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GLBT Theology: A Travelogue and Personal Reflection by David Weiss

Message for the Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa, March 30, 2003

Good morning.

Thank you for inviting me to be here today. And a special thanks to Lynn Bowman, a student of mine at Luther College whose good words about me to her mother, Kathy, led to the invitation that brings me here today.

The theme of my message this morning will be “GLBT Theology: A Travelogue and Personal Reflection.” I’ll begin by briefly explaining my connection to GLBT Theology and then I’ll turn to the substance of my thoughts in which I’ll offer an overview of the basic insights of GLBT theology and conclude with a few personal reflections.

Most of us, if we are honest, take pretty meandering routes to where we wind up later in life, and my route to GLBT Theology meanders quite a bit. I won’t tell you the whole story, but, given the ironies of language, I need to say at least this—as much as my route meanders, it is also straight.

So I speak about this theology as something of an outsider. I do not identify myself as gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered. But as a straight man I have journeyed with wonder, appreciation, and gratitude across the landscape of this theology. And perhaps as a straight person, I can help articulate the promise of this terrain to others in the church.

My connection to this theology is through these people. Beginning in high school and college, but particularly in seminary, graduate school, and into my first teaching position at Luther College, I came to know enough gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons well as friends that it became impossible for me to consider them—or their love—opposed to God’s good will.

As a theologian, it then fell to me not simply to say, “I just know it’s okay,” but rather to do the study, the reflection, the thinking, the writing, and the speaking to help others see why this could be so.

Ultimately, I entered their land, so to speak, for three reasons, all quite humble. First, as a friend to many, I wanted to be able to better explain them to the rest of us. Second—and perhaps more urgently—I also did this to be able to better protect them from the rest of us. And third, because it seemed there were gay, lesbian, bisexual, and ally students at Luther anxious to visit this theology themselves, and they needed someone to guide them. So I became their guide to the theology—and they became my guide to the lived experience.

“Us” and “them” are clumsy words. Too easily divisive, but sometimes descriptively honest and inevitable. So let me warn you that while such words are often used to put “us” at an advantage over “them,” when I resort to these words, by “us” I mean we straight persons who have caused so much suffering and grief for those not like “us.” When I say “them,” I mean those whose “not-straightness” has made them sexually, culturally, socially, and religiously “the least of these” among whom Jesus pledges to be found. There is no privilege in my “us”; there is usually a tone of confession.

G-L-B-T. Letters can be as clumsy as words. The course I taught at Luther was titled “Gay & Lesbian Voices in Theology” the first year I offered it. But in the teaching itself I learned how important it is to hear oneself named, so it eventually became “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Voices in Theology” which was shortened to a variety of more practical nicknames. Some students called it “Pink Theology,” a colorful name, but also more “G” than “BLT.” Some felt comfortable calling it “Queer Theology”; others felt quite put off by that term. I use the shorthand phrase “GLBT Theology” which succeeds in “naming” everyone, but admittedly does so only by reducing everyone to a letter.

How might I sum up the central convictions of GLBT Theology? Well, to begin with, it is multivocal and evolving.

It is multivocal in that that are many voices within it, and, perhaps in direct response to its own experience of being rendered voiceless for so long, there is a general tendency to allow differing perspectives to sit side-by-side without feeling an urgency to adopt one “orthodox” position.

It is evolving in that this is relatively young theology, still unfolding at a pretty fast pace. Perhaps the most noteworthy turn in its evolution is the shift from “apologetic” to “constructive” ventures. I mean by this that in its early years, at that point primarily gay and lesbian voices, it had little choice but to engage in apologetic theology—that is, to defend with words the very right of gay and lesbians Christians to have a theological voice at all. Such theology is limited by the demands of the majority—the “us”—and therefore spends most of its energy addressing the skeptical questions put to it by those with power. Eventually, as more voices were added and more creative energy built up, GLBT theology announced, in effect, “we have better things to think about than the narrow worries of straight Christians, so we’re going to set our own agenda from now on.” This marked the move from apologetic theology to constructive theology.

Within the multiple voices and in the course of its evolution, some patterns have emerged. I’ll mention six of them. While my list is just that—my list of patterns that strike me, I think most persons would say it is true to the terrain.

Let me list the six basic patterns I see, arranged in two sets of three central convictions. Then I’ll consider each one in turn.

1. an affirmation that God hopes for human flourishing.
2. a declaration that theology is always political.
3. an embrace of incarnate experience as fundamentally trustworthy.

1. a rejection of authoritarian power in favor of relational power.
2. a commitment to the value of this world;
3. and a deep suspicion about any salvific role ascribed to suffering.

The first claim, that God hopes for human flourishing, hardly seems controversial. But, as you’ll see, when linked to the other claims it becomes a revolutionary assertion.

Politics, in its truest meaning, names the communal venture of organizing our life together. It may or may not have to do with political parties and elections; it may or may not have to do with formal models of government. But politics inevitably has to do with the patterns by which power is held, shared, transferred, and withheld among a group of people.

Often this notion of politics has simply been reduced to the endorsement of the status quo. It has meant little more than “the way we do things” or “the way God wants things done.” But in the latter half of the twentieth century, GLBT persons, along with a whole array of marginalized persons have said, “No, wait. Politics is not divinely instituted, it is humanly chosen. It is up for debate.” And for centuries it has been woefully misshapen by the monopoly on power that white straight men have claimed and have preserved for themselves.

And this imbalance in communal power has often been preserved with theological sanction. Our language about God inevitably shapes the way we view and value the world. And we have by and large imaged God as a white male, all-powerful and sexless. This has both reflected and reinforced communities in which white men are the most privileged, and in which white male sexual appetites are merged—from movies to music to locker rooms—with the ideal of being all-powerful. Sex becomes conquest . . . and conquest becomes eroticized.

Hence, to say that theology is political is to say that power relations in any given community overlap with the way God is discussed—and it is to suggest that any legitimate discussion of the God who hopes for human flourishing—and not simply the flourishing of humans who happen to be white, or male, or straight—must include those voices traditionally silenced and dismissed. This leads to the third claim: that incarnate experience is fundamentally trustworthy.

The first step in securing the oppression of GLBT persons, the move that allows “us” to silence “their” voices and erase “their” lives, is the move that says, your experience of who you are is untrustworthy. It is, honestly, a message that most persons in the mainline churches get from their earliest days, but it troubles few persons as much as it does GLBT persons. I learned as a boy growing up, that the Bible and the Church knew more about goodness than my own experience could convey . . . but because both church doctrine and biblical texts have been almost exclusively the work of straight white men, their experience has often had at least a passing familiarity to my own.

Persons of color, women, and the poor have had a struggle similar to GLBT persons because they, too, have had to recognize that the sources of authority in the Christian tradition came out of experiences in which poverty, color and femaleness were noticeably absent. I won’t argue here over which absence is most primal—they may well be interdependent—but the starting place for GLBT theology is here because until you can challenge the claim that dismisses the very life you live, you remain complicit in your oppression and have no foothold from which to challenge it.

In this awareness, GLBT theology inherited from liberation theology (theology done from the viewpoint of the economically oppressed) an appreciation for the epistemological privilege of the poor. Epistemology is the discussion of how we know. It is the determination of what counts for trustworthy knowledge. What liberation theology re-discovered about the biblical portrait of God was that God repeatedly is particularly available to and known by the poor and the marginal. Despite the fact the most theology was done by those with the privilege of education and that most church positions were held by those with the privilege of power, according to the biblical narrative, the privilege of knowing God was somehow especially available to the poor. Not because their poverty made them virtuous, but because a God who hopes for human flourishing is inclined to be most actively present in those places where flourishing is most needed.

The result is the simple but strident claim: “I matter. My life matters. My body matters. What I know, in my own experience, as deep joy matters. What I know, in my own experience, as betrayal and alienation matters.”

This is not to say that all experience is equally revelatory. It is not to say whatever feels good in the moment must be of God. But it is to say because God hopes for human flourishing (and any God who does not hope for this is not worthy of being God), and because theology is political (because it is always implicitly a discussion about who deserves power and how they will receive and hold it), therefore my experience (simply because it is human) lies potentially within the hope of God—and must be heard.

From these three interwoven claims, three more follow.

First, a rejection of authoritarian power. Within GLBT theology there is a widespread affirmation that God is known in profound experiences of power shared in common with others, often referred to as “power-with” rather than “power-over.”

This affirmation—grounded in experience—challenges a view in which God is seen as all-powerful and argues instead that God is all-relational. That God’s “godness” is not a function of singular power but of universal presence.

It also calls into question the notion that Jesus—and Jesus alone—was God incarnate. Instead, much GLBT theology suggests that all humans have a capacity to manifest divine presence. Jesus did so with astonishing clarity, but to make his humanity uniquely divine supports an institutional structure in which clergy become his representatives and the holders of his delegated authoritarian power. In looking at the record of his lived life GLBT persons see instead a clear practice of relational power, one which resonates with the moments of deep goodness in their own lives.

This rejection of authoritarian power also shapes the way that GLBT theologians approaches the biblical text. It is, for most of them, still authoritative—it has a historical priority, but it is not authoritarian. It is a text of theology—of human talk about God— and as such it is political, and it is shaped by the power relations of the human community that produced it. Hence, it can—and must—be argued with whenever its words fail to reveal the God who longs for human flourishing.

And finally, this rejection of authoritarian power means that within GLBT theology the realm of sexual ethics is grounded not in hard and fast rules but in the honoring of relational integrity. There are perhaps few places where GLBT theology is more diverse than on questions of ethics, but overall I think it is fair to say that abusive power is rejected, safe vulnerability is prized, fidelity is measured by honesty and integrity, procreation is affirmed as the care of creation in all its forms rather than merely the begetting of children, and sexual pleasure is claimed as one of God’s best gifts.

How any particular relationship or behavior is assessed morally is not a matter of finding the right rule; it’s a matter of looking carefully at the character of the relationship itself.

Second, the affirmation that bodily experience is potentially revelatory—rooted in the claim that embodiment is a gift from God—leads to a commitment to the value of all bodies and thus to the value of this world. GLBT theology recognizes that an unbalanced commitment to the next world has the predictable consequence of consoling those who hunger for justice here with the promise that they will get justice there—and thereby quietly condoning injustice here, since “here” is only a temporary place of relative value. Never mind that those who do the condoning often are the indirect beneficiaries of injustice in the meantime.

So GLBT theology, which may vary widely in its claims about the next world, is unstinting in its affirmation of the importance of this world. Justice matters now. And while that may begin in the recognition that they themselves are discriminated against, excluded, bashed, killed because of injustice, GLBT theology is increasingly vocal in claiming that justice is a seamless garment, that racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice are all essential aspects of human flourishing. At this point GLBT theology often goes “queer.”

“Queer” has historically served as a term of contempt for GLBT persons. In its original meaning, queer means to “foul up,” and to call a GLBT person queer was to say that they “fouled up” what it meant to be human. They spoiled the ideal. In recent years, GLBT persons have claimed this word as theirs to wield with pride. Not unlike the “black is beautiful” movement, to be queer and proud is to deny the oppressors symbolic use of language as a weapon against you.

But beyond this, when GLBT awareness, whether faith-based or not, becomes driven by a political vision that includes the flourishing of all, then to be “queer” is to actively seek to “foul up” the systems that perpetrate and perpetuate injustice. To be “queer” is to be subversive in a society where oppression is all too common on all too many fronts. To be “queer,” in this sense has less to do with one’s bedroom activities than one’s intentional work for justice in the wider world.

This leads me to the last pattern I want to highlight. When GLBT theologians look to Jesus they see someone who was supremely queer. In his healing on the Sabbath, his table-turning parables, his fellowship with women, his feasting with outcasts, they see a life determined to subvert the oppressive forces of society because of his vision of an all-welcoming God. And when they see this, it becomes clear to them that Jesus’ death is not a sacrifice offered to God to pay the debt of human sin; it is the violent reaction of a society determined to maintain the status quo against the threat of grace. Hence, GLBT theology tends to downplay or outright reject the notion of a sacrificial death by Jesus. He was killed because he was queer, not because God needed innocent blood.

This theological move is also rooted in lived experience. When the dominant theology portrays a God willing to shed innocent blood through violence for the sake of redemption, it is all too easy for the institutional powers that claim to speak on behalf of God to decide where else blood must be shed to preserve that redemption. So infidels are massacred, pagan savages are slaughtered, witches are burned, Jews are marked for extermination, blacks are lynched, ... and gays are bashed. Because GLBT persons have seen the destructive power of a theology of redemptive violence aimed at them, their own experience tells them this is a dangerous myth to entertain, and one that it is time for Christians (and others who hold it in different forms) to put to rest.

Well, that is a whirlwind tour of GLBT theology. It is amazing terrain, with many a nook and cranny we haven’t even peeked at. I encourage all of you to visit there for yourselves. As I conclude it would be presumptuous of me, a Lutheran (a bit unorthodox, yes, but still a Lutheran) to imagine that I can tell you, either individually or as a Unitarian Church what this theology has to offer you. You can do that far better than I, and I hope my message this morning will inspire you to have that conversation for yourselves.

I will close simply by mentioning three particular gifts that this theology has offered me.

First, It has echoed many of my own theological intuitions, and in so doing it has helped me further define and shape my own theological voice and the foundations of my own ethical discernment. I am not GLB or T, but I am queer—deeply committed to challenging oppression and to creating justice—and GLBT theology has helped deepen and nourish that conviction.

Second, it has reminded me that God speaks in many places—including some that have been marked “off limits” by church and society. This invites me to remember that the only limit to God’s freedom is God’s grace. The last word uttered by God may well surprise us, but it will not fail to welcome us.

Third, and perhaps most personally, my sojourn with GLBT theology has encouraged me to listen with supreme care—and in the good company of others—to the echoes of truth in my own experience and in my own body. Without question both my spirituality and my sexuality are infinitely richer on this account. I have learned that in this inspired flesh, gifted by the presence of God in both my ache and my ecstasy, I am indeed at home. That is revelation, my friends. Where I come from we call it “Gospel”—news that is astonishingly good.