Saving possibilities: Salvation, the Holy Spirit, and variegated resistance

This dissertation constructs a theology of resistive performance by bringing together the insights of performance theory and contextual theologies of resistance. Saving Possibilities explores and seeks to resist catastrophic suffering, the human capacity to justify suffering, and the human capacity to use routine analysis of and responses to suffering. This project argues that (catastrophic) suffering should be approached as contingent events or sagas comprised of concomitant causes and effects. Because these events are often produced by concomitant factors and suffered variously, this dissertation maintains that resistance should be understood as variegated life-giving practices, which include performance and works of art. This theological understanding of resistance is predicated upon the salvific multivalence of the Holy Spirit. By focusing on the salvific efficacies of the Holy Spirit, this dissertation also provides a soteriological alternative to cross-centered, Christocentric visions of salvation.;In this project, resistance refers to the perception, identification, exposure, analysis, prevention, subversion, survival, and/or transformation of a situation of injury, death, and meaninglessness; theologies of temporal retribution and redemptive suffering, which justify disproportionate suffering; and models of salvation and liberation that ossify strategies of rescue and/or resistance. By employing both the dissertation, and its accompanying album, The Infinite Struggle, this project offers itself as a two-pronged performance of variant salvific possibilities to counter the various manifestations of singular salvific possibility.