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John Macquarrie (1919–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the foremost Anglican systematic theologian of the twentieth century. His many books cover a wide range of topics, from studies of existentialist philosophy to expositions of systematic Christian theology, writings on mysticism and world religion, and analyses of ethical thought. Macquarrie was always a theologian of the church, using a philosophical vocabulary that united philosophical idealism, existentialism, and Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy in an original and fruitful way. His masterpiece was the 1966 Principles of Christian Theology, which works through almost every aspect of Christian doctrine in the light of the concepts of human nature and of God that he had forged from idealism, from Martin Heidegger, and from an increasingly sacramental and mystical approach to Christian faith. In 1970, Macquarrie was offered, without his prior knowledge, the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He received various honours that testify to the high regard in which he was held both in America and in Britain.

The discipline of Christian theology is itself formed around the traumatic narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion. Investigating trauma in order to provide useful accompaniment to trauma survivors is, therefore, theology’s starting point, not a secondary interest. Holding the narrative of crucifixion at its center, this chapter asks whether a discipline constructed in response to traumatic rupture is bound to exacerbate systems of retraumatization or has the potential to empower trauma survivors toward recovery. Building upon the scholarship of late 20^th and 21^st century womanist and feminist theologians and the significant risk of retraumatization, it engages contemporary psychoanalytic trauma theorists to argue that theology's strength with respect to trauma and contribution to the interdisciplinary task of supporting trauma survivors is its potential as a holding space for diverse stories of both traumatic rupture and recovery.

Though Christian Theology profess a God who inhabits flesh, bodies have been historically and systematically ignored and reviled by many institutional expressions of this faith tradition. Even as many core Christian institutions resist the Incarnational symmetry between embodied practice and Christian theological professions, bodies explore and embrace healing modalities at the margins of Christian practice. Using the emerging wisdom of four particular healing explorations along the margins of Christian institutional life, this chapter explores the contours of Christian spiritual practices that fold out of trauma. By focusing on the institutional practices of Kevin Ladd with labyrinths, Shelley Rambo with the Warriors Journey Home project, Sr. Joanna Walsh with trusting touch, and my own Wandering Home Retreat for women, this chapter attends to these contours with an eye toward possibilities for institutional transformation around trauma.

The first chapter (From Oikos to Ecclesia) reviews the history of the concept of oikonomia in Christian thought from the Pauline letters and up to the third century C.E and describes how oikonomia was consolidated into a key concept in Christianity: it focus on how Irenaeus of Lyons revolutionized economic theory and set the stage for a radical change in the conceptualization of time, of history, and of space.