liberation of the self comes through the liberation of the poor. Gutiérrez pushes the idea that God is poor. In her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Mary Daly uses ideas of a divine feminine to reimagine God. For Daly, to say that God is masculine is blasphemous. Through race, class, and gender, Cone, Gutiérrez, and Daly sought to create a God who truly was incarnate in “the least of these.” In the coming decades, many other theologians followed suit, daring to believe that liberation would be found in naming their people as the contextual center of God.
In 1968, Anglican priest H. W. Montefiore published a controversial essay entitled “Jesus, the Revelation of God.” In this essay, Montefiore argues that Jesus’ celibacy could have been due to homosexual leanings and that this might provide further evidence of Jesus’ consistent identification with the outcasts and the friendless.15 Troy Perry published The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay in 1972. This apologetical text describes Perry’s experiences in founding the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches and argues for the full inclusion of the broadly defined gay community. Also in 1972, Howard Wells, pastor of Metropolitan Community Church of New York, wrote a provocative essay entitled “Gay God, Gay Theology.” Wells asserts that gay people have a right to God and declares the liberating redeemer to be our “gay God.”16 In 1980, in the seminal Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, John Boswell argues that homophobia was not a part of the early church and that the church should accept gay people for who they are. Montefiore, Perry, Wells, and Boswell all represent the early stages of formulating a queer theology, and those who followed would bring a high level of diversity.
Carter Heyward’s Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God, published in 1989, draws on contextual embodied experience to declare that God not only is present in the romantic relationships of women with each other, but also exists in the very physical sexual acts two women share. In 1990, Robert E. Goss set forth a similar liberation-based theology around gay and lesbian identity in Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. Though Goss uses queer language in Jesus Acted Up, it would not be until the publication of his Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up in 2002 that Goss would fully explore queer theory within queer theology. Marcella Althaus-Reid took queer theology in a more indecent and systematic direction with the publication of her work Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics in 2000. The text discusses masturbation, erotic scents, sexual encounters, and much more with the idea that both God and theology are happening in these moments. Althaus-Reid does much to take queer theology in a broader direction through indecency. Patrick Cheng posits that the objective of queer theology is to challenge binaries and boundaries in his 2011 work, Radical Love. Through the radical love of God, Cheng argues that all boundaries should be dissolved. Cheng’s recent books, From Sin to Amazing Grace: Queering Christ (2012) and Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality, and Spirit (2013), push further the idea that a God of radical love eliminates boundaries, though Cheng still seems to be very connected to classic language of identity and binaries. For Cheng, love is the unifying force in the universe. From Heyward to Cheng, a broadening of queer theology has taken place. I would like to broaden it further beyond prescribed identities, binaries, and borders to the space of the queer individual.
I have found some of the writings of Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldúa to be helpful in describing where I intend to take this project. Anzaldúa writes in This Bridge We Call Home,
Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement—an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.” Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.17
I have found the space that Anzaldúa calls nepantla to be similar to the space I call queer. I feel like this is the space where all individuals are: somewhere between. The easily labeled normative binaries, dichotomies, and dualisms always fail, but when we dare go to the spaces between, we find the space of transformation, and this is also where we find the self and God. Thus, it is from my own nepantla, or queer space, that I write.
The Epiphany of the Queer
I developed a queer hermeneutic based on an understanding that human beings are created to be uniquely queer in the image of a God who is queer and also that resurrection comes through the discovery of the Queer within. I will explore the theology that flows from the use of such a hermeneutic from the pages of Genesis down through the present. Through exploration of the Queer in context, I will illustrate the presence of the Queer in a variety of individuals and contexts. The Bible and human history both reveal the overarching nature of the Queer within and without. I intend to explore the Queer or God in five parts.
The words within the “The Queering” give voice to my mystical experiences of the Queer. Using the developed queer hermeneutic, I intend to explicate moments when I have seen the Queer and encountered the power of God in my own queerness. Visions of love and the Queer have liberated me, and it is important to allow this queer hermeneutical theology to interact with the contextual realities where I discovered it. This space of queerness has served as a launching point for me to discover the God or Queer within myself. The experiences of the Queer within have granted me the ability to create a queer hermeneutical theology. I pray that interacting with the discovery of my queerness will help others discover their own queerness. Upon traversing the meaning of my own discoveries, I intend to bring this queer hermeneutic to consequence on the Scriptures.
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