The New York Post recently reported that Dr Michael Banner, a dean at the University of Cambridge in the UK, defended a junior research student who claimed in a sermon that Jesus Christ had a ‘trans body’.
Joshua Heath, who was working on his PhD dissertation under the supervision of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, speculated in an Evensong sermon at Trinity College chapel that the non-erotic portrayals of Jesus’ penis in historical paintings suggest that possibility.
In addition, Heath pointed out to the congregation that the spear wound on Jesus’ side ‘takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.’
Heath suggested that ‘In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest is the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body.’
The New York Post reports that
Heath’s homily during the traditional Anglican service left many in attendance, including children, ‘Visibly uncomfortable’, according to an anonymous congregant who fired off a complaint letter to Banner. Shouts of ‘Heresy!’ reportedly rang out in the church as incensed worshippers left in disgust.
What Heath has attempted to do with his interpretation of historical paintings of Christ, however, is just an instance of the radical hermeneutics that queer scholars and theologians have been developing for many decades.
What is queer theology?
In his book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (2011), Patrick Cheng suggests three ways in which queer theology can and should be understood.
Firstly, the term queer in this context must be seen as a kind of umbrella concept that refers to non-normative sexualities and gender identities: lesbian, gay, trans*, intersex, questioning, and others.
Secondly, queer must also be understood as indicating a theology which challenges and overturns accepted conventions and the status quo. It is a theology which turns what is received as normative ‘upside down, inside out’. And thirdly, the ‘queer’ in queer theology indicates the erasure of all boundaries.
Queer theology is therefore deconstructionist in the sense that it seeks to call into question and demolish settled accounts of Christianity and especially of Jesus in order to discover afresh – in its radical and subversive re-construction – something ancient that has allegedly been forgotten or buried. As the great disciple of Jacques Derrida (the father of deconstructionism), John Caputo, explains, the aim of deconstructing Christianity is:
to sketch a portrait of alternative Christianity, one that is as ancient as it is new, one in which the ‘dangerous memory of Jesus’ is still alive – deconstruction being, as I conceive, a work of memory and imagination, of dangerous memories as well as daring ways to imagine the future, and as such good news for the church.
Queer theology is a form contextual theology. It displays many family resemblances to other contextual theologies such as liberation, feminist, and post-colonial theologies. It draws heavily from queer theories that have emerged in the social sciences, whose origin can be traced to the work of Teresa de Lauretis in 1991.
QUEERING JESUS
Queer theologians accuse institutionalised Christianity of colonising female bodies, queer bodies, and disabled bodies, alongside all sorts of non-normative, non-binary, and non-white bodies. Their quest is to radically deconstruct and subvert this oppressive orthodoxy.
In a similar vein, queer theologians also accuse traditional Christianity of weaponizing Jesus. They challenge the uncomplicated, privileged, racist and heterosexist portrayals of Jesus by white, heterosexist Christianity by suggesting iconoclastic and insurgent alternatives.
In queering Jesus, these theologians sought to reimagine him in the light of their own experiences of marginalisation, discrimination and oppression. Like them, the Jesus of their imaginings is an ‘outsider’. But it is precisely because Jesus is an ‘outsider’ that he may now be regarded and remembered by queer Christians as ‘one of us.’
Mirror images of such an approach can be found in the many versions of liberation theology where Jesus is portrayed as the poor, the oppressed, the Dalit, and as the one who stands in solidarity with the politically oppressed, economically exploited and socially and culturally marginalised masses (minjung).
Many queer theologians claim to be following in the footsteps of Jesus himself in their transgressive hermeneutics and radical reconstructions. They allude to Luke 23:2 where the chief priest made this charge against Jesus when he delivered him to Pilate: ‘We found this man perverting (diastrephonta) our nation.’
They argue that Jesus was crucified by the authorities precisely because of his perverse teachings and religious convictions. As queer theologian Robert Shore-Goss puts it: ‘LGBTQI theologians, Christians, and artists rightly see Jesus the pervert, with whom they can identify, as persecuted and murdered by empire and co-opted religion.’
Queer theologians seek to fashion Jesus after their own images – to reinscribe him, as it were, from their own queer orientation, sensibilities and lives.
In her book provocatively entitled Indecent Theology (2000), the late Marcella Althaus-Reed – one of the most prominent voices in LGBTQI+ theology – proposes a Bi-Christ, a Christ beyond dualisms, who undermines the cis-gender Christ of the old orthodoxy and who is the example par excellence of gender fluidity.
Christ’s gender fluidity is read into the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples in the upper room (John 13:1-17), which, according to queer exegetes, is an act that is associated with a female slave. As Shore-Goss explains:
Jesus’ gender fluidity of performing a female/slave action in washing the feet of his disciples and his performance as a drag-king threaten Roman imperial power built on masculine conquest and the ethno-masculinist ideologies of the nationalist high-priestly party.
Queer theologians have also created a female Christa – a Xena Christ – who challenges all the conventional boundaries. In her essay entitled ‘Sexuality and the Person of Christ,’ Lisa Isherwood describes the leather-clad Xena Christ thus:
A leather princess hanging on a cross, declaring love for the woman she loves. This is a queer Christ indeed, one that challenges images on many levels. She is not passive, she is leather and dyke. She is courageous and transgressive just as Jesus of Nazareth was. She is the sort of Christ that women need, one who will free them from preconceptions.
PERVERTING CHRISTIANITY
Queer theology is therefore concerned with the radical reimagining of Christianity that would inspire perverse insurrections that challenge the heteronormativity and cisgender orthodoxies of traditional Christianity. As the subtitle of Althaus-Reid book Indecent Theology indicates, queer theology is about ‘theological perversions in sex, gender and politics.’
The idea of perversion looms large in queer theology. Here, perversion does not refer to sexual perversion in the Freudian sense, but to deviations from prevailing norms and accepted conventions. Thus, as we have seen, for queer theologians, Jesus is held up as the pervert par excellence.
Queer theology is therefore about the perversion of Christianity – the liberation not only of the people in the margins who are oppressed by its heteronormative theology, but the liberation of Christianity itself from destructive biases.
Occasionally, queer theologians get carried away with their criticism of traditional Christian theology. Consider Althaus-Reid’s outrageous critique of the alleged phallogocentrism (a term coined by Derrida) in traditional theology:
Traditionally, theology has seen the world as coming from God’s dissemination which has been represented by the Highest Phallus men could conceive of: the Word of God. Systematic theological thought has been made by those forceful seminal disseminations and their discursive reproductive powers. Christian issues of humility and submission to God come from that premise; the ejaculatory movement of the Word of God requires an immobile receptacle, such as the Virgin Mary, for instance. However, there are many varieties of sexual positions which Systematic Theology has not considered yet.
As we have seen, Queer theology unapologetically begins with the experiences of the LGBTQI+ community. It can therefore be associated with the modern and postmodern ‘turn to the subject’. It is an anthropocentric theology which begins with the specific experience of the people who belong to or identify with that community, and evaluates the doctrines of God, Christ, humanity, etc through those tinted lenses.
Consequently, traditional understandings of the basic Bible passages upon which the Church establishes its teaching on homosexuality are challenged and overturned. For example, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not homosexual acts, but inhospitality.
In the same way, queer scholars have sought to provide a different narrative of the Church’s attitude towards homosexuality and homosexuals. For example, in the celebrated Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (whose 35th Anniversary Edition was published in 2015, twenty years after the death of its author), John Boswell argues that the early Christians were not generally homophobic – that attitude only emerged in the 12th or 13th century.
Queer theologians also try to excavate queer representations in the Bible. For example, queer exegetes see queerness in the relationship between Ruth and Naomi, between David and Jonathan, and between Jesus and his beloved disciple, John.
CONCLUSION
Needless to say, queer Christianity is inimical to biblical and historic Christianity.
The insurrectionist hermeneutics of queer theology is clearly not informed by the doctors of the Church: Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas and Luther. In fact, in its view, these are the very theologians who are responsible for the heterosexist Christianity which it rejects.
Instead, queer theology is fundamentally shaped by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.
In priding itself as a form of contextual theology, queer theology has dismissed the fact that authentic Christian theology must also always be catholic and orthodox. Starkly put, queer theology is informed and nourished by traditions that are foreign to historic Christianity (Cf. Colossians 2:8). As such, it is a grave departure from the ‘faith that was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 1:3).
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.