Art Review: Radical Love
It's really not that radical.
Note: Special thanks to my book club members for inspiring some of the arguments in this review. I wish I could give credit where credit is due, but their confidentiality matters too.
I hate getting rickrolled.
Rickroll #1: I’ve been praying the Psalms almost every weekday for the last four weeks or so, but I haven’t heard very much from God. I’m pulling prayer topics left and right and even throwing in some others from my friends, but I’m not getting anything back. And before the holy rollers come at me, my experience with listening prayer has been a rickroll in and of itself.
Rickroll #2: “You are not in control. I am in control.” God finally decided to show his face last Monday at 4 AM, while I was tossing and turning in an overpriced airport hotel room. The following morning, I tested positive for COVID, after which I was bedridden for a whole week with chills, phlegm, and the throat from hell.
Rickroll #3: That week was supposed to be spent eating Chicago deep-dish pizza and rollerskating with old friends from Church of all Nations. I had spent the last five months reserving tours, juggling text chains, and building back-to-back itineraries on Google Calendar. All that work…for nothing.
Rickroll #4: I had to use the last dregs of my PTO because I only received a day of paid sick leave for the entire year. You can thank the red tape for that one.
Rickroll #5: Radical Love, by Patrick Cheng.
I picked up Radical Love for a book club held by my old church. The pastor had heard good things about this book, so she decided to give it a shot. She wasn’t alone: one of our group members had read this book for seminary.
I was a little bit more iffy about Cheng, having read Radical Love’s sequel (Rainbow Theology) last January. Back then, Cheng shocked me with his willingness to use observations from pornography as a building block for theology. But to be fair, there’s no going around porn - most queer kids use it as an intro to sex ed (sadly). And if you can't avoid it, you gotta talk about it.
At the end of the day, I liked this pastor. And I liked the people she brought to the table. So I also decided to give Radical Love a shot.
Cheng’s thesis is that queer contributions to Christian theology can be summed up by something he calls radical love: “love so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries.” Throughout his book, he attempts to use radical love as a framework to queer God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the other hallmarks of theology.
In principle, “radical love” sounds really cool. We’ve seen the damage caused by homophobes like Ron DeSantis and the heterosexist boundaries they set up. And we’ve seen the growth that happens when we listen to queer Christians like Eric Lige or Erina Kim-Eubanks or Leigh Finke.
But in practice, Cheng’s “radical love” imposes its own boundaries. For him, queer people must either come out of the closet or risk losing out on who God made them to be.
In Chapter 3, Cheng conflates the closet with “hiding or running away from God,” claiming that “only grace in the form of coming out can set us free.” In Chapter 5, he says that coming out is the way to “repent of the closet.” He follows this with Robert Shore-Goss’ claim that the sacrament of reconciliation means “the refusal of queer Christians to be reconciled with churches that still engage in ‘heterosexist oppression’ and ‘compulsory heterosexuality.’”
As an Asian American, this kind of language burns me up: racial capitalism has stripped my people of the luxury of coming out or leaving non-affirming communities. The closet allows us to stay in community with family members or churches that don't understand our queerness but provide us much-needed financial and social supports. Even if our survival strategies keep us from fully experiencing God's love, the responsibility to “repent of the closet” belongs to the Asian American church, not us.
Ultimately, Cheng’s insistence that coming out was the ultimate queer experience is simply annoying: queer people are so much more than that.
While Cheng’s radical love excludes queer people that don’t meet his standards of visibility, it does include stuff like this:
“Theodore Jennings, a theologian at Chicago Theological Seminary, has suggested that YHWH, the God of the Hebrew Bible, can be understood as being the “top” in a homoerotic relationship with David, the king of Israel—akin to that of a warrior chief and his boy companion.” (Chapter 3)
Okay. Let’s take a second to process what we just read. What. the. FUCK?!
Here’s my take on what’s happening: this book is written as a literature review of anything that’s written by an LGBT+ scholar and fits within Cheng’s definition of “radical love.” This is a very different model from traditional systematic theology, which explicitly determines what is right and wrong. It’s new, it’s transgressive, and it’s perfect for getting rave reviews from Cheng’s fellow academics.
It’s also a mishmash of disparate and conflicting perspectives, very few of which are consistent with God’s character.
The vast majority of featured perspectives cherry-pick some detail in the Bible or Christian tradition and project some kind of queer phenomenon onto it. Some are somewhat edgy, like the claim that gender reassignment surgery allows trans participation in the Resurrection (Tanis). Others are overly sexualized, like the claim that Trinity is a polyamorous orgy, with each member possessing individual lovers (Althaus-Reid).
The most egregious claim is that if the Virgin Mary is the Bride of Christ, Jesus is the “prefigured lover of the mother who gives him birth” (Ward). If Cheng actually bothered to copy-edit his own work, he would recall that “nonconsensual behavior” (such as parent-child incest) “is by definition excluded from radical love.” More importantly, this claim is unacceptably offensive, not only to God, but also to queer people.
At the same time, Cheng devotes multiple pages to a scholar claiming that baptism and the Eucharist are queer because they erase sex and gender (Stuart). This is not only a form of queer erasure but also inconsistent with the tone of Cheng's previous selections. Is Cheng trying to justify human gender and sexuality, or devalue it altogether?
At this point, I've speculated enough on Cheng's disconnect to hypothesize two possibilities:
(1) Cheng is abdicating his responsibility of evaluating his sources to his audience.
(2) Cheng is implicitly endorsing all the sources that he cites.
Neither possibility is a good thing.
It is fine to argue that queer scholars and queer experiences can shed light on God’s character. But Cheng’s selection of works centers human sexual preferences instead. This leaves me to interpret and criticize Cheng’s work with my own understanding of God’s character.
I'm only twenty-four and I haven’t gone to seminary. But here’s what I know about God:
God is transcendent. God doesn't exist to justify our kinks or fetishes. There is no scriptural evidence supporting the idea that God is a sexual being. It is irresponsible to project our preferences on human sexuality or gender onto God. God is God, and we are not.
But the worst part? Cheng’s attempts to queer systematic theology are hardly relevant to building a liberative framework for social justice. Such a framework would consider queerness’ relationship to class and racial capitalism. But this book’s “queer theology” is too preoccupied with justifying human sexual excess to address these issues.
That said, Cheng’s “literature review” approach allows him to occasionally offer a useful insight or two. Here’s the one that inspired me the most:
“[John] McNeill wrote about how HIV/AIDS has forced all people to face the reality of human mortality. He notes that most heterosexual couples satisfy the basic human urge to transcend human finitude and mortality through reproduction. However, because this option is often not available to many LGBT people (at least without substantial technological and other resources), this gives them the choice to either (1) despair or (2) accept the hope of the resurrection of the dead. And it is the special “spiritual peace, joy, and trust” that McNeill saw in his patients with HIV/AIDS that has allowed such people to hope in the resurrection and to “give themselves over to celebrating life and enhancing its quality for themselves and others.”
This passage exemplifies what I believe queer theology could and should be. Instead of projecting or justifying sexual or gender preferences, McNeill asks how queer experiences can add wisdom to a universal problem faced by the church. From there, he conducts original research gauging related queer challenges, as well as responses to said challenges.
As a result, McNeill’s contribution extends well beyond defending our self-gratifying impulses. It challenges all of us to interrogate our hubris in seeking immortality, a privilege reserved for God. And it challenges us to place our hope in Jesus’ resurrection, as well as the resurrection of all believers.
That kind of analysis is my gold standard for theology. And it comes from remembering one simple truth:
God is God, and we are not.
Do you have any observations or questions that you’d like to add? If so, let’s chat. Email me and we can get the conversation going.
As always: fight proud 📢, fight strong ✊, and fight on! 🗡️