AFTER METHOD: QUEER GRACE, CONCEPTUAL DESIGN, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THEOLOGY. By HannaReichel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2023. Pp vii + 277. $40.00.

After the bitter arguments that characterize Christian theology's current methodological crisis, what will it look like to do “better” theology? Drawing inspiration from philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend's “Against Method,” Reichel develops not only a compelling account of the state and stakes of theological method but also a vision for this desperately needed “better” theology. In Part 1, “How (not) to get along,” Reichel makes an insightful taxonomy between the oftentimes incommensurable commitments from “Systematic” and “Constructive” theologies. Reichel follows queer, decolonial theologian Marcella Althaus Reid's critique against the ways “T-Theology” can hide harmful effects through claims to neutral, a-contextual access to theological truth. Showing how these critiques from “Constructive Theology” tend to provoke “Systematic Theology” to double down on prior commitments to systematicity, Reichel argues that a deeper problem provokes “allergic” reactions like this one: the two theological types inhabit different and mutually indecipherable, theological epistemes. Each methodological type carries its own qualifications about what counts as good theology and, especially under the sense of threat, tends to hold the other's theology up to its own epistemological standards and thereby reject the other as deficient, nonsensical, and dangerous. This dynamic prevents the two types from hearing each other and developing even a “relative solidarity” between their differing aims. At this impasse, Reichel's part II, “How (not) to lose hope” shows how method, like “Law” in the Reformed tradition, can open toward grace exactly as it reveals our epistemological limitations and susceptibility to sinful hubris. Reichel reads Barth's insistence on the “No!” of human ability to capture knowledge of God together with queer critiques of theologies that try to justify themselves by a superior method and appeals to intellectual purity. Only after the promises of the method have run out can the theologian learn the (queer) virtues of stubborn excess, messy solidarity, and indecent honesty that open to the disruptive reality of God, which surprises and interrupts the theologian's hubris and despair alike. In Part III, “How (not) to do better,” Reichel explores what resources design theory offers to theological method “after” method. Here, a reorientation to sideways growth and epistemic “cruising” might allow for theologies that attend closely to their contexts and material consequences rather than a rigid conception of progress. Queer use of theological doctrines might look for “affordances” through which “swords can become plowshares.” And “better theology”? Following an insight from conceptual design theory, better theology might continually seek to reflect on users' experience and be re-designed toward welcoming the God who remains “a misfit in any system.” Even before their constructive turn to imagining better theological method, Reichel's project makes clear the ways our entrenchments in particular theological methodologies can preclude even hearing, let alone being productively irritated by, each other's critiques. This clarity alone offers readers an “affordance” toward the transformation of epistemological territorialism—and the doors we close on one another—into windows that might let in, by grace, the messy reality of the world and the excessive reality of God. Reichel's style is accessible to the general reader although young theologians—and all of us who feel especially tangled in Christian theology's methodological tug-of-war—are best suited to fully receive the gift of this book.