What Can a Theology Do? // or, Why Steel City Theology?

In 1677 Baruch Spinoza’s monumental Ethics was posthumously published. The relation between the text and its title often baffles readers, who expect an “ethics” to primarily discuss good and evil, right and wrong, moral quandaries, and the like. And while the text does occasionally venture in those directions, it spends the lion’s share of its time constructing sophisticated deductive proofs concerning the nature of God, the world, and the human body. So why “Ethics”? The answer, as perhaps no one has captured more clearly than the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is found in a passage which reads: “nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do.” (Ethics EIII, P2). Simply put, before one can get to the questions of ethics, one must ask “what can a body do?” Before one can figure out what people should do, you must first simply determine what they can do. In this way, Spinoza completely reframes the question of ethics.

It seems to me that this strange pastime that academics and religious folks call “theology” could use a similar reframing. For it is a discipline that no longer really seems to know where it stands or what it is doing. At times it seems to have all but been cast out of the churches. And yet it is also increasingly uncomfortable within the academy, where utility and practicality rule the day—“how can this help me get a job?” students implicit ask with every skeptical glance. Before we can return to the dialogues, debates, and disputes of theology, perhaps we should take a moment to ask the Spinozist question: “what can a theology do?”

If one spends too much time within the ivory towers of the academy, then the answer seems to be “not very much.” Theology can read quite well. It can publish long arduous books. It can hold conferences where old white men retread even older arguments with other old white men. Of course, I am being far from generous here, but my point is this: have we failed to truly recognize the power that theology could have? Have we unnecessarily delimited theology? Have we told it what it can’t do, without genuinely investigating what it can do?

What would it look like if we began to think of theology less as dusty books asking the same old questions about God, and instead—to borrow a turn of phrase from the theologian Charles Winquist—as “the desire for a thinking that does not disappoint” (Desiring Theology, 218). What then could a theology do? Such a theology, it seems to me, might genuinely change the world.

If I might have rightly been called polemical and pessimistic above, then I might now be called too optimistic, even utopian. And perhaps that is true. But also, maybe we need a little bit of the utopian. What I am proposing is no mere optimism, for optimism merely waits for the world to get better (See: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism). Rather, to dredge up an old theological word, perhaps what we need today is a bit of hope. Perhaps theology could be hope for change—or hope, for a change. What can a theology do?

If we are going to dust off theology, if we are going to revitalize it, if theology is going to become a theology of hope, then it will necessarily need to move beyond the restrictive walls of the academy. “What can a theology do?” must become “where can a theology go?”

Liberation theologians have shown us that theology can march through the streets of El Salvador, and the abolitionists have shown us that it can overturn slavery. The mystics have taught us that theology can transfigure reality, while queer theologians have shown us that it can throw bricks at Stonewall. And while womanist and feminist theologians have shown us that it can transform our very language, radical theologians have shown that it can unblinkingly face Auschwitz.

But, while “the spirit blows where it wishes” (John 3:8), theology is less unencumbered. Theology can only move where we let it. It is for this reason that I am excited to have joined together with Steel City Theology. This is an initiative that is unafraid to ask “what can a theology do?” and “where can a theology go?” It is a community devoted to breaking theology out of the confines of stale academic exercise, in order to expose its most vital edges to the wider public. Here, theology is experiment, theology is practice, theology is experience, theology is hope, theology is revolutionary. What can a theology do? Steel City Theology intends to find out.

J. Leavitt Pearl