Queer Hermeneutics

The Core Assumption

Meaning lives in the text read from the starting point of the experience of sexual minorities, under the rule that heteronormativity is an interpretive assumption to be examined, not a default to be obeyed.

The Four Assumptions

Where meaning lives

Meaning lives in the text read from the starting point of the experience of sexual minorities: those whom heteronormative readings have made the problem become the subjects who ask the questions.

What the text is

The text is an ancient artifact whose sexual world differs radically from the modern one, neither containing the modern homosexual as a category nor delivering, without interpretation, the church's later sexual prohibitions.

Who may interpret

The authorized interpreter is the queer reader in community, together with allies, whose embodied knowledge of stigma, passing, and chosen family is an interpretive resource and not a disqualification.

What counts as a good reading

A reading is adequate when it is historically honest about the ancient sexual world, refuses to weaponize the text against queer people, and yields readings under which queer lives can flourish in church and world.

Genealogy

This method arose in the contemporary period (Roots in gay liberation readings of the 1970s; formed as an academic approach in the 1990s with the consolidation of queer theory).

Key proponents: Robert E. Goss, Mona West, Ken Stone, Deryn Guest.

Key texts: Jesus Acted Up by Robert E. Goss; Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible edited by Ken Stone; The Queer Bible Commentary edited by Deryn Guest and others.

The Procedure

These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.

1. Name the heteronormative defaults

   List the assumptions about sex, gender, marriage, and family that you and the standard commentaries bring to the passage, and mark which of them the text itself actually contains.

   Why this step matters: The method's first act is to make the invisible default visible, since most readings argue from heteronormativity without stating it.

   How to do it: Distinguish modern categories, such as sexual orientation, from ancient ones, such as honor, household, and act-based classifications, and refuse to blur them.

   What goes wrong here: Claiming the text teaches a modern doctrine of orientation, in either an affirming or a condemning direction.

   You record: An inventory of heteronormative assumptions. Done well when: Modern and ancient categories are kept visibly distinct throughout.

2. Do the historical work on the contested texts

   Examine the passages traditionally used against homosexuality in their languages and contexts, and state precisely what acts, relations, and abuses each one addresses.

   Why this step matters: The method insists that the so-called clobber passages be read with the same historical rigor as any other texts, no more and no less.

   How to do it: Engage the strongest traditional readings in their best form, and record where the historical evidence is genuinely contested.

   What goes wrong here: Dismissing the contested texts without exegesis, which concedes the historical ground the method claims to occupy.

   You record: Historical verdicts on the contested passages. Done well when: Each verdict states the evidence and the degree of scholarly dispute honestly.

3. Read queerly beyond the contested texts

   Bring queer questions to the whole canon: chosen family, outsiders brought in, bodies that do not fit the order, friendships and beloveds that exceed their categories.

   Why this step matters: Queer hermeneutics is not exhausted by defense against six passages; it is a way of reading everything, alert to the text's own disruptions of fixed orders.

   How to do it: Take up figures and stories the tradition reads past, such as the Ethiopian eunuch or Ruth and Naomi, and show the textual basis for each reading.

   What goes wrong here: Claiming ancient figures as modern identities instead of reading them as disruptions and resources.

   You record: Queer readings across the canon. Done well when: Every reading is tied to named textual features rather than to resonance alone.

4. Test by the flourishing of queer lives

   Submit the reading to queer communities for the pragmatic test: does this interpretation make life, faithfulness, and community more possible, or does it re-inscribe shame?

   Why this step matters: As in the other advocacy hermeneutics, the reading is verified in the lives of the people who must live under it.

   How to do it: Record dissent within queer communities themselves, since they do not speak with one voice about either the texts or the goals.

   What goes wrong here: Treating one segment of the community, usually the academically published, as the whole.

   You record: A community-tested queer reading. Done well when: Internal dissent within queer readings is recorded in the result.

Inputs Required

• The contested passages read with full historical and linguistic care
• An account of ancient sexual categories and their difference from modern ones
• Queer communities prepared to test readings against lived reality

Outputs Produced

• An inventory of heteronormative assumptions in reader and tradition
• Historical verdicts on the traditionally cited passages
• Queer readings across the canon, tested by the community's flourishing

Quality Criteria

Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:

• Ancient and modern sexual categories are never conflated
• The strongest traditional readings are engaged, not caricatured
• The community test includes voices that dissent from the reader's own position

Common Errors

• Reading modern identities straight into ancient figures
• Claiming the historical questions are settled when scholars of good faith dispute them
• Reducing queer reading to the six contested passages and abandoning the rest of the canon to default readings

Strengths

• It forced the historical question about ancient and modern sexual categories that all sides must now answer
• It recovered canonical stories of outsiders, eunuchs, and chosen families as resources for the church's present debates
• It gave queer Christians interpretive agency in traditions that had read them only as problems

Weaknesses and Critics

• Its historical claims about the contested passages remain disputed by competent scholars who share its historical methods
• Queer theory's suspicion of stable identity can sit uneasily with a community's need to name itself in order to organize and worship
• The flourishing test can be invoked by opposed readings within queer communities themselves, limiting its power to adjudicate

Robert A. J. Gagnon: Gagnon argued, in the most extensive scholarly statement of the traditional position, that the Bible's witness against same-sex intercourse is consistent across both testaments, grounded in creation's male-female order rather than in culture-bound purity rules, and that revisionist historical claims about the contested texts fail on the evidence. (The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (2001))

Richard B. Hays: Hays held that while the handful of texts addressing homosexuality are not the center of the New Testament's ethics, they speak with one negative voice, and that the church's welcoming of queer persons must be argued on other theological grounds rather than by reversing the texts' plain sense. (The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996))

Internal Schools

Revisionist historical school: This school, descending from John Boswell and Robin Scroggs, concentrates on the historical questions: what the contested texts actually prohibited in their ancient settings and whether the modern category of orientation changes the moral analysis.

Queer theory school: This school, represented by Stone and by Guest's commentary project, is less concerned to vindicate the texts than to read them queerly: destabilizing identities, exposing the text's own strangeness, and refusing both condemnation and domestication.

Queer liberation theology school: This school, represented by Goss and West in the Metropolitan Community Churches tradition, reads from the worshiping life of queer congregations and joins interpretation directly to pastoral and political liberation.

Exemplar Readings

The Ethiopian Eunuch and the End of Exclusion (Acts 8 read with Isaiah 56 and Deuteronomy 23): The reading follows a sexually altered outsider who stands under an explicit exclusion in the law, hears Isaiah's promise to eunuchs read aloud, and is baptized without condition, and it argues the narrative itself performs the canon arguing toward inclusion.

David and Jonathan without Anachronism (1 Samuel 18-20 and 2 Samuel 1): The reading examines the covenant language, the soul-knit imagery, and David's lament that this love surpassed the love of women, declines to assign the pair a modern identity, and shows why the text nevertheless functions as a resource for queer readers that traditional commentary has worked to neutralize.

What This Method Cannot Do

Site Stance

The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.

Run This Method in the Workshop

Open this method on the bench →

Across the Site

This method belongs to the Contextual and Advocacy Hermeneutics family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.

Primary Sources

• Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto by Robert E. Goss (1993)
• Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible edited by Ken Stone (2001)

Secondary Sources

• The Queer Bible Commentary edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache (2006)
• Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell (1980)

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