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In the forty-seventh episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Sarah Coakley, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emerita at the University of Cambridge. Coakley opens by discussing the complicated distinctions between constructive theology and systematic theology. Coakley’s work reflects some of the qualities of constructive theology including its interdisciplinary sensibilities and pastoral inclinations. In the end, however, she contends her work has more in common with what is presently referenced as systematic theology as well what is historically referenced as natural theology. Coakley then discusses how she knew from the age of twelve that she wanted to serve as a theologian. In essence, she contends few aspects of one’s life could yield greater satisfaction than the prayerful and contemplative consideration of God. She discusses the arc of her work to date, the questions toward which she has gravitated, the arguments she sought to advance in her Gifford Lectures, and how mathematicians are continuing to add layers of understanding to those arguments. Coakley concludes by offering an overview of the virtues theologians need to cultivate, the virtues for which they need to pray to receive, and the ways theologians and the Church can work together in the service of adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s navigating their faith and their own vocational discernment.
- Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God, Part I: “Stories of Evolution, Stories of Sacrifice” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God, Part II: “Cooperation (Alias Altruism): Game Theory and Evolution Reconsidered” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God, Part III: “Ethics, Cooperation and Human Motivation: Assessing the Project of Evolutionary Ethics” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God, Part IV: “Ethics, Cooperation, and the Gender Wars: Prospects for a New Asceticism” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God, Part V: “Teleology Reviewed: A New ‘Ethico-Teleological’ Argument for God’s Existence” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Gifford Lectures – Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation, and God: Part VI, “Reconceiving ‘Natural Theology’: Meaning, Sacrifice and God” (University of Aberdeen, 2012)
- Sarah Coakley’s Sacrifice Regained: Reconsidering the Rationality of Religious Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Sarah Coakley, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emerita at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for joining us.
Sarah Coakley: Thank you so much, Todd. It’s good to be with you
Todd Ream: Theology has historically been classified as including biblical, historical, practical, and systematic theology. But over the course of the last 50 years, constructive theology has also emerged, most prominently with Vanderbilt University Divinity School’s Work Group on Constructive Theology.
Over the course of those years, how would you define the scope of efforts classified as systematic theology, and then how does it differ from what is now being also called constructive theology?
Sarah Coakley: Well, that’s a bit of a trick question, Todd, because I think there’s considerable blurring between these two categories now. And the first thing I would say is that I, I don’t think that at the moment, constructive theology, that term, is a very hot topic. I think it was hot when it was being explicitly concocted under the influence, particularly of Gordon Kaufman, my former teacher Sally McFague, of course, at uh, Vanderbilt.
In the case of both those theologians, there was a very considerable desire to push back against the forms of systematic theology or historical theology in their eyes had been too bound to biblical authority or the restrictions of tradition.
And they wanted to do more creative things that responded into immediate crises and critiques of the tradition, such as the nuclear threat, in the case of Kaufman or feminist issues in the case of Sally McFague. And so for me, that term has always had rather the overtones of wishing to escape from the shackles of, of the authority of tradition and Scripture.
Now, I don’t think that’s been true of everybody under that category because after all, David Tracy was also associated with that group and, and Kathy Tanner as well. Um, and I think my work is really quite like Kathy’s in terms of how we combine response to interdisciplinary and contemporary issues with a very strong remaining respect for Bible and tradition. So I think it’s a bit of a false choice.
Um, I’ve never called myself a constructive theologian because of wanting to distance myself a bit from the Kaufmanian project in particular, which I always saw as ultimately Feuerbacharian. Um, and in my case, I remember what upset Gordon Kaufman really about the way my thinking was developing while I was at Harvard, was the very central place I give to the practices of prayer more explicitly contemplation as I weave my own vision of systematic theology in relationship to those practices. So that’s a short answer.
answer I would want to make is that I think systematic theology is itself chameleon-like, and it’s a modern term, of course. I don’t think it was in use until the end of the 17th century or early 18th century, perhaps it’s the first instance. Um, and dogmatics was a term that was much more commonly used. Um, then you have the Schleiermacherian revolt from that tradition, which results in him using the category of Glaubenslehre of sort of unpacking the teaching of faith.
Um, so the idea that systematic theology enshrines at base, as I’ve defined it in my own work, is that what characterizes systematic theology, however it’s done, is that the theologian concerned wants to have a systematic vision in which the pieces relate to one another. In the jigsaw of the unfolding of any systematic theology, whether it be long or short, is the idea that, to use a biblical phrase, one is giving an account of the hope that is within one and trying to unfold it in a way that would be satisfying to someone seeking to understand the faith today.
Um, so for me, systematic just means that. It doesn’t mean that I’m bound to model of doing systematic theology from the 19th century or, or or even earlier in the 20th. I can make up my own methodology to do systematic theology, and indeed, I have done so, as you know. And what confuses people about the way I’ve done it is that I refuse certain binaries which are otherwise being imposed on us these days. The most important one, I think, being the binary between what people think systematic theology is and what they think they need to free themselves from in that, in order to fully attend to contemporary contextual issues and constituencies.
So it’s a great irony, I think, of theology in the West, Anglo-American, European American, since the Second World War, that there’s both been a great regeneration of systematic theology of all sorts, but there’s also been a proliferation of works done in what David Tracy called fragments. Um, because attending to contexts where liberation is needed, particular ethnic and racial constituencies new concerns that threaten the contemporary world, new practical and pastoral issues within the Church. And I think it’s a mistake to allow that division to cause a false choice. Um, which is why the characteristics of my own method of systematic theology is precisely to attend to the contemporary situation, precisely to attend to practical and pastoral issues. Um, also to attend to the realm of aesthetics and the representation of faith in, in art, music, and poetry, and not to force these decisions.
Um, finally, because I make contemplation, as it were, the, fundamental activity which I think transforms the the tone of how I approach different loci, my claim is that it’s the free fall of contemplation, the, the turning over to God that is a, a repetitive undertaking and should disallow any kind of rigidity or stasis. Um, that’s why I don’t think that systematic theology in, in my way of thinking about it is what many people think systematic theology is, that it is either hegemonic or phallocentric or indeed onto-theological, as some people claim.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. When you’re seeking to resist these binaries that then are being imposed or have been imposed in terms of one’s theological methodology you also draw from a variety of methods, the riches of the Church, but then also resources, methods from other disciplines, including biology, feminist theory, law, and medicine.
Would you say then, a little bit more about how those contributions then, within the framework of theology that you’re working with, help you resist these binaries then and create this path?
Sarah Coakley: Yes. I think a lot of people look at my writings and feel quite bemused. What is this woman up to? She seems to hop between different undertakings and genres and interlocutors and so on and so forth. As we’ll discuss a bit later, I think this is partly a matter of the happenstance of my career that I have been fortunate enough to teach in some very different kinds of institutional contexts.
But it’s also that I still retain a certain scholastic view that, I hope I don’t do hegemonically, that theology is the queen of the sciences, and the quest for truth that we’re all engaged in in the university. Um, we’ll discuss something about the university context later as well. The, the, the quest for truth is one in which all the many discourses that are at play should be relevant in some way to the great theological question of God.
And here I’m very much akin to Cardinal Newman’s view about the idea of a university in which there surely must not be a university in which we can’t talk about God. Um, in fact, all these subjects which have now split apart because it’s no longer possible for one person to have a competence in this enormous range of interdisciplinarity nonetheless are brought to the table of the university for a reason.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I’ll look forward to picking up on that here in just a couple of minutes, especially when we talk also too about your time at Oriel College where both you and Newman spent a considerable amount of time.
Sarah Coakley: And I do again now because I’m an honorary fellow in retirement, which is wonderful.
Todd Ream: Yeah. I want to ask you now about the development of your sense of vocation as a theologian here. You earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge, Murray Edwards College, Th.M. from Harvard University Divinity School, and then back across the Atlantic and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
At what point did you discern the study of theology play, would play a considerable role in how you understood your vocation?
Sarah Coakley: I’ve often been asked this, and I answer it truthfully each time, and nobody believes me, so I’ll try again.
Todd Ream: This should be a pretty good answer.
Sarah Coakley: It is true. I, I decided and kept it to myself, but I decided when I was 12 that I wanted to be a theologian. And the occasion for this was being prepared for confirmation. Um, and I was so interested in, quite naively of course, in theological questions. Mostly sort of more philosophy of religion kind of questions. Questions like, you know, why is there something and not nothing? Or why is there so much evil in the world? These kinds of questions rather than biblically based questions. Although I was also already interested in the extent to which historical critical effects on the way we receive the Bible might destabilize some of our doctrinal system.
But the priest who prepared us, it was a large class that year for confirmation, was absolutely ungifted in this arena of, he was the most lovely priest and one of the most prayerful men I’ve ever known, and for that reason, he was a, a strong influence on me. Um, I could see, as you know, when you meet someone who is deeply steeped in prayer it’s so electrifying. And he was a terrible preacher as well. Um, but anyway, I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could spend the rest of your life thinking about these questions and getting to the bottom of them?
And I do remember rummaging around in my parents’ house, which was absolutely full of books. It was a very bookish family, but only my mother had a very small collection of books relating to the history of spirituality. My father had no theological books with one exception, which he brought home in that year, with a sort of disgust and put it on the table in the library and said, “You can look at this if you like.” And that was John Robinson’s Honest to God, which everyone’s forgotten about now, but caused a tremendous furore because it was a kind of short compendium of European theology, post-war European theology, mostly Bultmann on man come of age such like, that was sort of opening the floodgates of critical thinking in the Anglican Church, and completely tame really, but it caused it caused the, the ceiling to fall in rather briefly. But there, there weren’t many books that I could read at home, and my school had almost nothing on theology in its library either.
So I found myself immersing myself in John Robinson on the one hand, and my mother’s sort of spirituality bookcase on the other, which in particular Evelyn Underhill her letters of spiritual direction I found for some reason absolutely fascinating, but at the same time, kind of repellent. This sort of stuffy upper middle-class lady who, you know, was reading Rosebrook and so on.
But I’m not sure if that begins to answer your question. I, I, was just compelled somehow by, by this, this topic of reflection. What could be more interesting than God?
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Sarah Coakley: I’ve always thought that there’s just nothing more magnetic than the idea of God. And so my school didn’t encourage me at all in this area. I was a classicist. Um, you know, in England we, we specialize rather early in high school, and so I spent the last two years plus at high school mainly reading Latin and Greek.
And I was told very firmly that theology was not something I should be doing that was for men who were going to be ordained, and I was obviously a woman and couldn’t be ordained. So I had no encouragement really from my school. But in the way that adolescents are spurred on by counter suggestibility, that of course only further enticed me.
Todd Ream: That’s a much more pleasant way than I think my father perceived it when I was the same age. But, but, no, absolutely. Yeah, and yeah, to your credit as a child too for doing so.
I want to ask you then, so you mentioned, you know, the, the influence and I wonder, you know, the, the prayerful, the steeped-in-prayer sort of quality that you mentioned your priest had, access to history, albeit maybe had some insufficiency to it in terms of spiritual practices, if these aren’t sort of anchors that you sort of adopted, you know, as being critical to theology when you started to think about how you were then going to do it and make a contribution.
Sarah Coakley: I think looking back, I, I, I had no idea what was coming down the pike. Um, but also being steeped in the liturgy, I was, of course, affronted when the same priest scooped up all three of my brothers to be altar boys, but told me, of course, that I couldn’t come inside the sanctuary. Um, but he did say that as a sort of consolation prize, why didn’t I join the choir?
And I mean, it’s hard to remember that we’re talking about a period when theological feminism had actually hardly begun. So we’re talking the ’60s here. And I remember just looking around and thinking, “Are one of there any women theologians anywhere in the world?” You know? Dorothee Sölle, I think, was on the scene. Um, but the only women I could find to read who had been great theologians were Evelyn Underhill who was a spiritual director rather than an academic although she did get given an honorary degree.
Um, and, and Simone Weil. I, I discovered Simone Weil because her essays uh, including this very famous one on attention, had recently been published in English. Um, but these were two very weird role models, if you think about it. They were both, as Evelyn Underhill put it, white hot Neoplatonists.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Sarah Coakley: Um, and that attracted me because I was reading Plato in Greek at school, so you know, that, that, that linked.
But also being allowed to sing in the choir meant, and increasingly taking responsibilities, meant that I was, you know, liturgically given a, a very, very strong formation in the understanding of the music and the liturgy and the biblical structures of the Church year within an Anglo-Catholic setting.
Todd Ream: Thank you. The early years of your career then included appointments at Lancaster University and then as I echoed, you know, just a few minutes ago, at Oriel College at the University of Oxford. But in 1993, you accepted an appointment to the faculty at Harvard University Divinity School, eventually becoming the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professorship of Divinity and, and appointed to that position.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to come back across the Atlantic? But then also, what opportunities did you seek to embrace while studying there and beginning your own contributing to your own theological project?
Sarah Coakley: I wish that I could make a kind of logical and consciously directed story out of this, but, you know, there are such things as serendipities and luck and unexpected developments. I should perhaps just insert that my husband, who’s American, had never really wanted to go back to America. Um, he’s a great Anglophile, and he, even now, he’s not very happy in America. but there are good reasons not to be happy in at the moment.
Todd Ream: There are lots of unhappy people in America right now.
Sarah Coakley: But, but a piece of the story that isn’t upfront anymore is that in 1990, when I had recently published my first book, which was my thesis book on Ernst Troeltsch, whom most people in Britain thought no one should be writing on. The tenor of standard systematic theology in Britain, including Scotland of course, was, was fundamentally Barthian, in tendency. And I was really regarded with great suspicion as someone who had even a sympathy for Ernst Troeltsch. Um, the, you know, the, the Barthian critique of him had been swallowed whole.
But to my very great surprise people in in the sort of stronger strongholds of liberalism in theology had a very different view of Troeltsch. And so the first thing that happened in 1990 was that I had a most unexpected invitation to apply for a job at the University of Chicago. This was Langdon Gilkey’s position. He had recently retired. And my goodness, what a thrill it was to think that I might be a colleague of David Tracy, Bernard McGinn, and Brian Gerrish. That great triumvirate that produced, you know, just generations of excellent doctoral students.
And they had me over, and they offered me the job. And it caused a great sort of upset really because I think my husband thought that we’d both been at Lancaster together for nearly 15 years and it worked very well with our bringing up our children together. And Chicago notoriously doesn’t do spousal hires, so that was problematic.
But the matter was solved for me because Hanna Gray, who was then the president of Chicago, ultimately scotched the offer. And quite rightly because, you know, I had one book and about a dozen articles, but I hadn’t produced a second monograph. And that would’ve been a great problem, I think, if they’d given me a tenured position when other people did not have them at that stage. So that solved that problem.
But it kind of made me look back to America again to think, you know, maybe this would be a more exciting place to be a theologian. But unbeknownst to me, Harvard was watching this little Chicago charade and in the way that universities, you know, universities, you know, they get the nose for someone who’s being sought after. I guess that was one of the main reasons why I was approached then to apply for Harvard.
But they rang me up to ask me to apply on the very day that I’d just arrived at Oxford. I was literally unpacking the boxes of books, and the phone rang. And it was Harvard saying, “Um, would you like to apply for this job?” And I said, “You must be joking. I’ve, I’ve just made this big move to Oxford.” And anyhow, they went on and on and on and on, and eventually they made it so attractive to us both. They not only offered my husband a job, but then created a job for him that was just so perfect for his particular skills, which are quite esoteric. And after a year of haggling you know, it just became impossible to, to, to say no, really. But nothing could have been less expected.
One very weird feature of my career, which may not be obvious at all to people just looking at the CV, is that I have never spent a moment in my career, wishing and hoping to be somewhere else or to have some particular job. I’ve just never gone there. And I, I always tend to advise people against that as well. It’s not that I haven’t been ambitious. I’ve been ambitious to do good work or ambitious to enjoy all the wonderful opportunities of the particular institution that I’m in. Um, but there was no thought-out plan in the way that my career unfolded.
Todd Ream: Well, thank you. Uh, serendipity being what it is then, and plans unfolding as they do then you were asked to consider an appointment at the University of Cambridge the, and the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity there which you finished out your career serving in that capacity. Can you describe the discernment process that led you then to go back?
Sarah Coakley: That was a little different. Um let me be dutifully tactful.
But some may remember Larry Summers becoming the president of Harvard. And when he did so, we happened to be at a particular moment where we had lost a dean under difficult circumstances and were looking for a new one. And I think on the very first day that Larry Summers became president, he canceled an enormous conference, that was actually a neuroscience conference at which the Dalai Lama was going to appear, because he said he didn’t want anyone in a robe, in a religious robe on his campus. And that was a, that was a, that was a signal. Harvard Divinity School has, in any case, always had a kind of identity problem about whether it is truly working for the Church, which it was originally funded, you know, set up to do, though in the tradition mainly of Unitarianism and Congregationalism, liberal Congregationalism.
But Larry Summers created a moment of decision for the Divinity School because he did not appoint the dean that actually we had chosen, whom I won’t name. He canceled that, and he appointed someone already within the Divinity School, whom I’d known from my very first as a ThM student um, at Harvard and gave him the charge really of transforming the school into a secular religion department.
It turned out not to be possible to do that actually, because of the, the founding documents and the, the money and the reserves for the divinity school that had to continue to be used for the most part for what it had to be used for. So it, it, it emerged that there was going to be some kind of uneasy compromise, which it’s, you know, continues in, in a kind of creative and interesting way.
But it’s no place to be a systematic theologian. And it was very clear indeed to me that I was going to have to leave. It was made very, very clear to me that I had to leave. In fact, the Mallinckrodt Chair was suppressed. Um, so the money, evidently is being used for other things. Um, and that remains a mystery. So I had made several attempts to leave.
So this wasn’t, you know, some cool, calm practice of discernment as you seem to assume we go through when we make changes. It was exit stage left, pursued by a bear, as Shakespeare says. The Winter’s Tale, I think.
And it was just unbelievably fortuitous that the Norris-Hulse Chair came up for a second time because they’d asked me to apply a couple of years before or a year before. I declined for family reasons and, you know, other things. And I also had a big grant, an interdisciplinary grant at Harvard. Um, and then that, that attempt at appointing someone didn’t work for some reason, and so they came round again. And eventually, they pretty much offered it to me on a plate, and, and created something for my husband again, which is very, very unusual.
Um, so this was a, you know, an act of grace of an extraordinary astounding nature, and a, and a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful chance to actually change gear again because this chair is one in philosophy of religion or philosophical theology, it can be either. And so I knew that my teaching now was going to be more, again, philosophy as it had been when I was in Oriel to some extent. And again, that was a, that was very, very creative for the place that I was at that time in my thinking. Um, And I was preparing for the Gifford lectures which came shortly after I got back, and so on and so forth.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You’re the author or editor of 20 books, and when you look back over the arc of those titles, what themes emerge? What questions, enduring sort of questions, keep sort of threading themselves through those works?
Sarah Coakley: Well, it would take a long time to go through them all and say what animated them initially. Um, but to go back to something I said earlier, I don’t think in your earlier years as a scholar, it’s wise to try and have a large überblick of everything that you want to draw together in your thinking. But once you reach the sort of later years, you begin to see that a lot of things that you had earlier done, perhaps for rather unexpected reasons, just because you got a, a nice invitation or you ran into interesting people in other fields are capable of being drawn together in some shape or form.
And so all the interdisciplinary adventures I had at Harvard were very much the result of the dean who appointed me, Ronald Thiemann, asking me when I arrived, “Would you go and be an ambassador of theology to other parts of the university?” That was his vision for me because he saw the downplaying of theology, even at the Divinity School, as being a demerit of the strength of the Divinity School. But he also saw that there were plenty of people working at high levels in other parts of the university who were actually interested in those more robust theological claims and wanted to engage with them.
So that’s how what seems like a very kind of promiscuous set of adventures and books that are collaborative in these different areas, and indeed teaching, I taught at the medical school at Harvard, I taught at the law school at Harvard came about. And then after all that, I was able to step back and say, well, what does this amount to as an adventure in the university that has allowed me to think afresh towards the end of my career about how the pieces of this jigsaw of systematic theology should fit together.
And in addition to that, I wanted to continue to defend something we haven’t mentioned so far, which is something called natural theology, which is vastly out of fashion in most quarters. Um, but it’s because with one half of myself I speak to the Church and to those already Christian, but with the other half of myself I’m continually seeking to do engagements with those outside Christianity altogether, who often have very deep questionings of the bases of religious belief.
But often as I see it, the Spirit is always also moving in some of their work and causing one to draw out new dimensions of thinking about the Christian faith. So despite the fact that there’s been a huge fashion since especially the Second Vatican Council and especially since Barth against natural theology in its old apologetic sense, I think it’s absolutely vital for the vitality of our faith, not just in the university, but in our culture, that Christian theologians are qualified to have these conversations with some of the most challenging scientific and economic and philosophical issues of the day. If there’s a one story, it’s been the gradually emerging desire to create a method that allows for these interdisciplinary engagements to enrich our own historic Christian heritage.
But at the same time, as I mentioned a little earlier, I’ve been very, very concerned, and here I am not Schleiermacherian at all. Uh, people think, oh, she isn’t Barth, she must be Schleiermacher, but that’s not the case. Um, I’m much more someone who is doing a recuperation or resourcement from the early monastic and patristic tradition such as Gregory of Nyssa or, or Evagrius. People who see the life of prayer as fundamentally entangled with the voice of theological expression, as Evagrius famously puts it the one who prays is the theologian, and the theologian is the one who prays. That gives you a bit of a picture of the flavor of the whole, I hope.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I do want to pick up and ask you here in a second about natural theology as it was expressed in your Gifford lectures. But before we move on to that, if you had to pick one book, and I realize this is potentially a hard thing to do, is there a book that you found to that you edited or authored more vocationally satisfying than perhaps the others?
Sarah Coakley: Well, I, it has to be the first volume of systematics, God, Sexuality, and the Self, because there was a reason why it took me 20 years to write that book and rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it. And in the course of rewriting it, I was also ordained. And the transformation of my consciousness and my spirit, and my theological perceptions were so profoundly affected by that training that this was the great moment of integration, if you like, for me, when I was able to state what my method now was and why it shouldn’t allow that we break academic theology and practical and pastoral theology apart, or indeed ascetical theology, which must be core.
Um, and so the methodological sections of that book, I know Jeff Stout always talks about methodology and prolegomena as throat clearing. Um, and I understand what he means by that. But this was more than throat clearing. This was, this was 20 years of swallowing and digesting everything that I felt needed to be pulled together in my life and in my vocation, both in the Church and in the academy, in order to come up with a way of thinking about systematic theology that would take us forward in this generation.
So, at the same time, I took another risk with that book, which that it didn’t please everybody. I wrote it as a book that could be understanded of the people we say in early Anglicanism. Um, and I wrote it therefore with most of the footnotes, not at the bottom of the page, but at the end of each chapter in a significant bibliographic section which people could skip if they wanted. And it’s not an easy read even then, but it is a, it is a book that can and is read by intelligent laypeople. You don’t have to be a theologian read it. And in a generation in which I think so many theologians have obfuscated themselves out of existence, um it’s, it’s just so important that we write in a way that people can understand.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask now about the Gifford Lectures. So you mentioned shortly after you got to Cambridge and began your tenure there on the faculty, you got a call from Scotland.
Sarah Coakley: I actually had come earlier. They book you years, some years in advance. So I, when I came to Cambridge, I knew I was going to be coming.
Todd Ream: You knew you were going to be going north then to deliver them.
And in those efforts, you seek to map out a fresh understanding of natural theology, to align it with both philosophical and theological reflection on the cooperative phenomena of evolution. And in some ways, we’ve talked about some of these themes already, but can you say a little bit about the experience of delivering those lectures and in what ways they continue to sort of linger in your thinking perhaps even today?
Sarah Coakley: Yes, well I should just add that they are published online, but they are not yet published in an extended book, which I do intend to do. But that, I’ve had a an important reason for not doing it yet. I will do it quite soon. But when I gave these lectures, the intense debates about evolution and its meaning were so hot. Um, we were sort of at the, it’s a different era now, but if you can remember Dawkins really being the king of the castle in terms of the ideology of The Selfish Gene.
And then what was more important in particular was the collaborations had with mathematical and empirical biologists at Harvard, where I had a three-year grant in this whole area of evolutionary cooperation. And even within biology, evolutionary biology, there was a huge debate, and which is continuing, between mathematical evolutionary biologists and empirical evolutionary biologists. And what’s so exciting about the developments in mathematical biology, which are continuing to unfold in a very short frame, let me put it this, the phenomenon of cooperation in evolutionary populations is not what you might think. It’s not just collaboration. It’s not, it’s not mutualism.
Cooperation has a more technical term in evolutionary biology. It means when you have entities in an evolutionary segment, a population. This could be something as miniature as bacteria or it could be something as maxi as human beings, where, where there is a loss of fitness, a loss of genetic fitness for one segment of that population, which at the same time turns out to allow the population as a whole to flourish. So it’s very counterintuitive.
What are the circumstances in which, most famously, by the way, most people know this example, worker ants, right? Worker ants don’t have offspring, but without what they do, ant hills could not have the flourishing life that they have. Um, and this phenomenon turns out to be found right across the evolutionary spectrum, right across it, this patterning. The question is, it’s mathematicians who’ve been able to figure out, it’s actually a form of the reiterated prisoner’s dilemma a mathematical conundrum, have been able to figure out the conditions in which, cooperation becomes stable. Um, and they’re still working out how many different variations on these conditions when it should be the case, surely, that cooperators would just die out because they’re not winning genetically.
Um, but it turns out that actually the story of cooperation is this, as it were, countervailing story of evolution without which the defectors, the people on the other side, the would not be able to flourish as they do. At first blink, you would think that defectors would always do better. In other words, that selfish people always do better in terms of genetic inheritance. But actually, they wouldn’t without being able to free ride on the cooperators.
And if you think about, just to make a farcical comparison, but it’s not farcical, if you think about academic departments that become absolutely striven by mutual dissent and hatred. It’s really interesting how those departments, they, you know, no one wants to go there as a graduate student. Um, they, they, they ultimately kind of kill each other off, right. And so that is a, a sort of memorable but slightly farcical example of this phenomenon, that without cooperation and understanding how it works we wouldn’t have the great evolutionary transformations either that we’ve had in the tree of life.
So I wanted to ask, in a situation where people were still saying with Stephen Jay Gould, you know, there is no way that you could ever rewind the tape, right. There’s no, there’s no patterning, there’s no teleology, there’s no repetition. Um, people were also still saying in the spirit of naturalistic, atheistical, skepticism that evolution developed, you know, delivered no meaning. That evolution is just one damn thing after another.
But the one thing that we do see is that selfishness works, and that’s about it. you know, this was the atmosphere in which suddenly the mathematical biologists were beginning to say, “Wait a minute, look at this extraordinary set of patterns that repeat right across the spectrum.” What, what meaning should we ascribe to these? And so that was the, was the, that was the story I was taking up.
And I in the course of the of the Gifford lectures, which are very complicated, so I can’t tell you all about it here, but you can look at them online. I come to the conclusion that with the rebirth of a greater interest, including mine, in neo-Aristotelian explanations in philosophy of biology in particular, which, you know, have been also tremendously out of fashion on the assumption that they simply represent the naturalistic fallacy. Um, but we are able to argue that these patternings appear to foreshadow in pre-human conditions, something that I call the preparatio for ethical decisions, altruistic ethical traditions which can’t simply be reduced to the most banal reductive utilitarianism. Um, and from there, I then argue that there’s a possibility here of creating a new argument for God. Not a knockdown argument, but one that’s worth putting alongside other arguments for God which has a sort of ethico-teleological form.
But what’s different about my natural theology from anything like Paley, for instance in fact, I call it an un-im-Palyed form, is that I’m not suggesting that anyone surveying these evidences would immediately have to conclude that there was a, you know, a watchmaker who set up cooperative structures in evolution. In fact, my, my, proposal here is that something has to happen to the epistemic condition of this, of the of the reflector on these phenomena to, to, to, to comprehend the not only the complexity, but the richness of what may be at stake in these phenomena.
And I go back to an ancient spiritual senses tradition from the Patristic era to argue that this capacity to see the whole and to see patterning throughout it requires a certain spiritual maturity and prayerful and contemplative attention. And of course, to ask that of working scientists sounds odd, but actually there are quite a lot of working scientists who don’t find that as odd as you might think and who will admit that it’s that quality of contemplative attention that actually allows them to make breakthrough insights in their, in their science itself.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As time becomes short for our conversation, I wanted to just ask you a couple questions then, and perhaps you’ve echoed some of these just right here, but also mentioned, you know, a few earlier in our conversation about the virtues that theologians need to acquire or pray to receive in order to flourish in relation to their calling which intellectual and moral virtues might be needed to be, you know pursued and cultivated, but then also what theological virtues might need to be received?
Sarah Coakley: Great question. Um, I think it was John Cassian who said that humility is the greatest of the virtues. And so of the theological virtues, I think humility which academics are not known for, in case you haven’t noticed, and I’m not known for it, I’m sure, but I think without the kind of patient attention to others and to the materials of study, and being open and willing to be transformed and changed by others and the material of study, one is always simply trying to grasp and consume. Um, this is one of the reasons why, for me, prayerful contemplation is at the heart of theological method. Submission to God is at the heart of, of, of this undertaking, in my view.
So in more secular terms, I think what’s needed is a great deal of patience, a great deal of tenacity. The great academics are the ones who don’t sort of suddenly get bored with something and flip off to something else, but actually stay with something that’s really difficult. Um, you know, think of Sir Andrew Wiles trying to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem and, and how many years that took him. Um, also, I think there’s, you know, a great deal of charity needed just in doing business with one’s colleagues, and I have found actually the most distressing aspect of academic life, the amount of polemicism and nastiness and jealousy and hostilities of every sort.
Um, I asked our daughters the other day, “Did it never occur to you to pursue an academic career?” And they said, “No. We saw how unhappy it made you,” which was rather sad. Um, but the fact is that especially now in the university where it seems to be so difficult to conduct an argument with courtesy and acknowledgement of real disagreement, but a capacity to stay with it, these, these virtues become more and more important and less and less, as it were easy to engender refresh when you can no longer take them for granted.
So the way people chair seminars or the way people deal with their students is so important for the glory of the academic task.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, and we’ve talked about this, you know, in various sort of threads already in our conversation, but I want to ask you directly, if I may, in what ways do you believe that theologians can be of greater service to the Church a bridge that you’ve sought to cross in many ways, but then also the Church can be of greater service to theologians, a bridge you’ve also sought to cross as a, an ordained clergy person and priest in the Anglican Church?
Sarah Coakley: I think this is the question that weighs more heavily on my mind and heart at this time in my career, i.e., technically in retirement, because I see so many churches, especially in the broadly speaking liberal Protestant side of things especially my own churches, Church of England and the Episcopal Church, just making a terrible set of mistakes about what the priorities are for Church development and mission and kind of assuming all the way around, with some rare exceptions, that theological discourse is more or less useless in as far as making converts is concerned. And so many of the kind of businessified tricks that have been somewhat successful, in terms of leadership and mission have quite suppressed deeper theological reflection.
Now, I would say this, I know, but my passion in my older age is, when I can, to reintroduce the possibility for younger people to go more deeply into their faith, more deeply into the theological and biblical traditions. Um, And I find that there is no lack of such young people. In fact what’s being underestimated, in my view, is the significance of this kind of teaching.
And certainly what’s happened in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church just in the last 30 years, is that we have almost no bishops left who are theologically qualified at a high level. And that’s a very, very peculiar in a Anglican tradition where that particular vocation of the priest scholar or the bishop scholar has had a very high role, if you think, right back to the Reformation and behind, but particularly since the Reformation. And this breaks my heart because once it’s gone, it’s very, very hard to retrieve. And if you don’t have bishops who are encouraging the priests who want to enrich their congregations in this way then it’s a kind of downward spiral.
So if I have a prophetic burden at this point in my life, it is to try and do something in this arena, probably online, that might contribute to the kind of regeneration that I believe we need. And after all, we have ways of getting at each other now, which because of the internet there’s no reason why really good quality stuff can’t be on the internet. There’s plenty of pretty poor level stuff. Um, I’m sure, I’m sure that you are contributing to it very importantly in this particular series. But of course, in this series, you’re just interviewing particular theologians, what’s needed is a, a set of thought out reflections on some of the biggest theological challenges, with a number of voices engaging and disagreeing and going deeper.
Um, and I, I’ve spoken to so many people in their 20s and 30s particularly who, 20s, 30s and early 40s who say, “This is the piece that we haven’t got.” So that’s my longing to contribute something towards that crisis because real regeneration in the Church, in the churches, has to not only go deeply into prayer again, but also deeply into intellectual engagement with the tradition.
The other way around I’m afraid I’m, I’ve, I’ve ceased to expect very much from my churches in terms of, you know, particularly encouraging what I’m doing. Um, although it would be unfair to say that I have no encouragement. There are people who care about this. But we’re, we’re living through a pretty arid moment mainly because of the panic caused by large numbers of losses numerically from our churches.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Sarah Coakley, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emerita at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for taking time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Sarah Coakley: Thank you so much, Todd. It’s been a delight.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
