Undoing Duality

I believe that our binaristic western categories sit squarely in many of our blind spots. Much of our world seems to be divided into (supposedly) disparate categories: male and female, spirit and flesh, revelation and creation, saved and unsaved, white and black, citizen and immigrant, human and nonhuman, among others. More often than not, one category is decidedly preferable, despite the reality that many biblical and spiritual sources will suggest differently. These places also often sit in our blind spots. While trees, people who look different than us, and dogs may be part of our everyday lives, we may seldom consider what it is like to exist as something else. As Whitehead suggests, “In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.”(1) Progress requires creative imagination and recognition of our interconnectedness.

In Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith, Justin Tanis highlights how Jesus' ministry and the Jewish tradition ask people to seek new and complex ways of viewing the world and scripture, to "tease out all... possible meanings so... [we have] the richest available knowledge of how God spoke, and speaks..."(2) Tanis suggests that, similarly, transgendered ways of being similarly call on all of us to look more deeply and consider the complexities of this world from outside the boxes of binaristic thinking. Not only does this ask us to open ourselves to new ways of being and thinking about gender, but it asks us to consider the ways that we limit our own thinking based on our societally-ingrained presuppositions about gender and what it means in our lives and world. Unraveling this binary allows us to see how we are not only arbitrarily defined by our sex organs, but by our species.

Laurel Schneider suggests that we need to move into "promiscuous incarnation," understanding God as unbound to a particular kind of body.(3) If God is not limited by these binaries, why should humanity, created in God’s image? The Church has suggested that God became flesh in one particular time, place, and body. Many churches still hold that those particularities are meaningful. Schneider offers a counterpoint: that this need to specify God's particularity reflects human tendencies and, furthermore, serves to reinforce claims of exclusivity and power. The Jesus of the Gospels is extravagant and promiscuous in whom he chooses to love, implying that God is likewise as promiscuous. The particularity of Jesus' body, then, at least as far as moral implications that can be derived from it, must be liberated. We must understand God as incarnate in all kinds of bodies in order to approach the kind of love that God truly conveys. This must, perhaps queerly, reach other animal and non-animal expressions of God.

If I see God as woven throughout and within creation, God loves as intensely and closely as is possible. Perhaps a panentheistic God can queerly return us to embodied intimacy with God that happens at a physical level, that thrives on physical contact with diversity. If we take this to heart, we can open to ours to how God is present in everything and to reading our scripture with fresh minds.

1) Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 9.

2) Justin Tanis, Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Pr, 2003), 177.

3) Laurel Schneider, “Promiscuous Incarnation” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).