Queer (Non-) Method and Eschatological Imagination: An Experiment

Reichel’s “Method After Method”

The invitational challenge to reconsider our conceptions of why and how we theologize that Hanna Reichel offers in After Method does not position the methods of queer theology as a foil to, complement of, or even a conversation partner with other ways of theologizing. Rather, in Reichel’s estimation, queer theology, while being one of the Constructive theologies Reichel takes to be locked in a critical impasse with what they term Systematic theologies, possesses the theoretical and conceptual leverage needed to help theologians perceive differently where the conflict between them lies and to attend to the crucial work of theologizing differently. The result is not a reconciling, harmonizing, or synthetizing of Systematic (i.e. doctrinal, dogmatic) and Constructive (i.e. liberationist, contextual) theologies, terms that Reichel capitalizes to mark them as “framing devices” for two general theological trajectories rather than denoting specific theological approaches. ⁶ It is to move—queerly—beyond the Systematic–Constructive binary logjam into a different theological mode, in which each theologizes faithfully and with integrity without needing to justify itself before or being threatened by the other and while paying careful attention to and making appropriate use of the critical calls and interventions each makes upon the other.

Reichel is emphatic that a new method is not what is needed to address modern theology’s crises. No new method, Reichel avers, can save theology from its perceived lack of relevance, its disciplinary fragmentation, or its moral failures and complicities. In fact, it is method that has produced these conditions. For both Systematic and Constructive theology, even if differently, the desire to specify what makes for “good” and “bad” theology has resulted in articulating methods aimed at achieving “good” results and excoriating and eliminating “bad” ones. Theologizing in strict adherence to these methods, confident in their ability to produce “proper” theology and in their assurance that theology done otherwise is inadmissible, predetermines what can be considered theologically salient (what is legible to a given method), which only results in yet more theology that rigidly justifies one’s pre-existing position and further exemplifies what the other finds blameworthy in it, leading in response to increased uncompromising compliance with one’s method, guardian of all theological truth and bulwark against the deficiencies of theologies produced by “erroneous” means—with no attention paid to the effects that such theologies have on people, epistemologically, spiritually, or materially. Each new attempt to specify a method impervious to external criticism inflames rather than calms this dynamic, generating theology’s three crises. Moreover, both theologians and the methods they employ are marked inevitably by sin, which alone is sufficient to ensure the failure of method as therapy for the methodological impasse. The forms of methodological sin that Reichel identifies are the hubris of positive dogmatism, the sloth of nihilism masquerading as critique, and the falsehood of a self-absorbed dialectics that seeks to balance the two but only falls into the pitfalls of both. Method is, then, the source of theology’s problem, not the cure for what ails it.

Nevertheless, Reichel is clear that they “are not against method as such, whatever that would mean.” ⁷ Methods, indeed, are required for theology to remain possible. Neither Systematic nor Constructive theology, to be what they are, can avoid method. Of necessity, they even each avail themselves of some of the methodological commitments of the other:

If Systematic Theology is not free of constructive activity, Constructive Theology, in turn, is not free of coherence nor of norms, but proceeds rather systematically in its epistemological self-reflection, its principled examination of latent power structures, and its fierce ethical commitments. ⁸

Moreover, if truth is to remain “the criterion to both [the] content and [the] form” ⁹ of any theology—truth understood as correspondence to God and the Good News—employing methods is not optional. To proclaim that “method cannot save us,” Reichel writes, “is less a dismissal of method and more a methodological critique of its use—in the double sense of its purpose and applications.” ¹⁰

The endeavor of Reichel’s book is not to jettison method. It is instead to advocate for adopting a “method after method,” in their formulation. This is to assume a posture in which, having given up the idea that following any method will make one’s theology right (i.e. that it will “redeem” or “save” the theologian or their theology through the self-justifying force of its correctness), the theologian is freed to quest not for good theology (since all theology will fall short of the good, given, as they point out, citing Mark 10:18, that God alone is good), but of relatively better theology. Having loosened—not lost—their grip on their methods, Systematic and Constructive theologians alike would be free to attend to their work with a different relationship to it and to one another. They would understand themselves as neither opponents or competitors, nor as complements to one another or as two sides of one theological coin. Instead, Systematic and Constructive theologians could thus “work in relative solidarity with one another, providing one another with constructive mutual irritation and encouragement to push their respective critical awareness forward.” ¹¹ Each would do what they could to limit “bad” theology—identified not by its lack of correspondence to proper method but by its demonstrable effects on those who hold it or are subjected to it—while hopefully offering theology that is “better,” ¹² better relative to alternatives on offer within the complex matrix of realities in which the theology being produced is embedded.

It is here, in specifying their “method after method” for designing better theologies, that Reichel brings queer theological resources to the fore. Throughout the book, queer theological concepts, perspectives, and approaches serve to cut through the methodological knot that Reichel takes to have led to theology’s triple crisis. This could be read as offering a methodological solution to the methodological problem that Reichel claims cannot be solved methodologically. That, however, would be a misunderstanding. Queer theologies and the body of theory around which they revolve share certain critical and ethical commitments. In either case, however, is there a stable and specifiable queer method that, like the methods Reichel criticizes, coordinates those perspectives or governs the use of the interpretive strategies of which any theorist or theologian might avail themselves. Queer engagements hold them too lightly to serve as anything so determinative as a method in that sense. That is precisely the reason why Reichel finds queer theory and theology to be so promising: in taking this tack, they model the possibility of a (non-)method or a “method after method.”

Reichel demonstrates this by way of example, using the notion of queer anti-normativity. The queer focus on “the misfit, the outsider, the trickster, the vagabond—all those who fail to become legible to prevailing norms and regimes, whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether by their own volition or external forces,” ¹³ stems from a desire to surface and a refusal to legitimate those norms and regimes precisely on account of the harmful erasures they perpetrate. This is the impulse that gives rise to queer anti-normativity. What it does not do, however—and this is crucial—is create a methodological principle out of anti-normativity. Indeed, it cannot do so, since queer criticality maintains normative commitments of its own and because, given the queer resistance to binaries, no “queer thinker worth their salt would build their case on a binary distinction of normative and anti-normative,” anyway. ¹⁴ Anti-normativity, as Reichel shows in an extended argument in conversation with Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Linn Tonstad, is produced by a complex, non-reductive relationship with norms in a positive and capacious sense, one that produces generative forms of subjectivity and ways of attending meaningfully to difference. In Reichel’s estimation, queer thinkers do not so much deploy methods as make interventions, proceeding more artfully than scientifically. Even so, drawing on Jane Ward’s work, Reichel writes,

To pair the terms “queer” and “methodology” might be less of a contradiction than “a productive oxymoron.” Its distrustful stance vis-à-vis norms and its critiques of normativity’s productivity has never prevented queer theory (or queer theology) from engaging in deliberate, intentional, and self-reflected ways, let alone understand its interventions as profoundly ethically driven—thus proceeding arguably both with a recognizable methodology, as well as a distinctly normative impetus. ¹⁵

Method and normativity thus remain in queer constructive work. As Reichel points out, however, adverting to the work of their principal queer theological figure, Marcella Althaus-Reid, if there is a method, is it best described as “a not precisely systematizable ethos,” ¹⁶ and the normativity in play is, as we have seen, a critical normativity aimed at the pursuit of justice and solidarity that gives rise secondarily to an anti-normativity that is deployed strategically but never becomes a methodological principle of its own.

All of this stands in signal contrast to the methods of Systematic and Constructive theology and their methodological attempts to achieve “good” theology and defeat “bad” theology. The promise Reichel identifies in queer theology is the possibility of its relieving theology of its methodological crises, not by providing a new method, but by helping theology to think itself otherwise, by encouraging it to shift the emphasis from what it says to what it does, and precisely in doing this, to produce relatively better theology. To make their case, Reichel interacts with queer theoretical and theological resources with the capacity to move theological production in that direction. Examining some of those resources is the aim of the next section.

Affordances of Queer Theology’s (Non-)Method

Largely, but not exclusively, in connection with the component of the case made in After Method on the basis of conceptual design (which will not be engaged here directly in order to focus more narrowly on the queer theological valence of the work), Reichel invokes the notion of “affordances” advanced by psychologist James Gibson. Gibson used the term to mark a use to which an element of a given environment might be put by a specific agent interacting with it in that particular context. Reichel offers the following example: “A branch affords sitting for a bird, but not for a bear. The same branch affords eating for the bear, but not for the bird.” ¹⁷ The important thing to notice is that the affordance does not inhere in the object itself—it is not there “in advance,” as it were, as a pre-given, authorized use or an essential purpose teleologically entailed by it—but arises in the utile relationship between a specific agent and a specific object in a specific environmental context, each of which contributes qualities, histories, and faculties that condition (without determining) what is afforded under those concrete conditions. We can, Reichel maintains, understand concepts—including theories and theologies—to carry affordances of this kind. Affordances of queer theory’s and theology’s (non-)method that Reichel identifies for the “method after method” they seek to espouse provide tools for theologizing with more freedom from methodolatry and its attendant crises.

Making “Queer Use” of Eschatology

If the queer use of doctrine entails recycling, repurposing, and reusing theological constructions so as to unleash their affordances for revealing a queer holiness characterized by the presence of queer virtue, thereby providing an interruptive opening for a systemically destabilizing, queer grace-filled encounter with the queer God and the queer other, then, consistent with Reichel’s (non-)method of “method after method,” we ought to be able to queerly redeploy the standard themes of Christian eschatology with such an aim in mind. This mode of theologizing is methodical without itself constituting a method. There is coherence and purpose in it. However, these are not in service of a set of principles or procedures, nor are they driven by alignment with a commitment to an approach to theology taken to be right and good, over against others that are wrong and bad. They serve to expose where theological limits have excluded and done violence to God and others and to tarry with the realities of those failures, some remediable (due to causes that admit of amelioration or reparation) and others not (due to divine transcendence or creaturely finitude). We are no more certain about which is which, than we are certain about the truth of what we say or the effect of what we offer:

For queer theology—any theology—to relinquish control of the solution and the outcome [of our theologizing] is a queer grace. This release which queer grace enables does not lead us into the secret knowledge of the inner workings of God’s action—when, where, how, with whom, etc. While one might believe with reasonable confidence that God will make all things new out of the ashes of our current reality, who can say who we will be beyond our current system of meaning making regarding sex, gender, and sexuality? To offer much of a framework of that potential new reality runs the risk of reiterating the idolatry and projection that we are attempting to expose and resist anyway. Yet that release which queer grace enables does allow us to continue our work, albeit reframed. ²⁷

With this queer eschatological proviso in place, we can begin to risk making queer use of eschatology on the way to offering “better” theology.

The temporal indeterminacy of eschatology is one of the signal felicities of traditional theological understanding where its queer use is concerned: the fulfillment of all things is not either now or not yet but both now and not yet. Excessive faithfulness to reality requires facing the fact that the promise of full flourishing is neither fully present now, as a realized eschatology that denies a temporal futurity for such a condition maintains, nor is it a fully futural state, as a consequent eschatology consonant with systems committed to certain forms of The End (i.e. of time, the world, etc.) contend. Instead, the times interpenetrate, the future promise being provisionally realized in evanescent moments glimpsed in and through both the daily mundanities and extraordinary epiphanies of life and the imperfections of our broken but beautiful relationships. We are tantalized, not fulfilled, and so are opened to a future beyond our control. Moreover, in messy solidarity with those who live and die at the margins of dominating power, queer use of eschatology seems to demand being fiercely indecent about proclaiming the truth of a vindicating power promised to expose, judge, condemn, and overturn the unacknowledged and normalized systems upon which many of our polite but vicious lives depend, in ways both penultimate yet immediate, and ultimate and yet to be fulfilled.

Similarly, there is a tension in Christian eschatology regarding the continuities and discontinuities between the proximate and the final, or, in theological terms, between the present creation and the New Creation, our present heaven and earth and what is theologically indicated by the New Heaven and New Earth. In the transformation from old to new, whether provisionally now or in a less immediate and more thoroughgoing sense, what remains and what is lost? Or is this, too, a binary that queer grace breaks by an affirmation that there is neither (full) remaining nor (absolute) loss but an unanticipatable transformation in which, like the risen body Christ, what endures is both utterly unrecognizable and intimately known, marked indelibly by its past woundedness but gloriously healed from its injuries? Realism about eschatological continuity and discontinuity requires insisting that the continuity required for the preservation of identity is necessary but also reckoning with actual negativities, such that they are neither replicated in what is held to be a state of fulfillment nor erased without residue as if they never existed and are not a component of the continuing identity that is transformed. Specifying eschatological continuity and discontinuity in advance closes down the ability for indecent aspects of the mess of finite existence to become legible as sites of queer holiness. Messy solidarity demands that we hold the possibility of both continuity and discontinuity radically (and compassionately) open.

Related to this is the eschatological theme of love and judgment, which is bound up with dialectical conceptions of divine mercy and justice. The messy solidarity exhibited by the Bi/Christ demonstrates God’s own excessive faithfulness to that which God has made, a solidarity up to and including the divine indecency of becoming flesh and permitting the creation to commit deicide in an act of torturous murder. The interruption of queer grace—the manifestation of love across the infinite qualitative difference between creator and creation—lands as divine judgment against that which separates, maims, destroys, and kills, that is, as resurrection. Love-as-justice requires exposing and condemning violence and death (no matter their source). Mercy-as-judgment finds them incompatible with the relational flourishing of resurrection life, consigning the negativities to which they give rise to a place among the discontinuities of eschatological transformation, where their effects are reconciled and redeemed rather than removed. Solidarity with the queer others subjected to violence and injustice demands a reconciliation that does not incorporate or amalgamate or assimilate but that repairs and, in a theological idiom, redeems from just oblivion all negativities that assert themselves against the really real, that is, God—and, given the God who stands with them, against the queer others, as well.

Queer use of the eschatological horizon employs its affordance as both personal and cosmic. Against eschatological imaginaries that reduce the possibility of beatitude in fullness and flourishing to either the exaltation of human beings to a state of heavenly bliss or their consignment to hellish agony, excessive faithfulness to reality sees the human as a relational emergence, enmeshed in a web of material and phenomenal intersections out of which its being and identity arise. The queer grace of eschatological transformation cannot occur apart from this nexus but only in and through it. Biologically, sociologically, phenomenologically, and theologically, human identity—the specific concrete arising of a biologically based narrative situated within time and space—is impossible, cannot be, apart from its relational connection to the rest of creation, human and other than human. There can thus be no talk of eschatological flourishing of the reality‚ the person, God is said and experienced to value in its unique particularity without that which allows for the existence of it. The hard borders of systems and their normative conceptions, divisions of inside and outside, self and other, material and immaterial, when viewed in light of the character and promises of the queer God, begin to dissolve. The continuity of identity required for eschatological transformation and flourishing turns out to depend not on the discrete perdurance of some kind of stable self that can be picked out as one thing among other created things but on the continuity and discontinuity of the highly differentiated transtemporal and transspatial totality within which any created thing is actualized as a sequence of unrepeatable and unrepeated events. It is thus unintelligible to ask whether the queer God “saves” apart from the queer other.

These are merely some suggestive, underdeveloped possibilities for using eschatology queerly. The queer use made of this theological material may (and hopefully does) disrupt certain theological formulations produced by Systematic or Constructive methods unwilling or unable to countenance the indecent implications of a queer God’s standing in messy, incarnational solidarity with an ideologically and morally impure creation that fails to live up to the idealisms of systematic tidiness that so much theology has used to closet God, as Althaus-Reid puts it. Nevertheless, nothing that surfacing the queer affordances of eschatology has excavated contradicts the traditional, central claims of Christian witness where the eschatological element of Christian theological imagination is concerned. This should not be surprising. Reichel describes, for instance, the queer use that Tonstad makes of the doctrine of sin, explicating how Tonstad refuses to return theological conservatives’ charge of reprobation made against queer people by claiming it is, in fact, they who are the sinners in their loveless judgmentalism, a common progressive tactic. Tonstad instead disables it by putting the doctrine of sin to queer use, embracing, not denying, queer sinfulness while also asserting the sinfulness of all humanity, without remainder. Reichel observes, “In this particular repurposing, a queer use of sin is curiously both more orthodox and more radical at the same time.” ²⁸ Certainly, this will not always be the case. Still, it should not be surprising if excessive faithfulness to the truth in messy solidarity with the queer God and queer others leads us to tell an indecent theological truth that coincides with insights and intuitions made by theologians and within theological trajectories less straightjacketed by method than some others.

What is the (Queer) Use of Eschatological Imagination?

Reichel asks,

What do the uses afforded by theology say about who God is, about the reality of the human being coram deo, and about what right relationship between God, world, other, and self would look like? What practical uses of theology would best reflect and witness to who we claim God to be? ²⁹

In their estimation, how a theological conception answers these questions—not conformity to a systematic method—is how it is seen as “better” or not. “‘Better theology’ is thus always relative, without being relativistic; aspirational while indexical; invested in beginnings while at the same time deeply an-archic; in theological terms, we would say that it marks an eschatological horizon, not a teleological one.” ³⁰ “Better” theology is not about policing the boundaries of an idealized and closed system that can only produce, in the end, that which it is designed to produce. In its radical openness to a future that it does not possess and cannot see but only receive as (queer) grace, it seeks to create better imaginaries to inhabit as the affordances of times, places, and agents shift. ³¹

The eschatological imagination, like all “better” theological imaginaries, is a provisional and penultimate one. While no imaginary can rightly be called “good,” Reichel does maintain that “bad” theologies can be identified, if one does so by attending to the effects—intended or otherwise—they have on those who hold them and that those who hold them have on the world and on those around them. According to those criteria, what can we say in order to support a claim that the queer eschatological imagination sketched out above is “better” than others?

Bad eschatologies, assessed as such in Reichel’s terms, contribute to Christian nationalism, triumphalism, and militarism, resulting in social deterioration and neo-colonial domination. They have led directly to the suffering and death of untold thousands. Apocalyptic dispensationalisms underwrite ecological neglect and devastating extractivist schemes on a massive scale, as well as deadly social policy based on having discerned the “will of God” in natural disasters and pandemics, which signal the so-called “end times.” Optimistic versions of postmillennialism have put their faith in a divinely directed upward trajectory of moral and material conditions that, in some instances, have resulted in passive apathy (leaving suffering unacknowledged and unaddressed, or passively endured while awaiting a celestial reward) and in others, the destruction of faith upon disillusionment, as was widely the case when the horrors of the First World War destroyed the impetus of the Social Gospel movement. Such eschatological optimism continues among Christians convinced it is their job to “build the kingdom of God” rather than to discern where God is “building God’s own kingdom” and to put themselves at its service. Bad eschatologies based in spiritualized sentimentality prize idealized norms of purity, cisheteronormativity, and reproductivity that continue to impact negatively on the lived lives of queer people, on one hand, and that lead to anti-body and anti-material quasi-gnosticisms, on the other hand, along with notions of a private, individualistic, consumeristic “heaven” of personal fulfillment that reinforce market ideologies and retreat into private life at the expense of the public good and social vitality. There is also a bad non-eschatology among Christians who hold that any serious thought of such questions is for the poor and uneducated, or for those who “don’t believe in science.” For such as these, the indecency of taking seriously the excessive promises of a God in messy solidarity with the world outweighs the indecent honesty of divine promise for judgment, mercy, healing, and reconciliation, resulting in a turning away from queer and marginalized others with whom the queer God stands.

By contrast, a “better” eschatology exhibits and nurtures the queer virtues of excessive faithfulness to the real, messy solidarity with the queer God and the queer other, and indecent honesty about current conditions and future hopes. Such an eschatology demands and nurtures commitment to reality—the reality of the world, the reality of ourselves, the reality of the other, the reality of God. This includes realism about the limits of our own efforts without reducing the demand to care, tend, nurture. It provides resources for remaining faithful whether we succeed or fail, whether our hopes are fulfilled or dashed, whether the worst happens or the best is realized. A better eschatology forbids both uncritical hope and hypercritical hopelessness. It bars denigrating the material, the bodily, the fleshly and demands deeper engagement with them without idolatry or divinization of them. Such an imagination continually orients one to the unknowable and the unknown, the ineffable, the excessive. It inspires vision and courage for indecent honesty, tells the ugly truth about exclusions and harms, about hopes and joys. A better eschatology looks to the queer God and the queer other, seeking to love not the one and the other so much as each in and through the other, failing, beginning again, attempting without certainty of success to be ready to make use of it when, in the midst of the chaos and mess, perched precariously on the horizon between the promise of now and the fullness of then, they are afforded just a bit of grace.