Abstract
In academic life, it is often the case that a book can be skimmed within the span of several hours and considered more or less ‘read’. Eugene Rogers's Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk is not that kind of book. Insofar as the topic is relevant for one's own pursuits, this is a book to sit down and think with. Not because the experience of reading it is always a delight, although it certainly is at times. Not because the pages are filled with satisfying solutions to the vexing theological problem of blood, although some of the solutions Rogers offers are profound. This is a book to sit down and think with because it opens opportunity to conceptualize blood and all that blood signals more expansively than theological discourse often allows. For me, spending time with this book felt like being served a platter of delicacies after spending far too long attempting to nourish myself with the same old fare. Some of those delicacies were downright delicious. Some did not suit my palate. But the process of encountering and tasting—tuning in to what was offered—broke through a sense of intellectual monotony that had dulled my capacity for creative, enlivened thinking around matters of blood and sacrifice, suffering and solidarity, human life and the thick, red, pulsing nourishment it requires. This is a text that reenergized my thinking, and I expect it will do the same for many.
The book is about blood. Using queer and feminist tools for navigation, Rogers follows blood where it flows. As one might expect, Eucharist, sacrifice and atonement become sites of intellectual encounter. But so do menstruation, placentas and childbirth, evolution and DNA, meat-eating, miscegenation laws, physical digestion, and the conservative cry that LGBTQ Christians ‘impugn the blood of Christ’ (p. 117). The theses Rogers pursues across this landscape are multiple and wide-ranging. His style of argumentation is not to develop a single line of inquiry to a linear and stable conclusion, but to hold up a whole network of intersecting ‘what ifs’ and muse, thoughtfully, about the possibilities they present. There is not space enough in this review to recount the full set, but a brief listing may help to convey their significance.
What if blood marks the interiority of social bodies in the same way that it marks the interiority of physical bodies (p. 75)? What if we treat meat-eating as a primary metaphor for thinking about what it means to ‘(make) something good out of death without making death good’ (p. 142)? What if blood marks suffering as ‘a wound to be honoured and a solidarity to be shared’ (p. 158)? What if we were to regard the placenta—an organ literally made of blood and shed in childbirth—as supplying the logic for the claim in Hebrews that there can be no remission of sin without the shedding of blood (pp. 84–101)? What if it is the thief crucified with Jesus who is his bride (pp. 124–30)? What if, in the ways we make meaning of crucifixion, we centred the observation that Jesus’ flesh—quite literally according to the theory of the virgin birth—is Mary's menstrual and placental blood (pp. 85, 101)? What if, following thing theory, blood has agency? What if blood's agency extends beyond that which is given to it by human symbolic reasoning (pp. 204–216)? What happens to God, creation, human nature, sin, salvation and Christology when we follow blood, through these ‘what ifs’, where it leads?
One of the claims that Rogers sustains across the breadth of this terrain is, simply and powerfully, that blood is strange—that blood is doing more than we realize. He accomplishes this not by constructing a rational proof, but by showing the reader how many questions they had never thought to ask about blood. He holds up the symbolic mechanics of blood again and again, asking each time, ‘Isn't this odd?’ Eventually, after being confronted with a number of blood's strange instances, the reader is compelled to respond, ‘Yes, it is rather odd, isn't it?’ This agreement opens space for an alliance between author and reader characterized by mutual investment in exploring why blood is strange, how that strangeness works on the social body, and finally, what we might do to put the strangeness of blood to use for social good.
Rogers endeavours to articulate how blood works in the Western and Christian social imaginary as a means of becoming better equipped to put blood logics to use for socially positive ends. Because Rogers grounds his thinking in the social mechanics of blood, Blood Theology treats anthropological methods and discourses as foundational to the theological task. Rogers uses anthropology to unsettle what we think we know about blood in order to create opportunities to know more expansively. The hope of that expansion is that it will allow us space to breathe, imagine, play, and ‘repeat blood's language subversively, to free it from contexts of oppression and violence’ (p. 7). In the words of Judith Butler invoked frequently by the author, doing so ‘mobilizes the signifier for an alternative production’ (Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 35–57).
Rogers sets out upon this task in the first place because he is convinced, as am I, that Christian blood-signalling is dangerous. Blood has been weaponized by Christian thought and practice to do the violent work of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, Christian supremacy and European colonization. It is a signifier that has been regularly wielded for domination, and this is precisely the reason Rogers finds it urgent that we strategize to put blood to work for alternative ends. However, he also identifies his work as intervening in those criticisms of the past half-century that likewise insist on the dangers of Christian blood-signalling. In Rogers's view, while these arguments are correct in their identification of blood as dangerous, their solutions to the problem of blood have been ‘anthropologically naïve’. He continues, explaining that his intervention is necessary since ‘Christian blood-signalling is not going away, and that the options are not exhausted by repristinating it, on the one hand, or deploring it, on the other. A third option remains: to repeat blood's language subversively, to free it from contexts of oppression and violence. This option reclaims or “mobilizes the signifier for an alternative production”’ (p. 7).
Rogers does not include a literature review to help us understand exactly which critiques of Christian blood-signalling he finds anthropologically naïve or on what grounds. He does offer a footnote identifying Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker's 1989 essay, ‘For God So Loved the World?’ (in Joanna Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (eds.), Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989), pp. 1–30) as an example of what he has in mind. However, this single mention of a three-decades-old essay is obviously not sufficient to demonstrate that Rogers is warranted in characterizing the entire discourse as naïve or as uniformly failing to do what he thinks is necessary: ‘to repeat blood's language subversively, to free it from contexts of oppression and violence’. And yet, those familiar with the literature will intuit something of what he means. It is not as if Rogers's claim has no grounds. Rather, he leaves topography a blur. And this serves as an example of precisely what makes the book simultaneously brilliant and frustrating all the way through.
Rogers's method has the impact of both inspiring creative, novel, expansive thought, and leaving important components of his arguments underthought. The latter is benign (perhaps even generative) when all it does is mark an intellectual opening where others might come in and continue the work. But there are times, such as in the example I have given, when Rogers's quick sprints across vast distances put such a thick gloss on his subject matter that he opens himself to criticisms of dismissiveness and inaccuracy. It is, in my view, dismissive, inaccurate, and ultimately unhelpful, to characterize the last fifty years of critique of Christian blood-signalling as simplistically condemning blood-talk without mobilizing the signifier for alternative production. A non-exhaustive list of critiques that I read as resisting Rogers's characterization might include M. Shawn Copeland's Enfleshing Freedom; Nancy Pineda-Madrid's Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juarez; JoAnne Marie Terrell's Power in the Blood; Darby Ray's Deceiving the Devil; Shelly Rambo's Spirit and Trauma and Resurrecting Wounds; Serene Jones's Trauma and Grace. The list goes on.
Because this body of critique is largely a feminist one, Rogers's characterization has the potential to dismiss not only the richness that does exist within the scholarly conversation, but also the value of feminist theological scholarship in general for thinking with and about blood.
Clearly, at least in my view, Eugene Rogers has no desire whatsoever to undermine the value of feminist theological scholarship. Blood Theology as a whole both draws from and contributes to the ongoing development of feminist theo-logic. My point is that Rogers's speed, elasticity, ease of transition and birds’ eye perspective—the very dynamics that make this book so generative to think with—occasionally have consequences that work against, rather than for, the book's intention. The dissonance, when it occurs, is frustrating.
And yet, I stand by my description of the book as, also, brilliant. I would much rather spend time with a sometimes-exhilarating, sometimes-frustrating text that stirs my intellectual imagination and moves the conversation forward than I would with a dependably pleasant text that leaves the reader near to where they started.
Blood Theology has made its way easily onto my shortlist of texts to engage when I need to think well about birth, sacrifice, creation, redemption and social ills that ooze red. I expect that colleagues engaging these points of reflection from queer, feminist, critical theory, ritual theory, anthropological and historical theological perspectives will likewise find the text valuable. It deserves attention in the advanced classroom as well.