I recently returned from Theology Beer Camp, a week/end event featuring scholars, activists, curious minded folks, and God podcasts! My friend Tripp Fuller hosted the event and I was fortunate enough to speak there! Here is my keynote for you to consider

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Roberto Che Espinoza, PhD

15 October 2022

Delivered at Theology Beer Camp

Chapel Hill, NC

Please cite, if you use this work.

Early in my doctoral work, I began working on an ontology of becoming. I was and am still compelled by Deleuze’s work and his position that all philosophy is metaphysics. Along with Deleuze, I was introduced to Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in seminary and her work not only helped contextualize my own racialization as a Latinx, but taught me that we exist in a web of interrelatedness that is always becoming. I ended up writing my dissertation at the intersection of Deleuze and Anzaldúa and traced the philosophical concept of becoming in a genealogical fashion. That felt like satisfactory work! I had read the history of philosophy and invested in French post-war thinkers and women of color theorists that helped me get a bit closer to not only a theology of God but also a political theology.

Political theology as a term and as a field in the study of religion is explosive. We know that political theology is not a theology of politics, but rather a theology that is politicized in its analysis regarding the particularities of social, political, and economic spheres. Political theology is a highly critical theology that depends on both historical and sociological criticism.

I write in my first book, Activist Theology, that theology is primarily about harm reduction. Meaning, if theology doesn’t invite you into a process of becoming, then it might be doing more harm than good. If Theology is about concretizing certainties & privileging a dogma that doesn’t adapt or respond to pressing social concerns, then that theology is likely producing harm & is not rooted in the concept of becoming. Also, we are living in an epoch of the need to be trauma informed, because of the ways in which Christian Theology has been deployed into the pubic square. With so many leaving the Church, what & where are our networks of trust? How do we discover Becoming if we are not tethered to a body?

Activist Theology as an off-shoot of liberation theologies is primarily located in liberating theology from the academy and returning it to the streets—returning theology to the people who are living out their faith & experiences of God. It is asking our God-Talk to be informed by the contexts of the world, specifically race, class, gender, sexuality, sex, and ability, among others. Activist Theology composts the bullshit & normative understandings of theology as God-Talk and compels theology to move beyond normative understandings of theological truths  as faith seeking understanding and to consider for a moment that faith without works is dead.

So, what does all this have to do with becoming, you might ask?

Becoming, in the Deleuzian sense, which is how I find my way to Whitehead and others, which I’ve been reading since I was in seminary, is contextualized by change. The importance of Deleuze’s work, along with Guatarri and the activism he shared with Foucault, is that Deleuze’s becoming is relational. Remember that, and let me take a detour.

When I visited the Gloria Anzaldúa archives at the University of Texas in Austin, I saw remnants of what I thought to be Deleuzian discourse. Torn up pieces of paper, folds, creases, poetry; it all pointed toward a Deleuzian becoming. But, because of the politics of citation, it might be that Anzaldúa didn’t cite the white Western philosophers with whom she agreed or disagreed. So, I’ll never know if Anzaldúa was borrowing from Deleuze, but Anzaldúa’s work is also pure metaphysics and has folds and creases of becoming woven throughout the corpus of her work, which is deeply relational. I wondered, could there be fragments of Deleuze contained within Anzaldúa’s work?

Now, you might be asking: “what in the hell does this have to do with experiencing God or with becoming?” Well, I tend to experience God in and through relationship. And, if our relational orientations are framed by becoming, that ever evolving crease and fold that encourages us to lean into difference, then we might be experiencing the Divine.

When I was in Palestine just a few weeks ago, I opened myself to divine possibilities. I traveled by myself because the trip was calling to me. I didn’t know what I was going to experience or who I was going to meet? While there I experienced God through and by the folds of becoming, but becoming wasn’t just the evolving folds of change, it was a becoming that was rooted in praxis.

When I wrote Activist Theology, my point was to invite folks to get their hands dirty with the wounds of the world. Palestine showed me that woundedness is both close and far from home, but is caused by the same thing: empire & imperial power structures. Even here in Chapel Hill there are unhoused persons; there is poverty; there are wounds to be healed. And, we have been so isolated from each other during this ongoing pandemic that we aren’t sure what to do as we begin to emerge from our homes, which have now become our work spaces. This might be your first event in person since the pandemic started. It’s a lovely event: Josh Patterson brewed an amazing IPL; Dr. Tripp put on this amazing event; we’ve had wonderful music performed by the amazing Trey Pearson, and the food has been so good I’ve already written home about it. But if we leave here only have had intellectual orgasms & have only been aroused by the theopoetics of becoming, then we might be missing something. When do we begin to reframe becoming as something more than change that is rooted in relationality? When do we begin to frame becoming as praxis? I’d like to suggest that particular crease in becoming and reframe becoming not as simple or complex change, but as a relational framework of change that is conjoined with action. After all, many of us come from a tradition that says: “faith without works is dead.” Right?

Inspired by Dorothee Sölle (& some have even compared my work to hers, which is deeply humbling), I want to ask us all how do we live out our Becoming? How do we choreograph Becoming in a world where we are all deeply compromised.  That’s a serious question. How do we live Becoming?

We live in a world composed of hyper individualism. Our theologies thus reflect this hyper individualism. Sinn & grace these days are too simplistic, cheap, & too focused on individualism. Like Sölle, I depart from Rudolph Bultmann’s existential hermeneutic because of the enduring focus on individualism. Our theologies must enflesh a critical stance toward the ideologies of our era. Like Sölle, my theology has been shaped by the rise of white supremacy & neofascist ideologies. For Sölle, it was the autocracy of the Nazi regime; for me it is the emergence of a fold of fascism that has its roots in the 1940s & has never gone away. If our theology refuses to respond to our present moment, then we will have a difficult time choreographing becoming as praxis.

Is Theology possible after this new fold of supremacy culture? Is Theology possible in the face of today’s crucified god?

So, what does this have to do with experiencing  god and becoming? If God is justice as I believe & how Dorothee Sölle spoke of God, then our Becoming must be connected to praxis. Like I wrote in Activist Theology, I don’t care what you believe. I care about how you live your life. I care about your actions in the world.

We have to remember that all theology is ethics. And, there are some scholars who will tell you that theology is about belief structures and dogma that often supports an ontology that is disconnected from both epistemology & ethics. I will say that is bad theology & as Kevin Garcia says, “bad theology kills.” So, if our theology is disconnected from lived experience then it’s safe to say that that kind of theology is stewarding the logic of oppression and is death bringing.

If god is justice, then our theology should reflect an enfleshed & embodied praxis. Thus, our experience of god should be rooted in becoming & our Becoming should be framed by a critical praxis. Theology devoid of relationship or action is mere discourse that accelerates harm against the least of these.

So, several weeks ago, I traveled to Palestine & was open to experiencing God. And, I did, but not by entering the holy sites, which I did for the three Abrahamic traditions, and that was not where I experienced god. I experienced god with Arab Muslim men who welcomed me as a common brother among them. I experienced god drinking Arak, the National Palestinian drink. I experienced god with displaced Palestinians who are fighting for their freedom & the collective liberation of all who are oppressed. I experienced god in the West Bank in the city of Hebron as I witnessed how settlers throw their trash on top of the Old Market where Palestinians have their shops & make their money. I experienced god by & thru relationship and by being open to a kind of becoming that is rooted in praxis.

Why do I share this? Because if we don’t take seriously the ethical demand inherent in theology, then we miss becoming entirely.

If god is justice & if god is most concerned with the margins of the margins, the underside of history, then we’ve got to reframe becoming as that which is rooted in praxis. If we don’t, then we might miss the god of justice and remain tethered to a god of neoliberal bullshit that is killing us all.

Deleuze & Foucault spent years protesting the prison industrial complex in France. We must too begin to protest the systems that silo us and exploit us & deny us a livable life. We must become attuned to a Becoming framed by praxis at the end of empire. When we do this, we experience the god of the underside of history, the god of justice.