The Science of the Cross: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Theology of Desire

This dissertation develops a method for a science-engaged theology (SET) of desire. Situated in both the context of a methodological debate in science and religion and the Catholic debate over homosexuality, it makes three interventions. First, it models a new approach to SET through a critical reconstruction of a method from classical Latin American liberation theology. Treating that method as a potential model for SET is the second intervention of the dissertation, since it has not previously been recognized as such. The result of its reconstruction is the dissertation’s third intervention, a set of guidelines for responsible theological engagement with scientific research on homosexuality. After a brief introductory chapter, chapter 2 builds the case for a science-engaged approach. It draws on the history and philosophy of psychiatry to show that magisterial teaching on homosexuality already engages science, but unsuccessfully. The argument is that the act-centered moral theology the magisterium uses does not suit the ethical analysis of homosexuality, because that concept, within its historical and scientific context, is fundamentally a quality of persons, rather than acts. Clarifying magisterial teaching on this point requires SET, since the concept of homosexuality depends in part on a scientific paradigm. Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate three models for doing science-engaged theology, the third of which comes from liberation theology. This third model stands out for combining the best features of the first two, as it dispenses with problematic assumptions about the unity of science, but does not dispense with fundamental questions altogether. SET has deliberately eschewed such questions, to its detriment, as chapter 5 shows. Chapter 5 addresses Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of modern science, which puts the very warrant for SET in question, by arguing that the classical Catholic understanding of the analogia entis permits engagement. Chapter 6 articulates a positive warrant for SET, based not on the epistemic authority of the sciences, but rather on a theology of the cross, which radically calls all human scientia to humble reconciliation. Chapter 7 uses this theology of the cross to reconstruct the model from chapter 4, which ultimately grants too much faith and credit to scientific authority. The result of the reconstruction is a framework for theological engagement with scientific research on homosexuality that does not substitute a scientific grammar for a theological one. The conclusion to chapter 7 proposes that theologians engage the relevant sciences indirectly, through the mediation of history and philosophy of science, to better recognize both their own presuppositions and also the scientific “discovery” of sexual and gender identities as a historical novum that requires the development of doctrine.