Radical Love. Patrick S. Cheng
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Sources of Queer Theology
Where did queer theology come from? Did it just fall out of the sky? Was it an invention of LGBT activists? For many people, the notion of queer theology is an oxymoron, particularly in light of how traditional Christianity has condemned— and continues to condemn—same-sex acts and gender-variant identities as intrinsically sinful. However, in recent years an increasing number of theologians have written about queer theology, drawing upon a variety of different theological sources.19
Like all other theologies, queer theology draws upon at least four sources: (1) scripture, (2) tradition, (3) reason, and (4) experience. This multiplicity of sources is important because, on the one hand, theology has never been simply about reading the Bible literally (that is, scripture) nor simply about what the church authorities have taught (that is, tradition). On the other hand, theology has never been simply a matter of drawing upon philosophy (that is, reason) nor has it simply been equated with the human experience of the divine (that is, experience).
Rather, theology is a synthesis of all four sources, and each of these sources acts as a “check and balance” for the other three. Of course, different traditions give different weight for each of these sources. For example, evangelical Protestants rely heavily upon scripture, Roman Catholics rely heavily upon tradition, Anglicans rely heavily upon reason, and progressive Protestants rely heavily upon experience. But it is important to realize that each of these sources must still be read in light of the other three. Let us now turn to each of these four sources in the context of queer theology.
Queer Scripture
First, queer theology draws upon scripture—that is, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (also known as the First and Second Testaments)—in creative ways. Although scripture (and, in particular, the handful of “texts of terror”20 for LGBT people) traditionally has been used as a means of oppressing LGBT people, queer biblical scholars in recent years have not only countered these antiqueer readings with alternative readings, but they have also “taken back” or “reclaimed” the Bible by interpreting it positively and constructively from their own perspectives.
For example, take the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, which has been the paradigmatic story for God’s punishment of same-sex acts. In that story, two angelic visitors stay overnight in the town of Sodom. However, the lawless men of Sodom demand that the visitors’ host, Lot, turn the visitors over so that they may “know” them. The visitors escape along with Lot’s family, and God destroys Sodom and its sister city, Gomorrah, with fire and brimstone.21
Although the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been interpreted traditionally as evidence of God’s punishment of LGBT people, queer biblical scholars have argued that the story is actually a condemnation of the sin of inhospitality toward strangers, which had life or death consequences in the harsh desert environment of the biblical world. This is evidenced by the descriptions of Sodom and Gomorrah elsewhere in the Bible (for example, Ezekiel 16:48–49), which focus on inhospitality instead of same-sex acts.22
Ironically, some LGBT theologians and ethicists such as Nancy Wilson and Kathy Rudy have “queered” the Sodom narrative by placing hospitality at the center of queer theological reflection. For example, Wilson has constructed a “queer theology of sexuality” by focusing on the gift of “promiscuous” or “bodily hospitality” that many LGBT people have.23 Rudy, an openly lesbian ethicist at Duke University, has suggested that nonmonogamous sex acts—including anonymous and communal sex—can be viewed in terms of a progressive ethic of hospitality.24
Much has been written about the debate over the meaning of the half-dozen or so LBGT “texts of terror” in the Bible, and I will not rehearse those arguments here.25 However, it is important to note that queer theologians have gone beyond these “texts of terror” and have read the Bible in creative and constructive ways as a means of affirming LGBT experience.26 For example, Nancy Wilson has argued that LGBT people can be found in a number of biblical narratives—including David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, the Roman Centurion, the Ethiopian Eunuch, and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus—which she refers to as “our gay and lesbian tribal texts.”27
In 2006, over thirty LGBT religious scholars, ministers, and writers contributed to The Queer Bible Commentary, which was the first queer commentary on all the books of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation. As the preface states, the commentary shows that biblical texts have the “ever-surprising capacity to be disruptive, unsettling and unexpectedly but delightfully queer.” Furthermore, the contributors employed a wide range of hermeneutic approaches, including “feminist, queer, deconstructionist, postcolonial, and utopian theories, the social sciences, and historical-critical discourses.”28
Other examples of using scripture as a positive source for queer theology include: Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel; Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible; The Subversive Gospel: A New Testament Commentary of Liberation; Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible; Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible; When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics; and The Word Is Out: Daily Reflections on the Bible for Lesbians and Gay Men.29 By engaging with scripture from our unique social locations, queer people are able to articulate more clearly how the Word of God has touched us, and how we in turn can “talk about God” from an authentically queer perspective.
Queer Tradition
Queer theology draws upon tradition—that is, church history as well as the teachings of the church over the last two millennia—in creative ways. As in the case of scripture, Christian tradition usually has been seen as being uniformly anti-queer. However, in 1955 Derrick Sherwin Bailey, an Anglican priest, published the groundbreaking historical study Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, which for the first time challenged the traditionally negative view of the Christian theological tradition toward LGBT people.30
Bailey’s book was followed twenty-five years later by Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, a groundbreaking work by the late John Boswell, an openly gay history professor at Yale University. Boswell argued that Christianity was not uniformly homophobic throughout its early history and that it only became significantly homophobic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.31 The book was incredibly influential and even generated a collection of essays on its impact on religious scholarship.32 Prior to his death in 1994, Boswell published Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which argued that same-sex blessing rites existed in the Christian church for centuries.33
In addition to Boswell, other scholars have reexamined the Christian tradition from the LGBT perspective. These include Bernadette Brooten, a religious studies professor at Brandeis University, who wrote about female homoeroticism in early Christianity—an issue that was largely overlooked by Boswell— in Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, and Judith C. Brown, who documented the story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a lesbian abbess in sixteenth-century Italy, in Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.34
Finally, a number of LGBT scholars have reexamined the work of classical theologians from a queer perspective. These include Mark D. Jordan, an openly gay theologian at Harvard Divinity School, who examined the work of medieval theologians such as Peter Damian and Thomas Aquinas in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Jordan concluded that the theological term “sodomy” was invented by medieval theologians as a result of their fear of the pure erotic state (that is, sexual pleasure without any connection to biological reproduction) and thus created a category by which such a state could be condemned unequivocally by the church.35
Such scholars also include Virginia Burrus, a professor of early church history at Drew University, who has read early Christian stories of saints from a variety of interpretive lenses, including queer theory, in The Sex Lives