Rambo is one of an emerging group of theologians writing about the ways in which trauma and moral injury inform theology and force us to read scripture and sacred texts in new ways. The book highlights the challenge that situations of trauma pose to the traditional accounts – a shift in language from strictly theological to moral, interrogating the traditional Christian account of the resurrection with the question, ‘Is it for good?’ Rambo places the ‘doubting Thomas’ pericope from John (and Caravaggio's visceral depiction of it) front-and-centre in this examination, using it to critique articulations of the Easter narrative that gloss over, minimise or erase the presence of wounds on the resurrected body of Christ.
Rambo's primary critical motif is that the Christian tradition, represented by theologians like John Calvin, exhibits a profound uneasiness in dealing with wounds marking Jesus’ body. As such, Rambo argues, it has a great difficulty in lingering in the space in which life, marked by death, emerges in the ‘after’ of traumatic events. Pointing to the way in which trauma is often considered as life marked by or in the midst of death, the book presents the narrative of Thomas as a fertile ground for reimagining the narrative in a way that is attentive to wounds as the very sites of divine grace.
Rambo identifies the critical problem with the traditional interpretation of the ‘doubting Thomas’ pericope as its hasty closing off of the broad range of possibilities of meaning in the resurrection. The traditional position, for her, is that ‘Life, if it is to triumph over death, must not retain the marks of death. Wounds must be erased’ (p. 36). The work then takes on the titular task of ‘Resurrecting’ those wounds within the theological imagination in order that they may provide meaning to the ways that death continues to linger into life, as sites where the precise miracle of the resurrection occurs – the ‘crossing of death and life’ (p. 42).
What follows is a thoughtful feminist critique and reimagining of the pericope through several different lenses. Rambo uses Gregory of Nyssa's vita of his sister Macrina to note the way a particular scar on her breast becomes the site of a miraculous healing narrative in a way that critiques both Gregory's idealised ‘virginal’ (p. 55) understanding of her body as an ‘untouched earth’ and the notion that wounds are markers of redemptive suffering. Macrina's wound, rather, manifests as a site of miraculous healing, both of her own marked body and those who come into contact with it, but through a layering of stories that testify to its healing.
Subsequently, Rambo looks at the power of wounds as sites of ‘crossing’ between death and life in terms of their power to resurrect violent racial histories that the Christian tradition (and its narrative of ‘pure’ resurrected bodies and discomfort with wounds) tends to move over too quickly. The resurfacing of wounds and the capacity to examine them (as Jesus invites Thomas to plunge his hand into Jesus’ side) allows for past trauma to breathe and ‘be tended’ (p. 89).
The final chapter examines veteran healing and eloquently articulates a theology of attention to the discovery of wounds as a locus of resurrection between American society and veterans suffering from the trauma of war. It serves as a poignant and necessary critique of the way Christian theology is often twisted in support of a system in which the wounds of ‘soldier-saviors’ (p. 113) are covered over, their importance ignored in service of a larger cultural narrative of resurrection. The description of trauma here is powerful, yet articulated from something of a respectful distance, occupying the space of a civilian letting the wounds of the veteran speak to societal trauma and larger issues of brokenness.
Overall, the book carefully articulates a theology of wounds that reimagines aspects of the Thomas pericope in powerful, direct and relevant ways. It is most effective in doing so when, as in the first few chapters, Rambo is able to contrast a particularly dominant theological narrative (Calvin's concern about both flesh and spirit leading to an erasure of wounds, Gregory's connection between Macrina's holiness and her pure, unmarked body) with the view of wounds as sites for something holy, envisioning resurrection as a strange space for examination, discovery, touch; and through those aspects – not their absence – come healing and new community. In later chapters, the phrase ‘Christian theology’ often stands in for a generic patriarchal narrative, which lessens the poignancy of the imaginative contrast that she draws – particularly as there are numerous contemporary examples that diverge from this characterisation.
