Rubén Rosario Rodríguez’s  Theological Fragments: Confessing What We Know and Cannot Know About an Infinite God is a bold challenge to theologians to reconsider the very aim and scope of the discipline. This challenge springs up from “the church’s panic over the rise of the religious ‘Nones’ and the continuing secularization of Western culture.” (2) Instead of attempting to bring Gen Z and Millennials back to a church they clearly reject, Rosario asks how the church ought to “listen to what these ‘Nones’ are saying.” (2–3) Rosario has discovered that the rise of Nones is not a death of religion per se. (7) He believes that this generation “retain[s] some degree of faith or spirituality.” (9) They thirst for a satiating spiritual life. Their disaffection from institutional religion, he adds, stems from ideological differences and specifically from institutional religion’s acquiescence to injustice and intolerance. Instead of panic, this is an apt opportunity for the church and its theologians to (re-) claim a “Heraclitian” kerygma that accepts the “flux” of reality (18 ff.) and consequently (and rightly) speaks in language that is “irreducibly complex, ever changing, and in constant flux.” (10) 

The book emerges from years of teaching theology and listening to the Gen Z and Millennial Nones and their disillusionment with the church.  Taking heed to this generational renouncement, he lists six myths that need to be rejected by the church. These are the myths of “theological totalitarianism,” of the “free market,” of “human uniqueness,” of “political sovereignty,” of “Christian uniqueness,” and of “materialism.” (33–37) These loci form the argumentative skeleton of the book. In response to each of these, Rosario correlates a “theological fragment” as a counter script to the prevailing narrative of domination, arrogance, and indifference. 

First, Rosario contends with the presuppositional apologetics that deploy intellectual dominance as their evangelistic modus operandi. Instead of deploying “a universally accepted, objectively verifiable, comprehensive system” that reinforces Christianity’s supposed epistemological supremacy (63), Rosario proposes a new apologia of humility. He entices the reader to look east, to Orthodoxy, and to its “christopraxis” of kenosis and its relational ontology grounding in the Trinity. (64–65) Second, Rosario advocates for the “liberating vision” of St. Francis of Assisi, unearthing therein “a radical critique of the dominant culture” of consumerism, irresponsible economic development, and ecological deterioration. (98)  Third, to counter the myth of human uniqueness, he rejects the fundamentalists’ rejection of science and draws from ecofeminism to offer a theological posture that replaces patriarchal god-talk with a theology that inculcates a doxological posture toward the image of God “immanent in every facet of creation” (134), and not just in the human species.  The next chapter is a masterful excursus in public and political theology in order to rebuke the idolatry of nationalisms rampant today.  Five, Rosario leverages the best of the comparative theological tradition to confute Christian privilege and supremacy. The reader is called to cast aside any sense of Christian theological sufficiency and to open oneself, through Pseudo-Dionysius’ via negativa, to the sapience preserved, extra muros ecclesiae, in other religious traditions.  Finally, Rosario denounces the modern gnosticism that paradoxically preaches neglect of worldly responsibility while simultaneously promoting worldly wealth.  Contra the prosperity gospel, he retrieves from disability theology a theological gem that proclaims a resurrecting word by way of the scarred and wounded, yet glorious, flesh of creation—just like Thomas, who touches the wounds of the Risen Christ and is transformed. (214)

Rosario brings into fecund contact historical voices and historically marginalized voices, opening a theological vista that is both enduring and timely.  I once heard it said: when we reach back to the fires of tradition, we should retrieve the heat and not the ashes. Heat emits from these pages. And, the theological fire he ignites in Theological Fragments are for burning off the deadening encrustations that have ossified theology.

Rosario reminds us that theology, when done faithfully, is more like pitching a tent than constructing a building. I suspect another reviewer (maybe someone too committed to the Platonic urge to conceive orderly forms) might criticize the author for leaving incomplete the dogmatic task of systematizing a whole schema.  Such critics have missed the whole point. If theology is to be a “true and lively word,” it must be done on the journey through the deserts of disenchantment and disenfranchisement. That is, it must acknowledge that “our knowledge of God is open ended and provisional,” and it must “live with contradiction and inconsistency in recognition of our human epistemological limitations.” (31) To be clear, Platonic systematizers who want brick and mortar will not find them here.  Rosario’s theological fragments are tent pegs, with which we can consecrate spaces to discern and encounter the glory of God. Tent pegs, with which we can carve out sites of justice and compassion in a world hopped up on domination. Tent pegs, with which—alluding to Jael (Judges 4–5)—we can drive a spoke through the skull of the evil one who incessantly rears his ugly head.