A grammar of trinitarian experience? On Sarah Coakley’s théologie totale

Abstract

The Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley has attempted to think trinitarian doctrine in explicitly experiential terms. Her erotically-charged, pneumatically-centred account of salvific incorporation attempts to articulate, on the one hand, an account of the purgation of desire and the senses through ascetic practice, contemplative prayer and liturgical habituation, while also maintaining, on the other hand, the priority of spiritual appetition as being itself the route through which believers are, gradually, drawn into the trinitarian life.

Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The study makes a contribution by critically articulating an aspect of Coakley’s ‘théologie totale’, a new proposal for the method of systematic and dogmatic theology, one that is centrally focused on bringing in a wider interdisciplinary focus to the practice of systematic theology.