Amy told me about her book, Theology in Many Voices, in the comments to a Facebook post I wrote, where I casually lamented the failure of most Christian theology to properly integrate reflection on experience (yes, this is what I rant about on Facebook instead of posting memes). Anyway, I was immediately intrigued, and I eagerly preordered her book and read it when it came in the mail, and I got to enjoy rereading it again as I prepared these remarks on the plane. When it was published after the annual College Theology Society (CTS) meeting in 2024, I recalled mentioning that a panel discussing this work would be something worth organizing. This past year, Derek Hatch and Kathryn House both graciously volunteered to give reflections on the book, with Amy Chilton responding. As moderator of a session on this book at the Society’s recent annual meeting, I will simply note three things I appreciated in the book, leaving more substantive engagement for the three contributors in the following.

This book stands as a kind of “prequel” to Chilton’s earlier work, namely the book edited with Steven Harmon, Sources of Light, a book in which different perspectives, different experiences, and different “lights” are shone within the context and consideration of Baptistic communal hermeneutics of listening and discerning.Footnote ¹ Although an adequate description for a hermeneutic of listening was given in that book, Chilton goes deeper in Theology in Many Voices to look at three things: “(1) theology rooted in local practice, (2) theology done intercontextually, and (3) doctrine” (4). Or, as she summarizes at the beginning: “Theology in Many Voices makes a case for understanding theology as a practice of the church, a practice that makes space for lived-community experience in theological content and the lived experience of Jesus” (2).

The book is organized into three parts: The first part of the book meditates on theology as a local practice, taking experientially blind theologies to task. Whether Wolfhart Pannenberg’s eurocentricism, Oliver Crisp’s propositionalism, Kevin Vanhoozer’s “unidirectional epistemological foundationalism,” or even Beth Felker Jones’s own relegation of “practice” to a post-doctrinal exercise in ethics, Chilton calls out different theologians for their refusal to see practice as a legitimate expression, outcome, and source of theology (20).

As an alternative, Chilton looks to Jon Sobrino’s theology, whose praxis-oriented Christology and realidad histórica approach prioritize the history of Christ and following him in the lived context of Latin American poverty. Taking issue with abstract Christology that can divorce Jesus’s nature (and thus belief in Christ) from the lived reality of the kingdom Christ called disciples to, Chilton follows Sobrino’s insights that “we ‘do’ so we can ‘know’” (53), and so, the realities of poverty, oppression, and the pragmatics of liberation in a given context must be integrated as part of doctrinal reflection.

The second part of the book reflects on theology as an intercontextual practice. For this, Chilton reflects on Alasdair MacIntyre’s notions of practice and language, suggesting that theologians must refuse the hegemony of cultural echo chambers, even purportedly orthodox ones, and develop “second first languages” that open up—a phrase I deeply love—“dialogical orthodoxy” (6). Using the example of discerning communion theologies between Baptist and Catholic traditions as they met at CTS in 2018, Chilton argues that “not only can traditions communicate with other traditions based on their shared texts, practices, experiences, etc., but in order for traditions not to stalemate in stage two they need other traditions to shed light on their own sources when they themselves cannot find a way forward in epistemological crises moments” (86).

To illustrate this learning a “second first language,” Chilton reflects on Muriel Lester’s life and spirituality, a rightful theologian whose place in society prevented her from writing theology in the manner and medium male counterparts were privileged to write. Nevertheless, she wrote in appreciation of Gandhi, whose teachings, rather than harming her faith, enriched her Christian practice of peace in the context of world religions.

The third part of the book reflects—boldly, I might add—on doctrine, applying the insights of the previous sections, discussing the doctrine of the Trinity and anthropology, both reflecting on the doctrine from global Latina perspectives and taking feminist experience and concerns seriously. In doing so, she takes up pneumatological and relational understandings of the Trinity to address subordination and heteronormativity, using these critiques to suggest triune relationality is not limited to heterosexual marriage but includes radical friendships.

Moving on to the final chapter of the book, while James McClendon first drew attention to the need to reflect on the body, Chilton points out the irony that McClendon often failed to fully consider women’s bodies, often presented as “mirrors of male experience” (141), whether Sarah Edwards, Dorothy Day, or Bathsheba. Her reflections on anthropology challenge neglect and repression of the body, whether the priority of the spiritual, the rational, or the male (and these being often symbolically linked together), all to suggest deeper pathways of authenticity and liberation.

When I first read Chilton’s book, I felt a deep sense that she had named and made explicit many of the things I had been intuiting. I have always had an allergy to Kevin Vanhoozer’s theology, and she named the objection perfectly: his unidirectional thinking in theology that shuts out experience. As I look at some of my notes, next to her critiques of some of these folks, I put an “Amen!” in the margins. In that regard, there is so much of this book that I find useable, enriching, and expanding for my own thoughts. I here state three things that I appreciated.

Some of us who were raised as fundamentalist Baptists, as I was, have had to deal with the aftermath and repercussions of experience-blind theologies: totalizing, literalistic (and, ultimately, quite slanted and inaccurate) readings of the biblical text, notions of authority that forbid your life and your questions from being meaningful to your relationship with God, convictions about sin and salvation that promote shame and suspicion toward bodies (whether your body or the bodies of others), and all of these really flowing from visions of God that simply are not gracious and loving, despite assertions to the contrary. Some of us, by God’s grace, have happened upon, worked through, and have been encouraged by theologians who have realized that the voices of the marginalized and the voice of our conscience—the voices of new light—should not be repressed and ignored.

Second, I appreciate Chilton’s reading of practices that forbid incommensurability between contexts. Her arguments bring me back to my first interactions with Wittgenstein, his notion of language games, and how Jean-François Lyotard used this to make the case that not only is there no metanarrative, but the plurality of communal narratives is incommensurable. While I don’t think there is one grand “metanarrative” in the way Lyotard describes (or that Christianity is one in the oppressive sense, despite him thinking so), I also have never thought Wittgenstein’s notion of language games (or MacIntyre’s notions of practices) necessarily mean the kind of fideist insularity some see as an implication.

From there, I found Chilton’s application using Muriel Lester and Gandhi to be appropriate, one that deeply resonated with my own intraspiritual wonderings: reading the wisdom from other religions and even participating in another’s practices (albeit, in my case, in admittedly amateurish, armchair ways at times) has made me a better Christian. The capacity to look at other religions with humility and empathy, the willingness to grant similarities and successes, along with honesty about differences and disagreements—this strikes me as a vital ingredient to the church’s witness in a pluralistic, postmodern world.

Lastly, I deeply appreciate Chilton’s recentering of God’s identity in non-patriarchal ways, both by her reflection on triune relationships and her refocusing on the importance of the body. My own work has similarly explored feminine language for God, realizing just how much certain ways of talking about God in a masculine way have harmed me as a man, husband, father, person, and so on. Although I approach some of the subjects differently and parse some of the concepts differently from Chilton, I nevertheless felt deeply inspired (not to mention intrigued) by her conclusion of looking to the vision of the Lamb who was slain in Revelation as an androgynous Jesus, eschatologically incorporating and healing both femininity and masculinity. She writes:

I simply want to end by saying that Amy Chilton has written an excellent text, reflecting on theological method and practice, challenging prevailing paradigms that exclude the lived dimensions of our convictions, whether poverty, oppression, interreligious encounters, patriarchy, or sexism. She concludes her book saying:

For those of us who have been formed by the Baptistic thinkers Chilton interacts with, this book is a decisive, critical, and constructive advancement of the discourse. It is time now to turn to Derek Hatch and Kathryn House for their reflections, and then read a response from Amy Chilton.

Amy Chilton offers theologians of many persuasions and with many commitments—Baptist, Catholic, systematic, and practical, just to get us started—a gift with Theology in Many Voices. Chilton is a weaver—one who knows “the joy of turning a flat piece of fabric or skein of yarn into something beautiful” (x). I celebrate with my colleague this something beautiful—this book, woven of and with different voices, perspectives, disciplines, and stories, into a work that is a rich project both in its totality and in the transformation it engenders. Because of Chilton’s work with these particular figures, many of whom are not typically in dialogue together—not often woven under and over each other, made taut and loose alongside one another—because Chilton has invited us to “go on” with these folks in particular ways and across disciplines, her project is an invitation to understand theologians anew (66). This also might temper Chilton’s fear that she has “used male theologians to sanction the presence of female theologians” (4). One could instead read Chilton’s work as woven: no one strand more significant than the other, both warp and woof essential. Still, with Chilton’s note in mind, I have enjoyed thinking about reading the book reversed. What if the experiences of women were first, and the methodology was linear and hierarchical, and the goal was to discern if George Lindbeck, Alasdair MacIntyre, James Wm. McClendon, and Jürgen Moltmann had richly engaged Loida Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado Pérez, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Mary Hunt, Leslie Kendrick Townsend, and Lina Andronoviené?

Returning to my first note, though, one place where the texture of one fabric changed for me as a result of its incorporation in the project is with James Wm. McClendon’s conceptualization of practice. McClendon’s work with practice is not often engaged by practical theologians, to the detriment of practical theology in my estimation, and to my chagrin, when one of my advisors, Bryan Stone, suggested that I work with McClendon in my dissertation.Footnote ² Stone works closely with McClendon and MacIntyre to conceptualize evangelism as a practice, and I spent a great deal of time configuring baptism as a practice of solidarity by reading McClendon alongside ethicist M. Shawn Copeland and mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz. McClendon’s articulation of practices both as powerful and ambivalent helped me grapple with baptism, and Chilton emphasizes these characteristics, too; likewise, I have long been uneasy with when and how some bodies show up in McClendon’s work, and so I was grateful for Chilton’s critical read of his incorporation of “Black religion” and women’s narratives (140–41). Bodies, like practices, are powerful and ambivalent, too, and I appreciate Chilton’s robust work with McClendon that takes seriously both his strengths and weaknesses as a theologian who also takes practice seriously.

My further comments correspond to each of the three parts, or strands, of Chilton’s work. First, as someone who most often identifies as a practical theologian, I appreciate Chilton’s engagement with the centrality of practice and indeed with “theology as practice” (2). Chilton would be in good company with practical theologians who need no convincing that “understanding theology as a particular set of practices aids in the recognition of the presence of one’s own lived experience in theology and doctrine and creates space in theology for the theological contributions of lived experiences of differently located and practicing communities” (5). Practices such as “prayer, worship, Bible study, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and preaching and teaching” as well as “Bible reading” are “necessary in doing theology not only because they grant the practitioner perception (although not assuredly right perception) but also because they function to unite the church across time and space,” Chilton explains (31). Affirming her robust work with Sobrino and the centrality of liberation theology as methodology that prioritizes practice, this practical theologian simply says, “Amen.”

With practical theology in mind, one place where I would love to “go on” with Chilton is to invite her to experiment with additional methodologies and insights from practical theology and sociology of religion to resource her investigation of theology as practice. Theologians and sociologists who use qualitative methods, including ethnographic studies, start from a similar belief that “theology is most often ‘done’ on the ground” (16). Many would probably concur that “if theology is to speak rightly about God and our relation to God, it must be rooted in local faith communities, and attended not only to its coherence and consistency (in the case of systematic theology) or its hermeneutic (in the case of biblical studies) but also to the very communities in which it is practiced and from which it arises (12). It is possible that it is impossible for those who are averse to experience to even assent to asking and listening to real humans in the realidad histórica about their experience, but for those who are willing, scholarship from Eileen Campbell-Reed, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Nancy Ammerman, and Susan Shaw (noting the inclusion of Shaw in part 3, so here pointing to God Speaks to Us, Too) would be a good place to start.Footnote ³

Staying with the first strand just a bit longer, I commend Chilton for her work with Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, for whom “the poor are not merely victims, but also theological contributors” (57, emphasis in original). Sobrino is a strong fit for the book, and Chilton does tremendous work traversing and sharing the genealogy of Sobrino’s theological trajectory. Chilton could have chosen any number of theologians who attend to their context (noting that theologians are always writing from their contexts, regardless of whether they name it), but in choosing Sobrino, she also gives space and credence to the perspectives, theologies, and priorities of those experiencing poverty. The poor make demands of solidarity on the church and the “methodological demand that the church de-idologize itself by aligning itself with them rather than with idols of power” (58).

Bringing threads of Chilton’s part 3 to bear here, and drawing from practical theology’s methodological commitments to reflexivity and power dynamics at any point when one is engaging any community who is imagined to be “other-than-themselves,” I would add the perspective of Argentinian liberation and indecent theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid as a necessary dialogical partner to resource resistance to “idols of power” of heterosexuality and decency when envisioning and trying to center “the poor.” A “yes/and”: Yes: I affirm what Chilton writes here: “In order to do theology well and to more fully encounter the presence of God, it must be done from within the church of the poor, where the poor live and practice their faith” (60). And I also affirm that it is crucial to cultivate reflexivity at every point in one’s encounters and to cultivate awareness of the biases or expectations one might be bringing to one’s conception of another. In her groundbreaking Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics, Althaus-Reid critiqued liberationists for erasing the real lives of poor women who were leaders in Base Ecclesial Communities (BECs). This erasure happened in many ways: their labor to organize BECs was “subsumed” by “analysis of BECs” and then the complexities of their lives were not allowed to appear as theologically appropriate. Writes Althaus-Reid, “Liberationists produced a discourse of the native woman, successfully sold as ‘the poor mother,’ ‘the poor but strong Christian woman’ fitting the patriarchal romantic idea of womanhood in Latin America. It was never the poor woman who was fighting to be ordained as a minister in her church, nor the poor mother trying to get an abortion or struggling, not against capitalism, but against abusive Christian men in her family.”Footnote ⁴ Althaus-Reid’s words are a caution that the powerful forces of erasure extend to engaging lived experience, too, and her words are also an invitation to humility and reflexivity.

Picking up the second strand, I am grateful for Chilton’s focus on a “multiplicity of sources” in engaging “the community-embedded theological process” (69). Chilton writes appreciatively of nurturing “relationship to other practicing faith communities,” highlighting the witness of Muriel Lester and attending to the rich conversation between CTS and National Association of Baptists Professors of Religion Region-at-Large members in 2018. I want to again affirm Chilton’s choice of figure with Lester and in turning to the personal and communal practices—prayer and friendship among them (96,100). If we are to take women’s lives of faith seriously, prayer, reading, friendship, and what I’ll call neighborliness must be among the practices we affirm as theology done. My academic studies of purity culture, clergywomen, and calling and innovation, as well as my own professional context of a Unitarian Universalist seminary again simply encourage an “Amen.” My personal life also informs my nodding with Chilton, as I know the power and influence of my mother and my aunt’s decades-long prayer group text chain.

Chilton’s narration of the 2018 conference and the “epistemological crisis” engaged during the panel contained several “ah-ha” moments for me. The first Region-at-Large meeting I attended was in 2018, and the panel Chilton describes was the first event I attended during the conference. Dr. Mike Broadway and I had corresponded over email, but I was meeting everyone else for the first time. Through Chilton’s analysis, I now see this panel as a conversation between friends who were trying to take one another’s traditions and spiritual needs into account. What I remember most about that morning was trying to discern why everyone was this concerned about taking communion together. Chilton has helped me contextualize my reflections and response then more richly now, as a response also deeply infused by the dialogue and the praxis of my own friendships and communities.

I was fresh off my ordination the fall before, and I had grown accustomed to the practice within my own local congregation that neither ordination nor membership was required to either give or receive the Lord’s Supper. I was also one of the regular facilitators of the Pub Church, a church in Boston originally founded by Boston University School of Theology students—friends—who met at the Dugout Café, a local pub, on Saturday evenings at 5 pm. Out of its understanding of fidelity to the good news of Jesus, and having witnessed the pain of exclusion from the table because of sexual orientation or theological beliefs that were not appropriately orthodox, this community practiced an open table each week. I had also been working with William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist as part of a project on torture, protest, and lived religion, and so I was reflecting a great deal on the Eucharist as a “counter-discipline to state terror.”Footnote ⁵

Drawing from Chilton, and weaving a bit with part 3, too, I now envision that panel with speakers weaving their points together, and I envision the commitments and conversations of my friends and communities too, being woven as I was watching the weavers. I was neither seeking nor found resolution for my queries in that moment, but I do remember thinking, “If it really bothers you, you can just do something different and see what happens. You can actually be friends who think the system is wrong and practice, powerfully, newly together. Just ‘go on’ already.” I would say now to myself, “That’s easy for you to say,” and I’m more aware of my impatience about a context where I did not have a lot at stake. Still I think we should not underestimate the power of groups of friends to do radical things together. I am reminded of the urgencies of COVID-19 and the praxes of life apart and together that remain with us now, and I wonder if we have new theologies to help us think across emerging contexts, too.

My own context of studying gender and sexual abuse in faith communities for more than a decade now makes me reticent not to try and create powerful good with our ecumenical lives, when so much has been torn asunder by faith communities. Baptists and Catholics both still face the ongoing epistemological crisis of sex abuse from persons in positions of ecclesial authority and the residue of theological commitments that foment sexual and gender violence. Moreover, in a time of unceasing terror from bodies that are the state and also more than any one state, we might also ask how we can be formed to resist and create otherwise in the face of unending death.

Finally, I appreciate the expansiveness of part 3. The work of Loida I. Martell-Otero, Zaida Maldonado Pérez, and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier and their explication of teología en conjunto are a welcome juxtaposition to other Baptist conceptions of the Trinity explored in the chapter. It is here, where the Trinity “models right human treatment,” where “God is understood as both familia and familial” (117). This theologizing is another site of revelation because it is also a disruption to the violence of eternal subordination or to a vision of God dependent on eternal domination or expression. In this explication of relationality, both theory and practice take a deep breath beyond constricting modalities.

Another welcome exhalation comes with Chilton’s turn to same-sex friendship:

This powerful sentence becomes an invitation for expansiveness in so many ways, but I will just name two. First, it makes space for moving beyond gender essentialism, complementarity, and in my hopes, a gender binary, to make space for the richness and depth and breadth of human life and of knowing God with us; this is a possibility to which Chilton also points (168). Second, this possibility “to [participate] in the triune God” is not exclusive to women. Men, this means you can be friends, too. Men, you might have heard, are in a “friendship recession.”Footnote ⁶ In a 2021 report from the Survey Center on American Life, in a survey of more than 2,000 adults, “Less than half of the men said they were truly satisfied with how many friends they had, while 15% said they had no close friends at all—a fivefold increase since 1990.”Footnote ⁷ The gift of Chilton’s conclusion is that it opens up expansive participation in the triune God for everyone.

Finally, after I read “women’s embodied experiences bring to light how the church’s theology of what it means to be human has created a reality that is often opposed to the truths of the imago Dei and of the Spirit’s life-giving work in the world,” I placed the book down and brought my hand down to my abdomen (160). I touched the many scars, old and fresh, from surgeries to remove noncancerous but painful fibroid tumors from my uterus. I lingered on the parts of my stomach that swelled and bruised from shots to increase egg production. I thought of my own life, initiated through assisted reproductive technology. As a 43-year-old woman for whom friendship is a theological method and source, I have shared and received and been formed by a multiplicity of stories of embodiment: unexpected loves, boring loves that transformed into forever loves, loves that faded, stories of relief for how many lines were on the stick, miscarriages, months swallowed by grief, abortions, thousands of dollars for fertility treatments and no viable embryos, stories of meeting one’s kiddo for the first time, chosen families, favorite aunts … to name a few. I want to keep thinking with Chilton about these threads and how our socially constructed bodies are still socially and theologically disciplined. I stay curious about the mother at the foot of the cross of her son, the Lamb that was slain. I stay curious about “right human treatment,” about being human, about wombs, about weaving. I am grateful to Amy, a friend and a colleague, for her good and challenging work.

In Theology in Many Voices: Baptist Vision and Intercontextual Practice, Amy Chilton unfolds a theological agenda that is both partly familiar and boldly challenging. Her engagement with the work of James McClendon and Alasdair MacIntyre (among several others) will be especially recognizable to many readers. At the same time, Chilton engages a wider range of scholars to critically evaluate those who might be familiar, offering new answers to existing questions but also asking new questions altogether. In general, I found this volume thought provoking and helpful. To focus my brief remarks, I will highlight four aspects of her text, each of which could be interesting to readers, be appreciated by readers, or foster further reflection.

One of the primary problems that Chilton identifies with certain schools of contemporary theological discourse is that they are afflicted by experience blindness (15). A term borrowed from Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “experience blindness” refers to a neglect of experience as a source for theology due to overly propositional theological convictions. She identifies Wolfhart Pannenberg and Oliver Crisp as prime examples of this condition, though other candidates for this label are certainly possible. A crucial sign that one has experience blindness is a tendency to criticize the use of experience and context in other theological methodologies (liberation or feminist theologies, for example) while missing the role that a different sort of experience—but experience nonetheless—plays in one’s own theological formation and in the shape of one’s theological convictions.

Although Chilton’s discussion of this issue is fair and accurate in its examination, it is most helpful that it is included in a chapter that discusses the role of practice as theology. It is not often that the conversations about theology and the category of experience have been linked to the conversations about theology and the category of practice. In other words, by connecting the discussion of experience blindness to the relatively recent discussion of practices in theology found in the work of George Lindbeck and James McClendon, Chilton helps to clear the ground so that a more fruitful cultivation of theology as practice can be accomplished. Likewise, attempts to target experience as a theological category can be seen as undermining theology as practice as well. By linking them together, a more robust response to these critiques can be developed and new theological partnerships can take place. Indeed, the volume embodies this by engaging a range of intercontextual conversation partners as well as a wider set of theological sources.

Second, in a chapter dedicated to Trinitarian doctrine, Chilton notes that Stanley Grenz described Trinitarian relations as encompassing unity and difference yet conceptualized this relation around the male–female sexual relationship within marriage. While retaining the notion of diversity within unity, Chilton argues that Grenz neglected the various forms of human relations that can also participate in the triune God.Footnote ⁸ Instead of focusing exclusively on heterosexual relations, Chilton sees friendship as the more apt pathway for discussing relational participation in the Godhead and a pathway that can address a wider range of relational forms, including but not limited to homosexual relations, relationships of single persons, and nonsexual relations between friends. For Chilton, this opens up space for women’s relationships to have theological import: “Women’s friendships, although largely absent in theological literature (as source and content), are intrinsic to Trinitarian theology as a form of human relationality. They are beneficial to Trinitarian doctrine because they broaden the discussion beyond binary sexuality and marriage … and can bring to light differently nuanced theological truths” (134).

This approach to human relationality seems right, and Chilton’s framing of it is quite helpful. Not only does it take seriously other sorts of sexual relationships, but it also embraces nonsexual relationships as meaningful for theological reflection. In particular, the discussion of single persons is especially significant, something that Chilton makes clear in a later discussion of the work of Lina Toth. Often the relationality of single persons is overlooked due to the elevation of the martial bond. Broadening the scope of experiences that can be relevant to theological work allows the experiences of single persons to be included. Moreover, the elevation of friendship can transform discussions of love so that they have a broader set of referents than simply marriage. Important for this work is the reframing of friendship’s encounter with difference, specifically when involved in friendships of virtue. For Aristotle, character friendships are the highest sort and lead to a kind of sameness because the virtuous friend becomes another self.Footnote ⁹ Chilton engages Ryan Newson’s work to convert Aristotle’s understanding of a character friendship so that it becomes “a radical friendship that … allows difference even in the community’s growth of Christian virtues” (135). We might be reminded that Thomas Aquinas—who also sought a “conversion” of Aristotle—described love, the very form of the virtues, as friendship between humanity and God.Footnote ¹⁰

In chapter 2, Chilton engages the work of Jon Sobrino, a Latin American Catholic liberation theologian, specifically his understanding of realidad histórica, the sense that there is one stream of history that encapsulates all of human life. There is no scholarly history separate from people’s history, no official history distinct from unofficial history, no history of joy set alongside a history of sorrow. When such dichotomies are allowed, then only one part of those dyads were seen as meaningful and meaning-making. Realidad histórica, as a holistic approach to history, according to Chilton, “derives its unity and meaning from what is ultimate: God’s own history” (41). This concept is crucial for Sobrino’s Christology, which incorporated the suffering of the Latin American poor into the theological project. Christ’s own life becomes crucial to the study and practice of theology, pointing to a method that is closer to a pilgrimage than an intellectual exercise (53). Chilton spends a good bit of space developing realidad histórica within the scope of her project. While she acknowledges that Sobrino does not quite get her to intercontextual theology (which is one of the primary destinations for the volume’s conversation), it, along with theology as practice, remains central to the direction of the book’s argument.

With the significance of realidad histórica in view, I was surprised that it largely disappears from the volume’s discussion after chapter 3, appearing only a handful of times and mostly as a callback to chapter 2. It is too much to say that the notion has been abandoned in the book’s discussion, but it certainly takes a back seat. Although it is understandable that not everything can appear in subsequent chapters, there are some interesting questions that might have been addressed. For example, how does “learning a second first language”—the theme of the third and fourth chapters, exemplified by the life and work of British social activist Muriel Lester—affect realidad histórica? In the same way that Christology was expanded by Sobrino, how might the doctrines of the Trinity and theological anthropology have been affected by realidad histórica? To be clear, such questions emerge from the good work that Chilton has done, with the hope to see the fruit of that work borne out in subsequent discussion.

One key place of further reflection concerns Chilton’s discussion of the revelatory nature of women’s bodily experiences. As a whole, chapter 6 is aimed at cultivating a more robust (and more fleshly) account of humanity. Building from McClendon’s notion of “body ethics,” Chilton argues that McClendon is too general and that “We need the ongoing presence of women’s embodied experiences and theologies in order to help McClendon’s vision live” (141). Rightly, she indicates that an emphasis on embodiment and a focus on listening to the voices of the marginalized should reach out to particular voices of women’s embodiment. And there are some helpful insights that Chilton points out here. For instance, she writes, “Women have rarely been afforded the illusory luxury that their bodies are not part of their being and value; our bodies bleed, lactate, and incubate in public” (155). She is right about this, and if I read this correctly, the unavoidably public character of women’s embodied actions and the inability of women to disconnect their bodies and their identities stands as an opportunity to better understand all human embodiment. Part of this opportunity would be to recognize various perversions of embodiment—such as how women’s identities are negatively affected by how their embodiment is used by others and how white male identities are often disconnected from their embodiment.

Moreover, for Chilton, part of the embodied women’s experience that deserves to be incorporated into theological discourse is menstruation. Though mentioned only a few times in the book’s final chapter, the discussion of menstruation is likely its most provocative, especially when presented against a backdrop of “theologies of the body” that privilege the male body and male bodily experiences. As she notes, the taboos against discussion of this bodily action cross many cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries. Not only is menstruation not discussed in everyday public speech, but it is somehow even more absent from theological conversation. Chilton aims to rectify this problem. Through the work of Leslie Kendrick Townsend and Doris Kieser, menstruation is reframed as part of the rhythm of creation and even the creation of life. By the end of the chapter, though, Chilton has linked the shedding of menstrual blood with the shedding of Christ’s blood, marking each as redemptive, stating, “Women’s blood is shed in a life-giving way that reflects the life-giving, life-making work of the Spirit” (162).

Readers might be left with myriad questions, many of which simply ask for some additional discussion: What justifies the redemptive character of menstrual blood? That is, from where does the theological account of this arise? Is it that it is connected to the rhythm of life? If so, are other facets of creation (e.g., rainfall, even though it is not blood-related) similarly redemptive? Assuming that they are not exactly the same, where are the places of distinction between the two bloods (that is, menstrual blood and Christ’s blood)? Finally, in a larger sense, how does redemption take on a new shape and even direction when viewed through the lens of menstruation?

To conclude, Sarah Coakley describes the task of theology as always in via. As such, she says that theology is “always undoing and redoing itself, not only in response to shifting current events, but because of the deepening of vision.”Footnote ¹¹ What Amy Chilton has given to us in Theology in Many Voices is an invitation to precisely that sort of pilgrimage of undoing and redoing. And how might that undoing and redoing be accomplished? She suggests a central image, one that is in fact woven throughout the entirety of the book: the Lamb who was slain. McClendon introduces this in the second volume of his systematic theology as an eschatological master picture that has the capacity to correct bad ecclesial practices and help shape better ones. Chilton embraces that role for this image and, by the end of the book, the Lamb who was slain—the Lamb that bleeds—is calling us to engage across contextual boundaries and genuinely hear the many theological voices around us. May we all heed that call.

DR. DEREK C. HATCH

Georgetown College, USA

derek_hatch@georgetowncollege.edu

First, thank you Spencer Boersma, Kathryn House, and Derek Hatch for reading my book and adding your voices to the conversation I hope it continues to inspire. As I said in the introduction of this volume, it was born over the long journey of wondering where my own voice fit in a theological dialogue that has been largely dominated by white, male academics. As part of that journey, I sought to unearth some deep structural supports that had long been in the background of Western theology: 1) conservative epistemological foundationalism that excluded lived experience and 2) ontological dualism that excluded the bodies that live those experiences. Perhaps this feels like old news to us in 2024, but 20 years ago when I began my theological studies, these foundations that held up the structure that ruled so many voices ineligible were themselves still hidden (at least to me). It was for this reason that I turned to practice as a means to incorporate lived experience. The Anglo-American postmodern philosophies of Alasdair C. MacIntyre, J. L. Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the theologians who used those sources sought to reincorporate lived experience when they developed theological methodologies that could recognize the coming together of Scripture (often read propositionally in conservative circles) and experiences that folx live out every day.Footnote ¹² The bifurcation between lived experience and Scripture forced by epistemological foundationalism was a puzzle that Western theology had not been able to reconcile.Footnote ¹³ But in “practice” (particularly understood through the lens of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work) there is a path forward that enables postmodern/post-evangelical theology to bring together the bifurcated foundations of modernity: folx practice their faith in various ways that are held accountable by Scripture, and those practices are shaped by and shape their lived experiences. Thus, we have the argument of this book: “If we understand practices as community-rooted ways of encountering and participating in the Triune God, as part of the discipleship to which we are called as Christ’s body, then we can see anew how theology might be a way of crossing contextualized theological boundaries” (2).

My turning to Jon Sobrino in this work was initially, as I explain in the book, a reaction to a graduate seminar taught by a propositional Reformed theologian. I mention these source stories because “every theology text is a story” (1). I found in Sobrino’s work not just a way out of the Reformed tangles my professor tried to keep us in, but more importantly into a robust christological engagement of the lived experiences of the communities Sobrino served. One correction I want to make to Hatch’s observation of the role Sobrino plays in my volume is that I do not think that I left Sobrino behind in chapter 2. Hatch is correct that Sobrino “remains central to the direction of the book’s argument.” I am not convinced, however, that his concept of realidad histórica “largely disappears” from the volume. Rather, what it does is set the direction for the chapters that follow—with MacIntyre and Muriel Lester expanding where needed so as to enable the Christo-praxic, inter-contextual doing of theology. The two doctrinal chapters (5 and 6) then serve as examples of how we can “go on” in doing theology that is honest with the realidad histórica. Rather than leaving Sobrino behind, these other voices in chapters 3 through 6 show how we might “go on” in our own theology, respectful of the voices that have come before while not allowing them to dominate the discussion and silence new and other voices. In some ways, if Christo-praxis is taken seriously, then Sobrino must be left behind as the church and its academy recognize more and more places where God is at work in the realidad histórica. That being said, I absolutely agree that it would be fascinating to engage Sobrino directly on questions of Trinitarianism and theological anthropology, as his work is by and large focused on Christology.

I am thankful for Hatch’s humility in discussing a socially taboo subject and what he names as the books “most provocative” aspect: menstruation as theological source. He wrote, “I take it that Chilton aims to undo some of” the absence of menstruation from theological discourse. Correct, but not primarily for the sake of shock value. Rather, because the almost comprehensive lack of women’s embodied presence both as doers of theology as well as subjects of theology has led, I know we would agree, to numerous theological outcomes that inaccurately reflect the triune God (e.g., the eternal subordination of the Son, the “genius of women” doctrine, etc.). Also, by failing to make space for women’s embodied ways of theologizing, which for many women includes the regular reality of menstruating in public and of the social shame that comes alongside this biological reality, we have failed to account for the whole realidad histórica. We have not allowed ourselves to ask the questions: “How is God present and at work in this social and biological reality?” and “What can we learn of God from this space and these faith practitioners?”

Hatch asks what justifies the pairing of menstrual blood and redemption, specifically, “From where does the theological account of this arise?” First, a story. A few years back a friend had proposed a dissertation in the area of theology of creation care in which she wanted to explore the lifegiving and redemptive nature of what we consider “waste”: human bodily waste, compost, and so on. Using Sobrino’s language, you might say she wanted to explore the underside of history. But her advisor refused to have his name on a “dissertation about poop.” So my rejoinder is—How does a theological account arise if it isn’t in the interest of those in control of doing theology? Certainly, we could link menstruation as a theological source to creation, particularly to doctrines of imago Dei (so long as we require them to account for human reality more expansively—such as what I’ve tried to do with my engagement of Stanley Grenz’s work). Menstruating women are, after all, created in God’s image. Theological anthropology is another potential home. But Christology and redemption are the Holy Grail of theological loci, so I think the real question is: can they arise from this most protected of doctrinal areas?

Hatch asks, “Cannot we consider rainfall similarly redemptive?” In short, I would say yes. In the Isaiah texts concerning the return to Israel through a blooming desert (35:1), the rain certainly played a redemptive role, as that which was dry and impassible becomes verdant and passable. The longer answer is that women’s way of shedding blood through menstruation shares with Christ’s shed blood the same medium and same (potential) outcome of new life—and in this way rainfall is another category altogether. I think the question is not whether women’s blood and Christ’s blood are identical (at least they are no more identical than men’s blood or the blood of the martyrs is to Christ’s), but rather whether there might be (in Sobrino’s words) an isomorphic connection between the two. Do the two point to each other? Can women’s shed menstrual blood appropriately image Christ’s shed blood in the same way that church history has let men’s blood shed through warfare do so? There is a reason, after all, that Walter Wink had to write against the myth of redemptive violence.

It might be helpful to remember here a voice that did break through the silence (although it is rarely engaged in systematic theology), that of Julian of Norwich. In retelling her tenth vision, she recounts where Christ showed her that in the wound of his side he carries us as if he is pregnant:

In this vision, Christ is pregnant with all of humanity and, from the space in which Christ holds us in his wound-womb, pours forth blood and water, poured “all out for love.” Julian has used the female reproductive system and its way of shedding blood to let the theological account of Christ’s shed blood give more of itself. In answering Hatch’s question, “From where does this arise?,” we might also recall Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus in the dark of night, when he told Nicodemus that he had to be born again from God—an invitation that we have sanitized to be something other than Jesus telling Nicodemus to crawl back up into God’s womb (John 3:1-15). Had we given women’s embodied way of shedding blood more voice, perhaps the gloss might not have happened.

What I hear in Hatch’s question is some of my own query: Why doesn’t our theological account already contain more than just snippets relating Christ’s blood with female shed blood? What nuance does this bring to our understanding of Christ’s work if we let this part of the realidad histórica speak for itself? We cannot even begin to answer Hatch’s question if we do not construct our answers without the insights of menstruating women doing theology. What I hope my volume has shown is that we have ample theological space for doing this exact kind of listening.

Kathryn House’s honest and sometimes raw reflections brought me to tears when I first read them. They also brought up some long-held anxiety that the systematic theologians might take away my theology card if they think I’m getting too close to doing practical theology! Considering all my training is in systematic theology and I am currently serving as a minister of a local American Baptist congregation, I find myself straddling—sometimes more comfortably than others—the gap that academia has forced between these two disciplines. I am thankful for her invitation to experiment with some of the tools that practical theologians more comfortably handle—my own lack of familiarity was highly evident to myself as I struggled to use a concept (practice) more historically at home in practical theology. Her reference to Eileen Campbell-Reed, as a practical theologian whose contributions would help us systematic theologians better attend to experience (although I personally prefer “constructive” over “systematic”), reminded me of the time ten years ago when I sat across a table from Campbell-Reed at an NABPR annual meeting, struggling to explain my developing dissertation topic. She asked me at that point why I wasn’t in practical theology. My answer then and now is simply this: Systematic/constructive theology makes my heart sing (so long as I can do it with a foot in the real world). Also because systematic theology has functioned for so long as the historic center of theological curricula—which puts it at the center of the academic patriarchal power structure—it needs more robust work so as to better account for God’s work throughout the whole realidad histórica. (Perhaps participating in this shift is actually what makes my heart sing.) So I welcome House’s encouragement to more interdisciplinary work—and wonder if this might be an invitation to some joint work in the future.

House’s call for humility and reflexivity when engaging the lives of poor women as theological sources systematically erased by the very liberation theology I use to include them is well taken. As I stated in Theology in Many Voices and, as she pointed out, I am uncomfortable with the flow of the argument from male theologians to female theologians. In building my case for theology as an intercontextual practice, I began with the conversation that was happening in the Baptist and evangelical/post-evangelical circles in which I moved—and those voices were primarily (but not exclusively) male. Her question of what it might have looked like to begin with the female voices of chapters 4 through 6 and then to justify the male voices is a question well received—and a question that illuminates the reality that even those of us fighting against “experience-blindness” are impacted by the waters we swim in. What Lester shows us is that these male sources encourage us to consider how we might “go on” beyond our epistemological crises—a path and method that grants us freedom for engaging additional sources.

Addressing House’s question of what I call it when I start weaving really fast, I call it “new level not yet unlocked” and “dropped shuttles”! But, I agree, I think chapters 5 and 6 on women’s contributions to the doctrine of the Trinity and theological anthropology are the capstone chapters of this book—an example of what we can do if we take theology as practice, as I have developed it in this volume. The Latina evangélicas, Molly Marshall, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw, and Leslie Kendrick Townsend, read as breaths of fresh air because their work is not aimed at narrowing down theology for the sake of some illusive orthodoxy, but rather at expanding it in order to capture the whole of the space in which the Spirit moves. They create the breathing room that lets us soar.

I am particularly thankful for House’s vulnerability in how her own body, from which she engages in theological and faith practices, was present in the reading of my book. The enormous weight of social and theological pressure placed on our bodies at all times is present across the theological spectrum. The eternal subordination of the Son and the genius of women doctrines (and to a lesser extent Grenz’s theology of the imago Dei) engaged in chapters 5 and 6 place theological meaning upon female bodies without also seeking the embodied theological contributions of the very same females. I am thankful she named some of the voices of embodied women who have shaped her own faith and theology.

Both Hatch and House concluded their responses with reference to my inclusion of James Wm. McClendon Jr.’s “master picture” of the Lamb who was slain. McClendon’s concept of picture thinking is, in short, that we (and our theologies) are shaped by images and stories—and one of the two powerful corrective practices he proposes to hold theology accountable is “eschatological picture thinking” (the first being Scripture reading).Footnote ¹⁵ I reference near the end of Theology in Many Voices a short writing by Shanell T. Smith titled “The Construction of Gender in Revelation.”Footnote ¹⁶ In this piece she compares two kinds of images found in Revelation of the lamb who was slain. The first is of a penetrated and voyeurized “female” image of the lamb, and the second of a “muscular robust figure, strong enough to open the seven scrolls,” that is, a “male” lamb.Footnote ¹⁷ She concludes by arguing that the Lamb holds within itself both sides of the gender binary. If we take seriously the powerfully corrective practice of eschatological picture thinking (which we must because of the ambivalence of practices), we should also take seriously the ways in which we might unknowingly be imputing one version of lived experience onto that master image. By opening ourselves, personally and methodologically, to the plethora of the voices of the faithful, we put additional safeguards in place against idolizing one form of humanity and humanizing God. What I hope I have shown in this volume is that in order to do theology well we need both to immerse ourselves in the practices of theology and to reach out to our siblings in other strands of our faith tradition so that we will not find ourselves stalled in an epistemological crisis of our own making.

Echoing House, who said all dropped stitches are her responsibility (a knitting metaphor), I will say that you all have helpfully pointed out some places where my work might have “skipped a warp thread.” Any dropped shuttles are my responsibility.