IT IS THANKS TO looking again into the late James Cone's theology that I went back to a book I bought years ago, stared reading, put down for what seemed like good reasons and picked up again last weekend, the late John J. McNeill's 1988 book Taking a Chance On God, one of his books in LGBTQ+ theology. The date of publications at the height of the AIDS crisis is important to the contents of the book and his thinking in it so I've noted it. I have to say right up front that there are some things he concluded from his experience that I don't agree with but that's the nature of reading LGBTQ+ literature and of reading theology. One example that I feel compelled to point out is that the consequences of anonymous sex make it a rather obvious sin to engage in it. McNeill was more of the idea that it might be the only experience of love available to some men and that influenced his judgement of it. I don't think that's anything like a sufficient mitigation for the enormous potential for harm that is an inescapable consequence of it generally being engaged in. Anyone who engages in more than one sexual encounter with more than one person who engages in any kind of promiscuity opens not only himself but any other sexual partner to serious even deadly consequences by their behavior. Though there are certainly worse sins, such as preventing the legalization and normalization of committed, faithful, loving sexual relationships, marriage equality, which is the larger sin which leads, inevitably to someone feeling the compulsion to engage in anonymous sex. When he was writing and talking that was certainly a more serious sin that was ubiquitous among legal, political, religious, etc. figures. Most of the habits of dangerous sexual encounters among LGBTQ+ people are a bad habit of the often violent discrimination against us. Discrimination which has the blessing of the ironically hypocritical Roberts Court, the same court which narrowly and likely temporarily ended legal discrimination against us so very recently. Earlier courts nearly uniformly upheld that discrimination against us.
Getting back to McNeill. I had put the book down due to my distaste for psychology and, especially, Freud's theories. After he was pretty much kicked out of the Jesuits by JPII and his chief enforcer, Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) for his ministry to Gay Men and Lesbians, McNeill went into the practice of psychotherapy, probably as a professional extension of his helping people in pastoral counseling. Now, I've especially got issues with Freudian psychotherapy so his use of Freudian terminology put me off and I closed the book a number of years back. Though I should have finished the book because his use of it is atypically harmless and a good opening into his thinking , though not as good for me as his use of Scripture and earlier theological texts. And he was decisively critical in at least one of the basic issues of Freudian dogma.*
It's kind of funny in my life of the past few months that from reading Chad Allen Lizzari's dissertation to reading Claude Piron's linguistic studies (he became a psychotherapist after working as a UN translator) and now McNeill, I'm being influenced by those who are and were much influenced by psychology and who all worked using psychotherapy to try to help people. Perhaps it's only as a science that my distaste for psychology is valid and as a therapeutic art it can, sometimes, be practiced by People of discernment and good will as a good thing. Sort of like religion, in that. I doubt that much of even effective physical medical treatment can be rigorously considered to be based in the best science because our organisms are far too complex and far too many illnesses are based on things we can't really study scientifically.
That is even more the case for mental problems which are entirely invisible to direct observation and tying down to an actual physical cause is probably not only impossible but conceptually mistaken. In the past and today one of the shadier things that psychologists and, perhaps even more psycholgists do is invent mental disorders to drum up business. For a large part of my life being LGBTQ was labeled diseased, though the resistance of a financially interested "therapists" who specialized in "treating" mostly gay men and lesbians was overcome and those official "diagnoses" were officially dropped.
I think any helpful help for mental disorders has to be more a product of art and wisdom for all the dangers that vaguery brings. I really don't think there is any helping that. The same dangers are present when quackery or bad-faith in the guise of science is allowed to be done as it certainly has been. In fact, when they believe what they think has the reliability of gen-u-ine science, they're less likely to question what they do. Especially when the legal and judicial systems collaborate with "experts" and two institutions of massive self-assured arrogance determine the outcome. And more than a little of McNeill's theology is informed by his thousands of hours of talking to and trying to help LGBTQ+ clients and his attentive listening and consideration of their reported experience. The wisdom of that is found in his conclusions though I will confess, the experience of being gay in much of it is foreign to my experience. Still, any acknowledgement of its potential to do good won't affect my rejection of psychology, even more so psychotherapy as science.
Despite having said that I don't find much of Queer Theology compelling, I have to say that I do find John J. McNeill's theology some of the most compelling I have read recently and it isn't just because so much of it compels me as a specifically Gay Christian. His explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the first one I have found really compelling, and I've read some pretty well regarded theologians on the topic. I'll give you a big chunk of it.
A primary task of gay religious groups as they seek to foster the spiritual growth of their members is to teach us how to become self-centered in a healthy way, so that we are able to take responsibility before God and our fellow humans for our own choices and our own lives. We must learn that we cannot live our lives simply to meet the expectations of others, whether those others are parents or church officials.
Certainly that isn't something that is peculiar to LGBTQ+ People, the struggle with our inevitable focus of our attention on ourselves and the strong tendency to become self-fixated is nearly universal.
As lesbian women and gay men, we must prayerfully undertake a personal reevaluation of what we have inherited, because much of what has come down to us from the church has been contaminated by the evil of homophobia. We must ask ourselves which of the church's values we continue to want, respect, and love; in other words, which values are compatible with who we are and are not destructive of our dignity as persons. As I mentioned earlier, whatever is psychologically destructive must be bad theology. Thus our identification of the destructive elements will be a service to the church, helping it separate purely human traditions from the authentic word of God.
The self-centering and maturing process has been a basis in God's revelation in Scripture. Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, was the last in a series of epiphanies or revelations of God that had been going on for millennia. When the followers of Moses began to worship God in the image of a golden calf - a worship that necessarily involved a dehumanization and depersonalization of the self, and a regression back into the subhuman, God revealed him/herself as a person. The central message of that revelation of God is a person and that we give God true worship primarily through the development of our specifically human capacities for work, joy, play and love.
The progressive revelation of God's self as Father, Son and Holy Spirit represents a progressive identification with and interiorization of the divine presence in our lives. In the first stage God appears as a parent figure, one who establishes laws and demands obedience, and yet a parent who is also faithful, compassionate, and forgiving. In the second stage of this self-revelation, God becomes present to us as a fellow human being in the figure of Jesus, our brother and fellow human being. At this stage God is still outside us, but is more accessible to us in the form of Jesus. In the last stage God appears as the Holy Spirit of love who now dwells in us. As the prophet Jeremiah stated, the old covenant of God was based on the law and the external authority of God: "I had to show them who was the master"(Jr. 31:32). However the new covenant is essentially different. In the new covenant, Jeremiah predicts, God will write the law deep within us, on our hearts. As a result every human being, from the least to the greatest, will be able to find the will of God within him-or herself and his or her experience.
This is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel when those days arrive - it is YHWH who speaks. Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbor to try to teach neighbor, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know YHWH!" No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest - it is YHWH who speaks- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind. (Jr 31:33-34)
At one point in his discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus said to his disciples: "It is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you."(Jn 16:7). Why did Jesus have to disappear from our own midst that the Spirit of the new covenant could become present? As long as Jesus remained present among the apostles, they had their center of authority and guide outside themselves. They were trying to meet the expectations of someone else. As long as they remained under the personal authority of Jesus, they were still children. They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults.
With the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, however, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. . .
Chapter 4: Spiritual Maturity: A Challenge for Lesbian and Gay Christians
Despite whatever risk of the typically Christian sin of presuming supersessionism is contained in McNeill's explanation of it - and he bases not a little of it on the words of Jeremiah, elsewhere noting that Jesus, himself said he had not come to overturn The Law but to fulfill it - that is an explanation of the Trinity I can see whereas all others I'd read had seemed off, to me. The sin of supersessionism, the claim that the New Covenant overturns the Old one is, perhaps ironically, knowable from exactly the same thing that McNeill condemns much of the anti-LGBTQ+ baggage of the Christian churches with in this passage, the oppressive violence, even murder that resulted from it, the bad fruit of that theology. Whatever else we know, that kind of fruit, that kind of result has to condemn any particular traditional holding of Christianity no matter what its provenance or its establishment in age because of the guarantee of Jesus that we could rely on that standard of judgement of such claims. If that is not to be taken as a reliable standard of judgement then it calls into question everything else attributed to him or, rather, any particular denominational or theological interpretation of it, that is if rational consistency is important in theological considerations.
There is a lot for an outsider of any focused theological school to think about in reading its literature. All theologies are an expression of the experiences and conclusions of particular groups of People, even individuals within those groups. In metaphysical academic theology it's not, perhaps primarily the life experience of those which is expressed but their educational and professional orientation and which particular flavor of that kind of theological bias they have chosen to be associated with. Often it is a denominational bias as a more overall determination of what is concluded. The difference in the Liberation theologies, Black Liberation, the various Latin American ones, the feminist, womanist, mujerista, LGBTQ+ ones, is that the lives of actual People outside of the academic elite are the actual testing ground of what those theologies propose.
It is one of the most irritating things about huge swaths of Roman Catholic theology, especially that which deals with marriage, married life, sex, that it has mostly, in the past, come from an elite of unmarried, educated men who were supposed to not have normal committed, honestly conducted sexual relationships and, in some cases, nuns who had gotten academic credentials in academic, Catholic theology. That isn't an annoying kind of thing that is restricted to this peculiarly Catholic case. It is a fact that as James Cone said, most of the history of theology has been made by some narrow band of elite intellectuals and academics who have produced almost all of theology, in the case of Western theology, almost exclusively white and almost exclusively male and almost exclusively privileged economically or within some institution that sustained them in something like privilege. Is it any wonder that so much of the resultant theology doesn't do anything for the large majority of People whose lives and experience are not considered at all. Or, when those are the focus of it, such as in the official Catholic line on the use of contraception and what marriage is for, the mostly priests and bishops and popes and the academic theologians who know that if they don't please the hierarchy their work won't have any impact - and under such regressive papacies as those of JPII and Benedict XVI it might get them fired - the official teaching will not work at all for the majority of Catholics and so they will ignore and disobey that official teaching where they can access contraception. It is more than a bit absurd that the Vatican, fifty-six years after Paul VI's upholding, against the conclusion of the large majority of the expert panel his predecessor and he called to study the issue, kept the absurd policy against the use of effective contraception in place for everyone but the celibate clergy to follow. In no small part that is the reason that Republican-fascists in the United States Congress and Catholics on the damned Supreme Court are floating the idea of ending legal access to contraception. What you can say about the arrogant and clueless isolation from and indifferenc to real lives of real People you can probably say even more for the vile secular hierarchy of the Supreme Court, the legal scholars who are traditionally more like those isolated traditional theologians than they'd like to have anyone pointed out and the Republican-fascist hacks who know their congressional districts are drawn to gather in suckers who will vote for any criminal or creep with an "R" after their name. Which, do in no small part to the Roberts Court, is why it is in the control of such criminals and creeps today.
That kind of elite legalistic, academic analogy to my criticism of elite theology isn't restricted to the right, however, it is also the basis of my rejection of the ACLU-"civil liberties" line of lawyering that has played the American left for such suckers on the basis of their own Constitutional and First Amendementy purity. It's why their lawyers can be proud of themselves for enabling America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, the foreign imports of neo-Nazis, and others who can be counted on to attack, terrorize and kill mostly people under the lawyer's economic class and outside of their professional, social and family circles, people NOT like them, in other words. An education in elite law is probably any number of times more dangerous than one in elite theology because under a secular, liberal democracy, they really do have the power to make their ideas have real power.
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