The God of the Bible is not “queer”

A seemingly permanent aspect of fallen humanity is the compulsion to fashion idols. In some cases those idols have been physical, as when Aaron made a golden calf to satisfy the desire of the Israelites for something to worship. In other cases, though, we fashion ideas of God that fit with our preconceptions, our predilections, and our preferences. This attempt to make God according to our desires is on full display in the now-fashionable efforts to “queer” language about God.

Much of this transgressive program is intended to upset traditional and classical ideas about God, developed over the centuries. It also has a clear social and political agenda: Because our ideas about God form who we believe human beings to be, radical changes to our conception of God and His will must have consequences for how we order our lives, our politics, and even our sexuality.

In a recent piece for The Christian Century, provocatively titled, “The Christian God is a queer God,” theologian and Anglican priest Rachel Mann asserts that because Scripture presents us a picture of God that is so wholly other and radically different, it follows that anything strange or foreign is divine.

The logic doesn’t hold up to even a moment of scrutiny, but the case for a queer God isn’t really about logic or arguments. Instead, it is about pathos and finding some emotional toehold to justify human sin and an understanding of God formed in fallen humanity’s own image. Thus, writes Mann, “Queer theology offers a way of unearthing what is already present—the fact that God is, by any stretch of the imagination, queer—and helping humans to inhabit that reality. It is the best kind of skewed God-talk.”

This really amounts to a reductivist play on words. In “scholarly terms,” as Mann puts it, queer refers to something that is unfamiliar, strange, or foreign. Something queer upsets our categories and represents a new experience. In a straightforward way, then, we might have used this kind of language to describe the radically transcendent, miraculous, and wondrous God in previous eras (at least before the “Christian” 20th century). In the same way because God rejoices and is the ultimate manifestation of happiness we might have in the past said that “God is gay,” at least when gay meant “lively” and “merry.”

But of course those terms don’t mean today what they meant in previous eras. Terms like queer and gay now have overt sexual significance, such that they are capital letters in the new alphabet of sexual ideology. So the idea that queering God and theology is anything more substantive than a fig-leaf for transgressive sexual ideology quickly evaporates. Indeed, as Mann makes clear, the point of this kind of talk is to move God out of “the closet,” to undermine “Heterosexual Theology,” and to destroy “heteronormative categories and boxes.”

It wouldn’t be enough for this program to simply talk of the strangeness of God, or even the older theological terminology of God as “wholly other,” because this kind of language doesn’t have the radical and revolutionary rhetorical power of explicitly sexualized terms. Thus God and theology must be “queer” to help realize this ideological agenda.

The first time I ever encountered this kind of interpretive move directly was at a “preach in” held in the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary to protest the awarding of the Kuyper Prize to PCA pastor Tim Keller in 2017. What was Keller’s great sin? He was part of a denomination that affirms male-only ordination and views legitimate sexual expression to be limited to heterosexual, monogamous marriage. But the messages of the protest insisted that God is a queer God. There is nothing more “queer” than the doctrine of the Trinity, or the idea of a wolf lying down with a lamb, or a child playing harmlessly with vipers. Because Scripture gives us these radically foreign pictures of what God and His kingdom are like, we are therefore supposed to embrace anything that upsets and inverts received tradition.

But of course this is precisely where the rhetorical power of the argument loses its strength. God is radically transcendent, and orthodox Christians have always confessed this truth. It does not follow from this, however, that anything that is strange, or foreign, or queer is therefore godly. God is wholly other in some true sense—but he remains holy. And instead of conforming our conceptions of God to our ideas of strangeness, we must let God and His revelation of holiness take priority. God has the sovereign right to define Himself.

The agenda to “queer” God ultimately leads to total theological corruption, and Christians must work to correct and condemn this pernicious error.