24 June 2024
Pride month is a chance to celebrate the contributions LGBTQIA+ people make to the world. Through a variety of learning offerings, Sarum College highlights the often-underrepresented voices of queer people in the theological disciplines. During Pride month in 2024, we hear from LGBTQIA+ theologians who are making major contributions both to the study of theology and to the Church.
In this final post for Pride month, Dr Penelope Cowell Doe (she/her) concludes her series of three blogs drawing from her recently published book Queering the Church: The Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure. Cowell Doe worked at the BBC and then completed a PhD at the University of Exeter. She now teaches courses including in New Testament studies within the Exeter Diocese.
by Penelope Cowell Doe
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him. [1]
In this, the third of three blogs, I argue that the Church would benefit from the experience of Holy Saturday’s queer temporality, this time of abjection and lamentation when all is failure.[2]
Christ is dead, His traumatised body is in the grave. This middle day is often not properly attended to in Christian theology, for we move quickly from the violence and terror of the Cross to the redemptive triumph of Easter Day. All too often the Easter lilies are being arranged in churches while Christ lies in the tomb. We turn from trauma and rush to resolution because we know (or think we do) the ending.
Yet the absence and failure of Holy Saturday could be a model for the Church’s engagement with the troubled waters of sexuality and gender. ‘Troubled’, not because gender and sexuality are troubles to be solved, but because of the Church of England’s compulsion to generate numerous reports and debates on the ‘problem’ of homosexuality.
What if the influential, neoliberal Church of England remained in that ‘middle day’ without anticipating the certainties and realisations of Easter day? Following the death of a naked and tortured Messiah and bereft of hope, the Church must encounter and admit failure, so that even if rescue comes, the experience of failure will always form a part of salvation.
If the Church were gravely attentive to the experience of suffering and failure, on Holy Saturday when all debate is stilled, the constructed ways of knowing would lose their power. In silence there are no voices to regulate or dominate. Here, in a place of failure, where redemption is only glimpsed provisionally – and hoped for only because, as Christians, we think we know the sequel – oppressive ways of knowing are undone.
—
Notes
[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty.
[2] My use of Holy Saturday as a theological site which can queer the heteronormative practices and neoliberal certainties of the Church owes much to the theology of Karen Bray. In her book, Grave Attending (p 28), Bray’s political theology borrows from the Holy Saturday theologies of remaining explored in Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
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Sarum College runs courses year-round on diverse themes in theology. Examples of forthcoming courses are –
On June 26, Chine McDonald is running a half-day course on womanist and liberation theology, details on the link below:
God is Not a White Man: Race, Gender and the imago Dei
On 10 July, Fr Jarel Robinson-Brown is running a half-day online course on spiritual practices for modern life:
On 18 July, Claire Williams is running a half-day online course on Autism and Theology:
Autism, Theology and Christian Life
Sarum also runs two postgraduate study programmes, an MA in Christian Spirituality and an MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture.
There is a taster session to learn more on Monday 8 July 2024
Free booking for postgraduate study taster session
This is the fourth of five blogs on queer theology themes. Read more
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