Gay eroticism and power: Queer exegesis in the Christian tradition

Cathcon:  Arguments such as these mark a complete rupture with Christian tradition. The use of the word tradition in this context is a rhetorical conceit. The last paragraph is particularly provocative.

There is much discussion about how the Holy Scriptures deal with sexual minorities. Queer exegesis asks for stories and models beyond heteronormative patterns. In an interview with katholisch.de, theologian Andreas Krebs explains how this is how the Church tradition is carried on.

Not least through the Synodal Way and the #OutInChurch initiative, the significance of sexual diversity in faith and church is being discussed. How does it look in the Bible? Andreas Krebs is Professor of Old Catholic and Ecumenical Theology and Director of the Old Catholic Seminary at the University of Bonn; queer theology is one of his research topics. In the interview, he talks about tradition, queer points of contact and criticism of Biblical passages.

Question: Mr Krebs, as far as we know, the Bible was written by heterosexual cis men for people in an extremely patriarchal system. Why then queer exegesis?

Krebs: Today we live in a time of social change. People live in opposite-sex and same-sex partnerships. Some discover that the terms "man" and "woman" do not fit them and call themselves non-binary. There are people with bodies that combine female and male sexual characteristics who resist the pressure to change this medically. Likewise, there are people who seek medical help because their gender does not match their body. I see this change, the increased awareness of different identities and needs, as progress - also from a Christian perspective. At the centre of Scripture is the command to love strangers and neighbours, in both the Old and New Testaments. But of course this change also challenges us: Against this background, what do we do with our biblical tradition, which is indeed very heteronormative and patriarchal?

Question: What perspectives does a queer view of exegesis add?

Krebs: On the one hand, we have to learn to read Biblical texts critically, that is, to be sensitive to the fact that they very often take the perspective of men who rule over other men, women, children, people of other genders and slaves. We should not simply adopt this perspective uncritically. We should also have the courage to say that there are Biblical texts that we actually have to reject and reject today. The story of Sodom is an example of this. It is often used to condemn homosexuality. The point is that the inhabitants of Sodom want to rape Lot's guests, who are read as men but are actually angels. Lot knows how to prevent this by offering his own daughters for rape (Gen 19:8). How could such a text be used to say that consensual homosexuality is a sin? That is obviously not what this text is about. And more importantly, how could one even refer to this horrible story without distancing oneself, which should make one's blood run cold? Feminist Biblical scholar Phylis Trible has called such texts "texts of terror" - and so we may and should look at them today.

Andreas Krebs is Professor of Old Catholic and Ecumenical Theology and Director of the Old Catholic Seminary at the University of Bonn. Queer theology is one of his research topics.

Question: So it's about a re-evaluation.

Krebs: Yes. But the process of re-evaluating old texts is not new as such. Even in the Bible itself, texts react to each other, contradict each other, straighten something out, set a counterpoint. Luther advocated the principle: "Scripture explains itself". By this he meant that the Bible was understandable by itself. The Amsterdam School took this principle further in the second half of the 20th century by formulating: "The Bible criticises itself." When we read the Bible today in a gender-sensitive way and come to critical attitudes, we do not do so with a standard that would be external to the Bible, but we do so ultimately against the background of the commandment of love, which we owe to the Bible itself. It is not a matter of stepping out of the Biblical tradition, but of carrying it forward. It helps that Biblical texts are strongly influenced by hetero-patriarchy, but not always completely determined by it. If you read carefully, you will also discover voices that point in a different direction. Moreover, a point of Biblical texts often lies in their ambiguity, in their openness to meaning. In this openness of meaning, queer perspectives can also find a resonance.

Question: Do you have an example?

Krebs: One example is the interpretation of the Biblical verse that is often claimed for classical gender dualism, namely Genesis 1:27. In the past, it was translated: "God created human beings as male and female." In the new Einheitsübersetzung it says more precisely: "God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them." The words "male" and "female" can be used - like the underlying Hebrew words - for humans and animals. So it is precisely not about the social roles of "man" and "woman", but about a very physical reality that we share with animals. And of course people already knew back then that there were humans and animals whose bodies had "ambiguous" sexual characteristics. Therefore, there is something to be said for saying that "male and female" is to be understood as a so-called merism - as a linguistic figure that occurs frequently in the Bible and that refers to two poles of a spectrum. In this spectrum, there are other possibilities between and beyond "male and female". The creation story also speaks of day and night, but no one denies that there is such a thing as twilight.

Question: The very fact that we are now talking about such an abstract verse shows that when it comes to queer life concepts and self-images, the material is extremely thin.

Krebs: The material is also extremely thin when it comes to heterosexual life plans and self-images as we know them today. In the Old Testament, polygamy is taken for granted, and even in New Testament times, marriage was by no means a consensual community of two equal persons. The biblical texts come from a completely different world! Nevertheless, if you look very closely at a verse like Genesis 1:27, for example, they sometimes have surprising things to tell us. We can also learn a few things from the Jewish interpretation of Scripture. Some rabbis actually used Genesis 1:27 as an opportunity to think about other genders "in between" male and female, for example about "androgynes" or people with invisible or undeveloped sexual organs called "tumtum". Others speculated that the first human being created by God had been "male and female" as such, i.e. "androgynous", and that the separation into two sexes had only taken place later, when God took the woman from the side of the first human being. From this, in turn, certain traditions - which were effective beyond Judaism, for example, also in Christian pietism - concluded that redeemed humanity had to be "androgynous" again. You can see from such examples: Today we are often stuck in interpretive traditions that make Biblical texts even more hetero-patriarchal than they are or have to be on their own. It can be a gain of exegesis to discover that there are already contrary tendencies in the Bible itself and in the history of its interpretation that we can make fruitful today.

Question: What can this look like? Queer role models in the Bible are rare. There are David and Jonathan, for example, who have a very close relationship. "Jonathan loved David as his own life," it says, for example (1 Sam 18:1). Doesn't queer exegesis then interpret a bit too much into this?

KKrebs: Well, actually one has to say that the standard exegesis has continued to interpret this for a long time. If you look at the older commentaries, you can see that the erotic dimension of this relationship is often systematically denied and its political character, for example, is given priority. Heteronormative readings could pull out a thousand reasons to claim that this relationship had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with eroticism. Today, on the other hand, there is a broad consensus that the language used to tell the story of David and Jonathan is very much erotic - which is not at all contradictory to the fact that the story has political aspects at the same time. But of course it must be said that the relationship between David and Jonathan is very different from how same-sex relationships are lived today. But isn't it still legitimate to connect today's experiences of homosexual partnerships with it? In this way, we bring Biblical stories into conversation with the reality of our lives today, in other words, we engage in a living interpretation of Scripture. Anything else would relegate the Bible as an ancient text to the museum. On the other hand, to see ourselves as believers in an ongoing narrative, that includes letting the old texts speak in new contexts; that already takes place within the Bible, and it has always taken place in the post-Biblical tradition. This can be done in a transparent and honest way by keeping in mind the similarities and differences between past and present life worlds.

Question: On the other hand, there is already a decidedly homophobic interpretation of Scripture in the Bible, for example when the Apostle Paul uses the Leviticus passage: "You must not sleep with a man as one sleeps with a woman; that would be an abomination" (Lev 18:22) against homosexuality.

Krebs: I do not believe in minimising homophobic statements in the Bible. As I have already explained with the example of the Sodom story, we can and must refer critically to such texts. Basically, statements like the one you mention do not refer to consensual homosexuality. At that time, sexuality was almost always interpreted in the context of power asymmetries. This applies equally to heterosexual and homosexual sexuality, by the way. That's how people thought in antiquity, and Paul does the same.

Question: These are all very basic considerations of queer exegesis. What topics are currently being discussed in this area?

Krebs: For a long time, queer theology was a very Western and white affair. However, the queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid countered this relatively early with a Latin American perspective critical of colonialism. In the meantime, a broad and lively discourse has emerged on how different forms of discrimination - homophobia, transphobia, sexism, xenophobia, racism - intertwine. There are also interesting discussions about the experiences of trans* people. In Galatians Paul writes: "There is no longer Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3:28) The "male and female" spoken of in the first creation account is negated and surpassed here! The theologian Elizabeth Stuart therefore assumes that the completed humanity will be genderless. Christians are obliged to see gender as something that has no meaning in the end. For many trans* people, however, gender is not meaningless at all; on the contrary, they suffer when they are assigned a gender that is not their true gender. Elizabeth Stuart says to this: Trans* persons must nevertheless, if they want to be Christians, engage in a relativisation of their gender identity. But isn't that arrogant, to disregard an existential experience of certain people like that? I am much more sympathetic to a thought by Ruth Heß: she refers to another passage in Paul where he speaks of us being given a body of our own kind when we are raised from the dead (1Cor 15,39-42). Ruth Heß thinks that this could also apply to our genders; we would thus be resurrected into a physicality that would also make us appear as gender beings completely in our respective individuality - more than is possible in this world. No eschatological uniformity as in Stuart, but a genuinely pluralistic image of hope! And an interesting debate - which also reflects discussions in society as a whole.

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