This study argues for the significance and meaning of concrete acts of physical touch between persons for theology. In the process of developing my argument for turning to the tactual as a resource for theological understanding, I develop two sub-theses. First, I argue that foregrounding touching practices in our theological descriptions makes explicit the ways in which bodies give sense to the theological landscape. Typically, the theological landscape has been construed through seeing or hearing. Touch provides a third, and largely underappreciated, means of construing the theological landscape. This third way proves especially useful for doing critical and constructive work in the wake of modernity. Touch affords a constructive alternative to the rather overused and at times reified theological constructions of both seeing and hearing as well as a means for critically resisting the various ways in which bodies have been evaded by modern theology. Focusing on one locus within the theological landscape—the locus of divine relating to humankind—I argue, second, that touch provides the lived know-how which funds Christian knowing-that the radical otherness of God is manifest precisely in God's most intimate relating. The logic of incarnation is a deeply tactual logic, or so I hope to show.

This dissertation begins by asking how the experience of bodily touch might contribute to theological understanding. In order to fill out the very particular ways in which touch has constituted and been constituted by grace in Christian communities, in chapters two through four, I lift up three distinct instances in which touch plays a role in theological understanding. In chapter two, I take up the Gospel of John. Focusing on the resurrection appearances of Jesus in chapter 20, I show that Jesus is made known to the disciples in and through their exchange of a kiss with one another. In chapter three, I consider the role of the tactual in medieval women's mystical writings. Focusing on recent feminist engagements with medieval mysticism, I show how as a category of analysis the body is constructed as the obverse of the modern knowing subject thereby hiding from view ways in which bodily engagements are constituted by and constitutive of understanding. To illustrate this point, I draw upon the writings of Gertrude the Great whose writings use bodily sensibility as a source for theological understanding. In chapter four, I turn to recent interpretations of Martin Luther on justification in order to attend to the use of the metaphors of seeing and hearing in modern theology. Focusing on Luther's teaching on baptism, I argue touch provides a more adequate metaphor for justification imagining union in terms of God's abiding with the sinner and extending an ever open invitation to deeper relating. I draw on these three histories of touch in order to suggest, in the concluding chapter, what it might mean to say that the rite of passing peace provides an imaginative construal of God's presence and vision of what it means to be church.