be described as an act of disobedience, as this fails to capture the total illustrative nature of the passage. The fall is both Adam and Eve’s rejection of the God within, or the unique queer individual they were created by God to be, in order to chase the false normative construction of God created by the serpent. This resistance reading of Genesis sees the rejection of the queer individuals God has created us to be as the original sin.4
The level of acceptance or rejection of queerness is best measured using the rubric of love. This rubric can be described on multiple levels based on six theological presuppositions.
First, to reject the Queer within is to reject God. To love the Queer within is to love God. Rejection of the Queer within leads to a rejection of the Queer in the other.
Second, to reject the Queer in the other is to reject the God in the other. To love the Queer in the other is to love the God in the other. Rejection of the Queer in the other leads to a rejection of the Queer in communities.
Third, to reject the Queer in communities is to reject the God in communities. To love the Queer in communities is to love the God in communities. Rejection of the Queer in communities leads to the rejection of peoples.
Fourth, to reject the Queer in peoples is to reject the God in peoples. To love the Queer in peoples is to love the God in peoples. Rejection of the Queer in peoples leads to the rejection of the Queer in the world.
Fifth, to reject the Queer in the world is to reject the God in the world. To love the Queer in the world is to love the God in the world. Rejection of the Queer in the world leads to the rejection of the Queer in the universe.
Sixth, rejection of the Queer in the universe leads to the rejection of the God in the universe. To love the Queer in the universe is to love the God in the universe. Rejection of the Queer in the universe begins with the rejection of the Queer within. Rejection of the Queer in the universe also leads to the rejection of the Queer within. To reject the Queer in the other, communities, peoples, the world, or the universe is to reject the Queer within.
A belief in the intersectionality of all things is vitally important to this construction of queer theology. Love of the Queer within and without begins with understanding the intersectionality of all things and seeking to love all things. Rejection is the antithesis of love, and to reject the Queer is not to love. To reject love is to reject God.
If the antithesis of love is rejection, then love itself can be understood primarily by the sacrifice of acceptance. It is important to note that it does take sacrifice to practice acceptance. To accept the Queer within, we must sacrifice the constructs of normativity that our minds are bombarded with every day through messages that try to convince us that who we are is not good enough. To accept the other, communities, peoples, the world, and the universe, we have to sacrifice the security of non-engagement or isolation. These acceptances are all interconnected. The more we are able to accept the world without, the more we are able to accept the world within. If you want to heal yourself, then you are going to have to love somebody. If you want to heal the world, then you are going to have to love somebody. Love begins and ends with the sacrificial act of acceptance.
In Mark 12:30–31, Jesus says that one should “love . . . God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength . . . You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” To love God, or the Queer, we must push past normative constructions about meaning and value in this life, which often deprive us of being the Queer within we were created to be. To love the neighbor as the self, we must sacrifice our hesitancy to accept or find the Queer within the other. We must value the Queer in the other as much as we value the Queer within ourselves. Jesus, in John 15:13, states, “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It seems that we cannot lay something down of our own accord unless we know what we are laying down. There is a need to know the Queer in order to give or sacrifice the Queer. One must know the self in order to give or sacrifice the self. In 1 Cor 13, Paul states, “the greatest of these is love.” In the end, though there will be other constructs remaining, love is the greatest. If 1 John 4:8 is correct and “God is love,” then love and God are inextricably linked. Love will always be non-normative or queer in a world of insecurity, violence, and hate. Love will be God, and the greatest measure of that which is queer is God. Queerness functions as that which powers love and, consequently, life. Fitting ways of talking about our experience of this amalgamation of divinity might be: Queer the universe, love. Queer the world, love. Queer your community, love. Queer your self, love. The mystery (or that which is beyond our normative explanations) explodes from the activity of love, which is the very queer creator or core of the universe.
Theologies are constructed from an individual point in time and should speak beyond time. Traditions and histories inform theologies, and this theology will be no different. I will begin the construction of this theology in a place of perfection and conclude in a place of perfection. Perfection, or eschatological hope, is at the core construction of this theology.
The Queer Theological Approach
To pursue holiness is to pursue Godliness. That which is holy is that which is most intimately connected to God. The Queer within is the image of the God who made us. Holiness is the pursuit of the Queer, or God. Queerness is a recognition and pursuit of the God within and without. Queerness and holiness are ultimately synonymous terms. Holiness is pursued and found from where you are—your context.
Since the beginning, theology has always been constructed in context. We speak from where we are. We are always seeking, wondering, loving, fighting, and dreaming from our own time and our location. We raise our voices to speak, to name who and where we are. We wander and grope in the darkness to find the God who made us. We love each other in hopes that we might touch something eternal and transcendent by sharing love. We fight for a more just world because we believe justice is possible. We dream of a world made whole because there is something in us that believes that once, in a faraway place, wholeness was real and perhaps wholeness might be made real again. In a world being slowly demoralized by oppression, those of us who theologize in context choose to believe that there is hope for our local and global community and for us. Theology is an exercise of contextual hope. We are not alone in our efforts, as the consistent incarnation of God in Jesus is the ultimate expression of the continual creation of contextual hope.
In Matt 25:35–36 and 40, Jesus makes it quite clear where the incarnational context of Jesus or God will always be: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you gave me clothing, sick and in prison and you visited me . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”5 In the context of the consistent denial of rights, the consistent hate crimes, the consistent religious violence, and other marginalizations committed against those we call non-normative or lacking in their ability to fit our categories or idealizations of acceptance, it seems quite obvious to me that queer folk, or those who defy normatized constructions, are indeed the least of these. The location of the Queer is where we need to go to find God and any constructions of theology that might follow.
In order to arrive at the place where we can look to the Queer to create theology, something must die—namely, rigid normative traditional concepts that are consistently used to oppress. I have often found that traditional concepts of God do not allow room for expressing humanity’s varied experiences of God. Death is not something to be feared, as I do not believe in death without resurrection; things die and create new life. God in Jesus gives up life so that life may be made full. There is a sense in which God is consistently giving and receiving life. The danger of traditional theologians is their unwillingness to open up to the possibility that God’s death and resurrection is the true path to loving acceptance of queerness in the self, each other, the world, and in the divine.
Theology must be contextual, but contextual categories can only take us so far
