Tina Beattie: A Theology of Becoming

Modern theological approaches to birth have been filtered through an androcentric lens, focusing more on ethical questions of contraception and abortion than on the significance of birth for what it means to be human. In the Catholic tradition, this has been influenced by doctrines and traditions surrounding Mary’s virginal conception of Christ and painless birth. This Element considers the challenges posed by maternal life to ideas and theories about pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a woman and her newborn child. Reflecting on her maternal experiences through the lenses of feminist theory and Marian theology, the author sketches the contours of an incarnational theology that endows the birthing body with sacramental significance. She concludes by asking what it would mean for theological anthropology to adopt this as the normative model of the person reborn through baptism into the body of the maternal Church [ABSTRACT].

Tina Beattie, A Theology of Becoming: Body, Blood, Birth, and Sacrament (Cambridge Elements, 2026).

[TRANSCRIPTION] In 2015, Professor Miroslav Volf invited me to contribute to a consultation on Birth, as part of the ‘God and HumanFlourishing Project’ at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. That was when this Element was conceived, so it has had a ten-year gestation period.

I became a mature student the year my fourth child started school, as a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that my research has focused on that vast maternal presence, Mary the Mother of God, in theology, devotion, and art. I’ve drawn on psychoanalytic theory to unravel the entanglements of repressed desire and fear that so often obscure theological approaches to questions of gender, female embodiment, and sacramentality. My work has been informed by psycholinguistic theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, rather than by the appeal to women’s experience, which constitutes the preferred approach of liberal feminist theologians.

In this Element, I have with trepidation drawn on my experiences of childbirth and maternal life as well as on these more theoretical approaches, to ask how the raw and often painful realities of women’s reproductive lives might challenge theological ideas about birth and motherhood. This has resulted in a visceral narrative of human becoming, which suggests that “A theological account of birth developed through a maternal phenomenology would be a bloody rupture in the theological corpus”. I remind readers of the patristic saying that Inter faeces et urinam nascimur – we are born between shit and piss.

The Element is written in a narrative style that mimetically reproduces the evolving consciousness of maternal life and theological insight. My mothering experience is viewed through the lenses of feminist theory and of recent studies such as Lucy Jones’s Matrescence and Chine McDonald’s Unmaking Mary. It is interwoven with poetry, photographs and art that I hope create a sense of incarnate presence beyond that which a text alone can offer.

A theological vision gradually emerges, moving towards a redemptive reading of Mary’s virginal motherhood and Christ’s crucified body which, in medieval art and devotion, acquired the characteristics of a self-impregnating maternal body giving birth to the Church.

I ask what it would mean for theological anthropology to see the baptised individual as one who is reborn into trinitarian personhood, modelled on the dynamic life-giving capacities of the maternal self.