1 Stranger in our Midst: The Becoming of the Queer God in the Theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952-2009) “The Queer God may … show us God’s excluded face, which is the face of a non-docile God, a God who is a stranger at the gates of our existent loving and economic order.” (Althaus-Reid 2003: 153) “The Queer God is the God who went into exile with God’s people and remained there in exile with them.” (Althaus-Reid 2004a: 146) Marcella Althaus-Reid’s theology has always been about pushing boundaries and refusing to take platitudes for answers. Her first book to be published in English, Indecent Theology (2000) makes clear that the proper project of theology is per/version, that is, deviation or turning in another direction, which might well manifest in “incorrect”, “unorthodox” interpretation (Althaus-Reid 2000: 87). This entails a querying and rejection of discourse which presents salvation as a limited good to be dispensed via those in positions of power, be they priests or politicians – and a querying of Theology with a capital T for Tradition. “T-Theology” is Althaus- Reid’s shorthand for Western systematic theology which apotheosizes its own historical outworking, not acknowledging its shifting, unfolding quality or its dubious alliances with capitalist imperialism. She comments, “The main road of T-Theology sooner or later always leads us to the same (forced) agreements, to similar exchanges and values of pre-understood laws of capital profit. It seldom lets us perceive the historical presence of God in different, unfamiliar surroundings” (Althaus-Reid 2003: 33). T-Theology therefore implies the “decented”, legitimized theology which Althaus-Reid shows continues to be oppressive to sexually and economically marginalized people. It is in The Queer God (2003) that Althaus-Reid’s notion of an economically and politically subversive deity is really fleshed out – literally, as it is in queer embodiment with all its messy recalcitrance that God exists in and with human beings. The God who is truly queer, and not limited to dissemination via capitalist alliances, has been displaced by heterosexual metanarratives of desire, lack and power. It is only in overcoming such ideologies that human beings can see more clearly the nature of God’s solidarity with excluded, “indecented” persons. In this account, God’s incarnationality is a profound symbol of irreducible ungraspability, resisting sanitization or identification as untouchable transcendence (Althaus-Reid and Isherwood 2007: 310). It is important that God became incarnate in Christ, but just as important that God is also incarnate brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Open Research Exeter