Abstract Examining work by Rowan Williams, this essay explores what he often refers to as the ‘difficulty’ of writing theology. The difficulty of theology lies in engaging the ruse of having ultimate answers to ultimate questions. The stakes are high: ‘God‐talk’ must concern itself with truth, with reality. But theology knows that truth is always a work of grace and understanding always involves a cost. While it is intellectual understanding that is pursued, it is not merely intellectual understanding that we are aiming for, but rather a spiritual understanding through faith. This involves a diremption of meaning. The essay argues that theological ‘difficulty’ must wrestle with communication and intelligibility with respect to human language, on the one hand, and Christology on the other. The tragic always waits in the wings of such an endeavour and that has pastoral consequences.

Abstract “Divine action must be strictly ‘coincident’ with uninterrupted finite action”, is the theorem, inspired by reading Austin Farrer, that dominates Rowan Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation. It asserts the unbroken integrity of creaturely action in the presence of divine action. I shall defend this theorem, while at the same time reading Austin Farrer in a different sense, questioning the role Williams assigns to it, as “crystallising the general language of metaphysics” and linking creation and Christology. Williams’s exposition of the theorem is guided by the principle that God cannot be “another item” in any list. But excessive reliance on this negative principle creates a problem for categories that will embrace divine and human agency relationally, especially the category of “person”, normally congenial to Williams. I argue that the coincidence‐theorem must be located within the doctrine of providence, which speaks of the conformity of divine action to the limits of creaturely experience, and that “coincidence” must be understood as “cooperative grace”.

Abstract In his insistence (with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger) that human experience is defined by a “plane of immanence” and an unsurpassable horizon of finitude, Emmanuel Falque has elaborated a theological and philosophical concept of transformation as the experience proper to the finitude of immanence. His proposed notion of “extra‐phenomenon” develops a Deleuzean concept of transformation and problematizes the usual paths to transcendence as an “opening” to alterity, as receptivity, and as incompletion. Rather, he challenges thought to remain anchored within the forces of transformation at work in human finitude. Transformation, envisaged radically as an irreversible, ontological change, encapsulates an immanent logic of a surpassing, or a “trans‐” function known both in the impossibility of anticipating the path of transformation and of return. This essay constructs the path of Falque's proposals in relation to Deleuze, and argues that the phenomenology of “Transformation Itself,” without a preemptive anticipation of transcendence, provides a hermeneutic of human experience for a discourse of transcendence. If there is no longer an easy pathway to transcendence by any account of exit, the immanent experience of forces of transformation ultimately provide a hermeneutic for a possible transcendence, where God would be “Transformation Itself.”

Abstract In this article I engage with Kathryn Tanner's theological framework for understanding God's agency, focusing on the way her rules of non‐contrastive transcendence and non‐competitive immanence govern her account of God's acts of creation, providence, incarnation, and atonement. I argue that Tanner's account of God as beneficent gift‐giver uniquely confronts a problem of providential evil and offers a revised framework better able to incorporate the inexplicable existence of divinely sanctioned human suffering under sin and death. Central to the revised picture is a recognition of the deeply ambiguous character of God's providential order and a concept of incarnational solidarity suited to that reality. Finally, I highlight an explanatory advantage that my revised picture has over Tanner's in answering what William R. Jones called a “multievidential objection” to the claim of liberation theologians that under conditions of social and political evil God takes sides with the oppressed.