On Tonstad’s Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics
To answer important questions like “How can Christianity be queered?” and “What does queer have to do with theology?”, Linn Marie Tonstad offers Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics to the contemporary conversation surrounding modern theology and queer theory. Tonstad endeavors to offer digestible interpretation and practical analysis to a complex and evolving field; rightfully placing emphasis on the perils of a linguistic categorization process and it’s formative influences on culture. Drawing from a myriad of influential scholars, Tonstad’s text accomplishes much and places her firmly in the ranks of expertise among those who seek to address issues that perpetuate minoritizing attitudes to relegate individuals and identities from the workings of religious dialogues and social society.
The first part of the book clarifies the scope of the discussion and Tonstad’s aim to broaden traditional approaches of this field from mere apologetics to argue for solutions (not just negotiations) towards reaching a fully inclusive and fundamentally transformative practice. She confronts assumptions we may have about queer theology and lays a foundation to understand how some of the basic structures of enlightenment knowledge have built dichotomies that are historically contingent and not as static as we see them today. Unseating what we think we know about gender and sexuality becomes an important step to the summary arguments of Tonstad’s text; suggesting a more flexible approach to the LGBTQIA labels that may be acting as an acceptance half measure while still ill-defining identities that do not fit these labels. She assesses the field as we see it in order to bring to light some of the ways the current entrenched debate has become unproductive.
The second part, Apologetics Strategies, is a collection of the common ways to approach contested grounds between queer identities and Christian theology. She examines the ways that apologists have approached text in order to find queer space in the gospels. Assessing the position of the Church as the bride of Christ and what implications this may have for limiting or guiding gendered perspectives of God or Christ. She addresses transformation utilizing biblical texts, drawing insights from the eunuchs of the bible. Jesus’s radical inclusion is juxtaposed against the Apostle Paul. Further discussion broaches the boundaries/binaries transgressed by the very nature of Christ; inclusive of his precarious genealogy and birth from a woman. Christ was divine and human, material and immaterial, god and man. In perhaps the most compelling debate, she considers food and circumcision topics which led to Roman’s account and Paul’s proclamation that “all food is clean” leaving each to discern for themselves what is unclean for themselves. Culminating in a discussion about judgment. Each argument founded but not lost in exegesis. Tonstad’s ability to deal with apologetics so knowledgeably lends to her sharp assessment that these approaches are limited and failing on their own to offer solutions.
Tonstad considers Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the U.S. case protecting a right to federal same-sex marriage as a case study to use as a back drop to critique the ways in which we deal with issues of queer identities. She suggests strategies in divergence from naturalization which suggests binaries are static formations that are natural and essentialism which suggests an inherent quality to gender and asserts that gender is culturally dependent and tends to exclude from it’s presumptions those that fall outside of dominant normative positions. Justice Kennedy’s contribution, however liberating, offers insight into the ways in which enlightenment thinking has depicted those who are worthy of rights, dignity, and state protection… leaving those not fitting descriptions outside of endowed recognition. This again, draws attention to Tonstad’s underlying implications that classification and binary thinking can never be entirely inclusive.
The next chapters approach the liberation and feminist theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s work as well as that of Karl Marx in an intersectional discussion that draws insight from economics. For Marx, religion eschews the ways in which the “intolerable is made tolerable”; this insight pairing well to Althaus-Reid’s materialist views that elucidate the social processes that “make real” or solidify reality from misordered dogmas. Structures such as economic systems build power maintaining gender and race forwarding inequalities, however, Althaus-Reid does not seek to reorganize the existing power structures for inclusion but rather, to critically approach the ordering system itself that perpetuates these problems. Tonstad suggests Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology as a path for queer theology.
Final applications of the directions queer theology has in the future discuss the queer ecotheology of Jacob Erickson, the blackpenecostal breath of Ashon Crawley, and lead a conversation between the work of Bersani and Brintnall as to body positivity and healthy sexuality in Christianity. Tonstad asks, “Can Christianity be queer?” answering in the discussion of this book the many ways in which it already is, highlighting her main positions that: “1) Christianity is queer because it is about strange intimacies and transgressions of binaries; 2) Christianity is queer because it is about radical inclusion and love; 3) Christianity is queer because it is strange.”.
The strengths of this text follow a paradoxical balance between adherence to a structured academic critique based on well founded and supported argumentation and a call to radical deconstruction of social orders (arguably those that support the primacy of argumentation and reason in academia itself). Perhaps deconstructing is the only way to appropriately reconstruct the thinking that enforces power structures informing and forming our perceptions of subjectivity and society as a whole. However abstract, this appears Tonstad’s main goal to suggest that working within these misunderstandings is not yielding productive conversations because we are using the wrong assumptions to inform them. A volume such as this introductory collection has little room to expand or fully engage with the scope of complex abstract thinking such as Althaus-Reid but brilliantly utilizes her work, among that of other scholars such as Judith Butler, to give the reader (presumably her students) a contribution to complete the complex picture she’s painting of a vast and variable field.
Going “beyond apologetics” as a practice, suggests a motivated outcome for theology and queer theory that is beyond academics allowing it’s valuable contribution to reach beyond the bookshelves and into the lived reality Tonstad devotes her endeavor towards. Questions arise as to the diversity of responses that may be received to a work such as this, as theology (like queer identity) exists in many forms. Further, social processes that influence subjectivity, cultural hegemony, and even institutional church authority are multifaceted and influenced in a diffuse pattern that also makes discussion of deconstruction difficult as the identified factors are enmeshed with others with variable power during given periods. For instance, the institutional church had authority that some would argue mass media has today showing a shift in underlying power that changes the way in which religious knowledge is disseminated and understood among individuals. If we are to practically address the ways in which identities can be liberated from dichotomies, perhaps, we first must discover from which institution the formative power is flowing. Tonstad’s survey and insight into Queer Theology is powerful and the most readable abstract text I’ve encountered. She is an imaginative thinker with ethical purposes that surely will impact and further understanding in this field.
Tonstad, L. (2008). Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics. Cascade Books.
