Modern Theology 30:4 October 2014 DOI: 10.1111/moth.

12135
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

PRAYING THE TRINITY:

TRANSFORMING FEMINIST
TRINITARIAN THEOLOGIES

SUSAN ABRAHAM

Perforce, Sarah Coakley's approach to gender and feminism in God, Sexuality

and the Self1 attempts a vigorous departure from many preceding feminist
proposals in Trinitarian theology. In what follows, I will focus on notable
Catholic feminist proposals of Trinitarian theology: Catherine LaCugna's God
For Us and Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, both of which repurpose the
pastoral intent of the doctrine with particular political and social goals in
mind. By contrast, Coakley's intent is to demonstrate that Spirit-initiated,
Spirit-centered and Spirit-led practices of prayer lead inexorably (Romans 8)
to the multiplicities of threeness in God and in the human self. In a different
key, Tina Beattie's New Catholic Feminisms: Theology and Theory also centrally
features prayer, but with a view to resisting Roman Catholic institutional
obstructions of women priests. Coakley's Anglican and sacerdotal identity
protects her agenda from such a preliminary goal within Roman Catholic
Trinitarianisms.
One of Coakley's boldest and most innovative moves is to assert that "only
an engagement with a God who has been ineluctably revealed and met as
triune could hold the key to contemporary anxieties about sexuality, gender
and feminism."*2 Firmly,
1 the Triune God is not an "imitable prototype" for
social relations as social feminist Trinitarians are wont to argue; to do so is an
idolatrous project to be thoroughly resisted because "no doctrine of the

Susan Abraham
Department of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University, One LMU Drive, University
Hall 3700, Los Angeles, CA 90045-8400, USA
Email: Susan.abraham@lmu.edu
1 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity' (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
2 Ibid., xiv.

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 Praying the Trinity 583

Trinity, as charter and paradigm of perfect relationship, can be completely

innocent of political, familial and sexual associations."3 Coakley argues,
methodologically and differently from LaCugna and Johnson, that "unsys­
tematic systematics" requires that theology itself be an ascetical practice of
purification, integrating both the insights of feminism and the social sciences
while untangling desire and debates on gender in and through the incorpo-
rative work of the Holy Spirit in contemplative prayer.
Coakley's insistence that theology must attend to the social matrix of
prayer is also apposite to a postmodern sensibility in which spirituality
engages contemporary social, ecclesiastical, political and personal contexts.
Spirituality is Christian-disciplined encounter with the Triune God, in a
"total" context—what Coakley calls a Theologie Totale. Theologie Totale is the
hard, prayerful work of realigning human desire with divine desire. Nine
distinguishing marks of Theologie Totale obtain.4 It privileges contemplation;
it is always in process (in via); it functions as a counterpoint of philosophy
and science; it understands orthodoxy as a goal; it is socially located without
being reduced to its social location; it expands the classical loci of classic
systematic theology; it attends to aesthetic expressions; it overcomes false
divides; and it is framed by divine and human desire.

Beyond the Economy of Relation

For Roman Catholic and Western feminist theology, Catherine LaCugna's
God For Us remains the quintessence of scholarly achievement in theology,
simultaneously pastoral and ecclesial in intent. She provided a significant
advance for second wave Euro-American feminists with her argument that
the historical breach between theologia and oikonomia was both "a fatal political
mistake as well as a fatal theological mistake because it allowed Christianity
to renege on the original insight of the doctrine of the Trinity, namely, that
God's arche is the shared rule of persons in communion, not domination by
some persons over other persons."5 Consequently, her premise that orthodox
creedal statements possess forms of replicable human models for relating in
the world leads her to retrieving perichoresis and its language of mutuality.
For Coakley, neither the term perichoresis nor the discourse of mutuality
brings us to a clear understanding of the value of Trinitarian thought because
erotic desire tinges all human relationality. Its infinite capacity for distortion
prevents human beings from true mutuality, although its potential for order­
ing in divine and human relations points the way forward. Coakley disavows

3 Ibid., 308.
4 Ibid., 88-92.
5 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York, NY:
HarperCollins, 1991), 394.

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584 Susan Abraham

the "optimistic closure" of perichoretic harmony and mutuality espoused by

LaCugna, and points instead to human sexual desire as the site of feminist
analysis.
LaCugna was, to be sure, quite critical of liberal feminist attempts to
establish a romanticized mutuality of relations in the Trinity. She points out
that "... many feminist theologians reject the Greek emanationist scheme,
beginning with the Father as principle of divinity, because this makes God
(Father) into a dominant figure."6 Perichoresis in much feminist theological
revision describes the unity of divine persons in each other's openness and
interdependence. Since none of the persons of the Trinity is now subordi­
nated to any other, feminists have an argument for equality; "Father, Son and
Spirit are coequal because they are the same thing, namely, God."7 At the heart
of such proposals, points out LaCugna, is the distaste for "hierarchy" that has
been the particular bug bear of liberal feminist critiques, now overturned in
a reading of Latin Trinitarian theology of mutual interrelatedness in divinis.
LaCugna thus argues for a more sophisticated theological method for femi­
nist theology: instead of Latin theology starting and ending in divinis, it
should return to the economy of salvation and the forms of human community
that such a theological view makes possible. Otherwise, feminist theology
simply effects a reversal: God is now re-made in the image and likeness of
liberal feminism's mutuality and equality.
LaCugna's theological starting point for revising Trinitarian theology in
the economy of salvation is subtly repudiated in Coakley's scheme. Instead of
articulating a Trinitarian theology from the economy of salvation, Coakley
contends that feminists must begin theologically and spiritually with the
achievements of "classical orthodoxy." Encounter with classical orthodoxy in
prayer purifies and purges their impulse to create God in their own image
and likeness; prayer attends instead to divine erds and desire impelled from
within to the creation of the self in the image of God. Its call can lead the
individualist feminist ego to bring together spirituality, ethics and orthodoxy
in radically new ways. By beginning with God, instead of women's experi­
ence, an "ontology of desire" holds together feminist theology's attempt to
integrate ethics and metaphysics.
LaCugna, it must be said, provides a slightly different emphasis in her
argument of prayer. She concentrates on doxological and Eucharistic prayers
that direct praise to God through Christ the mediator, emphasizing thereby
the experience of salvation. LaCugna's focus is on a "metaphysics of
economy," harkening back to Karl Rahner's revision of Thomistic Trinitarian
theology, while Coakley's theological point of departure aligns with Aquinas'
idea of God in Godself as the beginning of theology. The Thomistic orientation,
however, does not lead Coakley simply to describe God in Godself. Rather,

6 Ibid., 269.
7 Ibid.

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 Praying the Trinity 585

her metaphysical realist emphasis spurs thinking about the "messy entangle­
ment" of sexual desire and desire for God, demonstrated in her reading of
Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. Because a "feminist on her knees" attends
closely to the world and its suffering, she will bridge, by virtue of that
attention, the false disjunction between human carnal desire and divine
desire. Coakley's derogation of women's "agency" and "equality" is of one
piece with her critique of Western liberal feminist projects. In contrast to
LaCugna, who is invested in the reception of orthodox theology, Coakley is
(more) invested in the transformation of liberal feminist agendas.

Beyond Divine Naming

Elizabeth Johnson's proposal for a feminist Trinitarian theology focuses on
the "mystery of relation,"8 thereby enabling a different naming towards God.
Like LaCugna, Johnson's liberal and Western commitments are in clear evi­
dence. Her primary intention, however, is to speak to the "praxis of faith"
arising in global, ecumenical and intercultural encounters. Such a speaking
of, a "naming toward in analogical relation,"9 entails a threefold process of
purification: affirmation, negation and eminence. Insofar as Trinitarian rela­
tions are always mystery, speaking towards God invariably results in "dense
symbols" shining a "dark light" Classical theology usually presents a hier­
archical Trinitarian relationality in which the first person of the Trinity, as
"fans divinitas," is privileged differently than the other two relations in the
Godhead. For Johnson, one may well begin with God the Father, a Thomistic
starting point, but the problem remains with classical theology's presenta­
tion. Orthodoxy, as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan confession,
provides an alternative view, despite the fact that classical theology contin­
ued to present the procession of the Son and the Spirit from the Father,
reifying a hierarchical set of relationships in the Trinity. Johnson directs much
critical energy to this hierarchical presentation because "Father" reductively
becomes "He Who Is," rather than one symbol among many that preserves
the dark light of God's mystery. Further, "hierarchy" is offensive to liberal
feminist sensibilities because hierarchical models of being and knowing
obstruct the creation of conditions for equality.
Coakley is not convinced that "hierarchy" is a valid object of feminist
critique any more than she is convinced of its criticisms of "Father" language
for God as inescapably hierarchical. She notes, firstly, that hierarchy, like
"power," requires more nuance and analytical precision to provide for a
different feminist goal than equality. Hierarchy as order invites feminists to
think beyond the goal of equality. Secondly, as anthropological studies by
Louis Dumont (and more on this later) have shown, the restriction of the term

8 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1993), 191-193.
9 Ibid., 113-117.

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586 Susan Abraham

hierarchy to "power hierarchy" creates an epistemological gap between soci­

eties that order themselves according to social hierarchies and societies that
understand themselves as organized around individualistic, modern and
Western principles.10 A third criticism is that feminist theology "implicitly
and mistakenly identifiejs] divine hierarchical power with worldly male
power/'11 thus reinscribing the very ontological fallacy it seeks to overthrow
in masculinist theologies. Coakley finds a different path to hierarchy. She
discerns a Dionysian strand in Gregory of Nyssa's and Augustine's asser­
tions of divine desire that incorporate and transform human desire that,
together with the notion of cosmological hierarchy, challenge liberal feminist
dismissals of "hierarchy." Why should the God identified in Dionysius' hier­
archy be a "male dictator God?" Instead of a dictator God, asks Coakley, can
feminist theology see in God the source of all that is? For Johnson, the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed has the potential to dissolve human hierar­
chy; for Coakley ordered human hierarchies are both good and necessary
while the Nicene stance disavows any simplistic hierarchy in the Godhead.
Johnson, in all fairness, is far more invested in loosening the grip of liter­
alism in naming toward divine relations. Her constructive Thomist proposal
presents the "symbol" of the Trinity that "evokes a livingness in God, a
dynamic coming and going with the world that points to an inner divine
circling around in unimaginable relation."12 Johnson's primary interest is not
to re-name God. Her point is that an exclusive use of male imagery to denote
Trinitarian relationships has had the unfortunate result of creating an isomor­
phic relation between sexed human beings. Coakley's Thomistic sensibility is
evident in her contention that "Father" is a name properly to be used for
inter-Trinitarian relations, but with the important stipulation that "Father"
used alone of God ought to be understood as a metaphor. The Fatherhood of
God depends therefore on the Sonship of Christ.13 Thus Coakley, in contrast
to Johnson, argues that naming God "Father" in terms of Trinitarian relations
need not reinscribe the problematic social relations which Johnson's notion of
the exclusive use of "Father" outlines. Coakley and Johnson's reading of
Aquinas' analogical argument for speaking of God as "He Who Is" (ST I,
q. 13) results in two differing feminist emphases. Johnson presents a critical
and constructive proposal to point out that Aquinas' insistence on God's
Being as the basis for naming toward God can also be analogously adopted
by feminists. Coakley, more sanguine about the use of the name "Father,"
contends that the metaphorical use of Father (when referring to God alone)
can indeed be purged of idolatrous masculinist tendencies in submissive

10 Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 320.

11 Ibid.
12 Johnson, She Who Is, 192.
13 Ibid., 336. This insight Coakley finds in Janet Martin Soskice's "Can a Feminist call God
Father?"

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 Praying the Trinity 587

prayer. The subtle distinctions of feminist Thomisms are clear: Johnson's

Thomism names God from feminist experience, while Coakley's Thomism
seeks to purge feminist theologies of their distaste for particular names for
God.

Beyond Masculinist Thomisms

Feminist Thomism is a rich strand for Catholic theologians seeking not to
jettison the tradition in feminist reconstructions. Tina Beattie, in a recent
argument for feminist Thomism, challenges Catholic neo-orthodoxy in pre­
cisely this way. Catholic neo-orthodox misgivings regarding postmodern and
secularized feminist theology result in a "new attentiveness among conser­
vative theologians to questions of sexuality, gender and embodiment,"14
coupled with a strident anti-feminist polemic inveighing against "gender
feminism." An alternate view presented by the so-called "New Catholic
Feminists" advocates an unquestioning loyalty to papal and official pro­
nouncements concerning the nature of women and their relationships with
men and the institutional Church. New Catholic Feminists also assert that
Catholic secularized feminists do not make room for prayer and faith in their
revisions.
Beattie's critical proposal emphasizes the need to continue to unearth the
"unacknowledged metaphysics" of much androcentric and patriarchal lan­
guage about God, while also engaging the "dimension of prayerful mystery"
in the divine-human encounter. Of course, in their own ways, LaCugna and
Johnson also emphasized prayer, albeit not in relation to the specifically
postmodern context Beattie is referencing. Beattie then presents the central
question for feminist theology, a question that highlights the discontinuity
between her project and Coakley's: "How is a woman to approach the incom­
prehensible otherness of God in order to articulate her relationship to Being
and language that does not already inscribe her into its theological and sexual
hierarchies as the feminine other 'to the economies of the Same' constructed
around the projections of the masculine subject?"15 Beattie wants to investi­
gate language about the Trinity, its gendered metaphysics and its resulting
impact on women's lives in the Church. Coakley, on the other hand, wants to
investigate the limits of these feminist strategies by using those very meta­
physics to renew the goals of feminist theology. Coakley is therefore more
aligned with New Catholic Feminism, though without its Catholic doctrinal
literalism and its avoidance of academic social science insights.
A striking similarity between Coakley and Beattie's proposals emerges
vis-a-vis the function of prayer as an agent of transformation. Both maintain

14 Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminisms: Theology and Theory (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006), 19.
15 Ibid. 57.

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588 Susan Abraham

that prayer, as mystical encounter, transforms idolatrous images of God

while simultaneously transforming the one who prays. Here Beattie, explic­
itly advancing beyond Johnson, notes that Johnson's liberal agenda dismisses
the theological category of "conversion" as antithetical to a feminist prac­
tice.16 For Johnson, conversion in classical theology is kenotic—the "process
of disowning oneself or divesting oneself of ego in order to be filled with
divine grace." This conception has to be discarded in favor of conversion as
"a turning away from demeaning female identity toward new ownership of
the female self as God's good gift." Beattie calls this "moralizing banality," a
privileging of the Enlightenment notion of Self. Beattie and Coakley alike
disavow as a reliable yardstick such an experiencing, autonomous, rationalist,
feminist subject. For both, conversion is "an experience that reaches into the
visceral depths of our humanity, beyond all socio-political realities,"17
because it is rooted in an encounter between an unknowable self with an
equally unknowable God.
While faith-filled prayer marks a strand of continuity between Beattie and
Coakley, the apophatic goals of their respective proposals are distinct. For
Coakley, apophatic practice in contemplation is to be led by the Spirit.
Prayer—the practice, not the experience—is the ground of Trinitarian theol­
ogy. Being led by the Spirit in prayer safeguards the distinctiveness of the
third person, for "Trinitarianism ... is always in danger of reduction, the loss
of the wafting 'pigeon,' the apparent redundancy of a hypostasized relation­
ship."18 The subversion of being led by the Sprit also reveals, most tellingly, a
"radical ontology: that there can be in God's trinitarian ontology no Sonship
which is not eternally sourced by Father in the Spirit/'19 All forms of linear
subordinationism, hierarchicalism and masculinism are vanquished.
Apophatic practice accordingly undermines gender stereotypes, instead of
reinscribing gender as the central concern of feminist theology. Further,
apophatic prayer subverts Enlightenment and liberal pretensions to self­
empowerment, a "narrow rationality."20 Instead, prayer orders affects and
passions to provide a new moral compass against the demand for control of
the self and greed for power. This is "power-in-vulnerability," where the
contemplative "steps wilfully into an act of reflexive divine love that is always
going on, always begging Christomorphic shape."21
For Beattie, by contrast, apophatic practice itself is gendered. Desire for
God, arising from the specificity of the female body, negotiates with secular
feminist theories and Catholic theology while always risking emptying the

16 See Johnson, She Who Is, 61-65.

17 Beattie, New Catholic Feminisms, 64.
18 Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 341.
19 Ibid., 332. In parentheses, Coakley underscores that in prayer the notion of Fatherly 'source'
cannot be contained in literal and exclusive meanings.
20 Ibid., 342.
21 Ibid., 343.

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 Praying the Trinity 589

self before God. Beattie is hesitant here, unlike Coakley, to place anything—
theology or theory—in the aftermath of feminist kenosis. While Thomas'
apophaticism can indeed invite the proliferation of language about God,
woman has to move beyond the negation of the negation of her being in texts
of theology. Her unknowing is different than a man's unknowing. Gendered
apophaticism then is a "proliferation of negations and counter-negations"
and Beattie, drawing on Coakley's own Powers and Submissions: Spirituality,
Philosophy and Gender, asks for the "dark knowing beyond speech"22 that
leads inexorably to the sacramental reality of women's bodies and the capac­
ity for a maternal and Christomorphic priesthood.

Praying the Trinity

Sarah Coakley and I pray the same Trinity. God does not present the problem
for those of us who are identified as representing global Christianity; the
vertical complex that Coakley charts is not unfamiliar in liberation theolo­
gies.23 Post-colonial feminist theological analyses may find some resonance
with Coakley's critical view of Western liberal feminisms. But where they
and I part company with Coakley is in the reconstruction of her feminist
proposals. In the postcolony, theology—theory and practices like prayer—
must decolonize.
Decolonization entails more than rejecting the excesses of liberal-secular
feminist theologies. Postcolonial theory and theology are not simplistically
postmodern, as if Western-style modernity and postmodemity are the only
frameworks enabling their speech on a global stage. Neither are they primar­
ily interested in securing a marginal and meager identity in relation to a
Western center as the "other" of Western thought. Contending modernities,
secularisms and traditionalisms enact a particular complex for postcolonial
theologies. Liberal-secular feminism, to be sure, is one of the more powerful
actors today. Sometimes it enables, other times it empowers. Often it perpetu­
ates misrecognitions and deepens coercive silences. Desire in such a complex
is "unknowable." Theologie Totale must therefore order desire to unlearn
relative privilege and decolonize in a more complex horizontal movement.
And is praying always in view of Christian purification? In the metropoli­
tan center of the Western academy, the rage is all about "religious pluralism"
and "interfaith dialogue." Willy-nilly, women from marginalized religious
and cultural contexts are dragged into a mutuality-relationality obsessed
secularism. Can Christian prayerful purification interrupt this benevolent
disciplining of multiplicity? I suggest that a practice of comparative spiritu­
ality, the hearing into speech that Coakley advocates, may require participa­
tion in more than Christian prayer. A very early proposal in this regard was

22 Beattie, New Catholic Feminisms, 67.

23 Ibid., 51.

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590 Susan Abraham

offered by Raimon Panikkar. As Anne Hunt24 points out, Panikkar suggested

that "the deep intuitions of Hinduism and Buddhism, which come from a
different universe of discourse than the Greek, may help us penetrate further
the Trinitarian mystery."25 The "Father" in such a view is not. Further, in
Panikkar's view, Trinitarian plurality secures a foundation for the plurality of
religions as opposed to the secular universalism of Western-style
pluralism.
A final proviso has to do with Coakley's presentation of Louis Dumont's
Homo Hierarchicus. I am in basic agreement that not all hierarchy is inherently
bad: our classrooms, parliaments and churches would be in complete chaos
without hierarchical systems. The feminist objection is that hierarchies are
rarely "ordered" in the way Coakley advocates. If hierarchies were indeed
dynamic systems that organize themselves around individual gifts of
complex selves, feminists might not be critical of hierarchies. However, hier­
archies—even complex socio-cultural-religious ones like the caste system—
function through the "unacknowledged metaphysics" of Self and not-Self.
Dumont, as is well known, was speaking to his Western audience. His
Orientalist presentation of India's caste system was crafted in stark opposi­
tion to modem Western individualism. Decolonizing the colonial view of
hierarchy remains still another negation (Beattie asserted the negation of
negations) to be engaged by postcolonial pray-ers, even as Coakley and I call
God Father.

24 Anne Hunt, Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).

25 Ibid. 152.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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