Introduction

These intuitions and starting points find grounding in the Christian tradition not only because of the rich history of texts and practices therein that support doctrinal and ethical formulations of multiplicity, evolutionary openness, and relationality. But also, like other global religions, “Christianity” was never merely One to begin with. Internally multiple and complex, it has always required an agile and spirited approach to theological reflection. We sense that the current resilience of theology in its becoming multiplicity of relations is a sign and a gift of that Spirit. From the start, the plurality of canonized gospels accompanied by the ancestral Hebrew library and the shadows of the excluded gospels made multiplicity manifest. Any durable unity that Christians achieved in texts, theology, or community was not just debatable but hotly debated. The debates display the manifold genius of Christian orthodoxy and the creative tenacity of dissent. But the habit of producing heretics as outer boundary markers for orthodox identity also exposes a repressive evasion of evident Christian complexity. Every point in the two thousand year trajectory of Christian theology is a nexus of traditions engaging – in whatever irenic or bellicose moods – each other and the divine. This means that, despite its linguistic ease of use, “the Christian tradition” does not refer to a singular lineage, nor do Christians speak with one voice even (or especially) when they attend to the same line of scripture. In this sense, the Christian tradition is always already polydox; it is irreducible to any one voice or lineage that may claim exhaustively to represent Christian faith, thought, and practice. This characteristic complexity is wrought of interweaving cultures and stories, of shifting agonisms and political pressures, of myriad communal practices, artistic media, and philosophical schools. Thus multiplicity becomes a source of richness and revelatory possibility for supple theologies that remain open to the ongoing participation of divinity in the world. It invites theological attention. The specific complexity of the Christian tradition may well be precisely what enables its mature (that is, not simple) unity. In other words, much theology that has been understood as orthodox nourishes and advances its own polydox legacy. If, therefore, we dub the present gathering of texts a polydoxy, we do not intend a new orthodoxy of the Multiple to replace the orthodoxy of the One. Deleuze, a great thinker of multiplicity, puts it precisely: “A multiplicity certainly contains points of unification, centers of totalization, points of subjectivation, but these are factors that can prevent its growth and stop its lines. These factors are in the multiplicity they belong to, not the reverse.”3 Theologically we intend a confessedly multiple teaching of divine multiplicity. Its hermeneutics and its ontology implicate and explicate one another. Both in reality and in the theological interpretation of reality we presume therefore a deep interconnection, a constitutive relationality, between every one and its others. And so by multiplicity we do not mean a mere many, a plurality of separate ones; nor by relationality do we mean a swamp of indistinction.4 Yet the lines of differentiation that we find in a logic of relational multiplicity resist predictability. Without leakage into the indeterminate, multiplicity collapses into totality and dies. The mystery of relationality lies, in part, in its inexhaustible depth and

openness to emergence, its stubborn resistance to unification under one point of view. A certain critical apophasis – an “unsaying” of what we most want to say – becomes unavoidable. It is related to the mysticism of negative theology but also to what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls, for postcolonial theory, “a critical nonknowingness.”5 This priority of multiplicity signifies in other words a developing attention to the edges of the known. It conveys the wilder energy of revelation in polydoxy, grounded thematically in our inherited biblical stories of the wilderness, whether grand and desert-exilic or intimate and Emmaus-suburban. Michel Serres reminds us that “[t]he multiple as such, unhewn and little unified, is not an epistemological monster, but on the contrary the ordinary lot of situations …” Yet it requires us to recognize that its comprehension, like the apophatic God, always eludes even as it beckons and inspires. “Commonly we know a bit,” Serres concedes, “a meager amount, enough, quite a bit; there are various undulations, even in the hardest and most advanced sciences.”6 We cannot know it all, in other words. But this unknowing is an energy of epistemological and theological integrity, as the disparate apophatic thinkers of the Christian tradition from Justin Martyr, through Nicholas of Cusa, to Sallie McFague have always insisted. Unlike the otherworldly priority of much mysticism, polydoxy understands unknowing to have a deep relation to creaturely interrelations. It constitutes and animates the actual openness that an evolutionary sensibility requires; it limns the depth of “ordinary situations” with which theology has to do, or it dies.