Theological Reproduction: Figurality and the Sexual Life of Christian Sense

This paper reads Henri de Lubac’s writings on Christian spiritual understanding and Eugene Rogers’ writings on the sexuality of the Christian body to show that figurality is how sexuality and social reproduction are said in Christian thought. Christian figurality incarnates the sexual sense of Christianity through the figure of the Jew who, in the Christian imagination, becomes the occasion for the enfleshed verification of Christianity’s truth. By analyzing how each author frames Jewishness in their expositions of Christian sense and sexuality, I show how anxieties circulate around resolving the crises that would call Christianity’s status as a “living” tradition into question. Staving off this perpetual crisis of continuity reveals the relationship between the social reproduction of a distinctively Christian sense capacity and the sexual securitization of (in this case, Christianity’s) significance through the proper stewardship and management of Christianity’s textual and perceptual life—its erotics of sense.