In this roundtable, panelists will constructively, critically, and creatively engage Hanna Reichel’s After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023). In After Method, Reichel rejects, on theological grounds, the possibility of doing theology right—of theology adequately justifying itself. Putting constructive theology (via Marcella Althaus-Reid), in conversation with systematic theology (via Karl Barth), Reichel argues that theological method, nevertheless, has use, and considers how we might do theology better. Reichel proposes an understanding of theological work as conceptual design, and offers an approach to theology as one of cruising outside the gates.
This paper theorizes doubt as a type of disruption to theological meaning and examines whether it may be harnessed as a theological method in pursuit of a “better” theology. To do so, it reads doubt through the lens of Hanna Reichel’s proposal for an “after method” theological approach, holding in tension insights from systematic and constructive theologies while resisting the urge to synthesize them. Drawing on several interlocutors—including Karl Barth and Marcella Althaus-Reid, whom Reichel deploys in their own project—this paper will position doubt in two main ways: as a tool that contributes to (and benefits from) Reichel’s model of theology as conceptual design, and as a means for queering theological method by subverting expectations that method must be simultaneously stable and absolute. Ultimately, this paper draws upon Reichel’s project to ask whether doubt may contribute to better models of theology without necessary lionizing doubt as a virtue.
Empirical research has traditionally been absent in and is still a foreigner to systematic theology. Yet, the turn towards practices in studies of religion and theology implies that empirical research methodologies cannot be deemed irrelevant to systematic theology. This paper explores Hanna Reichel’s theory of theology as design, focusing on how she understands theology as practice and possible implications for the relevance of empirical methods to systematic theology. Bringing Reichel’s concept of theology as practice into dialogue with Geir Afdal’s concept of distributed normativity, the paper makes the case that the question of the affordances of a doctrine is not only an imperative theological question but also an empirical question opting for empirical research methods.