Brubaker Abstract CTRF

Starts with three lacunae in contemporary Christian dogmatic theology, all of which bear upon “place” as a theological category. Theologians who thematize place as a term of theological resonance, tend to restrict the conversation to created emplacement, bracketing the question of place’s grounding in the triune God. Meanwhile, an influential stream of postmetaphysical trinitarian theology (here exemplified by Jean-Luc Marion) exhibits a nearly opposite tendency: here placial terms, applied to the trinitarian relations, perform a key role in clearing Christianity from the charge of ontotheology… yet placiality itself is given only implicit, and often contradictory, status. Third, some postliberal ecclesiologies, it is argued, are so invested in setting up the Christian church as a rival polis, that they tend to assume the same kind of emplacement is appropriate to the Christian church as to a rival polis – the main difference being that the church defends its borders without violence. (The possibility that nonviolence mandates an entirely new form of emplacement – one arguably more faithful to scriptural witness – is not, the author suggests, not adequately considered.) In response to this, first, although a number of factors conspire to make place an urgent question for contemporary theology, there has so far been a failure to give theology of place a trinitarian grounding with satisfactory ecclesial implications. Second, part of the blame for this failure must lie with a fundamentally violent, dominating episteme wherein place is coded as a supremely passive foil for agency (human or divine). I suggest that the strange mode of emplacement exhibited by Christ’s body in the post-resurrection appearances, hints at a possibility for a genuinely theological, nonviolent, and specifically pneumatological understanding of emplacement: one with sufficiently trinitarian groundings, and one with implications for Christ’s ecclesial body.