2. Queering God, Christ and the Church
2.1. (The) Desiring God
Queering is the continuous process of questioning and destabilizing notions that are taken for granted, thus rendering them ‘strange’ in a positive way that challenges our ways of thinking and inhibits the solidifying of contingent into absolute knowledge. Queering God then is to question notions of God as the patriarchal, omnipotent head of his bride the Church, as an unchanging homogeneous being, and the implicit acceptance of this idea of God as a model for human subjectivity with the consequent discouragement of diversity and multiplicity.[9] Knowledge is a means of power, and presuming to know God and through God the world is a means of disciplining God and the world, and especially those who do not reflect the ‘image of God’ as we think we know it (white, male, heterosexual).
[9] M. Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003), 54.
Queering is a mode of thinking that is not discontinuous with the tradition of reflection about God, but instead aims at turning it upside down in order to critique presumptions and open up new insights. Two traditional notions of thinking about God offer themselves for a queer reconsideration: the idea of God as relationship and of God as love. Traditionally, relationship is taken to characterize both God’s internal nature (the trinity) and God’s being as oriented towards relationship with human beings, a concept that allows for dynamic, shifting positions and queer constellations of lovers and loving. Yet in ‘straight’ theology, these relationships have fossilized and been inserted into the binary matrix of masculine and feminine subject positions with their respective expected ‘natures’ and heterosexual, penetrative relationships between the forth-going God-Father and receiving God-Son, the active triune God and the passive bride Church, the dominant male and submissive female. This heterosexual binary pattern of thought introduces a hierarchy within the trinity which contradicts Christian belief about the three divine persons as absolutely equal, and creates an idea of relationship as a violent taking or penetrating rather than mutual pleasurable enjoyment. A queer view of relationship might be helpful here, and in fact, when we discard our heterosexual lenses of seeing the world and instead put on queer ones, it turns out that God-as-relationship is very queer indeed: the trinity is a ménage-à-trois in which each person is passionately engaged with the other, and the relationship between God and human beings is promiscuous, polyamorous, as the divine being desires with passion all humans, men and women, many of whom would not be considered ‘desirable’ according to prevalent social norms.
The Asian-American queer theologian Patrick Cheng describes this indiscriminate, transgressive love which God is as radical love, and God’s revelation as an act of queer coming out: “God reveals Godself to us because God loves us and wants to share Godself with us.”[10] This radical love is queer because it dissolves boundaries and creates new possibilities: it crosses what is considered an absolute boundary between divine and human as God ‘comes out’ to humans up to the point of becoming human, and not just to any humans, but in particular to those at the margins, which is the preferred site of God’s presence, transcending thus the boundary between the powerful and the weak. And in making Godself known to humans, encountering humans in passionate, loving ways, without ever fully exhausting God’s mystery, God confuses the boundaries of what we know and how we know: not through affirmative statements, but through unknowing and unsaying in the apophatic tradition, even to the degree that the notion of God as radical love has to be questioned to make sure that it does not become limited to human ways of imagining even a love that transcends all love.
[10] Cheng, Radical Love, 45.
The queer experience of transgressive loving against social norms allows for new insights in God, not in the sense that God now finally has become known, but rather that God’s dynamic, transgressive love is the source of ever-new, ever-insufficient attempts at knowing, driven by a passionate desire that is, like all true passion, never fully sated.
2.2. Bisexual Christology
Cheng writes: “Jesus Christ is the boundary-crosser extraordinaire, whether this relates to divine, social, sexual, or gender boundaries.”[11] The transgressive, challenging character of queer thinking that makes ‘strange’ what we take for granted is embodied in Christ, but, as Althaus-Reid argues, Christ’s scandalous queerness has been covered up by heterosexual theology: dressed up in heterosexual clothes, Christ as the “Systematic Messiah is a Christ of clear limits and boundaries,”[12] the potent male lover of his devout bride, the church, the model of intersubjective hierarchical relationships. What would happen if we took these clothes away? What would happen, as Mark Jordan asks, if we removed the loin cloth that so carefully covers Jesus’ abdomen in most representations of the crucifixion? Why do we so carefully cover up Jesus’ genitals, even though the incarnation – God becoming human flesh – is the center of Christian faith?[13] What would happen if we let ourselves be guided by the ‘elusive fluidity of Jesus’,[14] the God/man who ate and laughed with prostitutes, who died and came back to life?
Queer theology is not just an intellectual game of conceptual boundary crossing, but also, and importantly, a doing theology that brings bodies and sexualities back into theology and draws on embodied desire, passion and intimacy as sources of theological critique and insight (maybe this is, for many theologians, the most troubling part of the disturbing transgressiveness of queer theology).[15] Jordan’s meditation on Jesus’ body does precisely this: it integrates the body – Jesus’ whole body, including his genitals – into his christological reflection and plays with the meaning of sexual desire in relation to this body. Theological silence about Jesus’ sex (both in terms of sexual identity and activity) has denied sex, made it shameful (something to cover up under a loin cloth, or best not even to represent, with the loin cloth covering a void) and mutilated Jesus’ embodied reality: this Jesus is not fully incarnate in his embodied, desiring reality, and thus our genital-ed, desiring, aroused bodies cannot be fully image of God.[16] To remove any hints of sexuality from representations of Jesus to discourage an erotic relationship with the divine works to impoverish both the fullness of the divine presence in the world and our own embodied reality as created, wanted and loved by God, even beyond death: “The erotic powers with which we were created were given not only for this world, hence not only for reproduction. They were given as instruments and enactments of intimate union. That union culminates in union with God.”[17]
Removing Jesus’ heterosexual clothes does not only uncover a fully human body, but also a way of being and engaging with others that defies the either/or logic of heterosexuality with its obsession with categorization and exclusive boundaries. Althaus-Reid captures this in the notion of the ‘Bi/Christ’, with bisexuality embodied in Jesus Christ not as sexual acts (of which we do not know anything), but as a way of thinking and being that is based in the logic of both/and.[18] For Althaus-Reid, a bisexual christology takes into account – and more, makes it its governing principle – the presence of those who do not fit the heterosexual logic. A bi-christology refuses to start with general principles or categories and instead lets itself be surprised and moved by those it encounters in their concrete reality in an attitude of solidarity, like Jesus did. As a pattern of thought that refuses the either/or of heterosexuality, bisexual christology questions hierarchies and encourages openness, creativity and discontinuity rather than closure and stability: ‘Bi/Christology walks like a nomad in lands of opposition and exclusive identities, and does not pitch its tent for ever in the same place.’[19]