QUEER DIVINITY

 

                                             

                                           Marcella Althaus-Reid

This is another excerpt from my book (in preparation) Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the Queer Struggle. 

CORRECTIONS COMMENTS OR SUGGESTED ADDITIONS WOULD BE VERY WELCOME

Applied Divinity

The queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952 -2009) sparked controversy with the books Indecent Theology and The Queer God (K. Cherry, 2023). She is famous for writing, in the year 2000, that ‘All theology is sexual theology’.

Althaus-Reid earned her first theological degree in Buenos Aires from ISEDET (Instituto Superior Evangelico de Estudios Teologicos). ISEDET is Latin America’s renowned centre for studying liberation theology, which emphasizes God’s “preferential option for the poor’. Althaus-Reid worked among the poor and the vulnerable, and in queer communities,.

In 2006, Marcella Althuis-Reid became the first woman to be appointed to a Chair of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She was a member of the advisory theological team in Metropolitan Community Churches and felt at home in MCC’s Edinburgh congregation, although she was formally a member of the Quakers and the Church of Scotland (COS). She wanted us to free ourselves from dominating constructs that keep us from knowing God... the goal is not to formulate one theology but to celebrate the diverse ways of knowing God.

While largely inflexible, Roman Catholicism concedes via its concept of successive divine revelation that ‘correct’ Christian teachings can evolve from century to century. The Holy Trinitarian Scriptures should not be regarded as inerrant, and for our neo-Calvinists and crass Evangelical Free’s to do so risks contextualising ‘what is right at the moment’ in the wrongs of the past.

Despite all the limp-wristed ‘clobberings’ from the pompous diehards, e.g. their crassly simplistic interpretations of the Creation Accounts and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, I see nothing in the Old or New Testaments to say that queer people aren't as acceptable to God as anybody else. The Creation Accounts are consistent with ‘Adam, Lilith and Eve’ and their relatives appearing in Eden from out of Africa and should be re-interpreted as such. See Schaffner (2022).

Tom’s Churches

My experiences in the institutionally corrupt Church of England, a much-less-than-Christian Evangelical Free Church in Madison, Wisconsin, the all-enlightening Integrity/Dignity of Madison, the profit-seeking, all-accepting Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Old Town, Edinburgh, the back-sliding South Edinburgh Quakers of Morningside, two contrasting churches in the neo-Calvinist COS, in New Town and Broughton, and the liberal-theologically enlightening St. Augustine’s United Reform Church on George IV bridge will all contribute to the content of this book.

Palm and Easter Sunday in the COS

A long-serving, gay and trans accepting COS elder from another parish advised me on Palm Sunday 2023 to the effect that COS is in a desperate, myopic, struggle for financial profit and self-survival due to decreasing congregation sizes, and in the meantime only gives token assistance to the population at large. He also told me that his minister had declined to celebrate gay marriages ‘simply because he (the minister) didn’t want to’.

Kittredge Cherry (2023).Marcella Althaus-Reid: Queer theology pioneer (Qspirit)

https://qspirit.net/marcella-althaus-reid-queer-theology/ Accessed 19 May 2023

Stephen Shaffner (2022) What Genetics say about Adam and Eve (Biologos)

https://biologos.org/articles/what-genetics-say-about-adam-and-eve Accessed 12 March 2023.