Queer Christianities

Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms

Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Mark Larrimore, Michael F. Pettinger, Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Mark Larrimore, Michael F. Pettinger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781479896028
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479851812
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Queerness and Christianity, often depicted as mutually exclusive, both challenge received notions of the good and the natural. Nowhere is this challenge more visible than in the identities, faiths, and communities that queer Christians have long been creating. As Christians they have staked a claim for a Christianity that is true to their self-understandings. How do queer-identified persons understand their religious lives? And in what ways do the lived experiences of queer Christians respond to traditions and reshape them in contemporary practice?

Queer Christianities integrates the perspectives of queer theory, religious studies, and Christian theology into a lively conversation—both transgressive and traditional—about the fundamental questions surrounding the lives of queer Christians. The volume contributes to the emerging scholarly discussion on queer religious experiences as lived both within communities of Christian confession, as well as outside of these established communities.



Organized around traditional Christian states of life—celibacy, matrimony, and what is here provocatively conceptualized as promiscuity—this work reflects the ways in which queer Christians continually reconstruct and multiply the forms these states of life take.

Queer Christianities challenges received ideas about sexuality and religion, yet remains true to Christian self-understandings that are open to further enquiry and to further queerness.

PART I

Celibacies

Celibacy was long the most prized among Christian “states of life”—indeed, the paradigmatic state of Christian life, distinguished from pagan and Jewish practices. It may seem today no more than an anachronism, a pathology haunting the Christian traditions, but as the chapters in this part suggest, such a judgment would be premature.

Like “Matrimonies” and “Promiscuities,” the title of this part invokes a traditional term ripe for queering. “Celibacy” abuts other terms and forms of living, including chastity, abstinence, asceticism, and asexuality, and raises questions of nonsexual eros and mystical sex. It is the only form of sexual life many churches permit their queer members. All these people might be bothered by our pluralizing insistence—not “celibacy” but “celibacies”—that the meaning is neither obvious, unitary, nor stable.

The chapters in this part set out to complicate received understandings of celibacies from historical and contemporary experience. David G. Hunter traces the unlikely emergence of celibacy as the ideal of religious life in the earliest Christian centuries and marks its queer potential. Lynne Gerber explores the equally unlikely emergence of celibacy as an ideal in our own time, in communities of Evangelical “ex-gays,” and finds these new forms of life destabilizing modern Protestant ideals of heterosexual marriage. Anthony M. Petro assesses the possibility and significance of “queer Christian celibacy” for a secular queer politics, finding it to have a far more transgressive potential than may at first appear. Finally, Sister Carol Bernice speaks as a contemporary queer Christian celibate, the quiet eloquence of her reflections on her life demonstrating the inspiring power of consummated experience.

In our time no less than in times past, what sounds most orthodox in theory can prove the queerest in practice.

1

Celibacy Was Queer

Rethinking Early Christianity

DAVID G. HUNTER

Sometime early in the fifth century in the Egyptian desert near Scetis (modern Wadi El Natrun), a prominent spiritual teacher known as Amma Sara was approached by two desert monks. In an effort to test the old woman, they warned her not to become conceited because male ascetics came to her for spiritual advice and counseling. Amma Sara remained undaunted. “According to nature I am a woman,” she replied, “but not according to my thoughts.” On another occasion Amma Sara spoke to her male disciples even more pointedly about her female spiritual authority: “I am the man; you are the women.”¹

This anecdote helps to illustrate the central argument of this chapter: that the practice of celibacy among the early Christians can properly be considered a form of “queer Christianity.” “Queer” is used here in one of the senses delineated by Patrick S. Cheng, that is, to refer to a transgressive form of religious life, especially one that is “transgressive or opposed to societal norms, particularly with respect to sexuality and gender identity.”² Amma Sara, by virtue of her ascetic behavior—the renunciation of sex, marriage, property, and all the other features of “normal” human life—attained a level of spiritual discernment that enabled her to adopt a “male” role in ancient monastic society. This inversion of gender roles was just one of several ways in which the early Christian practice and theology of celibacy “queered” traditional social norms. The early Christian exaltation of celibacy as the ideal of human behavior profoundly devalued marriage and procreation and subverted the traditional patriarchal household as the bedrock of civic and political life. In the course of rationalizing and defending celibacy, early Christian writers developed new notions of human “nature” that decentered binary categories such as “male” and “female” and relegated all sexual activity (heterosexual as well as homosexual) to an ancillary, even “unnatural,” aspect of the human person.³ Such transgressive practices and discourse deserve to be called “queer.”

The Origins of Christian Celibacy

Celibacy in one form or another has been practiced in most of the world’s religions. If we want to understand its specifically Christian meanings and functions, we must take a closer look at its historical emergence within the web of beliefs and practices that constitutes ancient Christianity. A good place to begin is the following statement from a prominent bishop of the early fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea, a noted historian, apologist, and biographer of the first Christian emperor Constantine. Writing in his apology, The Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius characterized the two modes of life prevalent in the Christianity of his day:

Two ways of life were thus given by the law of Christ to His Church. The one is above nature and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, child-bearing, property nor the possession of wealth, but wholly and permanently separated from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone in its wealth of heavenly love! And they who enter on this course, appear to die to the life of mortals, to bear with them nothing earthly but their body, and in mind and spirit to have passed to heaven . . . . Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life.

After thus characterizing the “perfect” life of the celibate Christian, Eusebius turned to “the other more humble, more human” way:

[This] prompts human beings to join in pure nuptials and to produce children, to undertake government, to give orders to soldiers fighting for right; it allows them to have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more worldly interests as well as for religion . . . . And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them . . . so that all people . . . have their part in the coming of salvation, and profit by the teaching of the Gospel.⁴

Eusebius’s statement was virtual orthodoxy in the early fourth century: celibacy was a heavenly way of life, as vastly superior to marriage as heaven was to earth. Celibate Christians find themselves embraced in a “heavenly eros,” as Eusebius put it; by dying to earthly life, they anticipate the life of the resurrection. In contrast to married Christians, whose hearts and minds were fixed resolutely on earth, the celibate enjoyed a foretaste of heaven, where, as Jesus said, they would neither marry nor be given in marriage (e.g., Matthew 22:30). This “virtual orthodoxy” of Eusebius became actual orthodoxy by the end of the fourth century, when a monk named Jovinian was condemned as a heretic for rejecting this hierarchy of “states of life.”⁵ Only in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century do we find Christians once again seriously challenging the idea that celibacy was the ideal form of Christian life.

It seems odd that Christianity should have developed such a positive emphasis on celibacy. Jewish tradition, out of which early Christianity emerged, was not, by and large, sympathetic to celibacy. The Jewish scriptures affirmed the goodness (even the necessity) of procreation, and early rabbinic tradition interpreted Genesis 1:28 (the injunction to “increase and multiply”) as the first of the commandments. Sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament affirmed the permanence of marriage and rejected traditional Jewish allowance of divorce and remarriage. Citing passages from Genesis, such as “God made them male and female” (Genesis 1:27) and “the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), Jesus is said to have declared: “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mark 10:6–9). Jesus’s prohibition of remarriage after divorce, which was echoed in Paul’s teaching as well (cf. 1 Corinthians 7:10), eventually became the basis of the traditional Christian notion of a sacramental bond of marriage that persists until the death of one of the spouses.

Despite this affirmation of the permanence of marriage, other tendencies emerged in early Christianity that favored celibacy. Most notable of these was the apostle Paul’s discussion of the topic in his First Letter to the Corinthians, a passage that became fundamental to all later Christian reflection on marriage and celibacy. Paul was no extremist. He argued that Christians who were married should continue to have sexual relations with each other, although the reason for this permission was rather grudging: “lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:5). He also allowed that unmarried Christians might marry, although, again, his rationale was essentially a negative one. If the unmarried and widows cannot exercise self-control, they should marry, Paul writes, “for it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). The reason for Paul’s preference for celibacy, it seems, was his expectation that Jesus would return shortly, that the dead would be raised, and that the entire cosmos would be transformed into the kingdom of God. In view of this impending crisis, it was best for all Christians to remain in the state of celibacy or marriage in which they found themselves (1 Corinthians 7:26). Even those who had wives, Paul urged, “should be as though they had none” (1 Corinthians 7:29).

Paul’s teaching had an enormous impact on subsequent Christian tradition. In later times, when the expectation of an imminent end of time had faded, Christians looked back on his words as a paradigm for all time and not just for an interim. Paul’s view that a lack of self-control was the only real reason to marry suggested to many later Christians that marriage was only for the weak and self-indulgent. Moreover, neither Paul nor Jesus said anything about procreation as a legitimate purpose of sex or marriage. Removed from their original context, Paul’s words sounded like a simple declaration of the superiority of celibacy over marriage, rather than a provisional ethic in place until Jesus returned in the Second Coming.

Given this ambivalent legacy, it is not surprising that Christians in the second century displayed divergent views on the matter of celibacy. The mainstream or “orthodox” position seems to have been that marriage was permissible, though usually only once and only for procreation. Christian apologists, such as Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, and Athenagoras of Athens, articulated this strict moral position in the hope that non-Christian critics would stop believing rumors about Christian orgies and would accept Christians as exemplars of a self-controlled way of life.⁶ But a number of Christians took a more radical view and repudiated sexual activity altogether. The view that celibacy was required of all Christians was held by some Gnostic Christians, as well as by the followers of Marcion and a Greek writer from Syria named Tatian. Marcion believed that an inferior and immoral Creator-God had produced the world, not the loving almighty Father of Jesus. In Marcion’s view, Christians were forbidden to marry or to procreate, lest they perpetuate the corrupt creation of this wicked god.⁷

A slightly more moderate position was taken by Tatian, a man often credited with founding the “Encratite” heresy (from the Greek enkrateia, meaning “self-control” or, in this case, “celibacy”). According to Tatian, humans were originally created as a harmonious union of body, soul, and spirit. Having rejected their union with God’s Spirit, the first human beings lost their immortal nature and became involved in the bestial activities of sex, birth, and death.⁸ Tatian admitted that sexual relations had been necessary near the beginning of time when the population needed to grow, but now that Christ has come and inaugurated a new age, sex is no longer to be tolerated. Although Tatian’s views were labeled “heresy” by the earliest Christian heresy hunters (e.g., Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Clement of Alexandria), they remained congenial to many second-century Christians. Various writings known as “apocryphal” gospels and acts of apostles appeared in the second and third centuries espousing the central tenets of Encratite theology. Works such as the Acts of Judas Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla circulated for centuries, and well beyond the so-called heretical groups that originally produced them.

In the third century it seems that enthusiasm for celibacy became an even more pronounced feature of ancient Christianity. Two writers exerted a profound influence on the subsequent shape of Christian theology: Tertullian and Origen. Tertullian, a native of North Africa, was an antiheretical writer who had attacked Marcion for rejecting the created world. But Tertullian himself came under the influence of a charismatic movement, the “New Prophecy,” that proclaimed the imminent end of the world. Tertullian came to see sex, even within marriage, as a kind of “sin.” Commenting on Paul’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: CELIBACIES
• PART II: MATRIMONIES
• PART III: PROMISCUITIES
• PART IV: FORWARD!
• Consolidated Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index