what it is that I might be missing.

More generally, then, even if nearly no one understands this book as a whole, the strength of those parts readers can understand should dispose them to learn something—or at the very least to appreciate that there is something still to learn—from the parts where they find themselves at sea.

At the end of God and Difference, Linn Marie Tonstad reminds us that theologians are nearly always successful in their searches, as when, searching for the historical Jesus, they find what they were hoping for all along. Similarly, with the trinity (lowercase throughout Tonstad’s book), they find it is about “sex, sexuality, or other differences” that have engaged their imagination (290). Moreover, in the case of the trinity it proves to be the key for the very differences they have sought to understand; now seen as only understandable through a “right trinitarianism.” But it is this very success that Tonstad wants to question. The trinity has been over-valued, over-used, made to perform tasks it cannot fulfil. It has become a “shibboleth for orthodoxy and theological seriousness,” and needs rescue. The trinity needs to “do much less theological work” (287).

Of course, the problem is the work that the trinity has been made to do, which in the modern period has been the establishment and maintenance of proper relations between people, and in particular between the sexes. The relationships within the trinity, as between its “persons,” have been made an exemplum for relationships in the world, as between men and women—even though, of course, it is various construals of the latter that inform the former. Indeed, the relationship between a differentiated divinity and the world—the differential relationship of creator from creation that is “beyond difference” (46)—has been made the measure of worldly relationships; the measure of man from woman. One need only think of Angelo Cardinal Scola, invoking an abyss—an “abysmal difference” (Scola 2005: 285)—between the sexes, as if it were Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative difference” of divine from human. The relationship of divine (intra-trinitarian) and sexual difference is perhaps the most egregious of analogies, since it aligns the man with divinity and materiality with the woman, and this distribution is not less toxic for being “analogous.”

Given that it is such trinitarian work at which Tonstad takes aim, it is not surprising to find her book opening with a taking down, a demolition, of Hans Urs von Balthasar and his trinitarian theology of the sexes (chapter 1). Indeed, one might think that Tonstad comes late to such work, with the likes of Tina Beattie (above all, Beattie), Corinne Crammer, Lucy Gardner and David Moss, Karen Kilby, Gerard Loughlin, Rachel Muers, and Graham Ward, preceding. But the critique of Balthasar is in some ways a feint, since what emerges through Tonstad’s reading of both Balthasar and his critics is the failure of the latter to remedy the failings of the former, for they are found too wedded to working with the trinity. They don’t see that it is less and not more trinitarian work that is needed.

Less is more for Tonstad. At one point, she notes how many “fulminate against the neglect of the Holy Spirit” in trinitarian theology. “S/he/it needs also to be seen as an actor in her/his/its own right and needs to be brought up to the level of significance that the Son and the Father already enjoy.” But rather refreshingly, Tonstad argues that matters are the other way around. She wants equality and not hierarchy in the trinity, but it is not that the Spirit needs more attention, but that the Father and Son will benefit from less, can be made to do less (damaging) work: “The way the Holy Spirit is often treated gives us a model for how the other two should be ‘neglected’ as well” (227). As we shall see below, Tonstad’s neglectful theology is in fact a spreading out of the Spirit, allowing the relationship that is the Spirit to inform how one might think the relationships of Father and Son, and the relationship of the trinity to that which the trinity creates.

If it was but Balthasar, and theologians like him, whom Tonstad was critiquing, her book would be interesting but not provoking. And it is, undoubtedly, provoking, for beyond the Balthasarians, Tonstad wants to show how even those who are in a sense her allies—other feminist and queer theologians—fail to outwit those elements of trinitarian thought that they do not think to question, that they think unquestionable. Thus, in the first part of her book, having critiqued Balthasar and his critics, she turns to the theologies of Graham Ward (chapter 2) and Sarah Coakley (chapter 3). Elsewhere, in an essay (Tonstad 2014) that serves as a companion to the present book, Tonstad considers the work of Elizabeth Stuart, Gavin D’Costa and Gerard Loughlin. As with Ward and Coakley, these authors valiantly attempt to save the Christian symbolic from its heterosexism, but can never undo the fundamental gendered binary of God to world. Movement of gendered bodies within the system—men taking on feminine roles, women (on rare occasions) masculine—does not so much frustrate as confirm the hierarchical binary. “To queer a hierarchical symbol system by permitting persons of all gender identifications to take up the higher positions does not undo the hierarchy, nor does it free the symbolic imagination from its commitment to reducing difference to hierarchical order” (Tonstad 2014: 10).

Both Ward and Coakley look to the trinity for a more equitable construal of sexual difference. But Ward’s trinitarian work, while “laudable,” ends by erecting “a cross in the very heart of God’s eternal being” (86). Something related happens in Coakley, but now the valorization of suffering becomes absolute for a theology that—on Tonstad’s devastating reading—leaves a possessive soul forever seeking its self-dispossession (121). “The whole cosmos is set up as a school for self-sacrifice so that all of creation may be divinized by participation in the crucifixion of the Son” (114). On Tonstad’s reading, Coakley’s creation becomes a joyless undertaking: “the utter absence of gratuity” (121). I will come back to some of the themes in these chapters, but their detailed reading is beyond the scope of this review. The point to take away is that Ward and Coakley are too enamored of suffering, too thoughtless (of the gospel) in making suffering the mark of difference.

But perhaps more important than the above assaults on the attempts of feminist, queer and queer-friendly theologians to rethink the Christian symbolic without undoing the symbolic itself—seeking to make it more inclusive by making it more fluid—is Tonstad’s aversion to origins, and above all to the relation of origin, which is the relation—within the symbolic—to the Father. Right at the heart of trinitarian thought—right at the heart of the trinity—is the Father, from whom all else flows, of whatever ontological status: the Son (begotten), the Spirit (processing), the world (emanated/created). The gendering of this origin is forever problematic, since even when given a womb (on this see Rogers 2005: 111–18), perhaps especially when given a womb, it establishes one sex above all others, and in that very establishment a trinity that is forever hierarchical, which is to say, forever subordinating, eternally. This then opens unto the valorization of subjection—subjectivity through subjection, of “persons” human and divine (46)—mentioned above in relation to Ward and Coakley. These theologians do their very best, but they only become more entangled the more they try to outwit a logic that cannot be undone. Instead, it must be refused.

The second half of Tonstad’s book (its part 3) is concerned to articulate an alternative to those forms of trinitarian theology that should be refused. There is a hinge between the first and second halves, a chapter (part 2, chapter 4) that attends to Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Kathryn Tanner, who, while not entirely beyond criticism, are read for what they contribute rather than for where they fall short. (It is a little curious—charitable—that Pannenberg is so warmly welcomed, given his antipathy to homosexuality, and his no doubt deprecation of queer theology, should it have come his way.) Building on these theologians, Tonstad develops a non-hierarchical, flattened-out trinity, so to speak—though not as flattened out as some (see Loughlin 1999: 193). In Tonstad’s trinity, all give and receive, differentiated only in what they give and receive. “The Father gives [the name of love] to the Son and the Spirit; the Son gives [glory] to the Father and the Spirit; and the Spirit gives [power] to the Father and the Son” (229). This is a trinity in which the “persons” come alongside one another, just as they come alongside the world in its creation. Their unity is not grounded in one person (Father), but shared between them (231): the field of light that is the divine life (227; the notion of the divine “field” is taken from Pannenberg).

Tonstad’s reading of her theologians is dauntingly close, attending sometimes to every permutation through which an essay has gone. The authors themselves could hardly know their work better than Tonstad. At times, her book can seem overly technical, its analyses so minutely detailed but swift that the reader is left breathless and dizzy. It is fearsomely rigorous, and this is so much the case that it comes almost as a surprise to find Tonstad—especially in chapter 6 (“The Lord of Glory”—a perhaps cheeky recollection of Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit / The Glory of the Lord)—sketching an alternative theology to those she has critiqued, in passages that, while never languorous, are more easeful, indeed seductive, that unexpectedly open onto a theological vision that is both attractive and comprehensive: an interlinked account of trinity, church and eucharist that manages to be both traditional and unusual.

The aim of the trinity’s action in the world is to give human beings a share in the life of God. What such a share in the life of God looks like is best seen in New Testament passages dealing with food and banqueting practices. . . . The transformation of human existence is not its translation into a world other than this one. It is, rather, the promise and reality of God’s coming close in love, so that the love of God for humans is made directly available in their sibling relation to Jesus, through which God comes to live among humans as an adoptive parent for the sake of new creation. God comes close in love to transform human difference from its seemingly inevitable, sinful tendency to turn into competition necessitating self-sacrifice into the possibility of table fellowship in friendship with each other and Jesus, as adoptive children of God all seated around the banquet table enjoying the overflow that characterizes the life given by God. (238)

This passage points both back to what Tonstad finds so distressing and even reprehensible in the theologies of Balthasar, Ward and Coakley, and behind them much of the Christian tradition—namely the valorization of scarcity and sacrifice—and forward to Tonstad’s theology of God’s ceaseless generosity, coming alongside us as sibling and parent, as friend. Another way to think the contrast is as between theologies of difference that stress the crucifixion of Jesus and those that focus on his resurrection. Tonstad is firmly in the latter camp. Theologians of crucifixion allow the church’s early interpretation of Jesus’ death as sacrifice to so infect their accounts of God’s life, that the trinity—the relation of Father and Son—becomes a story of “death, wounding, space-making, self-emptying, and eternal sacrifice” (147). And because it is this relation that is used to think the relationship of the sexes, the difference of sex becomes one of penetrator and penetrated, wounding and wounded; and woman—unlike the more mobile Son—never escapes the victim position.

The point—which Tonstad develops across a complex array of theological arguments—can be illustrated by the figure of Mary, who Tonstad describes, in paraphrase of Luce Irigaray, as having no place; “she just is place—a reduction of woman to the womb-place that births the ultimate man through the transcendent power of paternal reproduction” (68; emphasis in original). The Son, who enters Mary’s womb and comes forth from it as Jesus, and is sometimes himself a womb—a “wound-womb” as Tonstad calls it (13)—birthing the church he dies for, is nevertheless also able to escape death, rising from the womb-tomb, recovering “the phallus,” taking “back control over his own body” (68). The critique is not just that agency is always and only masculine in this trinitarian imaginary, but that the synecdochic womb is associated with wounding and death; life through violence, eternally grounded in what one might think the sadomasochistic relation of Father and Son.

While Tonstad insists on the different difference that God is from the world, she yet allows for the analogical crossing of that difference, not least and most wonderfully when she describes participation (sharing) in the life of God as the non-identical repetition of God’s non-competiveness. Just as the divine three do not compete for the same “space,” and nor for the space that we occupy, so in sharing God’s life we learn that we do not need to compete with one another. “One need not move aside to make room for the other, for there is enough space for all. Connecting trinitarian relationality to materiality and the body, we discover the possibility of bodies that do not crowd each other out, make room for each other, or penetrate each other in order to be in relation and to be in the same place at the same time” (239). We do not need to make room for each other because God has made enough space for all.

Yet, despite “limit” being associated with sin, there are some limits of which Tonstad approves, limits that are not the result of sin, signs of a fallen world, but borders within a redeemed cosmos. These are the separate bodies that we are to one another, alongside one another; skins we may touch but should not penetrate. And here too is an analogy, for the relationship of touching bodies repeats the touching of the trinitarian persons, just as these relationships figure that of God alongside the world. Thus, in a curious way, the very analogies, comparisons, that seemed so decried when critiqued in other theologies, are now allowed, now that the differences are no longer ones of origin—of Son from Father, woman from man (Eve from Adam), world from God—but are instead the difference of, as it were, coming alongside, of being side by side: of Father, Son and Spirit (side by side by side); of one person with another person or persons, (side by side—by side); of creator and creation (side by side): the sensuous Spirit caressing the world, driving it wild (276). It is the Spirit’s manner of relating that now informs the picturing of the other trinitarian relationships, of Father and Son, and of Father and Son and Spirit. The trinity is no longer imagined as “the spatial interpenetration of persons,” but as an economy of translucent “touch,” inspired by the “Spirit’s breathy caresses” (227). (Though Tonstad briefly critiques Eugene Rogers’ trinitarian theology [in Rogers 1996], there is perhaps some kinship between his central motif of the Spirit “resting” on the Son, and on the Son’s siblings and friends [in Rogers 2005], and Tonstad’s touching pneumatology.)

There is, perhaps, a playfulness here, the play of the provocateur and the tactician, making a deliberate breach in a phallocentric theology, a deliberate replacement of a penetrative logic with a clitoral symbolic (after Irigaray 1985); or not a breach, but the placing of a new, different imaginary, alongside the old, the one that imagines one must give up, put aside, sacrifice and suffer, in order to receive. Of course, penetration can be thought less violently, less as rupture or shattering, and more as intimate touch, the coming alongside of an interior, softer surface, but a surface nonetheless: a changing but continuous “skin.” Penetration might be a form of being alongside and being alongside a form of penetration; and it might be that we can imagine a relation of difference in which limit/skin is both crossed and not crossed at the same time. Perhaps we might think this a placental relationship that both joins and separates; that must be crossed over (the mark of difference) even as it is already crossed because already the shared limit of each: mother and child (see Irigaray 1993: 39–41; Loughlin 1994: 27–29). However, this might seem too panentheistic for those who—like Tonstad—want to maintain the “difference beyond difference” (169), the relation of creator to an “out of nothing” creation. Yet, we might think that this shared, placental limit, is the internal limit of incarnation—two natures touching in one hypostasis—and so indeed the most intimate union and infinite difference: the other side of the skin.

It will take some time to think through what Tonstad has and has not achieved in God and Difference. It is an exhilarating read, not least for what it builds up as well as what it tears down. Tearing down and building up might not be the best way to describe Tonstad’s project, for indeed she aims to be as “orthodox” as the orthodoxy she so relentlessly critiques. It is then more a transfiguration of the Christian trinitarian symbolic. Though Ward and Coakley are taken to task for leaving too much in place, Tonstad herself—as I have tried to suggest—leaves much standing as well, and not least the trinitarian name: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Borders and limits are disparaged—the evils of division—and yet they return in the skins that touch, side by side, but never puncture or breach. And this touching is analogous across the divine and human divide, so that one teaches the other. So Tonstad’s trinitarian theology is both very close and very different from that which it contests; just the other side and yet far away. I might have liked it a little further off, a little more apophatic in the way that Karen Kilby has espoused (Kilby 2005 and 2010), and that Tonstad notes (225). And in that regard I cannot but think Tonstad right to argue for a less industrious trinity, working away—and worked over—to produce the orders of difference and relationship that we find in the world; that we wish to affirm in our world. So, at the end of this review I find myself returning to an author I invoked the last time I wrote for Syndicate (Loughlin 2014), namely Jacques Pohier (1985), who came to understand, with the help of Thomas Aquinas, that God does not want to be everything. Echoing Pohier, we can say the trinity does not want to be everything, and Linn Marie Tonstad shows us how this can be, in showing—as I read her (which may not be how she reads herself)—a God who comes alongside and changes everything.

Bibliography

Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

———. 1993. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Kilby, Karen. 2005. “Aquinas, The Trinity and the Limits of Understanding.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7.4: 414–27.

———. 2010. “Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12.1: 65–77

Loughlin, Gerard. 1994. “Other Discourses.” New Blackfriars 75/878 (January): 18–31.

———. 1999. Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2014. “God Is Not Everything.” Syndicate 1.4 (November/December): 164–70.

Pohier, Jacques. 1985. God in Fragments. Translated by John Bowden. London: SCM Press.

Rogers, Eugene F., Jr. 1996. Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God. Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 2005. After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Scola, Angelo. 2005. The Nuptial Mystery. Translated by Michelle K. Borras. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Tonstad, Linn Marie. 2015. “The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and Its Others.” Theology and Sexuality 21.1: 1–19.

———. 2016. God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude. New York: Routledge.

Linn Tonstad’s God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude generates “trinitarian trouble” that promisingly shakes the very foundations of systematic and constructive theological inquiry. The fundamental conviction of Trinitarian theology, namely, that God is self-revealed in the world through Jesus, drives her bold interrogation of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Sarah Coakley, and Graham Ward. The groundbreaking queer God-talk that emerges from Tonstad’s genealogical Trinitarian experiment is significant for black womanist praxis that is greatly concerned with the contemporary scourge of anti-black violences and the development of theological mechanisms of resistance that nurture apocalyptic vision and life-affirming practice in church and society.

In part 1 Tonstad initiates her laborious examination of contemporary trinitarian theologies and begins the work of uncovering what she provocatively asserts on the first page of the text as the “lost-ness” of Trinitarian theology. Positing anti-difference as the bedrock of the Christian theological imaginary, Tonstad thoroughly examines the problematic gendering of the God-world relation in her effort to destabilize the pathologics of heterosexism, heteronormativity, and the hierarchical inequality of sexual difference in the trinity. The book’s immediate focus on the inner-trinitarian relational function born from the drama, woundedness, and kenotic finitude that respectively drive Balthasar, Ward, and Coakley initially threatens to overwhelm the critical question at the heart of Tonstad’s project: “what does our understanding of the trinity mean for us?” Summarily casting the reader into the almost impenetrable world of “T-theology,” however, Tonstad’s project echoes the formidable remnant of Rahner’s stimulating axiom, “the ‘economic’ trinity is the ‘immanent’ trinity [and] . . . the ‘immanent’ trinity is the ‘economic’ trinity,” in ways that confirm the project’s weighty relevance to the contemporary context and its sinful fragmentation at the seams of social distinction. As the economic relevance of the project carefully unfolds in relationship to hierarchy in sexual difference, which is Tonstad’s primary emphasis, I was excited by the ways in which the argument also translates to hierarchical inequalities and inequities that manifest distinctly at the intersections of varied social locations; namely, race, gender, and class distinctions, toward which Tonstad subtly gestures throughout the book.

There is no doubt that the fracturing of many twenty-first-century churches proceeds on the basis of hierarchy in sexual difference that emerges from an understanding of the God-world relation that is grounded in heterosexism, heteronormativity, and homophobia. In light of this scathing reality, God and Difference disrupts the Trinitarian status quo and invaluably asserts that God matters for us, and that the performance of the inner-trinitarian relation provokes the “people of God” or the church (a category of dis/belonging that Tonstad ingeniously troubles in her concluding chapters) to perform justly or otherwise in the world. The critical intention of Tonstad’s argument, however—the assertion of banquets without borders that unambiguously establish the whosoever that get to fully share in the life of God—unfolds with clarity as she debunks the sexed and gendered aspects of “subordination and obedience; the tight connection between the cross, obedience, and revelation of the inner-trinitarian relations” and trinitarian theology’s “corrective projectionism . . . regarding personhood and subjectivity” (17).

Stimulated by Althaus-Reid’s liberationist vision, Tonstad identifies Balthasar, Coakley, and Ward as principal representatives of colonial theology and unflinchingly argues that, even as its progenitors have been heralded as the arbiters of Christian theology, such colonial trinitarian claims are not only wrong but have, in fact, gotten God dead wrong. Accordingly, Tonstad calls the leaders of the field to account for the discrepancy between their God of death and the God in Christ who, as gospeled, comes to give life.

While systematic theologian Delores S. Williams is offered only a cursory nod in the book, the significance of her prescient late twentieth-century black womanist christological challenge to dominant theological inquiry’s “glorification” of suffering and subordination in the Father-Son relation is overtly perceptible. Tonstad pushes further by rigorously challenging the respective particularities and de/merits of colonial theology while, as exposed in her “Interlude,” decisively problematizing that which apparently holds them all together: the import and significance of immanent trinitarian space-making that compels “making room for the other” as the requirement of difference in the immanent trinity. Moreover, Tonstad further contends that the act and/or urge to “make space” is an act of theological violence insofar as it “symbolically sexes the God-world relation”; an affiliation that is problematically predetermined by a Father-Son relation that is consistently constituted in T-theology by “death, wounding . . . self-emptying, and eternal sacrifice.” Such Trinitarian assessments produce a sexed economy of dispossession that secures woundedness and submission as obedience in a world of debt, sin, and “sonship” (147). For Tonstad, this economic exchange is consonant with the violence of phallic penetration insofar as it necessitates an eternal cross for the minoritized; that is in this case, permanent subordination and suffering as the inevitable consequence of sexual difference (136). Since death, however, cannot belong to God and thus “should not be made the translation of any aspect of inner-trinitarian relations,” Tonstad advances the bedrock of her queer constructive argument which also appears to capture the foremost intrigue of the project; namely, the significance of “clitoral pleasure” as the contrasting logic to the symbolic order of sexual difference (134). Dismantling the imagery of male climax and its erection of “space-making” which demands that the self “move aside to make room for the other, to be filled by the other, for self and other cannot be in the same place at the same time,” clitoral pleasure offers a “phenomenology of touch without violence” insofar as it does not require invasion for relational joy, or demand death as the wage of difference (136).

In part 2, Tonstad engages Moltmann, Pannenberg, and Tanner’s respective modifications of the logic of Trinitarian procession with stunning precision. While apparently still falling woefully short, Tonstad implicitly contends that their significant variations on relations of origin, most especially Kathryn Tanner’s assertion of “making room” as the co-presence of a “for us” God and humanity, rather than the compulsory death of penetration, provide promising trinitarian ground for Tonstad’s assertion of the pentecostal import of Spirit as God’s clitoris in the final section of the book. Her queer vision of the Spirit that dispossesses the viability of masculine generativity in the Trinity and models theological imagination beyond the phallus to redeem sexual difference and transform finitude echoes Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Kathryn Tanner, and reveals Tonstad’s central claim with indisputable clarity: there is nothing in the immanent life of God-for-us that even hints of subordination; thus, the cross, that is, suffering and death, have nothing to do with or reveal of God’s economic mission. It follows that the myriad exclusionary ways in which the Bible, the church, and God-talk have been deployed to wound and oppress queer and/or other minoritized communities are the antithesis [antichrist?] of Tonstad’s “Lord of Glory” who, as revealed in/by the touch of the Spirit, is concerned with transforming “us from slaves and servants to friends and children of God” (235). For Tonstad, such transformation is the expiration of finitude in the world; the coming resurrection, or as black womanist theology might accede, the certainty that “trouble don’t last always.”

Time and space do not allow me the privilege of saying more about the book’s deeply compelling ecclesiology—especially Tonstad’s idea of the church as the “non-possessible Body of Christ”—that supports my recent work on the theological, ethical, and ecclesial significance of the contemporary movement for Black lives that was first conceived in the practice and virtual imagination of three queer black women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. In brief conclusion, however, my womanist sensibilities echo the authoritative work of systematic theologian Joanne Terrell and ground the question that my reading of Tonstad’s exceptional God and Difference amidst this new millennial season of black death at the hands of anti-black state-sanctioned violence leaves me with; that is, is there no power in the Blood?

I get it—and perhaps the answer is no for some of us and, frankly, is often the most comfortable answer for those who are constantly faced with the threat of non-being.

It seems, however, that there is room for womanist theology to approximate the question of subordination, woundedness, and death as an opening for the viability of Terrell’s “sacramental witness” as a faithful response to Tonstad’s claim. In fact, the inquiry proves to be a decisive que[e]rying of Hagar who, based on the triangulation/trinity of black women’s oppression—that is always concurrently raced, gendered, sexed, and classed vis-à-vis Abraham, Sarah, and Ishmael—lacks the privilege of difference, or as Tonstad proposes, the privilege of drawing a distinction between enslavement and “sonship.” Hagar is both slave and “son”; and such Hagaritic witness in concert with Tonstad’s book leaves me to wonder about what happens to death and finitude when one concurrently occupies space as both/and—both slave and “son,” both “wounded” and “touched?” This sort of theological intersectionality guides the work of the womanist liberationist project. It claims that God in Christ’s subordination with us, not merely for us authenticates God’s co-presence in us, which in the words of M. Shawn Copeland, wades “through many sorrows” that are both Cone’s cross and his lynching tree. What does an apocalyptic vision of life, resurrection that defies the eschatos, thus mean for black life, or more precisely, black queer life that proclaims “black lives matter” even as materiality suggests that there are no banquets that make room for black [queer] co-presence in church, academy, and/or society? As Sandra Bland’s driving while black, Alton Sterling and India Beaty’s standing while black, Tamir Rice’s playing in the park while black, and Korryn Gaines’ sitting at home while black suggest, death is constitutive of black life, oft performing as the end of always trouble for black lives. Perhaps it is even the driving force behind black postcolonial martyrdom that defies the phallic emissions of eternal suffering, as it sings in faith “O death, where is thy sting?” and as it is intoned in the Negro spiritual that claims, “before I be a slave, I be buried in my grave.” Yet if there is no death in God could it be that this death-denying, coming, and clitoral God is merely the drag of a white racist?

Linn Tonstad’s intriguing new book is, as she herself owns, written in two voices.1 It is crucial to acknowledge this at the outset, since—as this review will discuss—the fundamental presumptions, theological or otherwise, to which the two voices are attuned are by no means easily harmonized. And this makes the volume all the more challenging to assess. This reviewer has had to read the book several times to be sure of representing its contents as fairly and sympathetically as possible: what follows is my best attempt so to do, for there is indeed a great deal to be learned from its contents, not least in the way it deliberately provokes and disturbs.

Tonstad self-identifies at the outset as “a queer and feminist theologian who is interested in dogmatics” (3, my emphasis). As it turns out, this way of putting things is going to be important, although it is not immediately apparent at the beginning of the book what it will mean. From here, a significant portion of the book (Voice 1, as I shall term it) is written in a genre instantly recognizable as standard academic “dogmatic” or “systematic” theology,2 worthy of anyone rigorously trained in the “Yale school,” as Tonstad has been. In this strand of the book, Tonstad delivers, with considerable acuity and insight, a critical overview of recent trends in the renewal of trinitarian theology in the West: its rejection of a disjunction between “economic” and “immanent” Trinities; its notable (and in Tonstad’s mind, highly regrettable) seduction towards “social trinitarianism”; its tendency to fail to plumb the significance of the absolute ontological difference between the divine and the human; its unfortunate attempt thereby to deal with contemporary problems of “sexuality” and “gender” by recourse to supposed parallelisms between human and intra-divine “relations”; and its various assaults on the problem of a remaining (albeit covert) subordination of the Spirit. No one who reads this survey can fail to be instructed by Tonstad’s succinct and canny review of the relevant trinitarian literature: it is contentious to be sure, but thought-provoking in a sharp and instructive way. Yet the rather surprising final hero of the analysis is, as it turns out, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who is recovered at the end of the book as a supposedly fine example of a theologian resistant to tangling gender projection and theology together,3 indeed averse to saying anything whatever about God in se. The lessons of the “systematic” story (Voice 1), therefore, are what we might call purgative: speculation about an “immanent” Trinity is otiose, since “the work the doctrine of the trinity is being asked to do in contemporary theology is work that the doctrine simply cannot do” (290). What Tonstad wants, in contrast, is a christologically construed account of the “glory of God in the body” (291), a matter on which she thinks theologians can appropriately reflect without improper speculations about the inner nature of God.

The other voice in the book (call it Voice 2) is devoted to working towards this implicit Christology/theological anthropology by progressively subversive means. This second, “queer,” voice officially announces itself as a sort of interruption between the first and second sections of the book, and here Tonstad’s new methodological presumptions begin to emerge with force. Since the entire late-modern project of social trinitarianism, she believes (and especially that concerned with gender and difference), has been shot through with heterosexist propulsions, there is no room here, alas, for the desired “aegis of the clitoris” (sic), for the “enjoyment of relation” between women’s bodies; there has only been the “violence” of the phallus, and the “breaking” of the self in a false rendition of kenosis which competitively vies for space with the “other” and justifies its received cruelty under the sign of the cross. All of this latter package (cross, suffering, self-emptying, and so on) must be rejected insofar as it merely reinscribes unacceptable heterosexist norms. Inspired by the work of the late Marcella Althaus-Reid, Tonstad now delights, in Voice 2, to offend: “If we move from dick-sucking to clit-licking in touching God’s transcendence . . . we will no longer gag on God’s fullness nor be forced to swallow an eternal emission” (141). Anything smacking of “heterosexual” symbolics must be obliterated, therefore, including the very notion of trinitarian “procession” (with its overtones of begetting and dependence); indeed, “infidelity” itself must become the essential mode of resistance, and an escape thereby from any mandated appeal to “sacrifice” and “obedience”: it is the “non-ordered logics of difference, grounded in resurrection as transformative nonrepetition” that are to be sought instead (138, my emphasis).

From here, Tonstad moves in chs. 6 and 7 to indicate what her alternative trinitarianism and (“apocalyptic”) Christology would look like. There is a puzzling moment in ch. 6 as Tonstad reverts to Voice 1 and does after all enunciate an ontological view of trinitarian “relations,” starting with the Spirit and focusing on “gift-circulation” rather than “personhood” (225–238). It is unclear why “gift” does not itself always already imply some sort of origin and reception; but Tonstad seeks here again to avoid any reprehensible (i.e., covertly gendered) speculation about the immanence of God, and to focus instead on “the nature of the unrestricted community that God establishes . . . with humans” (238, my emphasis). The end of ch. 6 and all of ch. 7 then climax with the promised vision of humanity as transformed by the resurrection into “rematerialization.” Needless to say, this state (whatever it connotes, exactly: it is by definition “apocalyptic”) must be devoid of all “heterosexist” taint; and we might also expect from earlier polemics in the book that it would be cleansed too from any associations of “suffering” or “vulnerability.” Rather late in the day, however, Tonstad ruefully acknowledged that “brokenness is part of the human condition” (245), and that it is the role of the eucharist to show Christ’s participation in this brokenness. In the eucharist too we find that “Christ’s body moves past even sexual difference and joins itself to the materiality of the whole world” (246).4 However there is to be no stabilizing thereby of ecclesial life, but rather an “abortion of the church . . . a fundamental refusal of the logic of reproduction in both its biological and socio-symbolic senses” (273, my emphasis). In short, the “fulfilment of gender is in its overcoming,” which simultaneously of course means “the end of marriage” (275). The clitoris however triumphantly survives this obliteration of gender in a way that the (heterosexist) “phallic logic” or “womb-wound” do not, since it represents a “non-bounded self” that resurrection “promises to transform.” Voice 2 thus triumphs at the end, despite the strange Schleiermacherian postlude in which Voice 1 suddenly makes its last appearance: now we are back to a rather anodyne “absolute dependence of all that exists on God,” and a Nestorian-sounding final announcement that “the glory of God takes up residence . . . in a specific, historical human being” (289, 291). It seems that, after all, speculation about the divine is not altogether off-limits, any more than claims about the importance of the (gendered?) incarnate specificity of the God/man.

The two Voices in God and Difference are hard to hear harmoniously, then, not least because they seem to be operating with different and fundamentally incompatible presumptions.5 Voice 1, for instance, appears to be committed to assessments of other theologians according to established scholarly conventions of clarity, accuracy, and self-consistency, and via specifically theological criteria such as respect for the authority of Scripture, ecumenical tradition as conveyed through the Church, and reason (however construed). Indeed it is striking that the authority of the councils on the doctrines of Trinity and Christology is simply taken for granted throughout the book. Voice 2, in contrast, represents the “queer” revolt against any of these settled presumptions: hermeneutics becomes mandatory “suspicion”; the church and any “inclusion” into it something to be “aborted”; “stability,” “faithfulness,” “reproduction” and (of course) marriage rejected; “clitoral theology,” in all its necessary vagueness, elevated; and “submission,” “penetration” and “self-shattering” negatively hypostasized as the essential “heterosexist” plot of most contemporary trinitarian theology. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that “heterosexuality,” tout court, is the ultimate enemy for Tonstad—though whether any “heterosexual” woman (with a clitoris), or any man (without one) is finally capable of the redemption promised through a “non-bounded [resurrection] self” remains somewhat uncertain. Voice 2, by definition, does not seek to “include” but to enact its own prophetic shattering of the ecclesiastical and dogmatic status quo.

What can we say, then, of Tonstad’s remarkable claim, at the very start of the book, that these two Voices (two “genres”), actually announce the “same argument” (3, my emphasis)? It will already be clear that, in both method and fundamental theological presumptions, this cannot be true overall; and it must therefore be the playful intention of the book (successful, to be sure!) to leave one guessing about its final methodological coherence. But there is of course one sense in which unity may be claimed, and that is that the two voices identify the same projective target, viz., the particular form of modern trinitarian reflection in which “heterosexist” presumptions about gender, suffering and relationality are read back into the divine life itself. And for that reason Tonstad needs the authors she treats in the (springboard) first part of the book (Balthasar, Ward, Coakley) to make the same mistakes. But this is where her exegesis goes badly awry.6

I have been invited specifically to respond to Tonstad’s extensive account of my own work in ch. 3; but I shall do so only briefly here in closing, and with a certain diffidence and restraint. What one can perhaps say, however, after detailed inspection of the argument, is that the problem of the two Voices has already here become anticipatorily paroxysmic: the notable animus of Voice 2, departing from the normal scholarly academic requirements and courtesies of Voice 1, progressively inserts itself through the chapter. And this results in some significant misreadings. Let me attempt only three general points.

First, it is strange indeed that Tonstad accuses me of various positions she has already detected in Balthasar and Ward (and others), but which I myself explicitly reject and critique in my own God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.”7 In short, I have already made these points of criticism a central part of my own systematic position, and Tonstad seems to be merely repeating them. This is a heavy irony. Amongst these misreadings are my supposed projection of human gender identities into the persons of the Trinity; my purported failure to distinguish human and divine ontologies; and the charge of an unthinking elision of destructive suffering, supine passivity and prayer. None of these claims hit the mark; and indeed I explicitly argue against them at many points in my work. The core theme of GSS, in fact, is that the trinitarian God is beyond gender in any human sense, and precisely “interrupts” and transforms any attempts to fix a gender “binary” or to mandate “heteronormativity.” Likewise, in my earlier Powers and Submissions8, I explicitly disjoined abusive human suffering and the empowering act of prayer, and argued that the latter gives the resources to resist the former. The further charge that I have confused “finitude” and “sin” is simply puzzling and unsubstantiated, and appears to be another projection.

But secondly, there are of course themes on which Tonstad and I do indeed actually disagree, or rather on which I systematically disagree with the underlying presumptions of Voice 2. In particular, for Tonstad, contemplation is an act that seemingly can only be read as heterosexist false consciousness; indeed, there is a failure of comprehension in Tonstad for the whole life of prayer which may be immediately evident to the reader: any such act of willed “vulnerability” to God repels her. Likewise, it is true that I do recuperate and re-assimilate biblical traditions of “erotic” connection to the divine (in particular, the extraordinary tradition of the Song of Songs), and that is at least in part because I have a deep respect for biblical and patristic authority that Tonstad (in Voice 2 mode, at least) does not share. But I do not leave this material as it is: I extend and transform it into a contemporary mode, fully cognizant of Freudian, Foucaultian and postmodern gender theory.9 More importantly, I argue that this form of “eroticism” is empoweringly sui generis and profoundly personally transformative too in gender terms (as contemplation progressively reveals). It is no mere accession to worldly “heterosexual” norms: quite the opposite. However, for Tonstad, any metaphorical allusion to “heterosexual” attraction is seemingly so repulsive as to be instantly dismissed as either phallic “violence” or feminized “self-shattering.” Similarly, the arguments I have put forward for the value of ascetic faithfulness are dismissed a priori given Tonstad’s wholesale rejection of marriage and the stability of sexual relationships. On these matters, then, we must simply beg to differ. Voice 2 has a sociopolitical agenda which brooks no rivals, and it can only hear accounts of spiritual transformation as manoeuvres of worldly power or “self-policing.”

Thirdly, however, there is a random jumble of accusations against me which build up towards the end of ch. 3 (of racism, of mandated violence, of distorted fieldwork, of incoherent evolutionary theory, of “missing” the “fundamental nature of Christ,” of “obsession,” of “self-policing,” etc.), which come so thick and fast and are so poorly evidenced by the sources cited (many of which are not even yet published) that one can only conclude that something emotive is at stake: Voice 2 has at this point descended into a rant. Here I can only plead that Voice 1 could well do with a polite reappearance, if only for the sake of scholarly rectitude and the ordinary courtesies of a careful reading.

Let me conclude, however, with a final note of appreciation. God and Difference is a brilliant, angry, and iconoclastic book, written, as we noted at the outset, by “a queer . . . theologian . . . with an interest in dogmatics.” As such, it is bound to be a point of creative discussion for some time to come, not least amongst those circles of Christian dogmaticians who may now have “a [new] interest in queer theory” as a result of engaging with it. It will certainly leave its mark; and perhaps Voices 1 and 2 will in due course find their harmonious resolution, although I have some reasons to doubt this. It seems to me that Voice 2 is the real Tonstad.

I.

To speak frankly, Linn Tonstad’s remarkably arousing new book got me all hot and bothered. That is, excited, and occasionally annoyed as well. Yet titillation, intellectual and otherwise, is usually more than worth the accompanying irritation, and so before the imminent squabble I must emphasize the sense of grateful pleasure suffusing all that follows. There is so much to enjoy and learn from in this book for those of us who want to think through the doctrine of the Trinity with as much care as possible. She offers a constructive rethinking of Trinitarian theology by examining a number of influential contemporary proposals and subjecting them to a unified critique from two different angles: on the one hand, the hidden sexist and heterosexist assumptions that she argues are built into many of the reigning models; on the other hand, the dubious importation into these models, for epistemological reasons, of relational dynamics exclusively characteristic of finitude and/or fallenness and hence totally unsuited for theorizing Trinitarian relationality (a good Thomist point well made by Herbert McCabe among others, but always salutary to hear anew). For her, both lines of critique actually converge, together suggesting the shape of her preferred alternative. With regard to her second line, the one that engages most directly with my particular interests, I found myself, in spite of some serious demurrals, responding time and again to her broader insights with deep sympathy. I believe Tonstad is completely justified in some of her most central charges against contemporary Trinity-talk: that the human history of Jesus has been directly read back into the inner-Trinitarian relations in a disastrously unmediated way; that this has resulted in the conversion of a classically spare and rigorous Trinitarian discourse into a field for exuberant mythopoeisis (including the rendering of cruciform obedience as an essential divine ingredient); that this procedure ends up subjecting the Trinitarian persons to those patterns of competitive relation that define the interplay of finite things; and finally that the impetus for these maneuvers is at least partly due to the epistemic rather than soteriological orientation that has framed the discussion since the early twentieth century. Though I am less directly invested in her first line, I must applaud how Tonstad skillfully tracks the entanglements of God-talk with uninterrogated sexual and gender assumptions, often offering salutary but bitter medicine (the exercises in theological “mansplaining” she adduces on p. 193 are especially cringe-inducing).

II.

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. — Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) in Animal Crackers

But, to begin on a methodological note, I will suggest that her two dual critical procedures are uneasily yoked. That is, a certain style of persuasion absorbed from some of her theoretical exemplars in sexuality theory (the first line of analysis) seem to have unhappily affected her reading of Trinitarian intra-relationality (the second line), with a corresponding weakening of her counterproposal. (Reader beware: what follows is a formal point that in no way questions Tonstad’s bringing together queer theory and classical Trinitarian discourse, in itself a most welcome development as long as critique runs both ways; any hesitations or disagreements which finally arise in this field, and I have several, must be earned through following her suggestions attentively and sympathetically, especially by those tempted to dismiss them.) I speak of a dubious style of persuasion, since it does not for me qualify as argument. Now, many of her substantive critical points in the first half of the book I find effective, particularly against Balthasar and Moltmann. Her detailed grasp of so many complex positions is enviable, her avoidance of caricature refreshing. True, the surface restraint of her rhetoric when dealing with positions she dislikes is belied by her liberal use of scare quotes and other ironic distancing mechanisms, along with the adoption of a dryly pedagogical tone that continually threatens to tip over into condescension (and on occasion does: the final section of her chapter on Coakley, for example, might just as well have been suppressed). But this is not the issue of concern. I speak rather of her assumption that cultural complexes (images, words, concepts) can be fruitfully understood in the first instance as typically exemplifying unambiguously discernible patterns of interconnection and functioning. The idea is that such a pattern, usually denoted as a “logic” or an “imaginary,” is a kind of master cultural determinant, operating “behind” linguistic users to replicate itself through them and, especially, to generate specific social effects, usually damaging ones. Whatever the theoretical utility of this widespread notion (which surely requires scrutiny), it is its role as a mode of persuasion that I question here. In other words, I worry that what are really rhetorical and emotional appeals (themselves often justified) to the damage caused by symbolic markers of prejudice are, as in a lot of critical theory, given a kind of pseudo-rigor by maintaining that the markers fall collectively into fixed “logics” that “work” in more or less predictable ways and that therefore can only be unmasked and rejected wholesale. Ideas and images are far more malleable, multivalent and hermeneutically ambiguous than implied by this picture; the interaction of language, language users, and psychic or social events is more complex and contingent. In sum, there should be more attention to the interplay always at work in cultural production: the strange joints or articulations that continually undermine fixed patterns and inevitably mediate between meanings and human acts and organizations. The “logic” style of thinking pervades stretches of Tonstad’s engagement with Trinitarian theology. It fuels her suspicion of ameliorative “stipulations” around gender roles, for example, for what a person merely “says” can be simply dismissed if his or her position has already been diagnosed as captive to an evil “logic,” forced to do its work. One result is that Ward and Coakley, for example, are reduced to versions of Balthasar, only more dangerous due to their futile (and unconscious) attempts at disguise. But the real problem is that it injects into her discussion a series of exaggerated dualisms, instances where an either/or choice is apparently forced on the reader: clitoral or penetrative? Side by side or making room? Gift or sacrifice? Reciprocity or origination?

III.

For by the hands of the Father, that is by the Son and the Holy Spirit, human being . . . was made in the likeness of God. — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

We [women], too, have thrusting, probing sexual organs. We call them hands. — From a magazine column offering “lesbian sex tips for men”

It is that last dualism, of course, that provides the key to her insistence that the traditional scheme of inner-Trinitarian relations of origin will not do, and must be replaced. This is the point where my broad sympathy, outlined above, for her motive and intent falters. Her alignment of any use of origination language in the Trinity with an oppressive sexist/heterosexist cultural logic, and her construction of an alternative pattern of relations between the Trinitarian persons that avoids it at all costs, strikes me as an overreaction driven by a questionable dualism. In the rest of this section I will suggest (far too briefly) that her new scheme, thoughtful and suggestive as it is, [1] rests on shaky appeals to scripture, [2] is inadequate to secure divine unity, and [3] is at any rate unnecessary. [1] Tonstad’s constant and deft employment of scriptural motifs is yet another reason to recommend her book. However, her search for support in the New Testament for her new reading of the persons is too selective and tendentious to withstand scrutiny. Some examples. The son is glorifier, from whom glory moves out into God, who indeed is the glory of God (229); but this must ignore that throughout the NT “glory” is primarily located in the recipient of glorification, the Father, not in the giver of it. The Son is not that glory itself, but its “sheen” (Heb 1:3), its reflection. Or: the Father’s role is to “name” the Son (230); this belies the obvious lexical intent of Son language: the Father names because he originates, generates, begets. (As with Word: the Father is its utterer.) And where in scripture does the Spirit “give power” to the Father? (230). How can the notions of loss or self-emptying be simply rejected as readings of kenōsis? (233). And how can the central force of “adoption” language be missed as on p. 235, namely, its implied contrast with the “natural” Sonship of Jesus? [2] Beyond the exegetical contortions forced on Tonstad by her scheme, I have questions as to whether it is inherently workable. She claims (231) to build on Tanner by correcting her; but I think she rather vitiates the power of Tanner’s naming, throwing it off balance by abandoning its more traditional elements. The idea is that each Trinitarian person must be identified only in virtue of the entire reciprocal circle of differentiated relation. But the insistence that each person must always already “possess” its “own” divinity questionably prioritizes the threefold; Tonstad must reject the point of classical origination language, that of essential donation, the relational sharing of a common unity and identity. The result looks like a deadlock, encapsulated in her language on p. 229: the persons give “the same thing” to each other, and yet cannot do so, since they “already” possess it. One disruptive result is a strange “homelessness” of the very title “Son”: such language seemingly can have no place immanent to God since her understanding denies origination within the Godhead; yet it fails as an economic identifier since the terms in which she explains its use (intimacy, contrast with slavery, p. 235) would hold for the Spirit as well. [3] Finally, the drastic nature of her maneuver seems needless. Her properly intense awareness of gender- and heteronormativity prompts perhaps too delicate a sense of when origination and reception imply subordination. This, read through a putative juxtaposition of logics, triggers an overreaction: it is not enough to neutralize the threat, she must go on to annihilate its very possibility. To insist, as she does (235) that there must be simply nothing in the immanent Son that could even analogically correspond to his incarnate inferiority is too stringent a criterion. And the broad stigmatization of action and consent, determination and reception, initiation and derivation as definitive of heterosexuality (44) means that evading this syndrome exacts a terribly high price: a huge field of interpersonal dynamics that is needed to make analogical sense of the Trinity is swept up into a bad “logic” and rendered unusable. This accounts for the circularity of her key programmatic statement on p. 224: the “related problems” to which she offers her solution are only problems once origination is already defined in such a way that it effectively demands subordination. The duality of rivalrous logics of sexuality that skews the discussion invites an attempt to evade the opposition. Space-making and surface-to-surface (136) are not opposable, as the topology of sex always combines pressure and resistance, concavity and convexity. For sexual animals the womb is no wound but a receptacle, a fold rather than a tear that ruptures bodily integrity. Such a more reciprocal view might come into play once we abandon the essentially modern talk of an “economic Trinity” and return to the classic economic ground of the triune conception: the creator and the two missions into creation. Contrary to her account (236), the import of the sendings is that Son and Spirit are “given” to (into) the world in a way the Father is not. Tonstad having invoked upon our proceedings the spirit of the late Marcella Althaus-Reid, let me even in disagreement make an indecent (theological) proposal. Is not more involved in the missions than can be imaged as the fricative, clitoral stroke of the Spirit, hovering alongside creation? Have not the “two hands” of God, with almost suppliant delicacy, slipped fingers into the flesh of the world?

IV.

ratio filii ex ratione patris consideratur. Unde restat considerandum de verbo . . . — Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

Loquere obscene mihi — (“Talk dirty to me”)

If these sketchy critical reactions of mine are apt, the irony of Tonstad’s adventurous proposal is that her recoil from origination as subordinationist leads to a model in which God cannot share herself, her single divinity, with herself. Son and Spirit must have, must possess, their “own” divinity—a surprisingly “competitive” picture of Trinitarian relations for an admirer of Tanner. This leads me to a final, brief point in conclusion. Another reason for me to celebrate Tonstad’s book is her recalling Trinitarian theorists to a reconsideration of Schleiermacher. For like Tonstad herself, and perhaps unsuspectingly, Schleiermacher reminds us of certain more classical Trinitarian emphases, prior to the modern epistemologization of the doctrine. But unlike Tonstad, I do not accept Schleiermacher’s insistence that intra-divine origination cannot avoid positing a relation of dependence proper to creaturehood. Here I would recall, against Schleiermacher but with Aquinas, the possibilities of the psychological analogy, and particularly that equally primordial name of the second person: Word. For Aquinas, achieved understanding was the site where both utter unity and the perfection of difference reign equally as knower with known. Not only does this prompt our imagination to undermine the dualism that opposes reciprocity to origination. It also calls into question the (for me) much more problematic retrieval of Schleiermacher by Tonstad, namely her insistence (again, ultimately dualistic) that the gracious elevation of humanity by God can only be “unnatural.” The Son as the divine intelligence embodied in speech is the analogical locus of a sur-natural (not unnatural) liaison between God and the finally graced human creature in its intellectuality. For, contrary to Tonstad’s usage (289), a creature’s “unnatural end” could not meaningfully be called its “consummation.” The seed of grace planted in the world is, not by accident, the Word uttered into the world, an intelligible (because intelligent) sign. In saving the world, God does more than move against it, even does more than permeate it: in gracing the intelligent animal, she talks dirty to the world. The beasts may have their selected reproductive parts; only humans are endowed with the mind, the only truly erotic organ because it semiotically positions all bodily parts as fleshly media of sexual union. Let me repeat: Tonstad’s salutary and important book is to be highly recommended, not least because she exposes theological language as a hidden reservoir of unexamined sexual norming. For just that reason, why be so ready to label God’s saving intimacy with the world as “unnatural”? After all, that’s just not sexy.