Claim texts that condemn homosexuality all are ‘misunderstood’
(Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash)
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By John Murawski
Real Clear Wire
For centuries it was conventional wisdom that the Bible condemned homosexuality as sinful, and sanctified marriage between a man and a woman. But queer theologians have been chipping away at this assumption for decades, and today’s acceptance of gay marriage and queer sexuality is in some measure due to their efforts and their success in recasting the Bible as a queer-affirming text.
In recent decades, progressive theologians have worked out elaborate arguments to demonstrate that what they term the classic “texts of terror” censuring homosexuality are misunderstood today because they would have meant something totally different to their original audiences.
his critical approach to reassessing Biblical passages, known as “queering” – which stresses Jesus’s role as an anti-colonialist revolutionary who surrounded himself by the sexually marginalized and others rejected by society – can even go even further to suggest that the apostle Paul and Jesus’ disciples may have been gay, or that ancient Bible stories subvert the gender binary and validate queer identities.
Queer theologians are not positing plausible alternatives to traditional interpretations of the Bible; in the spirit of German theologian Martin Luther and other revisionist scholars, they say they are recovering the original, true meanings of the sacred texts.
“That is the correct way of reading the Scripture,” said Cheri DiNovo, bisexual minister of Trinity-St.Paul’s United Church & Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts in Toronto, a congregation in the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. “All that we’re doing in all these liberation movements is recovering our biblical basis.”
DiNovo, who performed Canada’s first legal same-sex marriage in 2001 and authored the 2021 memoir, “The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale,” said that the Bible sanctifies a broad spectrum of human love and family structure, from same-sex attraction to polyamory.
DiNovo can be viewed on an online video queering various “texts of terror” and interpreting other stories that validate the queer experience. One of the common examples she cites is the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, which purportedly shows that the very first Christian convert was a gender-nonconforming person of color, and indicates that the church was a welcoming queer community at its inception.
“Now, how did the eunuch convince Philip to baptize them?” DiNovo posits, referring to the first-century eunuch by a nonbinary pronoun. “By knowing their Bible and quoting Scripture at Philip. Lesson for all of us.”
In the words of queer theologian, author and minister Robert Shore-Goss, the queerness of the Bible is not a social construct or willful interpolation; it comes directly from the divine source.
“God is more akin to queers, the sexual outlaws who break cultural codes of decency and sexual restrictedness,” Shore-Goss wrote in 2021. “God is a ‘faggot’, for God creatively pursues the conception of Jesus outside the bounds of vanilla religiosity.”
“The pervert Jesus lacks middle-class respectability, male and heterosexist constructions of authoritarian, patriarchal and heteronormative Christianities,” Goss wrote.
These arguments make no dent on conservative Christians, who see queer theology as a vain exercise in sophistry to twist sacred writings into saying the opposite of what was intended.