The Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley is one of the most original and consequential theologians in the world. An Anglican priest and philosopher of religion, she was the first woman elected the Norris-Hulse professor of divinity at Cambridge, a chair she held until 2018, and before that she was the Mallinckrodt professor of divinity at Harvard. She is the author of eight books, including “God, Sexuality and the Self,” the first volume of her projected four-part systematic theology.
I spoke to Dr. Coakley about why she decided, at a young age, that she wanted to be a theologian; the times she has wanted to disbelieve in God but never quite could; and her attempt to reunite academic theology with the life of the church and the practice of prayer. Contemplative prayer, Dr. Coakley said, is a “crucible of purification.”
My editor, Aaron Retica, joined me for the conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity. It is the eighth in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of Christian faith.
1. Origins
Peter Wehner: At around age 12, you decided you wanted to be a theologian. What was the pull theology had on you at such a young age? What did that desire say about you, then and now?
Sarah Coakley: It wasn’t because I was precocious. It was because I was annoyed by the rather bad preparation for confirmation that I was receiving from a very beloved parish priest. He was a person of an enormous prayerful presence, but not an intellect at all. I think he found it terrifying to confront a room of 12- to 15-year-olds, and he really didn’t know what to say. But questions came up that seemed to me to be life-changing ones that anyone of any substance or moral tenacity would want to have answered at some point in their lives. It occurred to me that there must be people out there who spend their lives thinking about these things. And even better, maybe some of them get paid to do it.
From very earliest childhood, in a way that I can’t even now explain, God seemed to me to be an obvious and holy reality. And I’m therefore very much a once-born, as William James put it. I’ve never had a conversion experience. There have been times when I’ve wanted not to believe in God. There are lots of good reasons for not believing in God, and sometimes those reasons have seemed overwhelming. But I have great difficulty in not believing in God. When I got to the moment when I was about to be confirmed, I was quite frustrated. I wanted to ask questions about why there is something and not nothing. And why is there all this suffering?
I tried to raise these questions, and the other kids did, too. Subsequently, my eldest brother and I organized our own theological discussion group in that same parish. We brought a lot of our atheistical and skeptical school friends into it. And this very holy rector was very clever at this point, because he just sat watching the arguments go backward and forward, rather like the umpire at Wimbledon. He never intervened, never put us right, never told us what the right answer was. When my brother and I recently thought about who had attended those discussions, the vast majority of our friends who attended at that age, 14 to 16, subsequently became Christians. So that tells you something about opening the Pandora’s box theologically and how important it is for the clergy not to stifle that.
Wehner: You told Robert Lawrence Kuhn in an interview that you’ve often wanted not to believe in God for a lot of rational reasons, but you found it very difficult. Could you elaborate on that? Is the reason you find yourself wanting to disbelieve in God intellectual? And why did you find yourself coming back to God?
Coakley: The times when I’ve wanted to give it all up had to do partly with frustration with the institution of the church. They’re often very bad institutions, frankly. But the more important theological existential side has been an overwhelming sensibility about the way that God either abandons or oppresses us at times. And it’s that very bizarre combination of oppressive presence but at the same time abandonment. It is described probably more profoundly than anywhere else in Christian tradition in John of the Cross’s second dark night, the night of spirit, but also in Martin Luther’s Deus absconditus, the “hidden God.”
What ultimately this shows you, as you either throw Christianity aside or grow more deeply, is that belief isn’t a one-off achievement. It’s a journey. And of course, that’s obvious, but most of us don’t think about that very much. The idea that signing on to faith might involve stages of development in which very grave doubts arise and very great despair about whether one would have to change one’s whole view of God in order to accommodate what one is going through or what the world is going through, that’s part of the package.
My whole systematic theology is founded on the idea that theology is a journey — in via, as I call it — and that growth into the maturity of faith is one of the greatest challenges of anyone who is a faithful person. Of course, this is profoundly present in the theology of Paul in particular, but also in Jesus’s rather gnomic sayings about losing your life in order to find it.
Wehner: You’re associated with a phrase théologie totale, or “total theology.” Could you map out the core pillars of this approach? What does total theology reveal about the nature of God and the study of God that more fragmented, strictly academic approaches tend to miss?
Coakley: The kind of theology I’ve wished to write is the theology that takes account of every level of theological reflection, from the Council of Nicaea, through learned forms of scholasticism, to even quite illiterate and socially marginalized forms of faith. You could think of this theology as an attempt to dig down through the archaeological to the phenomenon of God in Christ.
I’m trying to overcome a chasm that has opened up in theological training and thinking, especially in the post-World War II period. Academic theology in university settings and seminary settings has become more and more esoteric. This is partly the influence of postmodern speak, which has done a very great disservice to the church and to theology. If most high-level theology is written incomprehensibly to the person in the pew, then a real disjunction has opened up between a set of conversations that are happening in the university for the purposes of the egos of the people taking part versus the people who are actually holding the faith.
That has been echoed by a split, including in the seminaries, between systematic theology, where you’re trying to give an account of the major doctrines and beliefs in a package so they hang together, and what’s often now called political theology, or pastoral theology, or sometimes liberation theology. All those in the latter category are regarded as contextual, nonsystematic and relating to specific circumstances.
I think this is a very unfortunate divergence. Every Christian is enjoined to be able to give an account of the hope that is in us. That means each of us as Christian believers ought to be able to think a little bit systematically about how the pieces of our belief fit together.
At the same time, every Christian ought to be able to see how this relates to the particular context in which they find themselves and what that means for their pastoral and political challenges. To cleave these apart strikes me as a very unfortunate development. So I’m pushing back against that. I’m trying to write in a voice that is, as it was said at the English Reformation, “understanded of the people.” I don’t want to talk in postmodern riddles. But that doesn’t mean I want to be simplistic or dumbed down.
Going on from there, “théologie totale” means that I’m making some alliances with anthropologists and sociologists of religion because they have insights about how people’s behaviors under the egress of faith show us a richer picture of what faith consists of. I don’t succumb to their reductionism, but I have things to learn from them.
I don’t see how theology can come alive as a systematic discipline unless it’s vitally related to the practice of prayer. This is another cleavage that happened much earlier in the tradition. You could say it goes back to the moment in the 12th and 13th centuries when the new universities were built in Europe, whereas the monasteries remained out in the field somewhere. A set of disciplines for scholastic discussion arose that weren’t necessarily connected to the life of prayer. And that disjunction has become more intense in the modern period. You could take any number of theological courses in university, and prayer would never be mentioned.
I myself think that systematic theology in the university and indeed in the church has an enormous responsibility to engage with secular culture and to go deeply into its thought forms precisely in order to engage with them, to critique them where needed, but sometimes to learn from them.
Théologie totale, then, is not totalizing in the negative sense of “I claim to have the truth and nobody else does.” It is an attempt to take account of disciplinary connections between theology and everything else, and also connections between the mind and the body and the affect that have been rent apart in various ways.
Wehner: It sounds like what you’re promoting is an integrative approach for the sake of the church and for the sake of secular society. Both can widen the apertures of their worlds in order to better see truth.
Coakley: That’s right. We often speak of our culture and political world as if there were a binary between people who are inside the church and those who are outside. I don’t see that to be phenomenologically the case. The most interesting materials that sociologists of religion are currently investigating are people who are seekers but can’t find their way into full faith. They hover on the edge. That’s why they’re attracted to certain evocations of transcendence that they find — for instance, in a midnight mass, which they perhaps go once a year to, or in the art gallery or in music. But they’re not one thing or the other. To be able to speak to that cultural phenomenon is very important to me.
2. Prayers
Wehner: Your Gifford lectures dealt in part with evolutionary cooperation and its significance for how we now understand the relation between secular science and contemporary theology and philosophy. What was the main point you were making in those lectures, and what is the cost to the modern university when it treats theology as a matter of private feeling rather than intellectual truth?
Coakley: I hold a view of the modern university that owes a lot to Cardinal Newman and his book “The Idea of a University,” in which the university should be the place of the contestation of all truths. And since theological people make large truth claims, they should be at the table. If their arguments are poor, they deserve not to win. But if their arguments are good, they deserve to be listened to. My view is that within the discourses of evolutionary biology in the last 50 years has been smuggled in a reductive vision, an atheistical vision, which is not necessarily mandated by the facts.
The assumption is that if you’re a proper scientist, you will also buy this particular naturalistic metaphysic. But that means that any discussion between scientists and theologians must involve coming to the table with philosophers of science as well. Then we can see what metaphysics are at stake and which of the metaphysics are more believable than others and for what reasons.
What’s particularly interesting about the phenomenon of cooperation at the moment is that its meaning is being contested. Because what the mathematical exploration of it has shown is that pure competitiveness, individual competitiveness, in any evolutionary population, is ultimately at the cost of declining average fitness in the population as a whole, if done in excess. There is a countervailing factor called cooperation, which has a technical meaning in biology. It doesn’t just mean working together, or what we speak of colloquially as collaboration. It involves unselfish behaviors that are, fascinatingly, positive for others in the evolutionary population.
It’s everywhere, starting from bacterial life and right up to humans. The thing about humans is that we have the capacity either to collaborate ourselves with such a matrix, such an understanding of the importance of mutual sacrificial behaviors, or we can decide not to do that. We can decide that the only meaning in life is that we compete until we’re dead. But we have a choice. And there is also commonly a choice about how we perceive the metaphysics of evolution itself, what its meaning structure is. So I wanted to open up that discussion. I think it’s become extremely vibrant of late and has enormous implications not just for evolutionary biology but for economic life in our conditions of late neocapitalism.
Wehner: I want to stay on this theme of integration. You believe contemplative prayer, prayer that’s vulnerable and wordless, is essential to theology. Prayer isn’t segregated out as a spiritual practice. You believe it’s foundational for systematic theology and a radical reordering of human desire. I wonder if you could explain the main elements of contemplative prayer. How did the practice of silent contemplative prayer transform your thinking and theology? And how has it transformed you as a person?
Coakley: These questions go to the heart of what I’ve tried to contribute. What is distinctive about contemplative prayer? First of all, it’s very important to clear away the idea that there’s something elitist or intellectualistic or unusual or sectarian about this practice. At the heart of the practice is a simple turning to God in which I turn over my selfhood to that without which I would not exist.
It’s surprisingly difficult for educated people to do that, because everything in our upbringing disposes us in the first part of our life to establish our distinct autonomy and identity. That is at the heart of particularly the modern American project: I must have my identity. I must have my freedom. I must have my rights. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if that is being constantly inculcated into you as an individual, questing to succeed, questing to compete, the idea of an absolutely simple turning to that without which you would not be and giving yourself back over to that core is often terrifying.
Often the very first experience that people have if they try to do this is dread. And that’s quite apart from the fact that being silent in that way for about five minutes and not filling it with constant ephemera is a kind of nakedness which opens up the self to the deeper elements in it. That often can reveal wounds and scars and pains. The idea of submission to God — without which we really cannot begin to talk about God — is very offensive to an amazing number of people. And it’s very offensive particularly to feminists, of whom I am one, of course.
The first book I wrote that really attracted a lot of attention was called “Powers and Submissions.” It had a long chapter about self-emptying. There was an enormous riposte, which continues to this day, that anyone of feminist commitments should never put themselves in a position of weakness. I had to argue that submission to God is completely sui generis. It’s different from submission to other powers, including patriarchal powers. In fact, submission to God gives you the power to resist patriarchal powers. So that’s the first point: contemplation is not something particularly special. It’s certainly not something reserved for those who live in monasteries or have a very particular vocation.
How do I pray? Well, you hand yourself over to the source of your being, and then you ask some things. But the handing over is primary, and learning how to do that. It changes your perspective on God — because when you practice this, even for a very short time each day, simple opening up space in which God is God. You don’t control it. That’s what’s so frightening.
This is not a new skill, like learning how to make a very good omelet or to ride a bicycle. This is a nonskill. It’s an unskilling, an unmastery. It completely changes your view of God, because up to that point you’ve probably subliminally been thinking about God as a very large entity, the largest and the best in a universe of entities whom somehow you’ve got to get on your side or cajole or get to answer your request.
I know that’s a very naïve sounding description, but as a priest I can tell you that’s the God I hear about all the time. All the great theologians of the tradition have slain that God, and they’ve had to slay that God — think of Luther — with great terror. It’s really just opening up to the possibility of grace. So that’s rather a long-winded way of saying that contemplation isn’t special. It’s just very difficult for people who are relatively educated and privileged. For people who are already absolutely broken, as Jesus said, they know about it.
Wehner: You’ve written about religious truth being expressed aesthetically, noting that through art, poetry, and music, “dimensions of divine truth are evoked which can be found in no other way.” What is it about these aesthetic mediums that allow us to perceive God in ways that strictly analytical reasoning cannot? And what does this capacity say about human teleology, especially regarding how our desires are wired to perceive the divine?
Coakley: We need to talk about what we think a human being is at this point. We are made in the image of God, but made with an astonishing, rich array of responsive capacities. And these include intellectual responses, moral responses and feeling responses. The aesthetic arena of our life, our response to beauty, has an extraordinary capacity to gather these up. It has an integrative function in itself.
It can also, at times, really destabilize us, because if we have a very controlling, rational part of ourselves, as I think I did, the life of prayer is one of these areas where elements of selfhood which have been relatively repressed are opened up for rich responsiveness. So I don’t think we can do without aesthetic dimensions of our faith, because they go deeper than purely rational consideration can.
But it works both ways, because one of the projects of the life of prayer in faith is that our reason itself becomes expanded. In other words, it’s not like reason is a static phenomenon. Just as we know from neuroscience that if part of your brain is damaged, it can sometimes compensate remarkably by connecting to other parts of the brain, so likewise part of a faith that’s on a journey, that’s in via, is one in which the parts of ourselves are constantly being renegotiated and integrated. The French philosopher Paul Ricœur once said that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” The aesthetic visual symbol is sometimes more effective in communicating and isn’t reducible to a merely intellectual explanation.
My view about human selfhood is that the category of desire is core in the integration. Desire has a physical dimension to it. Every child is born with physiological desires for food, for warmth, for nurture, and so on. But our desire has an intellectual dimension as well. Desires are directed toward goals, some of which are physiological and appetitive, and others of which are more noetic, including our desire for God. And our desire for God is not simply an add-on, but from my metaphysical perspective, that is the root desire we have. All our other desires are tied into a tether that we spend our life trying to negotiate and reorder and redirect.
This is one of the most distinctive things about the way I approach sexual questions in my thinking. I don’t see sexual desire as located in a separate box that we keep distinct from our desire for God, which I think is one of the greatest problems of our Western cultural perspective. We idealize sexual desire in a way, but we don’t see how we connect it to our other desires, and especially our longing for God, if we have a longing for God. So when you ask about the aesthetic element, it’s very much connected to my theory of selfhood and longing and desire.
Wehner: Within the last several months, several friends who are evangelicals have told me that when moral intuitions and one’s reading of the biblical text collide, moral intuition must yield. The Bible must form our moral intuitions, they argue, not the reverse.
What I think they often miss is sin’s noetic effects on our readings of the text no less than our moral intuitions. When I say moral intuitions, I have in mind what Paul describes in Romans 2, the law written on the human heart. It’s what allows us to recognize good and evil, including recognizing God as good. I’m not proposing that moral intuition overrule Scripture. I am proposing that it can serve as evidence that a reading of Scripture has gone wrong.
After all, the Bible has been invoked to justify countless moral atrocities. The persecution of Jews and gay people, the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, the burning of heretics and chattel slavery are among them. In each case, moral intuition and conscience, the awakening of human empathy in Christians and in non-Christians, played a role in the correction.
If a hermeneutic requires that moral intuition be invalidated whenever it collides with a reading of the text — for example, a reading of the conquest narratives in Joshua and 1 Samuel, holding that God literally commanded the killing of noncombatants, infants and even animals — how does that closed loop structurally differ from jihadism, where the argument is that God’s revealed word constitutes the good, so that revulsion at the killing of innocents is evidence of a corrupted conscience rather than evidence of a misreading?
Does any moral perception ever count as evidence that a reading is mistaken? If none can, the system has no check outside itself, and I don’t see what would distinguish it from an unfalsifiable ideology. So my question for you: If moral intuition can serve as a diagnostic, how do we distinguish principled moral correction from mere cultural accommodation? What’s the criterion?
Coakley: Excellent. This comes out of a very particular Calvinist dilemma, which also draws attention to the noetic effects of sin, as it’s called in Calvinism. For Calvin, we are so corrupted by the fall that left to our own devices, we can’t presume that we have any moral compass, and therefore we must fall back first and foremost on biblical authority. There is left in Calvin, and in Romans 1 and 2, this idea of natural law, which is still there. Calvinism is not devoid of natural law, and it’s had a very important tradition in the 17th and 18th centuries.
My approach is not a straight and quick answer, but it’s a more complex approach and therefore allows precisely for the resolution of your question. I’m exactly on your side in your question. The Anglican theologian and priest Richard Hooker was steeped in Thomistic natural law theory. But he devised his own theory in the light of his Protestant correction. So for him, the authority of Scripture is indeed primary. But the authority of Scripture is always mediated through two other sources.
First, through reason. Reason includes natural law and what you were calling conscience, what’s described in Romans 1 and 2. Astonishingly for someone writing in the 16th century, Hooker saw natural law itself as having a developmental history. I think it’s extraordinarily prescient for someone at that moment in history to see that even something as apparently solid as natural law and reason itself might be unfolding in some important sense. There’s a kind of anticipation here of John Henry Newman on the development of doctrine, or even some elements of Hegel much later. And so every time there’s a problem in the church, you go to what you can find in Scripture.
Of course, what you can find in Scripture isn’t always consistent, so that’s already an issue. You apply dialectically what you think emerges from contrapuntal material in reflection on natural law, conscience and morality. But you also do it through the traditions of the church which have grown up through the conciliar deposit, the settled Christian doctrine that came out of the early church councils.
And so what you have is this triadic vision in Hooker of each generation having to rethink how the primacy of Scripture affects it through the application of reason to Scripture in the generations before, who have mediated truth as it’s been received in Scripture, as it’s been received in the seven ecumenical councils, and now as it has to be renegotiated in the life of whatever are the contemporary challenges.
So this is a labile vision of how truth is layered and negotiated. And of course it’s not without problems. You might immediately say: “That just ends you up in relativism.” And that’s its danger. On the other hand, what it does is to open up a discussion in which you can have this debate on any particular point and not feel that whatever biblical text you’re dealing with just has to triumph without rational negotiation. That is why I’ve remained an Anglican. I prefer this to the infallible pronouncements of a papacy, which have themselves at times had to review what they’ve said earlier; and I prefer it strongly to an over-fundamentalistic rendition of the primacy of Scripture.
Wehner: The concern that’s often raised is if you move from sola scriptura it becomes all relative and subjective. But if you ask people, “What has sola scriptura given us in terms of unity on positions?” the answer is not much.
Coakley: No, because Scripture isn’t unified.
Wehner: Even if you took people who believe the Bible is inerrant, there are thousands of denominations with divisions on dozens and dozens of different issues. So if the Bible were as clear as the supposition implies, you would think that there would be a unity of opinion. There’s not. Set aside whether the text is inerrant. The interpretation of the text certainly is not inerrant. So everybody is wrestling with this. It’s just some people are willing to name it and others are less inclined.
Coakley: I also want to say that within the Anglican and Episcopalian tradition, it’s very fraught about how these three elements are actually negotiated. For me, any problematic theological question always must go first to Scripture. And it will be surprising and usually disturbing. That’s a good sign, because otherwise we are just deciding in advance what we want to hear.
And of course, underlying the question you asked as well is the issue that we haven’t unpacked, which is what theory of ethics do you hold? If you are a Calvinist, you probably implicitly hold the divine command theory — the view that an act is right because God commands it, not that God commands it because it is right. This takes us back to Scripture.
But I think there’s a part of you that’s also much more in the Kantian tradition and is interested in a moral command that is simply given naturally in our conscience. I have time for both of those, but I probably veer ultimately to a virtue theory of ethics in which whatever ethical outcome is developed is known by its fruits. That is, is the outcome one of virtuous and flourishing living, both for individuals and for a group?
Aaron Retica: You’re clearly trying to make a more universalist church. Why does that not mean taking Anglicanism and reuniting it with the Church of Rome? Why is that not the goal?
Coakley: Well, it is. When Jesus prayed that we might all be one, I think he meant it. And I think that you have to have a very eschatological long view, because we’re not going to get there quickly. And by the way, I extend that with Paul to our relations with Judaism. I think that Romans 9 to 11 says ultimately Jews and Christians are absolutely joined at the hip. The final winding up of history will be some kind of reunification of Judaism and Christianity. I cannot see that we can ever disentangle from each other.
Retica: When you’re talking about prayer and contemplation, how are you thinking about it? How much of it is an individual act? How much of it is a communal act?
I was thinking about it in the context of a recent funeral I went to. Some people got up to take communion, some got up to take a blessing, some just sat. We’re all expressing our views, but we’re all in communion in some other sense, and I’m just wondering how you think about that with regard to your theological work, as it has a practical effect on your shepherding of your flock.
Coakley: Earlier I started to unfold the implications of contemplative prayer. One of the impacts of even 15 minutes a day of silent attention on your own is that you begin to realize that you thought you were setting out on a rather individual journey in which you hoped you might have a deeper relationship with God, a more authentic life. And suddenly you begin to see that actually there’s no prayer that isn’t already communal prayer, and that there’s no undertaking of this sort that doesn’t impress on you that we are much more bound up with each other than we think. It’s actually quite frightening that the boundaries of selfhood are much more porous than we think.
In my view, even though we must do our silent prayer practice on our own much of the time, the longer we go at it, the busier it seems. You start and it feels very lonely but after a few months, it’s absolutely throbbing with the world and with others. So it’s one of the ways that contemplation completely transforms your perception of what selfhood is as a shared reality.
Wehner: Can you describe what it is about contemplative prayer that has opened up for you in terms of your understanding of God? What do you see about God through contemplative prayer that without it you think you would not see?
Coakley: I’m going to quote one of my heroines, Evelyn Underhill. She was an Anglican spiritual director between the wars. She died during the Second World War. And she wrote to Archbishop Cosmo Lang, as the Lambeth Conference of 1930 was opening, a famous letter. And she said: I know you’ve got a lot of other things on your agenda, but could you talk about prayer? Could you remind your clergy and the church and the bishops that God is the interesting thing? It was such a wonderful letter.
I come back to this because the effect for me of getting involved in this practice was absolutely scintillating and devastating. It was the great break in my life. I started practicing this when I was about 27, and I had no idea what I was getting into. I think I got in a bit too deep too quickly and didn’t have the resources for coping. But I found out that God was the interesting thing.
I’d always been interested in God, but the idea that this can be existentially grounded in a life-transforming way but also in a very secret and mysterious and dark way, it very quickly brings a lot of inner suffering, actually. Because your whole self is being kind of ripped open in nakedness to this divine reality in a fresh way. You don’t quite know how to cope with it. A lot of your psychiatric history is going to come out, your childhood traumas, whatever they are.
In my case, it was not very profound but nonetheless important. Your whole life of affectivity and desire is churned up and transformed, and there you are in this kind of crucible of purification, and you don’t quite know your way. The main effect for long periods may be of feeling quite lost and in the dark.
3. The Heart of Theology
Wehner: What aspects of God do you understand that without Jesus, you wouldn’t see or would not see nearly as well? And why did Jesus win the affections of your heart and your allegiance?
Coakley: Friedrich von Hügel, a Roman Catholic and a philosopher of religion, said Christians tend toward either the more obviously Christocentric or the more obviously theocentric. The ones who find it fairly natural to believe in God but have difficulty with Christ spend their lives trying to get there. And the ones who are naturally Christocentric have other problems with often being able to give an account of the Father.
I am more naturally theocentric. I had to overcome a presumption that Christ was a very good exemplar of human and divine life whom I was required to emulate and instead to enter from another direction, through the practice of prayer. What’s happening in the practice of prayer when you see it through a robustly Christian shape is that the Holy Spirit is inviting you in prayer — which you can’t yourself do; the Holy Spirit’s doing it in you — to stand alongside the person of Christ in Christ’s prayer to his father. So the whole activity of prayer is an incorporation into the life of what came to be called the Trinity.
This is a very different approach to Christ from the one that starts with Jesus as a good person, however compelling. It’s an internalized view of Christ as Paul sees it, as one into whose life we are baptized in order to die and rise again, in an ongoing process throughout our lives.
That doesn’t mean we don’t also learn from what we hear about in the Scriptures, particularly in the Gospels. But if all that remains extrinsic, it doesn’t really do the job that has to be done if we’re able to get to the point where we want to say that Jesus is the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity.
So in a very naïve way, I had to kind of reinvent the Trinity through my practice of prayer in order to understand how it was that the earliest church got to the point where it wanted to say that this Jesus was not just a prophetic figure or even a messianic figure but was actually nothing less than God’s son. I couldn’t get there by simply looking at the historical evidences for Jesus’s marvellousness. I had to get there by this other route of actually being taken into an incorporation into his life.
Wehner: You were a highly accomplished academic long before your midlife ordination. Given how fulfilling your work already was, what was the catalyst for becoming a priest? Did you feel anything was missing? And are you a better theologian because you became a priest?
Coakley: Well, on the last question, I certainly hope so. And I should add that none of this théologie totale method could ever have come to consciousness had I not gone through what is a tremendously transforming formation moving into the ordained state. I remember a number of people asking me when I felt pressured to test my vocation to the priesthood, “What on earth are you doing? Are you bored? Have you not got enough to do?”
The answer, of course, was I was terribly overbusy already. I didn’t need anything more to do. It really came about because I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School during a quite rocky time in Harvard’s institutional development, which involved an attempt to secularize the Divinity School and to turn it into a secular department of religion. I was caught in the crossfire.
My students, sensing my own faith, were constantly arriving on my doorstep for office hours, ostensibly to talk about academic questions. But these conversations constantly tipped into spiritual discernment questions. Because so many of them were trying to find out whether they should be ordained or not and they were seekers of real depth and insight.
I had to take the risk. I didn’t want another feather in my cap. It certainly hasn’t been a feather in my cap. A lot of the time it’s been very painful being in the ordained state. But I felt that something was happening, that in this conversation between me and my students they were wanting something from me that I couldn’t deliver without being able to preach and dispense the sacraments. And so after two or three years of discomfort, and much to the annoyance of my more secular colleagues, I was ordained. And therefore I was able to eventually celebrate the communion and preach at Harvard Divinity School for a few years before I left.
I went through all the things my students had to do, including clinical pastoral education, or CPE. I had a special interest in mental health, and so I worked in a mental hospital and two psych wards. I also wished to see the inside of an American jail. That was completely life-changing. Because this was at the height of the new Jim Crow — the period when very significant numbers of young Black men were being put in jail for extremely minor drug offenses to get them off the streets. I ended up being asked to run a silent prayer group with them, which was astonishing.
What emerged from this was an extraordinary empowerment in this group, a kind of poise and powerful peacefulness, which I think in the jail was seen as very subversive. But it kind of broke me as well, because what was happening was that I was absolutely having to review what I thought about American racism because of the system that I saw breaking people before they’d even begun. I didn’t realize that these jails were just part of the economic system apart from anything else. That was such a major recalculation of my perspective on the specificity of American racism and how it works that it’s taken me 20 more years to be able to write about this. But I am writing about it now.
So working at a mental hospital, in a jail, and in the parish where I was serving, I would say that that turned my life completely inside out. It really changed my priorities. It caused me to formulate what kind of theological method should arise from the integration of the pastoral and the academic. And it doesn’t make my academic lectures any less academically demanding. But I think it’s changed their flavor in a way that I can’t completely describe.
Wehner: Could you share with readers some important ways you understand God differently now than in the past? What aspects of his love, his character, his engagement with the world do you perhaps see more clearly now than you did when you started teaching at, say, Harvard Divinity School in 1993?
Coakley: Of course my view of God has changed over the years, and I would be very worried if it hadn’t. As a young liberal theologian, I found it very difficult to get into the idea of the Trinity. But now, for reasons I’ve explained earlier, that is the sort of lifeblood of my perception of how we participate in God, and therefore how this relates to divine providence. As the saying attributed to Teresa of Ávila has it, he has no body but yours. In other words, we often set up the problem of divine providence in the wrong way, and we wonder why God isn’t intervening more often.
But if we get away from that whole false picture of a God who has separated himself from us as a very big entity and then isn’t apparently answering messages, and then instead see God as enclosing and encompassing us willy-nilly, the problem is that we’re so affected by having separated ourselves from God that we can’t collaborate with him. So that’s an enormous mind shift which is very central to my preaching. In all my pastoral work, I find myself listening to people who are devastated by their suffering because they feel so separated from God. And that’s different from being devastated by a God who is so present.
I recently preached on the verse where Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church.” It’s often interpreted as an entirely institutional statement about the future of the papacy. But if you read on in that extraordinary Matthean text, the climax of this is that Peter’s being given the power of the keys to the kingdom, which surely includes the power to forgive. I think that’s the Church’s main job. This is what Jesus gave us, which is where he’s most astonishing in his claims in his own Jewish context. Who can forgive sins except God alone?
What the Church is at base is a church of reconciliation and forgiveness, and that’s our gift to the world. We live in a very unforgiving world. But then our churches are not forgiving places either. It seems to me that reconciliation and forgiveness is our task.
Wehner: Speaking in your capacity as a priest, you said that rehearsing for death is one of the most important things we do. What does it mean to rehearse for death? Do you fear death and what do you imagine lies beyond death?
Coakley: Well, I think it’s natural in a way to fear death because it’s the great unknown. But at the same time, I think another effect of the practice of handing over to God is that it is a rehearsal for death. If you think about it, at the moment of death, whether you’re conscious or not, you’ll have to let go, and it’ll be out of your hands. And that’s what we rehearse in prayer. And if we rehearse it and rehearse it, then we’re much less afraid of death. Since death is the great taboo, especially in American culture, it’s hidden from us, tidied up, averted as much as we can medically, and greatly feared. But if one’s spiritual practice is such that this is no longer that which is so fearful, then one is much less afraid of life in all its richness.
I don’t know what happens after death, but I’m very, very strongly inclined to think that there is another life and that one gets intimations of this from time to time. I take very seriously, actually, the people who have near-death experiences. I think they’re very reassuring. I shall be very surprised if there isn’t a next chapter. And I regard it as a wonderful, adventurous thought. Isn’t it something wonderful to look forward to? Something that we don’t know about yet. But the next great adventure.
Wehner: You said that it makes us less afraid of life. In what respect?
Coakley: Well, real life, of course — life abundant, as Jesus promises to us — must surely be devoid of a clinching need to control, to protect our own agenda. When we occasionally have those little tastes of ecstatic liveliness, I think they give us a taste of what he meant. We don’t think about that enough, actually. He means: I’ve come to give you a way of living that is almost unimaginable, in which you take on my yoke. “My yoke is easy”? What did Jesus mean by that? I’ve spent my life wondering. I think this must be part of what he meant: a kind of letting go into his life, which is also a letting go into his death — see Romans 6 — that must be at the heart of this.
Wehner: When you think over the arc of your career and the arc of your life, what are the things you most hope to have imparted to others? What would you hope they better understand because they encountered your work and words and life story? To put it another way, what would you like the legacy of Sarah Coakley to be?
Coakley: You never know, because my email is awash with people who write to me about different dimensions of my thinking. But I hope it will be something of this great propulsion to recombine serious systematic theology in the church with its practical and pastoral implications. That’s what I would like to think might have some impact. Because I’ve had a very distressing time in the church, especially with bishops who don’t think that theology is important anymore, especially in the Episcopal Church. Certain political topics become all important, and theology is seen as an unnecessary obfuscation and a sideline.
I think that’s why our liberal churches are dying, actually. Unless we can regenerate the depth of the theological tradition alongside the depth of spiritual transformation, I think our churches deserve to be empty. And I find in the youngest generation this great longing for substance, for real theological substance, and real ascetical demand. People want their lives to be changed. They don’t want a lightweight cultural Christianity with a lot of politics linked to it. They’re looking for the real thing. And if I have any impact on that for the rest of my days, I shall be pleased.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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