of learning to live with those, let us say, who have been left behind. Therefore, I speak of teaching and learning in contrast with one of the few most revered educators in the history of the world: Socrates. I speak of teaching and learning toward a liberation that he would have found to be, not outrageous, but pure folly.
Of course, there are also interludes between the chapters of this book, five of them. As the word suggests, they play there. They do hold chapters together, but playfully, while holding them apart. The first is a brief glimpse into the very mundane, very fractured labors of a little local church in inner-city San Diego. The second, too, concerns a gathering of working people in an inner-city neighborhood, South Central Los Angeles, where soil, work, and new life mingled for a while in one of L.A.’s bleakest sectors. The third is a report of the findings of brain physiology, of hard socio-biological research. The fourth is a transcript of a conversation between two of my friends concerning a certain ecclesiological question. The last is a travelogue of a trip I took to England sometime around 1990. Theology, this motley parabolic crew suggests, is not done alone and it is not done well; it is hard work with an uncertain outcome, the work of social bodies, and it is never to be confused with the completion of a circle, the solving of a problem, the closing of a wound, but is rather in the end a gratefully excessive expenditure, a wilderness feeding, a prodigal celebration, a resurrection of the dead, face to face with the faces that we meet, the faces the Crucified faces as he plummets, abased, into the abyss and rises, exalted, with glory.
There is also a prelude to this book and a postlude. The first draft of the prelude—the book’s playful overture, really—was delivered at a conference in Granada, Spain, where it was declared (with fanfare and snarky self-confidence) that “metaphysics is the new black!” I thought, “I don’t think so.” The chapter is written, however, not just as a kind of critique of metaphysics; it is more particularly written otherwise than by the rules of classic metaphysics. It is a story, a story that is frequently interrupted by voices that might have joined with other voices to shout out a history of Western metaphysics. At the time, I titled the essay “After Crucifixion: Unhanding Metaphysics in the Liturgy of the Eucharist.” This essay as it then stood and under that title is among the essays and addresses collected in the book The Transgression of the Integrity of God. The piece here makes the same move it did before, but I pray even more humanely. It confesses what After Crucifixion from the beginning is out to confess. I think it and the book’s cover are what I most want to say.
The book’s postlude is a collection of quoted passages, among which are just a handful of phrases I have written. It does not conclude this book, at least if my prayer is answered that this book will not come to a conclusion, but it does send it off in a certain way, a text that may be madness, but (I pray) not just madness.
There are so many people I want to thank. So many friends have spent their time reading and reacting to one or more of the pieces that follow. I would never have started and certainly would never have finished this book without their encouragement. This is true above all of Elesha, with whom I have spent the last forty-two years. She insisted that I write. She insisted! And she kept at me gently, lovingly, kindly, but relentlessly. That I—from deep down in my soul so very uneasy with conclusion—could get a monograph off to a publisher is due above all to her. But it is due to others, too.
Our philosopher daughter, Heather Keen Ross, has spent too many hours reading these chapters and talking through them with me. It is a marvelous gift to have a relationship like that with one’s daughter. Our sons, Stefen and Bryan, also have read chapters from this book and have responded encouragingly. I have received critical guidance on brain research from Warren Brown, on current scholarship in the Gospel of Mark from Matt Hauge, on the relevance of my work to the life of the local church from Josh Smith, the priest of the little local church where I am a member. I am so grateful for Charlie Collier’s readiness to work with me. He has understood and has been receptive to this book from our earliest conversations. I have gotten encouragement and critical help at various stages of writing from Sam Powell, John Wright, Doug Meeks, Teri Merrick, Donna Techau, Billy Abraham, Ted Jennings, Jack Caputo, and other friends and colleagues too numerous to list.
I do want specifically to mention Nate Kerr, however. He in particular has been my dialogue partner and advocate, since we first met when he was a business major and stumbled into an introduction to philosophy course I was teaching. I could never thank him and Thomas Bridges enough for their gift in compiling and editing The Transgression of the Integrity of God. Thomas, too, has in strongly quiet ways supported me in this work, ways to which he will be embarrassed to find me alluding here.
All the students with whom I have worked have marked all over this text. How could I not smile broadly and wave gratefully to them? This is true also, of course, of my teachers. I would like in particular to thank three of them, the last of whom died just a few years ago: Rob Staples, Paul Bassett, and Ken Grider. It is because of Rob that I am a theologian. It is because of Paul that I hope some day to become a scholar. It is because of Ken that I pray that I may yet learn as a writer to love.
I am grateful also to Azusa Pacific University for giving me time to work by providing me with a sabbatical, a Beverly Hardcastle Stanford Award, room, sky, and sea at Writers’ Retreats, a series of Accomplished Scholar Awards, CREV Seminars, and scheduling flexibility. Thanks also to my colleagues who have without complaint taken up the slack left as I have slipped away to research and write.
I would like to draw special attention to Stan Hauerwas. Friendship is a big deal to him, of course. He writes and writes about the importance of friendship. Because he is magnanimous, he has a great number of friends, among whom I am glad to say I am one. In our friendship, however, I have been from him the recipient by far of greater goods, than he from me. I am the beneficiary of his kindness, including his gracious expenditure of time, his time that is so much and so rightly in demand. This book was written and has been published because he has believed in it—from the beginning—beyond anything I could have expected. Stan understood this text immediately and has worked his way through its chapters, responding with a degree of enthusiasm unmatched by anyone outside of my immediate family and closest friends. Thank you, Stan.
Finally, I would like to mention the gift that having a full household has meant for my writing. A few years ago, during a particularly challenging time, Elesha and I opened our house to a handful of friends. We experimented together with a kind of ankle-deep new monasticism. Katrina Alston, Leah Butts (now Rashidyan), Sean Capener, Melanie Dosen, Peter Hawisher (who helped me with the technicalities of writing for Cascade), Tara Roy (now Bishop-Roy), and a number of more temporary houseguests helped us learn how very well the American Dream had smothered our social instincts, and they helped us learn how to live otherwise and especially how to be hospitable. And as we lived together, we talked through ideas at play in this book, and some of them took shape in the days we worked and ate together.
A little over two years ago our household arrangements had to change, because it was time for Elesha and me to take in my very elderly parents. My mother is ninety, my father ninety-three. However, had our compañeras y compañeros not struggled along with us, had they not taught us, the transition to life with my parents would have been much harder, perhaps impossible. As it is and has been, however, life in an extended family—life where we have to lean on each other because we have come to know all the way down that we are not, never have been, and never will be self-reliant or self-sufficient—has risen among us as a beautiful, marvelous, and unmerited gift. We welcome it, throwing open our windows and doors with a joyful yearning to the brisk Wind who bathed the mutilated body of the crucified Jesus with abundant life and gathered the church.
I could never simply lay claim to this book. It is truer that they wrote it—my friends and lovers, my teachers and students, my parents and children, and Elesha, the love of my life—than that I did. In this, too: Te Deum laudamus!
It is with joy that I think now back over the faces of all the people named and unnamed in this preface. But I think in particular of the faces of my parents, and I think of them in the roomy, disclosed countenance of the Slaughtered Lamb in whose future theirs, too, will forever vigilantly shine. It is to them that this book is dedicated.
The Feast Day of Ignatius of Antioch, 2012