He suggests that theology is closely akin to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a minor intensive use of a major language.

The minor intensive theological use of language, Winquist argued, pressures the ordinary weave of discourse and opens it to desire.

Serious groups generate ideas that despite their best efforts create conflicting interpretations that diminish, rather than improve the philosophical, dialectic and social scientific foundations of theology.

These communities are not isolated groups of privileged theologians, but rather people across the world who experience their lives as meaningful and important.

Communicating through abstract ideas is at the foundation of creativity and symbolic thought, including art, music, the written word, mathematics, and science.

It is enough to understand there is an infinite that can be judged, and that all these attributes clearly perceived and known imply perfection....[10] Thinking formulaically about God defies selfhood.

It is debated whether or not he rejected "reductionism",[13] but it's worth noting that Merleau-Ponty's opposition to Husserl sparked his phenomenology of perception.

Every structure in a questioner's desire for knowledge mediates meaning, and even the sciences factor into "dharma," principles that order understanding.

[20] Metaphysical categories, abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space, are not the essence of meaning.

[12] Consciousness takes an object — the other in all its forms — and the act of focused purpose cannot be detached from the renewed or, arguably, revived understanding of the perceiving subject.

Winquist called this calm of the unknown a "dark time," or "taboo," a juncture of understanding that allows individuals to enter a "range of meaning" that is already a part of human experience.

[22] Winquist was an early proponent of what has been called "weak theology," which emphasizes the responsibility of individuals to act in the world here and now — a controversial concept that has created a rift between traditionalists [23] and deconstructionists [24] — and was deeply engaged in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Paul Tillich, and Mark C. Taylor, among others.

Winquist argues in Desiring Theology, for example, that Derrida's deconstructive criticism is not "wild analysis," but the very careful reading of texts.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the founder of "deconstruction," a way of criticizing not only literary and philosophical texts, but also political institutions.

Deconstruction attacks such beliefs by reversing hierarchies between the invisible or intelligible, the visible or sensible, essence and appearance and voice and writing.

Skipping across the surface obscures and denigrates the qualitative nature of experiences hidden within, becoming rote and unavailable to daily concerns.

Winquist calls this a "literalized, hermeneutical gap," spaces between the past and present, insights that human collaboration keep hidden.

The chaotic, "sparkling new" discovered in the shadowy contrasts between the literal and the "other" leads to a renewed theory of knowledge more detailed and whole.

[32]Archetypal patterns are not just words and stories, but living truths and psychological realities that build upon human connections—soul, according to Carl Jung—and use symbolic language.

[32] Paul Ricoeur, an influential philosopher in Winquist's work, said modern understanding, in connection with new ways of questioning reality had placed language (and life) in a state of "semantic deficiency."

[29][36] The experience of originality without origins and serious thinking without foundations keep us bound to surfaces that are the space and theater of meaning This is the process of life and language, but nothing superior in creation revealed to humankind, Yahweh, the Lord, Allah, Buddha is subject to the "controlling rules" of verification contemporary society demands ad nauseam.

[6] Both the self and God are eclipsed with the deconstruction of the ontotheological tradition, which Winquist explored in his study of Tillich as an analysis of those structures of being encountered in reality.

"[16] Winquist posited that illuminating, or satisfying, the becoming of the occasion was a kind of prehension to finding a structured order: an interaction of subject with event, or entity (the other), that concerned perception, but not always reliable cognition.

[8][37] This concept, presented in Winquist’s theological work, and actually grounded in empirical studies, suggested emotional states heighten memory retention.

[8] Winquist argued there is a life history of striving beyond the passage of actualities; emotional and objective understanding (the conceptional reality of the transcendental imagination), as well as subjective goals, and the primordial nature of God bring interpretive, foundational knowledge.

is a conceptual impertinence that is itself a trace of a forgotten moment of originating consciousness Some have argued Winquist’s work is purely academic, at least regarding his posthumously published, “The Surface of the Deep”.

The “falsification of experiences” that elevates one tradition over another demands an exploration on the nature of God, a pilgrimage that is fundamental to both epistemology and theology.