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Towards a grammar of theocentric belonging: Kilby, Tanner and beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2025
Abstract
This article provides foundations for how our God-talk can inform the way we think about and live out belonging. It resorts to three key Christian doctrines: the Trinity, creatio ex nihilo and the incarnation. This exploration begins with some brief observations about the issues Karen Kilby and Kathryn Tanner raised regarding social trinitarianism. It then explores the concept of participation as understood by Tanner as another way of conceptualising theocentric belonging rooted in creation and the incarnation. From this emerges the idea of an expansive theocentric theology of belonging, understood as participation in the divine life through creation and the incarnation. This expansiveness is explored further through the concepts of kinship and deep incarnation.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Not all forms of belonging provide all these, or to the same degree.
2 Kelly-Ann Allen, The Psychology of Belonging (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 44.
3 Ibid.
4 Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community 1918-1945 (New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 1.
5 Allen writes that ‘our desire to belong is so pervasive that a fear of being rejected and not belonging can determine how we navigate our day-to-day life choices and decisions’. Allen, The Psychology of Belonging, p. 47.
6 John Swinton ‘From Inclusion to Belonging: A Practical Theology of Community, Disability and Humanness’, Journal of Religion, Disability & Health, 16 (2012), pp. 172–90. Also see Linn Marie Tonstad, ‘The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and its Others’, Theology & Sexuality, 21/1 (2015), pp. 1–19.
7 Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eebermans, 2020), p. 10.
8 Michael Brain, ‘The Grammar of Salvation: The Function of Trinitarian Theology in the Works of Karen Kilby and Robert Jenson’, Pro Ecclesia 31/4 (2022), pp. 481–2.
9 Ibid.
10 See Kilby, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2020), p. 16.
11 Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) p. 218.
12 These include the inherent political superiority of trinitarianism over monotheism, the use of gendered language and sexuality reinforcing patriarchal and heteronormative discourses, as well as confusion around ideas of personhood, identity, agency and relationality. See ibid., pp. 205–46.
13 Ibid., p. 12. See also Ian A. McFarland, ‘Sin and the Limits of Theology: A Reflection in Conversation with Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 22/2 (April 2020), p. 148.
14 Tanner, Christ the Key, p. 221.
15 Ibid., p. 207.
16 Ibid., p. 208.
17 ‘Christ’s own life provides not just the pattern of a new human way of life for our imitation, but the cause of that pattern in us, by way of the uniting of humanity and divinity in him’. Ibid., p. 57.
18 Tanner asks: ‘But why think we will relate to other humans in the process in anything like the way we are to relate here to Father and Spirit?’ Ibid., p. 237.
19 Kilby, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology, p. 55.
20 Ibid., pp. 52–3 (emphasis added).
21 Tanner, Christ the Key, p. 10.
22 Ibid., pp. 8–12.
23 Elisabeth Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos; Soundings in Deep Christology’, in Niels Henrik Gregersen (ed.), Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), p. 134.
24 Simon Oliver, Creation, A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2017), p. 44.
25 Ibid., p. 70.
26 Gregersen, ‘Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmic Story’, Theology and Science, 11/4 (2013), p. 387.
27 A caveat to this primordial mode of belonging is that, through sin, belonging as we experience it is itself distorted and can even be idolatrous. Yet, sin does not have the last word, and our belonging (as with everything else about us) is not beyond redemption. On the contrary, it becomes the vessel as well as the horizon of our salvation, as will soon become clear. In the meantime, distorted forms of belonging need to be critically reassessed, healed and gradually grown out of, a process I have called elsewhere ‘belonging christianly’, that is, belonging in the midst of belonging. This approach, rather than a radical rejection of belonging, conforms with ‘the Catholic understanding [of] grace [which] perfects nature, takes something which, while good, is severely damaged, and transforms it starting from where it is’ rather than destroying it. James Alison, ‘“The Gay Thing” Following the Still Small Voice’, in Gerard Loughlin (ed.), Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 55 (emphasis added).
28 Tanner, Christ the Key, pp. 13, 16, 20, and 34.
29 Ibid., p. 12.
30 Ibid., p. 13.
31 Ibid., p. 143 (emphasis added).
32 Ibid., p. 144–5.
33 Daniel P. Horan, ‘How Original Was Scotus on the Incarnation? Reconsidering the History of the Absolute Predestination of Christ in Light of Robert Gosseteste’, The Heythrop Journal (2011), pp. 374–91.
34 Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), p. 176.
35 Here, I would like to draw attention to what Lucas Mix calls the holistic life narratives in Scripture and beyond. Mix writes: ‘Holistic narratives refuse to privilege human life over biological life at large. We are important to ourselves, and thus specially positioned in our ethical considerations, but neither the universe nor God values us over our fellow creatures’. Mix, ‘Life-Value Narratives and the Impact of Astrobiology on Christian Ethics’, Zygon 51/2 (June 2016), p. 526.
36 Daniel Horan, Francis of Assisi and the Future of Faith (Phoenix, AZ: Tau Publishing, 2012), p. 101.
37 Celia Deane-Drummond, who is herself influenced by Balthasar, ‘finds a cosmic dimension to his thought in his appropriation of Patristic writers, particularly Maximus the Confessor’. Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll: NY: Orbis Books, 2019), p. 10. Thanks to Lucy Rauer for pointing me to this.
38 Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 56.
39 See Lynn White Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis’, Science 155/3767 (10 March 1967); cited in Hall, Plants as Persons, p. 55.
40 Hall, Plants as Persons, p. 71.
41 Ibid., pp. 99–117.
42 See Horan, Francis of Assisi, p. 102.
43 See ibid., chapter 8.
44 Ibid., p. 102.
45 See Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos’, p. 133–56.
46 Horan, Francis of Assisi, p. 107 (emphasis added). I am grateful to Rauer for suggesting another line of exploration in the language of friendship in John’s Gospel and the Johannine epistles.
47 Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos’, p. 137 (emphasis added).
48 Horan, Francis of Assisi, p. 105.
49 Since writing this article I have discovered the work of Rebecca Copeland, who explores the ways in which the language of ousia as used in the Nicean and Chalcedonian creeds can help us radically expand the universal purpose and scope of the incarnation beyond anthropocentrism. See Rebecca L. Copeland, Created Being: Expanding Creedal Christology (Waco: Texas, Baylor University Press, 2020), especially chs. 1–2. I am grateful to my reviewers for mentioning Copeland to me. I am particularly interested in her christological account of the concept of created substance and look forward to incorporating it to future work.
50 Niels Henrik Gregersen, ‘Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology’. Toronto Journal of Theology, 26/2 (Fall 2010), p. 176; cf. idem, ‘The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World’, Dialog 40/3 (Fall 2001), pp.192–207.
51 Celia Deane-Drummond, ‘The Wisdom of Fools? A Theo-Dramatic Interpretation of Deep Incarnation’, in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, p. 177.
52 Joshua M. Moritz, ‘Deep Incarnation and the Imago Dei: The Cosmic Scope of the Incarnation in Light of the Messiah as the Renewed Adam’, Theology and Science 11/4 (2013), p. 437 (emphasis added). Although the idea of deep incarnation has seldom been taken on board by Catholic theologians (excepting Deane-Drummond and Elisabeth Johnson), the idea of the fundamental unity of all things can be found in the more traditional, and more Catholic, concept of catholicity. To my knowledge, neither Gregersen nor the other proponents of the idea of deep incarnation explore this overlap with catholicity.
53 Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos’, p. 140.
54 Ibid.
55 Gregersen, ‘Cur deus caro’, p. 385 (emphases added).
56 Johnson, ‘Jesus and the Cosmos’, p. 143.
57 Gregersen, ‘Cur deus caro’, p. 384.
58 Ibid., pp. 383–7. Incarnation in a ‘strict’ sense refers to the unique mode of incarnation in the person and body of Jesus, somehow continued in the ecclesial body or community that is the church. Incarnation in a ‘broad’ sense refers to the fact that in Christ, the entirety of the material (or created) world is assumed and divinised. Finally, incarnation in a ‘soteriological’ sense refers to Christ taking upon himself all the suffering of this created world, and uniting it to God in himself and through the Spirit.
59 Maintaining human distinctiveness is also an ethical imperative as ‘erasing the distinction between human persons and other animals that relate to their more immediate surroundings, is fruitful neither for understanding our ecological situation nor for understanding the particular burdens of global ethical care allotted to humanity (and not to elephants and dolphins)’ (Gregersen, ‘Cur deus caro’, p. 377). For Gregersen, ‘human persons should here be accorded a special status in nature, not just by being distinctive natural beings among other beings in the inventory of our universe, but by being doorways to our cosmos, and even intimating realms of transcendence’ (Ibid.). Similarly, deep or cosmic participation in Christ does not preclude that each participates according to the work of grace in their nature and singularity. In the same way that Christ’s full divinity does not erase or reduce his full humanity, and in the same way that divinisation does not erase humanness, the recapitulation of all things in Christ does not require them to ‘dissolve’ into the divine life. Here, Swinton’s distinction between belonging and inclusion is illuminating: ‘To be included you often have to conform or have your context conformed to some kind of relational, social, or legal norm. To belong you simply have to be noticed as yourself. To be included you just need to be present. To belong you need to be missed’. Swinton ‘From Inclusion to Belonging’, p. 184.
60 See Kilby, God, Evil and the Limits of the Theology, p. 74.
61 ‘Those who belong share a sense of commonality, points of reference, as well as more tangible things such as language, religion, clothing, and food, and there is an understanding that those who belong are somehow alike’. Ian Walker and Marie-Aude Fouéré, Across the Waves: Strategies of Belonging in Indian Ocean Island Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2022), p. 9.
62 This should not be misunderstood in terms of the romantic fallacy of a non-competitive pacified, benevolent, and harmonious nature.
63 On non-competitivity between God and creatures see Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). For her attempt to apply non-competitivity to the political realm, see Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992).
64 Here, one should not underestimate the danger of spiritualising problems away. The uncovering or rediscovering of this foundational mode and sense of belonging does not dispense us from working for justice and repairing wounded forms of belonging due to forced migration, exclusion and abuse. On the contrary, this foundational belonging obliges us to work towards its realisation with consolation, hope, and perseverance for the kingdom, and therefore, theocentric belonging is already unfolding in our midst. I am grateful to Kilby for pointing out this danger of spiritualisation to me.