It is no secret that Christianity has a queerness problem. Same-sex attraction, of course, has been the Church’s bugbear for decades, and in the past several years, “gender theory” has become a favorite phrase for culture-warring clergy. More intimately, but no less importantly, queer Christians suffer routine abuse on a personal level, ranging from labor abuses to everyday harassment and alienation to conversation therapy. For that reason, it’s understandable that many queer Christians’ main priority is peaceful assimilation into the broader Church. If we can only show that we’re people like you, if we can show that we’re just Christians who happen to be queer, then we will be able to incorporate ourselves into the Church community.

But there is a certain evasion in this sentiment. It attempts to avoid the fact that queer Christians are unlike normative Christians. We inhabit the world in a fundamentally different way, and thus experience God in a fundamentally different way—in many ways, a richer way than normative Christians. Indeed, it is generally the aim of academic “queer theology” to highlight these differences, in pursuit of seeing the world and the Church anew; however, this discourse seems to have been slow in reaching mainstream discourse, where assimilation remains the dominant theme. With that in mind, this essay will attempt to develop a fragment of queer Christian theology to inform a new understanding of queer Christian life. Specifically, I will examine the possibility of a specifically queer Christian soteriology.

Despite its centrality to our confession, it’s easy to forget that the Christian faith is not of the present but of the future. It refers to a reality of salvation that has been promised and inaugurated but not fully realized. Edward Schillebeeckx identifies this reality as the humanum, the full humanity that is the fulfilment of Creation, whose “definitive salvation” is the “eschatological gift of the Spirit, the fruit of God’s liberating love.”¹ Crucially, this reality is not fully present to us, but is rather ensured by God’s love and “sought and found only fragmentarily in history”² —most clearly through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, but also through the human experience of suffering and the praxis of solidarity. Suffering, Schillebeeckx suggests, serves as the root of a “contrast experience:” in the human encounter with the intractability of reality, the tendency of reality to be other than we want it to be, we affectively intuit that reality should be different. Consequently, we may direct ourselves to the work of solidarity, and through this work briefly gain a glimpse at the human wholeness that God has promised us. For this reason, the Kingdom of God is necessarily realized in the world in a utopian, hermeneutical manner, in which human beings use their experience—inflected by the revelation of Christ and the guidance of the Holy Spirit—to discern the path toward the salvific reality of the humanum humanum. This is all to say that Christian salvation exists in a condition of already-and-not-yet, realized in an interplay of positive and negative experience—rooted, above all, in the fact that the Kingdom of God has yet to be fully realized, but can be glimpsed within history.

But this reality, as I said, is all too easily forgotten in the Church today, abandoned in favor of dogmatism and worldly power. Eschatology is, after all, humbling. It demands the recognition that we are unfinished, that salvation is rooted not in static dominance but in ongoing solidarity, that our institutions are not guarantees of divine guidance but rather contingent and flawed historical mediations—all of which are deeply dangerous notions to powerholders. While many of the faithful grasp the depth of this idolatry, it is another matter to actively orient the Church toward its utopian and eschatological mission, especially since broader society frequently wields the cudgel of “practicality” against efforts to create new possibilities. For those in power, there is no urgency (or even desire) to look toward the future, for the present is enough.

But for queer people, the present is never enough. Queer people are, by their nature, beings of futurity. As Jose Esteban Muñoz articulates, “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”³ That is, because the present world denies queer people the ability to live as full human beings, entraps them in a society that fundamentally negates their existence, they are able to understand that “this world is not enough,”⁴ that there exists a future ideality in which queerness may be fully realized. They intuitively grasp, in a charism which is foundational to their being, that a better world is not only conceivable but necessary. Even more strikingly, beyond queerness’ power to reject the world as it is, queer experience in the present can act as a “map of the utopia that is [fully realized] queerness,” offering a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”.⁵ In this way, queer aesthetics and ways of being, in their very performance, envision new social relations, offering a brief glimpse of the eschaton of queer life. For this reason, queer being, whether in art that stages new forms of self-expression or in pedestrian moments that cause us to experience deeper social relations than the present world offers, the unfolding expression of queerness in the present offers a glimpse of a future queer utopia.

It’s quite obvious that for both Schillebeeckx and Muñoz, soteriological reality (whether the humanum or a fully realized queerness) emerges in a historically embedded process of liberation, in which the insufficiency of our human experience directs us to the desire for a better world and human activity (whether in solidarity or queer relations) can illuminate salvific fragments of that better world. But what should we make of this alignment?

To my mind, this utopian soteriology is more than a common intellectual heritage (though both Schillebeeckx and Muñoz do cite Ernst Bloch) or a novel way of aligning “gender theory” and Christian theology. More than that, the dialogue between Muñoz and Schillebeeckx articulates the mode of being that queer Christians already experience—a mode of being in which full life in the Body of Christ is denied in the present but is anticipated in our lives and actions. Such a Queer Christian soteriology can and should provide a foundation for material acts of queer Christian liturgy and practice. It is an invitation to ground queer Christian life not in respectability politics or in assimilation, but in utopian witness. Queer Christian activity can reside in the knowledge that our queerness does not belong to this reality but to a better and truer one, the reality that God has promised to all human beings. And it can reside in the knowledge that we, queer people, have a special ability for revealing and realizing that world.

Though queer Christians frequently suffer existential negation—denied participation in the Church community by ecclesiastic authorities, denied legal rights by homophobic dogmatists, denied support in their spiritual life by apathetic or hostile communities—their suffering does not need to have the last word. Instead, it can emerge as an exemplar of Schillebeeckx’s theory of negative contrast experience. Because suffering consists simultaneously in an overwhelming affective depth and an intuitive call to action, it has the power to “promote a new praxis anticipating a better future and actively committed to realizing it”⁶—and for this reason, queer Christian suffering contains greater salvific potential than the experiences of oppressive Christians. Since the normative Christian experience so rarely consists in existential negation, it is a poor seed for any true salvation; it has no need to gaze beyond the present. But because queer Christian being consists in perpetual unsettlement and perpetual denial in this world, it has the unique ability able to gaze toward the future and make it real in the present. We may say, in this way, that queer Christians are paradigmatic of what Ignacio Ellacuría calls the crucified people—those who unjustly suffer, and whose suffering both unmasks injustice and offers the opportunity for entering into new life. Queer Christian experience may thus serve (alongside other non-normative Christian experiences) as a hermeneutic starting point for efforts to realize the Kingdom of God more fully.

The possibilities for a praxis rooted in Queer Christian experience are manifold. For instance, queer Christians’ all-too-frequent alienation from their traditional families may illuminate ways for Christian communities to nurture a relationality in which all people are above all brothers and sisters in Christ.⁷ Alternatively, the homelessness and material poverty that affects much of the queer Christian community might inspire new and deeper forms of material solidarity with the poor (rather than paternalism), such as ministries of no-strings-attached aid to queer homeless people. In liturgy, the existential ambivalence of queer Christian life may plant the seed for rituals that give sacred language to paradoxical experiences of faith and doubt, agony and ecstasy, presentism and futurity.

We may also find the same epistemic power in the positive and vitalizing experiences of queer Christian life, which, for Schillebeeckx and Muñoz, provide fragmentary glimpses of salvation in the present and direct the work of making the world anew. For example, queer Christian sociality, which is so often fostered in places deemed profane or dissident (gay bars, drag shows, homeless shelters), may radically enlarge our capacity to perceive God’s pervasive self-communication, most especially in places that are unexpected and indecent.⁸ Further, the profound diversity of queer experiences—each queer person experiences queerness differently, and their experience is further inflected by race, gender, class, and dis/ability, among other factors—may help foster a Christian ethic of intersectionality, allowing the Church to be hermeneutically open to a variety of identarian experiences within its overarching work toward human liberation. Or it may be that the uneasy embodied experiences of so many genderqueer people (left in a perpetual instability in expressing their authentic being through the body into which they were born) may shed light on a certain dysphoria in Jesus’ human-and-divine nature—highlighting the pain and grace that emerges when the totality of Creation is condensed into a limited and imperfect body.

If all of these examples seem capacious or partial, this is not an accident. The ambiguity and possibility of Queer Christian salvation is in keeping with the explicit character of the Christian faith, which is to be an open promise of salvation, grasped but never fully realized. As Schillebeeckx says, even Jesus “reveals the face of God in very clear contours, but at the same time veils the face (because it is a revelation of the inexpressible God through Jesus’ real-human, historical, and thus contingent and limited expression)”.⁹ For this reason, while we may say that Jesus’ ministry—even his salvific action on the cross—clearly  gestures to the Kingdom of God, we must also say that the Kingdom cannot be pinned to a definitive course of action, and the human path to salvation must be grounded in God’s power for eternal renewal. Thus, human beings cannot completely enumerate the path to salvation but are nonetheless able to hermeneutically discern the way toward salvation in light of Christ’s historical realization of the Kingdom of God. Given this fact, fragments of queer Christian salvation are always precisely that—fragments, to be realized in lived experience but not reified or made into idols. This means that it is an open question whether the examples above contain salvific potential; they might, or they might not, or other queer Christian experiences than those I’ve mentioned might have even greater potential. But the point is that queer Christian experience may serve as the grounding for the process of this discernment. And, importantly, this is not for the benefit of queer Christians only; queer Christian experience “simply” reveals shards of salvation that have always been present to Christianity, but which normative experience is only rarely able or willing to encounter.

Queer Christianity, in this way, is the open salvific promise that the contemporary Church so sorely lacks. Queer Christianity, unlike normative Christianity, does not have the luxury of enjoying the world as it is; it must reach for a world beyond, and must begin to sketch the outline of that world in lived reality. To be sure, the specific path toward this queer humanum is indeterminate, depending on the particularities of each community and the hermeneutic work of determining which practices have salvific potential. But nonetheless, the graced power of 1ueer Christian experience remains: Queer Christian experience must not simply be accepted or assimilated by normative Christianity, but must be recognized as an illumination of the salvific horizon, a of the complete life that God has promised.