The first and most important observation to make about Linn Marie Tonstad’s Queer Theology—a summative overview of what has named itself queer theology and a substantive argument about what queer theology could and should be—is that we are quite fortunate that it exists. Tonstad lucidly, judiciously, and incisively covers a great deal of terrain when explaining some key insights from queer theory, identifying the limitations of some oft-repeated strategies in queer theology, engaging the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid, and highlighting potential lodestars of future queer thought. That Tonstad is able to clear this much ground, clarify these many points, and construct this compelling an edifice in a slim volume evinces her passion for this mode of inquiry, her deep understanding of the materials that constitute the field, her formidable analytical acumen, and her inspired vision for the paths queer theologians should tread.

I focus my attention here on two key elements of Tonstad’s offering, confessing some confusion about how exactly they fit together. In the opening pages of Queer Theology, Tonstad notes that students who come to her queer theology course share an assumption with many Christians—namely, “that sexual ethics are fundamental to Christianity, and that figuring out what sexual acts are permitted (licit) is an important, indeed central task of living a Christian life” (4). This assumption, Tonstad rightly notes in the book’s second chapter, informs the desire to engage in apologetic battles. If sexual ethics are fundamental to Christian life, then it is a central task of living a Christian life to articulate an authentically Christian sexual morality. But Tonstad argues, appealing to passages from the New Testament about how to handle disagreements about food consumption in Christian communities, that Christians should not fight about sexual morality, but should suspend judgment about sex and be mindful of the weakness of others who may still be invested in the importance of such questions, thus not judging them (38, 46–47). In other words, those who denounce LGBTQ+ persons, same-sex sexual acts, and homophobic attitudes have all participated in un-Christian behavior. And in even more words, apologetics can never be the mission of queer theology.

As part of this discussion about fascination with sexual morality, Tonstad pauses over apologetic strategies that insist “gay is good” and that reject identification of gays as sinners. As Tonstad observes, “While there’s no reason to believe that queer people are more sinful than others, there are reasons to worry about this strategy as well. All persons are, I believe, sinners. Arguing that gays aren’t may participate in the production of hierarchies of sinners, where some people are only sort of sinners (but really good) and other are really sinners (so really bad)” (30). Making a similar point in her essay “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?” Tonstad riffs on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ruminations on queerness and writes, “Queering in the first person typically encodes a confessional impulse: I am gay, I am pansexual, I am genderqueer, and so on. But what if the first-person imperative toward queering were quite differently constructed? What if it said, for instance, ‘I am a sinner?’” (126). What if queer theology took as its foundation the notion that everyone—including queers—is a sinner, that all have fallen short of the glory of God?

There is, of course, a distinction here of which Tonstad is undoubtedly aware, but which she doesn’t explore on the page. When apologists make the claim that gays aren’t sinners, what they most likely mean is that gays aren’t sinners because they are gay, because they do gay stuff. In other words, “gay is good” challenges certain definitions and demarcations of sin, rather than renouncing a more general diagnosis of sinfulness. Given the way that sin-talk has been used against LGBTQ+ persons, however, Tonstad fairly and importantly reminds us that “most likely” is actually a question, and the practice of queer apologetics does a great deal to distance queer people from sin and to foster practices of judgment and critical assessment of others that Tonstad wants to forestall, consistent with key principles of Christian thought.

Tonstad’s insistence that queer people—as people—are sinners (a point she returns to near the end of the book) connects very nicely, even though Tonstad doesn’t make the link explicit, with queer theory’s suspicion of norms and normative conceptions of humanity. Engaging the work of Cathy Cohen and David Halperin, Tonstad underscores the familiar queer suspicion of norms, normativity, and normative conceptions of the human. In many ways, the reminder that we are all sinners, that our wills are distorted prior to any specific act of willing, that we are always already in structures that make not sinning impossible is another way of saying that a passionate attachment to norms is an attempt to draw distinctions that may not meaningfully capture the actual situation. Or, to take up Cohen’s insights, norms and normative visions of humanity are not best understood as evaluative criteria; they should be recognized as political tools for distributing goods, power, resources, and prestige. If we are all sinners, then none of us deserve any of the goods to be distributed, and we should recognize the violence at the heart of these normative conceptions.

The tension I noted above begins at this point, and it begins with Tonstad’s corrective to some of my own reflections on the unwillingness to grapple fully with human limitation, frailty, and vulnerability. My thinking about limitation is more indebted to psychoanalytic thought than to Christian theological sources. Tonstad notes that the Christian conception of sin includes an idea that things could or ought to be or will some day be different whereas psychoanalytic conceptions of structural limitation, while diagnosing negative consequences that make them look like indictments of lived experience, do not imagine another way of being: there may, undoubtedly, be better and worse ways of living (with) human frailties, but there is no escaping or overcoming them. On Christian understandings, however, as Tonstad points out, death—and all its analogues—will ultimately, one day be vanquished.

If conceptualizing the world as infected with sin necessarily includes an understanding that the world could be different (which is fully consistent with Tonstad’s insistence on the political importance of remembering that alternatives ways of being are possible), then it seems we can’t be suspicious of all norms and normative conceptions of humanity, but only of some of them. If there is another set of possibilities other than the ones we are living, then there is some critical—some evaluative—principle or vision that helps us to understand the limitations that constitute the current state of affairs and make judgments about what we should resist and what we should support.

And, of course, Tonstad insists on this in certain ways. Although she is quite uninterested in (sexual) ethics in Queer Theology, she is deeply committed to notions of (economic) justice. It may not be a central task of Christian life to find licit forms of sexuality, but it is most certainly a central task of Christian life—Tonstad suggests performatively—to understand, identify, and resist material forms of oppression, marginalization, and stigmatization. Economic, imperial, and colonial exploitation are wrong—or, at least, unjust—and should be resisted, if not eradicated.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am not trying to play the all-too-familiar, and completely unhelpful, game of “spot the norm.” Since queer theory has been suspicious of norms and normative conceptions of the human, it has become a wildly popular parlor game to critique (and/or dismiss) the work of other queer theorists and theologians once one has exposed how they have touched the third rail of normativity. If this was my strategy, then I wouldn’t have confessed confusion above, I would have asserted clarity and would now be announcing that Tonstad has failed according to her own rules and principles (her own norms for queer theology!). Instead, I remain persuaded by her statement that sexual ethics should not be taken as a central task of Christian theology, that queer theology should insist that we are all sinners, that we should be suspicious of the ways that normative visions of the human justify inequitable distribution of social goods, and that we should be worried about oppressive and exploitative conditions. Here’s my confusion: what is the norm, what is the source of the norm, that helps us to define, describe, and demarcate oppression and exploitation? And how can we identify that source without engaging, in some way, sources and norms that have been relied on to make judgments about sexual morality?

If I had to sketch a Tonstadian answer, by perusing the pages of Queer Theology, I would have to say that it has something to do with the body, with the facticity of flesh—with a materiality that is prior to sexual or gender or racial inscription. At the beginning of her discussion of Marcella Althaus-Reid, during which Tonstad identifies queer theology as a theology that tells the truth, over against T-theology that trades in ideological fictions, Tonstad notes that “if theology told the truth, it would speak of bodies, of flesh” (78). Later she adds that “Christianity is a story about God’s incarnation, the making holy of the body, a story in which each person is the object of God’s care, attention, and love” (96). And she closes the chapter with the assertion that Christianity’s central claim “concerns God’s presence in Christ, God’s presence in the body” (103). Therefore, “queer theology . . . needs to stand against the distortive powers of capitalism and colonialism; it needs to express and honor human bodily being” (103).

Economic justice—and all of its analogues—is such an important queer theological issue because bodies literally cannot survive (let alone thrive) without certain resources and will undoubtedly perish under certain material conditions. Just as we are all sinners; we are all embodied creatures who require sustenance. The incarnation signals some minimal merit—some modicum of dignity?—to each human body (the language of “person” in the quotation above may introduce complications beyond the minimality of the body and flesh), and the theologian must work to insure that all bodies have what they need for some baseline notion of survival—if not some more expansive notion of living joyfully. Anxieties about the proper use of bodies in gendered and sexualized schemes are always superstructures (and the nod to Marxist terminology is intentional) built on top of this minimal foundation of enfleshment.

But how do we prevent sexual ethics from not reentering through the backdoor (except by fiat)? There are, of course, ways of being sexual, ways of acting sexually, ways of embodying gender, that harm the very flesh of other people. What are the kinds of harms that, if not immoral, are unjust? Similarly, if bodies deserve a certain minimum respect, how exactly do we go about the work of resisting unjust—oppressive, exploitative—distributions of goods? If some body or some collection of bodies have more than their fair share of resources, what is it we are allowed to do? Can we harm those bodies for the sake of other bodies? How would this not create a hierarchy of sinners? How can we begin to do this work of justice-making without wresting the prerogative of judgment away from God? How do we do this consistent with the recognition that all bodies have some basic dignity bestowed on them by God’s incarnational act? Agreeing wholeheartedly with Tonstad that we should be thinking much less about identity and the precision of language and the goodness of gayness and much more about the violences and horrors we inflict on each other ubiquitously and unthinkingly in great and small ways, I’m left wondering how we do this without—implicitly at least—important normative conceptions of the human, insistence on human dignity, critical judgment of persons and actions, and sorting and ranking competing claims to the resources that bodies need and that flesh desires. And I also wonder how we appeal to Christian sources that seem to care about the materiality of bodies while skirting around those Christian sources that seem to care about the gender and sexuality of bodies. (Because there are some folks—John Paul II comes to mind—who find an almost necessary relation between the two sets of issues.)

In the closing pages of Queer Theology, Tonstad recognizes the tension between queer theory and queer theology. It is a tension that I think can be translated into her suspicion about ethics and her embrace of justice—and perhaps it’s in not understanding the precise distinction between them wherein my confusion lies. With her refreshing championing of sin-talk, I’m left wondering how to resolve—or at least map—the tensions she wittingly and unwittingly exposes.

“There are always only Christianities,” claims Tonstad in the first footnote of Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics. This nod to a plurality of Christian perspectives, foundations, and motivations drive the book and symbolize the non-singularity of discourses that underwrite Tonstad’s exploration of queer theology. And for her, queer theology is neither fully declarative nor is it directly imperative; it can’t be. Instead, queer theology is marked by interrogative troubling that opens up and tries to establish an investigatory posture of and orientation to theological pursuits. The initial claim about the multivalent quality of theological production, through its destabilizing of a normative and singular theological history, acts as one of Tonstad’s first queer moves in the book.

Tonstad’s queer orientation to a genealogy of theological production constitutes each chapter of the book. Offering a master class in how to develop an accessible, complex, and counter-normative theological historiography, she illustrates the utility in reviewing (1) theological and queer theoretical lexicography, (2) apologetic strategies and their provocations, (3) flesh-avoidant approaches for queer theological strategies, and (4) body- and flesh-focused discourses. In the first chapter, Tonstad deftly navigates various “problems” of language and vocabulary without attempting to fix them. Instead, she shows how the language has been used and whether or not those uses have been beneficial for the projects to which they speak. For example, Tonstad highlights the necessity of using “queer” in relation to theology by disentangling the term from its siloed connection with inclusion. She notes that queer theology is “about visions of sociopolitical transformation that alter practices of distinction harming gender and sexual minorities as well as many other minoritized persons” (3).

Tonstad illuminates the ways that a review—and perhaps and analysis—of apologetic strategies for justifying the existence and inclusion of queer folks within the divine kingdom and/or within a shared sociopolitical context actually denotes the import of sexual ethics. This denotation is why Tonstad, and many of us, remain confused by theologies that do their best to avoid issues related to the body and to human flesh. Leaning heavily on Marcella Althaus-Reid, Tonstad rejects such an avoidance and regales readers with one reason after another for why an irreverential posture is liberative, queer theological work at its best. Inasmuch as such a posture creates the space for us to think about theologies outside of inhibiting notions of propriety and limiting frames of right-vs.-wrong schema, queer irreverence allows us to conceive of the inconceivable and even deal with the “mess” of incarnational realities.

I want to note that Tonstad does indeed suggest that the apologetics themselves are useless. And she trusts that her readers know—at least on some level—that apologetics for sanctioning the livability of some persons within our sociopolitical context seems silly to have to make explicit. Still, Tonstad offers a theological reasoning for why such apologetics are useless. The basic ideas are that (a) there are simply too many apologetic strategies to attend to and fully engage, and (b) those strategies defend a certain type of expression of sexuality. Those defenses are, by Tonstad’s estimation, not particularly theologically rich; nor do they actually speak to the sort of fundamental qualities of complexity and instability that human existence encompasses. We ought to attend to such complexities in theological ways and with theological praxis rather than simply work to sanction same-sex relationships and support the identity of “homosexuality.” We need the work of queer Christian theology to trouble the idea of linearity and Christian limit embedded in apologetic strategies.

With her cut-to-the-chase writing approach, Tonstad leads us toward subjects that anyone interested in (queer) theology would be remiss to avoid and lands, oddly enough, in a bit of a binary polarized by “truths” and the necessary disturbances to those truths. She deftly moves through several of these framings, and I find myself particularly drawn to her discussions of linearity and binaries, and the potential queerness of Christianity.

In theological discourse (and elsewhere), queer and otherwise minoritized bodies and subjects find ourselves constituted by the heteronormative linearity that underwrites sex and sexuality. This is why, for all of us, dismantling heteronormative framings is the ethical part of queer analysis. In such analysis, we do the work of dislodging and disassociating narratives of linearity and rightness from the ways that we can conceive of and relate to those of us who intentionally or unintentionally escape the hold of normalcy and normativity. In response to the complexity of human existence and in relation to divine creation and revelation, such escape and the strategies or pitfalls therein actually illustrate the ways that linearity is a nonsensical orientation to divine providence and participation in the world. Tonstad’s retelling of the narratives of Christian theological history generates a troublesome genealogy. Such a genealogy rightly illuminates the effects of linear and binaristic framing on “ the problem” of the body and the ways that we manifest that problem in sociopolitical contexts.

One of the binaries that Tonstad highlights is the common apologetic strategy in which Jesus is framed as good and Paul as bad. In such a framing, Paul is associated with misogyny, heteronormativity, and the hatred and denigration of flesh and the body while Jesus is connected with loving the whole self, body, and relations. The problem that she rightly notes is that Paul is a foundational part of Christianity, and an overly simplistic reading of Paul as anti-material ignores the complexity and the situatedness of his writings. She turns to Jesus’ complicated ministry, including the story about the nasty language he used when speaking with the Syrophoenician woman. Jesus’ response to her is so ugly that people often ignore it, yet, as Tonstad reminds readers, this version of Jesus isn’t the one who typically uses language that represents radical hospitality or radical acceptance and equality. Through her attention to and interrogation of Jesus’ and Paul’s complex humanity, Tonstad is doing the queer work of troubling the boundary that exist between the two of them. Her exploration shows how the “problem” of the body and the humanity for which the body acts as metonym results in the (hetero)sexual underpinnings of discourse within various theologies.

Tonstad ends the book by asking a question that readers likely bring with them to the text: Can Christianity be queer? Through her attention to the grammars of the question, Tonstad points out the obvious impossibility. While there is a real and necessary relationship between queerness and Christianity, and while we all might hope that such a relationship has some reciprocal qualities, Tonstad’s brief explication reminds us that nothing can actually be queer. Queerness does not represent a kind of being; it represents movement, possibilities, transgressive action, and more. I agree with Tonstad, too, because if a thing can be queer, with all the stability that static ontology suggests, then that thing is released from the responsibility of doing the work of queerness. Its being and position is stagnant, even if falsely so. The position is itself fantasy, Tonstad asserts, but beyond that, such a position points to a type of invulnerability. The value of queerness exists in its troublemaking, world-shifting agitations as well as its capacity to render all “stable” identities and positions vulnerable, precarious, and in need of destabilizing interrogation. To do queer and to perform queerness is to disturb identities, she suggests, not to stabilize them.

To mark Christianity as queer is to participate in the type of inventive framing that heteronormativity underwrites. She argues, “Heterosexuality as a system doesn’t deal with the truth” (76). With this argument, Tonstad teaches us that the system of heterosexuality cultivates and venerates the normative subject which is, in turn, fiction. Her idea (and she’s right about this!) is that the normative frame of theological heterosexuality deals with fictional ideas of what human beings ought to be. This subjunctive formulation of the human is destructive because it establishes a sense of unattainable (for most) human perfection, dehumanizing and erasing most of us in the process (63–64). I am thankful that “the imaginary vision of the truly free subject” is not, in fact, accessible only as a commoditized product for and by white propertied men (63). Instead, as Tonstad assures readers, that freedom comes with our willingness and dedication to notice and subvert the fallacy of a singular “truth.” Queer theology exposes the types of fictions that persist in normative theological production, and holds us accountable to the sociopolitical and spiritual detriments that they effect.

I am delighted and honored by the invitation to engage with Linn Tonstad’s new book, Queer Theology. This invitation has offered me an opportunity to reflect more deeply on my own understandings of the multivalent and mutable ideas relevant to the topic named in her title. Firstly, I want to express gratitude to Tonstad for writing this book. Through her disarming and accessible prose and her careful mapping of various theological premises, Tonstad offers readers an explanatory text that carefully defines important moves in queer theory and queer theology, while never sacrificing details and nuance. This book is clearly written with students in mind. It can and should be used to teach what is often a difficult topic for students of theology to grasp.

While the entire book is a valuable contribution to the study of queer theologies, to my mind at least, the most gratifying of these sections is her chapter on “Apologetic Strategies.” Here Tonstad rehearses some of the most familiar techniques for a defense of queerness within Christianity. Through her own reconstruction of many of these apologetic strategies, Tonstad shines a light on what is often problematic, troubling even, about them. Here Tonstad’s argument leans into Audre Lorde’s notions that the “Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”1 That is, that many apologetic strategies continue to defend queerness by attempting to utilize the same logic, the same contours and parameters of the arguments used against them. This of course flattens the experience of queer people and is not at all concerned with engaging Christianity on terms that are actually meaningful to human lives. As Tonstad says, “many of these arguments ignore the ambiguities of human existence, the ways in which our lives and their consequences are neither transparent to us nor fully within our power to determine” (47).

She goes on to demonstrate how the terms of the discourse are already set within a problematic framework. But she also suggests that this framework is never completely shattered. Racism, classism, capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia are so intricately woven into the fabric of US American politics, economy, and culture, that it is quite literally the air we breathe and the water we drink (here I am thinking of Flint, Michigan, and the air quality in urban areas especially around poorer, working-class neighborhoods where the machinations of industry continue to make the air toxic). Tonstad put it a little differently:

For denaturalization and anti-essentialism to achieve change [two apologetic strategies identified by Tonstad], our recognition that things could be otherwise would need to alter or destroy our investment in the way things are, the way our selves are formed at the deepest levels within heteronormativity, patriarchy, racism, and so on. The moment we put it like that, though, we recognize that heteronormativity, patriarchy, and racism live within us, are part of us (even if we are targeted by them)—and knowing that they live within us doesn’t end their hold on us. (71, emphasis original)

This seemingly minor, or better yet, this seemingly obvious point is neither minor nor obvious. Here Tonstad reminds us that for those of us interested in dismantling various oppressions we must always account for ways that multiple oppressive techniques are deeply and inherently linked with one another and that the work of dismantling oppressive structures and movements towards justice and liberation are never complete, nor will they ever be.

Tonstad reminds me of a couple of different moments in my own life and my own thinking relevant to this. In 2010, I was a doctoral student and was invited to join the first cohort of the Human Rights Campaign Summer Institute for scholars of religious studies and theology. This was an enriching time and I am still so appreciative of the connections with people that I was able to make and sustain. Still, there was an interesting moment when it became clear that the organizers (the Human Rights Campaign) and many of the scholars (both the mentors and graduate students) may not have had similar ideas around marriage equality. It was the first instance where I began to think more critically about what, if anything, the fight for marriage equality was attempting to accomplish. Admittedly, and perhaps embarrassingly, until that moment I had not questioned the notion that all LBGTQIA folks wanted, indeed needed, the fight for marriage equality to be successful.

Another moment came later, in 2015, when I had my first tenure-track appointment at a small seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The seminary (or at the very least, the faculty) were motivated towards inclusivity, openness, and affirmation of LGBT life. I am intentionally excluding many of the other letters often included in acronyms associated with queerness, for reasons that will be made clear. What was evident during my time at the seminary was that the broader seminary community had an understanding of inclusivity (as it related to non-heterosexual persons) with a narrow focus on the issue of gay marriage because it fit nicely into many of their similar frameworks for conceiving of love, sex, family-making, and all the trappings of culture and theology associated therein. In other words, many of them were stuck on the “we’re just like you” (or “they’re just like us” depending on the vantage point) concept that flattens the diversity of lived human experiences—and certainly the lived human experiences of queer folx. When federal law changed that year to allow same gendered couples to marry, everyone was ecstatic.

Admittedly I too was happy. But I was happy because I did then, and do now, believe that the legal right to marry should be available to all regardless of the gender and/or sexuality of the persons entering the institution. I was not happy because this in any way reflected the concerns I have for queer life. It did not then, nor does it now, do anything for the astronomical rate at which black trans* women are being murdered. It did not then, nor does it now, do anything to account for the countless number of queer youth who are homeless or who commit suicide because they bear the unbearable weight of familial and cultural expectations. It did not then, nor does it now, do anything to create alternative ways for relating to one another as human beings nor for thinking about alternative ways we humans relate to the divine.

In her conclusion, Tonstad poses an interesting, provocative, and, I believe, vital question: can Christianity be queer? Here she pushes to the side well-worn claims by scholars and theologians (myself included) who continue to highlight and raise up the inherent queerness of Christianity from its earliest beginnings to our current moment. Instead, Tonstad reorients her readers through Marcella Althaus-Reid (an important and prominent interlocutor throughout the book) to think of different, dare I say, queerer versions of the same question: How do we humans “understand the orientation of a life lived under the shadow of death” (131)? For Tonstad this indeed is a question for queers and Christians, and perhaps all humanity alike. And she acknowledges that different strands of Christianity will make different claims about death—finitude.

I wonder though what real-life applications this question has for those living on the margins. If finitude is inescapable and inevitable and indeed is affirmed by both queerness and Christianity (except for the certain types of Christians who see finitude as “something wrong”), what then do we make of the unevenness of death? The inequality of finitude? How might queer theology orient us toward a praxis of liberation or a praxis of mutuality as Ada María Isasi-Díaz calls it. Thinking about the role of solidarity in social justice movements, Isasi-Díaz wrote, “In order for there to be a genuine community of interests and purposes between the oppressed and the oppressor, there must be radical action that makes oppression impossible. Thus, for solidarity to be a praxis of mutuality it has to struggle to be politically effective; it has to have as its objective radical structural change.” Tonstad shares some of these ideas when she also talks about the unending work needed to transform structures. But I am left wondering about the power of queer theology, if indeed it has any. Perhaps this is, as Tonstad claims, an “irresolvable dilemma.” Still, I wonder if the role of theology is not to resolve such contradictions but to make particular claims aimed toward radical structural change. And if so, how is queer theology implicated in such a project?

In Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, Linn Marie Tonstad dives deeply into the difficult and tumultuous waters of queer theology. When she resurfaces, having gone through the various efforts of queer theologians and Bible scholars, she raises a flag, calling into being a new iteration of queer theology—this time, beyond apologetics. Patiently guiding the reader through a materialist criticism of religion, queer theory, and Christian theology, Tonstad crafts a narrative of possibility and hope for the field. In this responsive review, I laud Dr. Tonstad for the work she performed in this introduction, and I invite her to think with me on race and reproduction, on the matter of theological eccentricity, on the ongoing function of apology, and on the operations of the Christian conscience within this text.

A former student of Professor Tonstad, I acknowledge that she continues to teach me through this text. For example, in the second chapter of Queer Theology, narrating the distinction between God as transgressive and God as transcendent, Tonstad explains how an improper understanding of the relation between God and creation would yield some sort of boundedness within God. If God is “whatever creation is not,” then creation would create a boundary or contrast with God and God would not be infinite (33). Rather, writes Tonstad, “the main lines of historical Christian interpretation argue that God is beyond both similarity and difference with respect to creation—God is the difference beyond difference. . . . It’s because God is God—transcendent—that God can be united with creation, with humanity, in Christ without either violating creaturely existence or giving up God’s divinity” (33). Boom! This explication was exceptional within the context of the text, clarifying why thinking of God as transgressive of boundaries does not do quite what the queer theological apologist wants for that argument to do. And personally speaking, within my own thinking and theologizing, this argument provided a much-needed breakthrough. I had been trying to discern the relation between God and creation, sensing that the answer was not the erasure of difference that yields pantheism or panentheism, or the absence of a relation altogether that yields a gulf or divide unable to be mediated—how, then, would we explain Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit? Thus, the argument that God is the difference beyond difference with respect to creation helped me to further reconcile God’s relation to creation and expanded my understanding of the meaning of transcendence.

Another example of my continuing education through this text has to do with the invocation of the Marxist and Feuerbachian critiques of religion. Dr. Tonstad narrates,

So the point of the nuclear family, its what-for in contemporary capitalism, is to ensure that private property will share the apparent non-economic status of the family, its social location as a form beyond capital.

Put differently, capitalism as we know it functions as an economic system partly by way of producing or supporting familial, social, and political forms that justify themselves in terms of their distance from capitalism. (81)

I knew that one needed to assess the operations of capital; the fact that capitalism produces forms that justify themselves by their distance from capital, however, was revelatory. This argument helped me to make sense of the various social media interpretations that I had read regarding the United Methodist Church (UMC)’s early 2019 passage of the Traditional Plan. This vote against the inclusion of queer clergy persons within the UMC has been interpreted as the way in which the problem of retirement investments—and the inability to divide them, should the church itself split—was lived out. Thus, while for some, this plan’s passage was absolutely about gender and sexuality, for others, gender and sexuality was the casualty in a plan that refused to suffer the loss of money or other economic goods that the church’s separation would have entailed. In other words, we see the relation to capital lived out in a theological form which allows it to justify itself as something other than it (also) is by its very distance from capital. (I want to thank the social media exchange between Amaryah Shaye Armstrong and Joy Bronson for that analysis.)

These are only two of the ways in which this text is an embarrassment of riches. And I am of the opinion that through this text, Dr. Tonstad enlarges the capacity of the genre of the introduction. It is clear to me, however, that this text is more than an introduction to queer theology. Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics attempts to move the reader beyond apologetics, and insofar as it does this, I understand this text to be a reorienting, reconstituting, and disciplining of the field of queer theology. That is, this text both assesses and evaluates the field, recalibrates its hopes, goals, and orientations, and raises a flag in an effort to call a community into being—a community which may already be present, in the flesh, but not yet constituted as community, as queer theology. As such, as a text that attempts to also reconstitute the field of queer theology, I invite Dr. Tonstad’s reflection on the following:

(1) Race and Reproduction. It seems to me that many queer discourses (theories and theologies alike) create a gap or gulf between reproduction and, well, everything, and often do not place reproduction back into its accounts of sexuality. As such, reproduction (reproductive sexuality, often exclusively thought about alongside Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurity) remains a kind of excluded cornerstone for queer theory or queer theological thinking. It seems to me that an approach to queer theology, or queer theory, which took African Americans into account would not be able to avoid reproductive sexuality for the simple fact that race is (re)produced at the site of reproduction. Part of the operation of whiteness and white supremacism, I claim, has included the legal and social monitoring of black motherhood, and the hyper-vigilance and heightened surveillance of the boundaries of whiteness against blackness, no matter how white-appearing a black person might be. (And the fact that the expression “white-appearing black person” makes sense is testament to the strangeness of these racial relations.) Can queer theology as a sexual theology also take on the queerness of racial nonnormativity, particularly in its relation to reproduction?

(2) Theological Eccentricity. It seems to me that Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics either has a theological eccentricity or an atheological center. If the text has a theological center, or a major theological claim, it appears to be organized around Marcella Althaus-Reid’s materialist theological leanings, and also around taking the meaning of the incarnation seriously. Thus, Dr. Tonstad states, citing Althaus-Reid, that “the task of theology is to ‘deconstruct a moral order which is based on a heterosexual construction of reality, which organizes not only categories of approved social and divine interactions but of economic ones too.’ Theology, in short, is about sex, money, and God” (75). And again, Tonstad writes, “Yet Christianity is a story about God’s incarnation, the making holy of the body, a story in which each person is the object of God’s care, attention, and love. Christianity is a story of God’s presence among the dissolute, and God’s own dissolution (on the cross). If Christianity, and more importantly, Christians, are serious about their claims, they—we—must be willing to reckon much more seriously than we typically do with their implications. The whole social order that separates people into the decent and indecent, that regulates accepted orders of bodily and economic exchange, is ruptured by a Christ who gave his life for all, but most particularly the despised, a Christ who died at the hands of a colonial empire” (94–95). These passages are beautiful and moving, and I understand them to be the “theological heart” of this text. Yet, I find it interesting that they occur so belatedly in the text. Is queer theology overdetermined or overburdened by the operations of queer?

(3) Beyond Apologetics. This question derives from my own ambivalent and cyclical reading of the aspiration or injunction to move beyond apologetics and, perhaps, Dr. Tonstad’s own ambivalence about the ongoing work of apologia for queer theologians. On the one hand, Prof. Tonstad is clear to state that queer theology is not about apologetics. At the beginning of chapter 2 she writes, “In this chapter, I rehearse apologetic strategies that queer theologians use to defend queer and trans* lives in order to make the case that queer theology is not about apologetics, or at least that it should not be about apologetics” (16; italics original). However, it seems to be the case that, per Tonstad, the beyond becomes accessible, ironically, through apologetic strategies. The “arguments from food and circumcision” are compelling to Tonstad, stating that they are “both theologically and theoretically insightful, and quite plausible on scriptural grounds” (35). (Though, to be fair, this is one of the few apologetic strategies she finds insightful or illuminating.) And, in a gratuitous aside, Dr. Tonstad explains why this argument allows us to move beyond apologetics. She writes, “It is, by the way, my own view that the implication of this argument is . . . also that Christians should stop arguing over issues of sexual morality altogether, and instead should allow the discernment of the individual conscience before God to rule. Which is one of the theological reasons queer theology ought not be about apologetics at all” (38). Christians should cease arguing over issues of sexual morality altogether. This is so because, theologically speaking, sexual morality is an issue which can be left to the discernment of the individual conscience before god. This argument re-raises the value and function of queer apologetic theology. What does it mean to move beyond apologetics if we have to go through apologetics to get beyond? Further, how can going beyond acknowledge that the terrains on which apologetic arguments are proffered (and rebuffed, still) are themselves uneven and contested? Can we move on, getting or going beyond apologetics, because they have accomplished the logical/argumentative work that they needed to accomplish? Or is something else the case? It seems to me that whether or not one agrees with the urge to get beyond apologetics, the idea of beyond raises the issue of differentiation within queer theology (some people will do apologetics while others do other work; can apologetic theological work continue to share the name of “queer theology”?) and saturation of queer theological arguments (Do enough people know these arguments? Who are the people who need to know these arguments in order for us to be able to get or go “beyond”? Is it sufficient that the arguments exist?). I perceive apologetic theological work to be space-making work. So, in addition to the other magic that one might learn at Hogwarts (if you will), apologetics might be considered a defense against the dark arts. Does moving beyond apologetics suggest that this defensive or space-making work is no longer needed? If a field comes through a set of arguments, what is its relation to that passage?

(4) Christianity and Individual Conscience. I recounted Dr. Tonstad’s argument above about sexual morality being an issue of conscience before God in order to raise, this time, not the issue of ambivalence with going beyond apologetics, but to ask after the place of others in Tonstad’s account of sexual morality. When Dr. Tonstad introduces the theology of Marcella Athaus-Reid, she also introduces the idea of sexual scripts or sexual stories. She then develops this point through the work of Mark Jordan. Tonstad writes, “Althaus-Reid distinguishes, therefore, between indecent theology or queer theology, and T-Theology. . . . T-Theology is a grand imperial narrative of power. It seeks to classify all of reality systematically. In other words, it tries to provide holiness scripts for people’s sexual and romantic lives, and by identifying what is decent and God-willed, it produces the indecent, that which (it pretends) is against God’s will” (85). And in the discussion on the position that queer theology takes with respect to identity, Tonstad writes, “Queer theology seeks . . . to avoid two particular types of dangers. One is the provision of sexual stories for others, the provision of what Mark Jordan has called sexual scripts that regulate how people tell stories about their lives. The provision of such scripts can artificially restrict the way people interpret themselves and their behavior, but it also has the capacity to produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexual subjects” (90). And finally, Tonstad recaps, “Althaus-Reid holds that sexual stories have to be tested for their effects on people’s lives” (90–91). While her writing style makes it difficult to know if Tonstad herself holds this position, assuming that she does raises a curious contradiction within the text. Does “sexual morality” include checking for “sexual scripts”? When one is checking for the effects of sexual scripts, is that an instance of queer sexual morality? If so, does one have to think of one’s conscience as including others in its moments of discernment before God while making sure—we recall from the chapter on apologetics—that though such others are present, they are not judged? The question is not about judging as much as it is about accounting for the inclusion of others in one’s conscience before God. How does casting sexual morality as the purview of the individual conscience before God account for checking for the effects of sexual stories on others? Here, I invite Dr. Tonstad to say more about the relation of others to the rule of the individual conscience before God.

I have raised these thoughts in hopes of sparking conversation. What I’ve learned over the years is that any discipline will discipline. The key, for me, is to think about the effects of a discipline, its generation and distribution of harms, its uses of resources, the amount of energy it requires, and its generation and distribution of goods. Insofar as Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics endeavors to discipline the field of queer theology, to say what queer theology is, and to say what it is not, and insofar as it articulates an aspired hope for what it should be, I raise these comments for consideration.

* I want to thank my colleagues Joi R. Orr, Shatavia L. Wynn, Quincy J. Rineheart, and Ali W. Lutz, and Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood for their encouragement and feedback.