The Queer Multiplicity of Becoming

This chapter considers the relationship between the Christian, sexual, nationalized, and anthropocentric exceptionalisms. It argues that gender does not get superseded by sex, or feminist by queer, in practice, in theory or in theology. Instead of supersession there appears a multiplicity of becomings, multiplicities of multiples happening in a nonlinear movement whose events of becoming, massively iterative even in their novelties, do not cease to entangle each other. The chapter explains how Christian exceptionalism could sanctify a new model of imperial sovereignty, one that could be retroactively interpreted as the political theology at work in all modern Western powers. It also examines how our entanglement in each other and in the planet is repressed by exceptionalism and how queer theory may collude in the human exceptionalism when it deploys a careless rhetoric of “denaturalization.”

Returning God: Gift of Feminist Theology

This chapter examines how the “returning God” of a half century of feminist theology relates to the return of religion. Feminist theology, where an intensive secularization meets an ancient discourse, may be considered a symptom of the so-called postsecular. The question is whether “God” is returning or getting returned; whether we might now receive the gift of a return, a coming again, or whether we perform the return of the gift to its religious givers; whether our returning God is a blessing and a renewal of the language of God. The chapter asks how the much touted “return of God” is both helped and hindered by the demand for gender and sexual justice. It suggests a theological supplement to the singular event of incarnation—the intercarnation, which might be narrated as the becoming body of God—but only if the God-metaphor does not defeat the multiplicity.

Introduction

This book deals with intercarnation, which emphasizes the intermittencies, intervals, and interdependencies of world relations. The intercarnation here holds the doctrine of the incarnation accountable to the messianic mattering of all flesh. The essays in this book all do some version of entangled difference: Indeed, the phrase may be considered a paraphrase of intercarnation. With theology itself, as the formalized discourse of the Western religions, in question among most thinking people, difference cannot be appeased by various feminist or materialist or ecumenical supplements. Some of the essays of this volume consider the legacy of feminist theology, which has destabilized the foundations of theology and inserted itself into any live future of theology, while others examine a planetary politics for a theology in search of its future. Topics range from transfeminist entanglements and materialism to theopoetics, messianic indeterminacy, postcoloniality and process cosmology, and a political theology of the earth.

Derridapocalypse

This chapter considers the “gift” of the messianic coming by focusing on Jacques Derrida's views on apocalypse. Several decades ago, Derrida, in the course of a dual analysis of the Apocalypse and an antiapocalyptic essay by Immanuel Kant, argued that the former reveals “a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even.” However, it seems that Derrida has succeeded in making a better case for that contention in his more recent work on faith. “In testimony, truth is promised beyond all proof,” Derrida contends near the end of his extended meditation on faith and knowledge. And again: “The act of faith demanded in bearing witness exceeds, through its structure, all intuition and all proof.” The chapter examines faith in the Derridean sense in relationship to the secret and suggests that a secret is evoked in the Apocalypse's opening words: “The unsealed secret of Jesus Messiah, God's gift to him.”

“And Truth—So Manifold!”: Transfeminist Entanglements

This chapter examines the sense of transit, transition, and translation involved in the nonlinear and necessary evolution of feminism under the heading of transfeminism. More specifically, it explores the link between entanglement and difference. As difference multiplies, the tension intensifies. And as gender folds into sexuality, into race, class, and ecology, into materiality, it resists reduction to a mere issue among many. Inspired by a poem of Emily Dickinson, “Truth so manifold,” the chapter hopes to keep feminism from getting either transcended or stuck in a certainty of its own. In discussing a transfeminist version of feminist theology, it outlines three criteria: entanglement, considered as relationality stretched from intimacy to infinity; unknowing, considered as apophatic uncertainty stretched from ignorance to wisdom; and multiplicity, considered as the teaching of the manifold, stretched from orthodoxy into pluralism.

Toward a Political Theology of the Earth

This chapter considers incongruent temporalities in the form of a political theology of the earth. Political theology can rarely be mistaken for ecotheology. At least in its guise as political theory, it leaves concern for the matter of the earth to ecological science, activism, and religion. Key to political theology has been its readings of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty in terms of emergency. The current conversation in political theology has been unfolding with the rush of a theoretical currency fueled by old, indeed ancient, theopolitical language. Even as ecological theology seems to slow theory down, capturing it in a geological time far older than language, it also lurches into the terrifying speed of climate destabilization. The chapter asks whether, in the guise of thinking for and as terra, we would territorialize politics itself. It shows how, by seeding an alternative to the political theology of exceptionalist power, intercarnation fosters “the new people and earth in the future.” It also explains how a theology forged in alliances of entangled difference helps that alliance emerge—in the face of what may be mounting planetary emergency.

The Cosmopolitan Body of Christ. Postcoloniality and Process Cosmology: A View from Bogotá

This chapter considers the notion of the cosmopolitan and the value of process theology for a Latin American context. Focusing on postcolonial Colombia, it proposes a cosmopolitanism—a “world citizenship”—in the context of an engagement between process theology and liberation theology. In Global Fragments, Eduardo Mendieta outlines a “dialogical cosmopolitanism” by taking into account “the critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism” of Walter Mignolo. The chapter examines how imperial cosmopolitanism colludes with the profound anti-cosmopolitanism of fundamentalism and argues that a rigorously dialogical cosmopolitanism must become ever more attentive to the ecological depredations of economic globalization. It also discusses a decolonial cosmology that will counter the dissociation of the human from its universe at seven points: as globalizing modernity; as ethical disembodiment; as repulsion of indigenous “cosmovision”; as androcentrism; as ecological anthropocide; as the theodicy of a Christian power drive; and as anthropocentric displacement of responsibility, Christologically reinforced.

“The Place of Multiple Meanings”: The Dragon Daughter Rereads the Lotus Sutra

This chapter examines the Lotus Sutra, a 2,000-year-old sutra recognized by the Chinese Buddhist master Zhi Yi as the ultimate teaching of the Tiantai lineage. Lotus Sutra announces the true dharma of compassion to all sentient beings, as distinguished from the inferior dharma of mere personal liberation. The compassion is boundless, infinite, encompassing all beings, all worlds, in their fathomless multiplicity. The Buddha of Lotus Sutra declares the Dharma of Innumerable Meanings. The chapter shows that the means of Lotus Sutra epitomize entangled difference: the buddhas “know that nothing exists independently/And that buddha-seeds arise interdependently.” It also considers how these far-flung intercarnations give rise to some unexpectedly current entanglements.

Messianic Indeterminacy: A Comparative Study

This chapter examines comparative theology within the context of the Abrahamic rhizome as inseparable from political theology. The darkness of the messianic anointing is no more that of its frequent destructiveness than of its unknowable indeterminacy. Freed of any certain outcome or homecoming, the messianic hope breaks open a temporality of collective becoming. As messianic indeterminacy thereby darkens into “the nonknowing of a not-ending noone, the naught of our now entangles us indirectly in everyone—without untangling us from the direct demands of some one tradition.” The chapter suggests that the Jewish/Christian linkage of comparative messianism—as an acutely nonseparable difference—is closely intertwined with political theology. It also argues that one cannot speak of the relation of apophasis to apokalypsis except as a manifestation of the connection between mysticism and messianism.

Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of the New(ish) Materialism

This chapter considers a bodily becoming neither human nor divine but entangled in both. In conversation with Karen Barad, quantum entanglement discloses the relational ontology—the “agential intra-activity”—of which every body in the universe is woven. The chapter demonstrates the proximity of Barad's to Alfred North Whitehead's responsive materiality. Here, intercarnation might have turned to intra-carnation. But then there might seem to be a single mega-body inside which all enfleshment takes place. The point, however, is that creatures, micro- or macro-, do not pre-exist their relationships. The chapter examines what kind of theology might materialize in conversation with the so-called new materialism and what sort of theology might already identify itself as a Christian materialism.