In the last chapter I argued that current resistances to systematic theology can be answered precisely by acknowledging the force of their critiques – and then subtly shifting the vision of the systematic undertaking to enable a simultaneous response and rebuttal. The danger of a false reification of the divine, the danger of a false bid for totalizing power, the danger of a false suppression of material associated with the ‘unconscious’, gender, and desire: all these are real dangers for contemporary systematic theology, I conceded, and not ones that can be dealt with either by evasion or denial. But a theology founded in intentional practices of ‘un-mastery’, I claimed, is able to meet them precisely by its learned, and embodied, strategies of dispossession to the divine. And not only that; for as I now begin to work with the full set of methodological tools of a théologie totale, I can show that the root problem of fallen human desire is displayed in each of these notable contemporary criticisms of systematic theology, and can thus only be addressed by a transformative, indeed ascetical, approach to the theological task itself. Such a theology is indeed in via (as I put it in the Prelude): it is challenged to examine, and chasten, its own desires, and to draw all dimensions of the self transformatively into that quest.

The same tangled root of desire, I argued, underlies the current cultural fixations and debates on gender, exposing problems which finally can only adequately be addressed theologically, and by specific recourse to reflection on a trinitarian God. It is the ‘interruptive’, or purgative, work of the Holy Spirit, I claimed, drawing the believer progressively into the life of crucified and resurrected ‘Sonship’, that gives the key to gender’s ultimate rootedness in divine desire. In short, from the perspective of a théologie totale, desire, asceticism, and God as Trinity belong together, all the way down.