The brokenness of Christology

Sarah Coakley’s characteristically layered and learned inquiry into Christology uses brokenness as the central thread to stitch together accounts of often disparate doctrinal inquiries: the cross, liturgy, and asceticism. The brokenness of Jesus’ body on the cross moves to and through the fraction of the bread in the Eucharist. Underneath that dyad is Coakley’s abiding interest in the apophatic. Christians need to be broken open by the Spirit, our presumptions and feints displaced, so that we might receive and encounter the Lord who was broken for us. And though Coakley is herself writing theology, she cautions at every turn that any attempt to systematize and say all this would overwrite brokenness with a completion that is only available eschatologically.

Three ruptures, then—on the cross, in the liturgy, and in us through the Spirit. To these, Coakley adds a fourth rupture: that between Judaism and the church. Judaism and Christianity have been broken apart from each other, but Christians must hope for their “ultimate eschatological re-convergence.” In dilations of themes common to Judaism and Christianity, Coakley finds “an extraordinary hidden nexus of ongoing shared theological insight, arguably the harbinger of a deeper unity that is still being worked out through and between the two traditions.”

For example, prayer. Long attentive to Romans 8, Coakley here observes that Paul’s “proto-trinitarian” explication of prayer and divine action “immediately precedes Paul’s excursus on Jewish/Christian relations in Romans 9–11” and that the internal order of Romans is “significant.” This is a simple but startling and productive observation. In a rich archive of rabbinic sources, Coakley finds resonances with Romans 8, including a wonderful passage in the Talmud in which the rabbis pursue the “(ostensibly odd) question of whether God prays to Himself.” Coakley argues that there is, perhaps, a “triadic” impulse in Jewish prayer, and the sympathies between Romans 8 and various rabbinic texts suggests to Coakley a new avenue into—or new evidence for—“the indissoluble relatedness of Judaism and Christianity in this fundamental arena of worship.”