Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art

by Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

The problem with theologies of kenosis, Coakley demonstrates, is that they tend to over-focus on articulating a right definition. But any understanding of kenosis must instead be oriented by its appearance in the second chapter of Philippians, where it functions liturgically as a hymn. It’s not an invitation ‘to speculate dispassionately on [Christ’s] nature,’ she writes, but rather it invites us ‘to enter into Christ’s extended life in the church’.12 Authentic (that is, non-patriarchal) Divine power unites to the Son’s human vulnerability in a way that makes the latter ‘wholly translucent’ to the former.13 To have the same mind as Christ, as the hymn goes, then, entails that we participate in this vulnerable translucency. Christians do this when we perform what Coakley calls, ‘prayer of a deep sort’,14 or ‘deep prayer in the Spirit’15 – that is, ascetic forms of prayer that we might describe as contemplative or charismatic.