A Theology of the Voice

Abstract

A Theology of the Voice aims to present a wholly new approach to the study of early Christianity, which has traditionally been presented in terms of the development of doctrine and the formulation of the creeds. It argues that in a context in which God is held to be unknowable and inexpressible doctrinal and creedal formulations need to be understood as beginnings rather than ends, and that early Christian reflection on the nature and practice of the voice offers a fruitful way of understanding these formulations for what they in fact are: open-ended statements which gesture towards the truth but which can never fully capture it. This monograph therefore offers a new way of doing theology which resists the traditionally logocentric, rational, and often elitist focus of theology, and by focusing on the characteristic qualities of the voice from an interdisciplinary perspective, takes account of the betweenness, open-endedness, and difficulty of all theological statements; of the importance of performance and of alternative modes of knowing (affective, tacit, participatory), which together make theology more widely accessible and effectively democratize doctrinal reflection.