God: Radical Love Itself

God is radical love itself. In this section, Patrick Cheng argues that LGBT relationships mirror the radical love of God because both serve to dissolve the existing boundaries between the self and the other and also the rigid societal boundaries which define gender roles. His initial way of revealing how it is that God breaks down these boundaries is through a brief critique of traditional paternal descriptions of God. He states that humans can only know about God through the use of analogical language, which means that the conventional construal of God as Father must be considered insufficient. A genuinely transcendent God is immeasurably more broad than all human classifications, including those of sex and gender.

Next Cheng contends that God is to be located in the erotic, which he defines as the shared experience of relational power between human beings, every other non-human creature and the rest of nature. God is not so much above, other or outside of us. Rather, God is among, between and part of us. God, who is radical love, can be conceived of as having a fluid sense of gender that is put on display through erotic friendships amongst all of creation’s creatures. This is yet another way that the boundary dissolving radical love of God can be described. God and LGBT relationships correspond to one another in the sense that both of them can not be contained by and therefore present a challenge to the traditional binary categories of sexuality and gender.

Cheng goes on to suggest that parody can exhibit the category dissolving radical love of God when it is utilized with reference to the doctrine of God. Parody is defined as extended repetition with critical difference or improvising on a theme with non-identical repetition. He gives two examples of parody. The first of these is the Lord’s supper, which is a repetition of the Jewish seder meal, but with the critical difference of the inauguration of a new covenant. The second is drag, which is the performance of a gender role with the critical difference of disrupting societal norms about gender identities. Queer theologians have parodied the traditional attribute of God known as omnipotence by suggesting that YHWH, the God of the Hebrew bible, can be viewed as the top in a homoerotic relationship that is akin to that of a warrior chief and his boy companion, with King David or Israel representing the bottom. Other theologians have imposed the leather culture of bondage and discipline on YHWH and contended that YHWH engages in a sadomasochistic relationship with humanity. Categories are ultimately dispelled by parodies because as they endeavor to replicate the thing to be parodied, they themselves become a new creation.

Lastly, he argues that the doctrine of God can be perceived as radical love to the extent that it can dissolve boundaries which prevent us from rethinking God’s divine attributes in queer ways. According to Thomas Aquinas, theologians can only say that God is pure actuality, or that God is. God is fundamentally an identity without existence and radically unknowable. Therefore it is legitimate to conclude that God extends beyond the classical theistic omni characteristics that have been attributed to God (i.e. omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence). This realization has empowered queer theologians to rethink the God of classical theism. Cheng insists that the attributes of God (like gender) should be conceived of as a matter of divine performance. In other words, as opposed to being characteristics that are essential or natural to God, we should think them as a parody or perhaps a divine drag show. Ultimately though, we must keep in mind that God cannot be fully explained in positive language. We can only describe God in terms of positionality or the effects of deployment. Just as with queerness, God demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.