Radical Love. Patrick S. Cheng
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has examined the themes of seduction and confession in the work of Augustine of Hippo in Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions.36
By reclaiming the Christian tradition, these queer scholars have located the LGBT experience squarely within the history and teachings of the church. As such, we are able to draw upon this work as a source for constructing our own theologies.
Queer Reason
Queer theology also draws upon reason—that is, our ability as human beings to observe the world and use philosophy to know God. Traditionally speaking, this source of theology assumes that God can be known by observing nature and the created order. For example, Thomas Aquinas’ famous five proofs for God are derived from the principles of reason.
Traditionally speaking, reason has not been seen as a queer-friendly source of theology. This is due in large part to the Roman Catholic view that nonprocreative sexual acts (including same-sex acts) are always intrinsically evil as a matter of natural law. However, the Roman Catholic theologian Gareth Moore challenged this traditional view in his book A Question of Truth: Christianity and Homosexuality. According to Moore, the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church must ask itself whether what it teaches is actually true. Is it really true that all same-sex acts and relationships are intrinsically evil? Is it true that all LGBT people are unhappy and poorly adjusted? Is it true that same-sex acts and relationships do not occur naturally in the created order?37
The truth is that, contrary to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, there are hundreds of animal and bird species in the natural world that engage in same-sex acts or gender-variant behavior.38 Furthermore, there have been numerous Roman Catholic bishops, priests, members of religious orders, and laypersons who have come out of the closet and written about their experiences as LGBT people.39
After reviewing the scientific evidence, Moore concludes in his book that the “only rational course at the moment” is to “continue to believe in the possible goodness of homosexual relationships.” For Moore, this is not a question of dissent, but rather the fact that the Roman Catholic Church currently lacks any sound arguments upon which its condemnation of same-sex acts can be based. That is, “the church teaches badly.”40
In addition to challenging the traditional natural law arguments about the intrinsically evil nature of same-sex acts,41 queer theologians have increasingly drawn upon reason in the form of poststructuralist philosophy—that is, queer theory— in constructing their queer theology. Queer theory rejects the traditional view that categories of sexuality (that is, homosexual vs. heterosexual) and gender identity (that is, female vs. male) are “natural,” essentialist, or fixed. Instead, as articulated in the work of theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, queer theory argues that the meanings of such categories are socially constructed.
This is not to deny that there are in fact physiological differences between people in terms of sexual attraction and bodies. These differences do exist. Furthermore, this is not to deny that sexuality and gender identity can effectively be immutable characteristics for many people and thus are deserving of legal protections akin to race. However, the significance of such differences in terms of sexuality and gender identity is not simply a matter of “nature,” but rather is socially constructed. As noted above, even though people may differ in terms of, say, hat size, that particular physical marker of difference has little to no relevance in everyday life. Similarly, there is no reason why a person’s genitalia must automatically determine everything from hair and clothing styles to preferred color (for example, pink vs. blue) to family role to career choices. It is important to understand that the spectrum of behaviors normally associated with an individual’s birth-assigned sex are actually a matter of a social convention that is constantly changing.
Queer theologians have used queer theory to challenge not only the fluidity of sexual and gender boundaries,42 but also the boundaries relating to Christian theology itself. These boundaries include the divine vs. human, soul vs. body, life vs. death, heaven vs. earth, center vs. margins, and numerous other boundaries that are dissolved or erased by radical love as we approach the eschatological horizon. Indeed, Christian theology is, as I have suggested, fundamentally a queer enterprise.
Finally, queer theologians—and especially queer theologians of color—are drawing upon other forms of reason and philosophy, such as a postcolonial theory, in their “talk about God.” The language of postcolonial theory is especially effective in terms of dealing with issues of hybridity and intersectionality (that is, the multiple social locations of sexuality, gender identity, sex, race, and other identities) and the power dynamics between and within various identity groups.43
Queer Experience
Finally, queer theology draws upon experience as a source for theology. As in the case of other contextual theologies, queer theology is premised upon the belief that God acts within the specific contexts of our lives and experiences, despite the fact that LGBT lives and experiences have been excluded from traditional theological discourse. Indeed, queer experience is an important—if not critical—source for doing theology from a queer perspective.
In recent years, there have been a number of anthologies of the voices of LGBT people of faith, including From Queer to Eternity: Spirituality in the Lives of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People; Recreations: Religion and Spirituality in the Lives of Queer People; Queer and Catholic; and Sanctified: An Anthology of Poetry by LGBT Christians.44 These anthologies are helpful sources in terms of articulating experience as a source for queer theology.
Queer theologians of all backgrounds and perspectives have used experience as a source of theology. For example, Robert Shore-Goss has written provocatively about his erotic love for Jesus in constructing a queer christology. Shore-Goss tells us that, while a novice with the Jesuits, he imagined a “naked Jesus as a muscular, handsome, bearded man.” Shore-Goss wrote that, later on, during “passionate lovemaking, I felt Christ in a way that I only experienced in my solitary erotic prayer.”45
Carter Heyward, an openly lesbian theologian and professor emerita at the Episcopal Divinity School—and one of the first female priests in the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion—has written about finding God in her sensual and embodied connection with nature while walking with her dogs. She writes that, in observing the “trees’ gnarled roots at the water’s edge, the wind-chill whipping my cheeks, the pile of dog shit I step in, the crows harping from the fence, the joggers and other walkers,” she knows that her sensuality is her “most common link” to the rest of the earth and “can be trusted.”46
Laurel Dykstra, an openly bisexual theologian and member of the Catholic Worker movement, has written about how, as “a Canadian living in the United States, a bisexual person, [and] a theologically educated lay person,” she is always living in “in-between spaces.” As such, her sexuality and spiritually are closely connected. Indeed, Dykstra’s in-between experience actually helps her to “live and love joyfully and defiantly, like Jesus embracing the glorious ambiguity and refusing to be held by purity codes, gay or straight.”47
Finally, Justin Tanis, a self-identified transman and ordained Metropolitan Community Church minister, has written about how his theological work arises out of the intersections of his personal experiences as a “transsexual person” and his “professional life as a clergyperson.” Tanis described how his calling in terms of gender was “remarkably familiar to me; it was like my experience of discerning a call to the ministry.” Like his vocational call, the journey of transitioning for Tanis was a “journey to authenticity, a deeply spiritual process.”48
By writing about their experiences of encountering God within their particular social contexts, each of the above queer theologians have shown that experience is a central source for “talking about God” and doing queer theology.