the God within and without. We must realize that context comes from the individual, and therefore theology must spring from the individual. Genesis 1:27 purports that we are created in the very image of God. This means that every human being is a unique reflection of God. It is important to state that God is black. It is important to state that God is brown. It is important to state that God is a lesbian. It is important to state that God is intersex. It is important to state that God is disabled. It is important to say all of these things and more because the individual is important. Constructions of shared identities can help us to understand God, but we must push further. We need to push to a place where we can discover the source of the whole of humanity by championing the uniqueness of the individual so that we may proceed to a place of community constructed in difference. There is something uniting and guiding us, something that draws each of us deep within the self so that we might discover the creator and sustainer of the universe.
There is a need for sacrifice and death in order that we might find the uniquely non-normative source and sum of the entirety of all uniquely non-normative creations. It is irreparably harmful to say that God loves someone but hates a core biological part of who they are. It is divisive and unhelpful to argue that a certain identity characteristic makes one superior to anyone else. No matter the source, words of oppression are shallow and have never made sense. There is a deep need to create a theology that celebrates the unique dignity and worth of all people as individuals so that unique individuals can come together to create honest community. I am interested in a theology that can speak to a woman I met not long ago. She was the product of four different races—her mother was of Mexican and Japanese descent and her father was of Irish and Ghanaian descent—and she also identified as a lesbian. When I told her that I was a pastor, she asked me bluntly, “I have wondered my whole life, where do I fit?” One of the great tasks I seek to accomplish in this project is creating a theology that allows such a woman to be the unique, non-normative creation of God she was born to be in her context. I believe if God is near and here in the diversity represented in every individual, then surely God must be queer.
A resurrection of theology requires a willingness to deconstruct and let die traditional and modern concepts that do not allow room for the Queer, or God. New constructions and ways of thinking must give way to experimental constructions of hope and promise. In the gospels, Jesus consistently deconstructs the egotistical religion. Jesus takes things even further by placing the center of spiritual life outside the normative gates, squarely in the midst of those people a society of boundaries has left out, marginalized, and oppressed. We must stand with Jesus against efforts to divide and disenfranchise by firmly creating theology that upholds the inherent worth of each individual at their core. I am simply no longer comfortable using the same constructions of theology that were used to lock out, deny communion, and brutalize those people deemed out-of-bounds or non-normative by our churches. The theological resurrection I have experienced continues to come in the presence of a God who dares to be queer by God’s very nature and calls us to the same.
Precursors Descending
The theological question of the meaning of the individual as context and source in relation to God descends from a long line of non-conformist theologies and thoughts. In the following study, I will not only show that my line of questioning and constructivist queer theology is not new, but also that it aligns with tradition in challenging non-normativity. In other words, I will attempt to illustrate what I understand my intellectual lineage to be in the construction of this project. I will begin in Ecclesiastes and end in modern queer theology and theory.
“I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind» (Eccl 1:12–14). The words of Ecclesiastes describe the existential crisis that plagues the minds of humans who seek meaning in the world and find only wind. In fact, the entire canonical book of Ecclesiastes is filled with individual speculation and striving for meaning. The canonical book of Job is a description of the search for meaning in the midst of suffering in the early Jewish existential tradition. These two books present scriptural examples and descriptions of the constant struggle to know whether or not the individual is able to connect meaning to God, the other, or the self.
Many centuries later, Søren Kierkegaard began to explore the meaning of existence and faith in the midst of futility. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard consistently describes the need for a leap of faith or love to overcome the cyclical nature of existential thinking. Faith becomes the way out, but faith is difficult to come by. The leap takes a concentration on both the inward and the outward.6 In section 125, “The Madman” of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims,
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?7
Nietzche’s response to Kierkegaard might have been that the task or leap of faith is impossible in the modern age. For Nietzsche, life itself was the ultimate revelation of the futility of life and that God was indeed dead.8 The juxtaposition and struggle between the inward and desire for the outward, however one describes either construct, is foundational to the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
The main premise of Martin Buber’s I and Thou is that humans find meaning in relationships. There are two primary categories of relationships: first, our relationships to objects, and second, our relationship to that which is beyond objects. In order to experience God, one must be connected to the immanent and the transcendent. Buber provides much room for a theology that is connected to the individual and that which is beyond the individual.9 Along with Buber, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time posits that the questioning of the self and the ultimate is at the root of human nature.10 Throughout his works, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that there is no creator, or thou, and “we are condemned to be free.”11 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that being is foundational and nothing else. Buber, Heidegger, and Sartre combine to illustrate the importance of consistently questioning relationships as the essence of being—both the relationship to the self and the relationship or lack thereof to that which is beyond.
Paul Tillich wrote of the courage to be. Being was Tillich’s fundamental theological and philosophical construct. For Tillich, there was something supreme about having the courage to exist: “Being can be described as the power of being which resists non-being.”12 Tillich also described God as the God above God.13 In the theology of Tillich, the being is consistently important, and any experience or connection to a semblance of God happens from the being or the context. In 1961, Gabriel Vahanian published The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era. Vahanian proclaimed that God was dead to the modern secular mind and that God needed to be reimagined or resurrected. Vahanian and the other theologians of the Death of God movement created much theological room for theologians to reimagine God. The Death of God movement and the highly contextual ideas of Paul Tillich combined to inspire the creation of liberation theologies from oppressed and marginalized populations that flowed from context.
In Black Theology and Black Power and A Black Theology of Liberation, James Cone uses his own experiences and the wider experiences of African-Americans to create a theology that posits that God is always most closely described by and connected to the marginalized and the suffering. In these works, Cone pushes the idea that God is black. Later, in God of the Oppressed, Cone argues, “What could Karl Barth possibly mean for black students who had come from the cotton fields of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, seeking to change the structure of their lives in a society that had defined black as non-being?”14 For Cone, previous constructions of theology and God were unable to speak to the needs of African-Americans,
