After Crucifixion: The Promise of Theology

by Craig Keen

This is an extraordinary text. It addresses no small number of traditional theological concerns. However, it addresses them mindful of the earthiness of life. Thus this is also a book that is concerned to address questions of migration, brain physiology, emotional trauma, time, love, and death. It is written not to satisfy a bloodless lust for the resolution of puzzles. It is written with confidence that tangible bodies think. Thus there is an earthy quality to its writing, both in what it addresses and how it is addressed. The manner of After Crucifixion may be imagined as a moment in which in some unpretentious underground venue the deep, resonant percussions of subwoofers roll as a carnal wave across the chest and throat before they become the bass line in a conscious musical thought. After Crucifixion has been written for the ears, the chest, the throat, no less than for focused, deliberate, disciplined thought. But it is written in particular for bodies befriended by the Mystery of life and death—in the carnal event of the crucifixion/resurrection of the Galilean peasant Jesus, who unhands the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and thus invites us to join him in prayer.

Genres: Religion, Theology

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2013

About the author

Craig Keen, Ph.D., is Professor of Systematic Theology at Azusa Pacific University. He has held various offices in the Wesleyan Theological Society, including Promotional Secretary, Program Chair, and President. Keen has published several articles in the Wesleyan Theological Journal, has a chapter in the book, Embodied Holiness: Toward a Corporate Theology of Spiritual Growth, and is under contract with Cascade Books to publish two books: The Transcendence of the Integrity of God and Other Essays and After Crucifixion: The Promise of Theology. He served as Co-Chair of the Systematic Theology Working Group of the Twelfth Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. In 2002, he served on an eight-member committee that envisaged, planned, and implemented the first Global Theology Conference of the Church of the Nazarene in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book, with a typo on its cover (spelt 'crucifixtion' in the version I have) (unless, by serendipity the t is there to be a cross) and its raggamuffin photo illustration, that found its way onto my Kindle (during a Wipf & Stock giveaway) to make my tired brain think (often while sitting on the toilet... this is important).

There were times when I didn't know what on earth I was reading (the earthiness matter(s)) and the reading was an undertaking (undertaking has been known to precede resurrection).

It is a piece of writing (a tome) that works by impressions and themes more than didactics. It's theopoetic in its approach... word play, etymologies, storytelling, cinematic and literary interludes, weaving together diverse and many sources. (The scope of its references is staggering.) Even the vast acres of footnotes are a play with the structure of academic texts. (Footnotes are a discourse 'underneath' the main discourse.) I regard it highly for that (I enjoyed seeing it in action - a style that I myself am wont to employ), but I discover it can become dense over a long form.

Its author, American Wesleyan theologian Craig Keen, self-effacingly says,

I have a lot of thoughts, having read too many books and articles, attended too many lectures, attended to too many seminars, spent too many hours—way too many hours—before movie and television screens and loud speakers, and pondered too long the words and deeds of my family and friends and enemies.101

Perhaps it is open to critique in the way it speaks on behalf of women and on behalf of struggling minorities and social groupings of which he is not a part. [From a position of white male academic privilege, can one speak on behalf and with full authenticity regarding these forms of struggle?]

But the overall positive effect is to place Christianity in the nitty gritty of embodied human struggle, the stuff of life, to place it as a heartbeat among the community of those not favoured by the power dynamic. To place it on dusty roads, and vacant city lots turned into gardens. Embodied in the sinew. A way of being that exists only in relation to and for the sake of the other. No tidy packages.

His own preface actually provides an excellent review of the book, as well as giving a taste of what the book is like. Some collaged excerpts:

though quite a large number of subjects are discussed here—from immigration to education, from the history of metaphysics to the Gospel of Mark, from urban planning to martyrdom, from brain physiology to ecclesiology, from wounded bodies to the forgiveness of sins, from hard work to hard, hard death, from time to resurrection, from theological method to the doctrine of the Trinity, and too much more—this is not a book about certain ideas or practices. This is not actually a book about anything (über etwas, Bultmann might have said). It is rather a book of something (von etwas).1 What I have written, more particularly, is a prayer, a prayer I have prayed precisely in the writing. This is a book that prays and prays in particular that its “speaking voice” would “also be [its] hearing ear.”2

we still habitually imagine that each of us thinks with her brain, in her head, that elongated sphere suspended on a thin neck between the brilliant, ethereal blue sky far above to which it is drawn, and the thick, heavy torso with its stabilizing limbs held by the force of gravity to the green, brown earth below. The people of ancient Israel imagined otherwise. We think, they believed, with our hearts, that organ in the middle of the chest, in the middle of the body, embraced by lungs alternately filled with sweet, rich air and emptied of it when expended in anticipation of the new breath that may yet come, the heart that pounds out the life-beat of the time that we are given to live together. It seems to me that the Israelites were right. We think from the midst of our bodies, with our bodies, with those social phenomena that are what they are only as they are interrupted and engaged by what they are not. I have written, i.e., for thinking bodies. I have written imagining the sound of words spoken and heard. I have imagined the reading of this book as a moment in which in some unpretentious word-of-mouth underground venue the deep, powerful, resonant percussions of subwoofers roll heavily as a carnal wave across the chest and throat before they become the bass line in a conscious musical thought. I have written for the ears, the chest, the throat, i.e., for a thinking body.

An extraordinary book, however, is not necessarily a good book. I would not claim that this is a good book—or its opposite, for that matter. I don’t know how I would even begin to make either judgment. It is, it seems to me, simply different, different from ordinary books, and especially those shelved near it in the theology section of university or seminary libraries.

Yes indeed. And here's a bonus quote for your pleasure:

Theology, this motley parabolic crew suggests, is not done alone and it is not done well; it is hard work with an uncertain outcome, the work of social bodies, and it is never to be confused with the completion of a circle, the solving of a problem, the closing of a wound, but is rather in the end a gratefully excessive expenditure, a wilderness feeding, a prodigal celebration, a resurrection of the dead, face to face with the faces that we meet, the faces the Crucified faces as he plummets, abased, into the abyss and rises, exalted, with glory.

Others have rated the book more highly than I have - perhaps I've been stingy. I wasn't always sure that it 'worked'. But as I look through the selection of highlighted texts from this book in my Kindle, they are rather remarkable. Have at it.

[Wesley Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Craig keen is a wonderful theologian and After Crucifixion is a beautiful work of theology which succinctly illuminates his perspective (quite personally, I think, but by no means comprehensively). And as such, it offers a welcome contribution to a variety of theological conversations. If we only learn from his posture of humility in the theological task, his book will have proved its significance. But this book has more to offer.

As a sustained reflection on what it means to take up the cross and following Jesus, After Crucifixion is a theological book about theology, about eucharist, God, hope, memory, church, practice, gospels (Mark in particular), and the gospel. There's a lot of potential here to place Keen in conversation with other heavyweights in the field. For example, his reflections on hope and memory place him, in my mind anyway, in conversation with the early Moltmann's reflections on crucifixion and resurrection in Theology of Hope and The Crucified God. Keen writes,

"And yet a dream of God--this God--is no ordinary dream, nor night terror... It is an apocalyptic vision. As such it makes manifest what good people do not want to see, perhaps cannot see. It manifests above all that there is a tomorrow that no yesterday can dictate. But it does so with the ambiguity that accompanies every call to revolution. 'The Reign of God is coming,' it says, 'and it is coming for you!'" (25)

He also writes,

"The gospel insists that Jesus' Holy Father, alive in heaven, is made manifest in life. The gospel indeed insists that the forsaken death of the carnal Son makes the Holy Father manifest, but that it does so in the work of the Spirit through the resurrection of his dead and damned body."(28)

I could also put Craig in conversation with Paul Tillich, perhaps even as a criticism of Tillich's perspective on hope. For Tillich, hope for the 'new' has to have some grounding in what has already been experienced in reality, in the 'old,' or else it is absurd. Hope, for Tillich, has something to do with potential. But for Keen, hope is, to a degree, unhinged from potential and past experience (even while it does not cease to be the hope for that which is utterly experienced).

“The hope of a future in Christ is a hope that does not lean on present and available ability, some power-pack of recovery. An act of the properly potential may restore, satisfy, and complete, but it will never break the chain that keeps it tethered to the essentially old. It may be relatively, but isn't absolutely new.” (49)

Keen, in fact, does not place himself in conversation with Tillich and Moltmann as much as he does with Hauerwas and Cavanaugh. The "earthy quality" (from the back cover) and carnality of his theology places his work in conversation with political and contextual theologies while by no means crossing neatly into any such categories.

Craig offers charitable and pointed criticisms for ecclesiology. "There may be no English word," he writes, "as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church" (41).

All this is to say, if you're looking for another theologian to engage, Craig Keen's work has lots of open doors for conversation, both for personal theological reflection and academic advancement. I recommend this book to you as one to read carefully and with expectation.

[Robbie Cansler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was encouraging to me as a pastor. Theology is weighty and important, but it was the application and narrative of this book that captivated and challenged me. The call to faithfulness, the call to bear one's own cross, that one might also know resurrection. The narratives of God working through small groups of faithful people, for that is the narrative of the church. It filled me with hope to carry on in faithfulness, no matter what.