Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk
Cambridge University Press, 3/25/2021
EAN 9781108843287, ISBN10: 110884328X
Hardcover, 254 pages, 23.4 x 19.6 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
The unsettling language of blood has been invoked throughout the history of Christianity. But until now there has been no truly sustained treatment of how Christians use blood to think with. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. discusses in his much-anticipated new book the sheer, surprising strangeness of Christian blood-talk, exploring the many and varied ways in which it offers a language where Christians cooperate, sacrifice, grow and disagree. He asks too how it is that blood-talk dominates when other explanations would do, and how blood seeps into places where it seems hardly to belong. Reaching beyond academic disputes, to consider how religious debates fuel civil ones, he shows that it is not only theologians or clergy who engage in blood-talk, but also lawmakers, judges, generals, doctors and voters at large. Religious arguments have significant societal consequences, Rogers contends; and for that reason secular citizens must do their best to understand them.
Part I. Why We See Red
1. Blood marks the bounds of the body
Overtures and refrains
Part II. Blood Seeps in Where It Hardly Seems to Belong
Blood Unnecessary and Inexhaustible
2. Blood after Isaac
Why God said 'Na'
3. Blood after Leviticus
Separation and sacrifice
4. Blood after the Last Supper
Jesus and the gender of blood
Part III. Blood Makes a Language in Which to Conduct Disputes
Family, Truth, and Tribe
5. Bridegrooms of blood
Same-sex desire and the blood of Christ
6. Red in tooth and claw
Evolution and the blood of Christ
7. Blood purity and blood sacrifice
Castilians and Aztecs
Part IV. The Blood of God and at the Heart of Things
Causality Sacramental and Cosmic
8. How the Eucharist causes salvation
9. Blood in the Christology of things
Why things became human
Appendix
Review of Gil Anidjar's Blood
A Critique of Christianity.