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Karen Kilby on the Politics of Not Knowing

There is a danger that, when making assertions about God or other things in relation to God, theologians will claim to know too much—more than they do, more than can be known—and that adverse consequences will follow from this epistemic overreach. Karen Kilby argues that this is a problem characteristic of social trinitarians, those who employ the doctrine of trinitarian perichoresis as a model for a hoped-for egalitarian and communitarian society (12). She also finds evidence of it in certain readings of Thomas Aquinas, which suggest that his systematic arguments about trinitarian persons and relations render them perfectly intelligible (21). She discovers it in efforts to construct a theodicy, a theory which aims to explain how theistic beliefs in divine omnipotence and goodness are rationally consistent with the historical reality of evil (72). She sees it in appeals to the suffering of God, which seem designed to make even horrific worldly afflictions fit into an attractive theological narrative (78). With these critiques, Kilby’s aim is not to denounce theology but to clarify its limits, so that those who pursue it might proceed with greater circumspection and humility. Apophasis—the art of not knowing—is not, for her, an alternative to theology, as it is for some postmodern philosophers, but an essential feature of theology, particularly one structured by Christian doctrines regarding the Trinity, Christ, the Holy Spirit, creation, sin, grace, and so on. While Kilby’s book might not immediately strike one as a contribution to political theology, there are many features of it that encourage such a reading, as I hope to show below. The politics she advocates asks theologians to admit what they do not know about God and what they do not want to know about their own sinfulness. It depends less on intellectual mastery than on a deep inner transformation that may only be possible with grace. Although Kilby thinks the efforts of theologians can increase understanding, she maintains that they do not give theologians any “significant advantages” over ordinary believers (29). The mystery of God is so exalted above any human mind that the epistemic playing field is essentially leveled for everyone. This leveling comes with a certain political message, namely against elitism and for the dignity of the people, the laity, and the uninitiated. According to Kilby, theology is not a secret knowledge that sorts the community of believers into superior and inferior ranks, as the Gnostics once assumed, but a much more modest task of linguistic clarification, which strives to specify “grammatical” rules about “how to read the Biblical stories, how to speak about some of the characters we come across in these stories, how to think and talk