Theopoetics: Process and Perspective:

It is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the unknown and new-name the creatures. --Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic Poets write in the line of prophecy, and their work teaches us how to live. The language of poetry, when properly absorbed, becomes part of our private vocabulary, our way of moving through the world. --Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters The term theopoetics was first seen in the form of theopoiesis, used by Stanley Romaine Hopper in a 1971 speech that grew out of conversations that had been taking place within the Society for Art and Religion in Contemporary Culture and the American Academy of Religion (Miller 3). Since then, theopoetics has served as a noun referring to a particular devotional quality of a text, a genre of religious writing, and a postmodern perspective on theology. A useful working definition of the term would be the study and practice of making God known through text. Used as an adjective, a theopoetic text is one that reveals some aspect of the divine. At a broader level, the essence of the term is found in its etymology. Combining the Greek theo with poiein, meaning "to make or shape" theopoetics is a means of making God, of shaping experience of the divine, and the study of ways in which people come to know the Spirit. (1) A number of writers and thinkers have contributed to current conceptualizations of theopoetics since the term came into use, and in fact, even in the years prior to its inception. Though not all have addressed theopoetics directly, any full view of the relevance of theopoetics to contemporary religious discourse would not be complete without addressing the work of these scholars. This article draws on a variety of disciplines to introduce the reader to the sources of theopoetics and to suggest its relevance to contemporary society. The "Foundations" section details the thinking that undergirds the origins of the word, focusing on the work of Stanley Hopper and Amos Wilder. In "Engaged Phenomenology" and "Embodied Process" I will discuss theopoetics in relation to ideas from Richard Kearny, John Caputo, Catherine Keller, and Roland Faber. Most of these writers do not concern themselves directly with theopoetics, but instead use it peripherally in the course of their own respective agendas. Consequently, it is worth holding in tension the conceptualization of theopoetics that emerges solely from their sources with that offered by Rubem Alves, Scott Holland, Melanie May, and Matt Guynn, all of whom directly consider the contemporary utility of a theopoetic perspective and whose work is considered in the section "A New Theopoetic." The article closes by addressing some of the challenges that theopoetics faces and by offering a vision of the opportunities that further investigation may invite. Foundations: Discrete Theopoetics Hopper's speech "The Literary Imagination and the Doing of Theology" is the first piece of scholarship to make direct use of the term (Miller 3). In this text, Hopper asserts that we are in the midst of a "radical revisioning of our way of seeing and thinking" (Hopper 207). He suggests that the question is not how to develop a new, socially relevant theology, but "whether theology, insofar as it retains methodological fealty to traditional modes, is any longer viable at all" (207). If it is to remain viable, Hopper suggests, we must reclaim the power of myth and imagination, moving toward a poetic perspective of the divine instead of a prosaic, theo-logical approach that results in the "progressive reification of doctrine, squeezing the myth out, trying to contain the symbolic in a science and to reduce mysteries to knowledge" (208). …