Scripts We Live By: on Inheriting Canonical Texts

Theology & Sexuality

ISSN: 1355-8358 (Print) 1745-5170 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yths20

Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts

Charlotte Dalwood

To cite this article: Charlotte Dalwood (2019) Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts, Theology & Sexuality, 25:3, 165-187, DOI: 10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430

Published online: 27 Aug 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yths20 THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 2019, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 165–187 https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1658430

Scripts we live by: on inheriting canonical texts Charlotte Dalwood Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In this article, I theorize the interpretation of harmful canonical texts Evangelicalism; inheritance; with special reference to John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian the Institutes of the Christian Religion. As a result of the actions and rhetoric of some of its Religion; reparative reading; North American evangelical readers, the Institutes has come to canon; queer theory function as an intellectual foundation for certain expressions of modern homophobia. In conversation with Jacques Derrida on inheritance and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on reparativity, I thus consider how queer evangelicals (especially those who wish to continue identifying themselves as such) ought to engage both Calvin’s text, particularly, as well as, more generally, those other canonical texts that are sources of trauma. In so doing, I proﬀer a capacious view of interpretation as not only what one says but also how one lives.

On 29 August 2017, a coalition of evangelical Christians affiliated with the “Council for Bib- lical Manhood and Womanhood” (CBMW) published the “Nashville Statement,” aseriesof fourteen affirmations and denials proffered “in the hope of serving Christ’s church and witnessing publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality revealed in Christian Scripture.”1 Sex is to be restricted to monogamous, heterosexual marriages, the Statement declared, for it is “sin” that “distorts sexual desires by directing them away from the marriage covenant and toward sexual immorality.”2 Although they censured heterosexual immorality as well, the Statement’s authors reserved the lion’s share of their condemnations for homosexual and transgender persons who refuse to adopt gender essentialist self-conceptions and submit to a life of voluntary chastity (or enforced heterosexuality). Article 10, which anath- ematizes Christian LGBTQ persons and their allies, is illustrative in this respect:

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.3 Unsurprisingly, the Statement’s release ignited a firestorm of controversy, with editorial- ists and Christian activists denouncing it in counter-polemics that variously compared the Statement to past Christian efforts to provide theological justifications for anti-Semitism, apartheid, and slavery.4

The urgent tone of these responses attests the particular damage that the document’s homophobic rhetoric inflicted on those who found themselves objects of the censures therein yet nevertheless wished to continue identifying as evangelicals. And, to be sure, I am personally sympathetic to the project of expunging the Nashville Statement from Christian theological discourse by refuting the propositions therein. That concession aside, however, I hesitate to commend (or pursue) that undertaking without first consid- ering the questions of theological method that the aforesaid counter-polemics raise. Those questions include the two that motivate the present essay, namely, must queer evangelicals expurgate harmful, even violent, texts like the Nashville Statement in their entirety? And, if so, what are they then to do with that other literature on which those texts are based? Since attending to the latter query allows us to see the dangers of too-readily answering the former question in the affirmative, it is instructive to begin with a treatment of this second problem. In so doing, the Bible is, to my mind, the principal text that must needs be considered, not least because a quotation from Ps 100:3 frames the Nashville Statement and a litany of Scripture citations were included in a post-publication draft of the document. Indeed, it is striking that, while the Nashville Statement was presented as an articulation of fundamental scriptural teachings, one would be hard-pressed to find an evangelical critic who holds that, in order to defeat the Statement, Christian communities must jettison the Bible itself. More typical is the strategy adopted by the framers of the “Christians United Statement” (issued a day after the publication of the Nashville Statement), who portrayed their acceptance of LGBTQ persons as a recovery of, rather than a departure from, key teachings in Scripture and the Christian tradition.5 As a canonical text par excellence, the Bible’s centrality within the evangelical imaginary undoubt- edly accounts for this reticence to throw it away tout court. But might other texts be suitable only for the flames? If one is committed to burning the Nashville Statement, it would not be too much of a stretch to think that one should likewise dispense with the writings of the Statement’s initial (and perhaps subsequent) signatories. For if these persons were able, given their personal theological commitments, to subscribe publicly to the Nashville Statement, would this not suggest that their other contributions to the Christian theological archive are inimical to queer flourishing? Pursuing this line of reflection quickly leads one, of course, to the precipice of a treacherous slippery slop. Consider, for instance, J.I. Packer’s works, which would be strong candidates for incineration regardless of their author’s endorsement of the Nashville State- ment given Packer’s repeated insistence that the inclusion of LGBTQ persons within the church represents a deviation from Christian orthodoxy,6 a theological position that found concrete expression in 2008 when he disaffiliated himself from the Anglican Church of Canada in protest of an earlier decision by the Diocese of New Westminster to authorize the blessing of same-sex unions.7 Asked during an interview for The Gospel Coalition to enumerate the books that have had the greatest impact on his life, Packer put John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion at the “head of the list.”8 In this way, he established a bibliographic connection between his own writings (including the Nashville Statement) and those of the sixteenth-century reformer, marking the latter as a sometimes-latent, but always-present, foundation for the former. That linkage is all the more striking because the historical Calvin would himself be nonplussed by the modern and postmodern debates over human sexuality in which Packer is involved.9 But if one THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 167 takes Packer’s appraisal of the Institutes at face value and identifies this text as a formative (perhaps even defining) influence on his thought, it is difficult to shake the feeling that the Institutes itself is in some way implicated in Packer’s homophobia. At the very least, Calvin’s text might well be charged with guilt by association, and, on that basis, rejected as incongruous with queer forms of Christian theology and practice. More precisely, by grounding his thought in Calvin’s own, Packer appropriates the Institutes as an intellectual foundation for contemporary theological arguments that dis- empower and otherwise marginalize queer persons within Packer’s evangelical community. Insofar as it lends itself to being handled thus, the Institutes serves as another reminder that the intellectual archive of Christian theological reflection in the West is hardly favorable (and, indeed, might well be openly hostile) to queer subjects. Rightly dis- tressed by Packer’s writings, queer evangelicals can, consequently, be forgiven for viewing Calvin’s text with suspicion, and regarding it as at least a potential source of harm given their subject positions qua queer. What, then, are such persons to do with the Institutes? To pose this question is to inquire into how it is that texts live on, continuing to speak and act even when their authors are long since dead. It is, further, to ask about the nature of Christian subjectivity, about how texts form readers even as readers form texts. In the present article, I take up these related lines of investigation with an eye towards sketching an interpretive practice suited to any text that – like the Bible, Calvin’s Institutes, and even the Nashville Statement – has purchase on the identities of Christian communities. As my earlier remarks suggest, I take it that much that is Christian is hostile to queer subjects and interests, the intellectual trajectory that links Packer and the Institutes not least. For that reason, my argument is, in part, an intervention against the well-noted trend amongst scholars of Christianity who are informed by queer theory to argue that Christianity is essentially queer, or, if not, that the Christian theological archive is at least, in the main, favorable to queer subjects.10 However, while my comments in this regard pertain most immediately to contemporary conservative evangelicalism, the importance of evangelicalism, broadly defined, as a primary vector of American religiosity – and of global Christianity – is such that my analysis has generalizable implications for the study of religion at large.11 The particular tradition I address is one in which a subject’s membership therein is predicated to a significant degree on the authority she or he ascribes to a corporately delimited set of texts, as well as on her or his adherence to corporately established practices of interpreting the same. That is the case in other traditions and contexts as well (even ostensibly secular ones), including, as I will show, disciplinary biblical studies. Theorizing the relationship between texts, readers, and identity thus provides insights into the matter of what it is to be a part of any socio-religious or academic community in which interpretation figures prominently.12 Going beyond description alone, moreover, the present study further imagines the constructive potential for that relationship to be reconfigured by those who experience a tension between their identification with some such community and other elements of their self-identity: in this instance, those who would claim to be both evangelical and queer. For such people, it is neither possible nor desirable to break entirely from the tradition that formed them, especially if that tradition is one they wish to continue inhabiting; this is so because their participation in said tradition will always remain a constitutive feature of who they are, even if the content of that heritage becomes an object of opposition or a source of pain. Since it is theirs 168 C. DALWOOD regardless of what they do, queer evangelicals would be better served by assuming responsibility for the evangelical tradition, affirming it as their own, and taking it upon themselves to make that tradition live on in new and potentially generative ways. That project is one of critical inheritance, that is, of the selective reception of elements from the past; and it is the work of heirs rather than of those undiscerning fanatics who indiscriminately conserve their heritage. But this praxis is one that, in order to be effica- cious, must be coupled with a hopefulness on the part of queer evangelicals themselves that the tradition they are engaging might yet lead to their flourishing. Hopefulness of this sort is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as a “reparative impulse,” and is analogous to what Calvin identifies as a pious disposition. It is an outlook that, to be sure, leaves readers vulnerable to violence. However, in the same way it opens them to the possibility of being unexpectedly, but positively, surprised by the life-giving potential of the textual entities under their care. In developing this argument, the present article is organized into three principal sections. In the first, I lay out the theoretical foundations for my study, demonstrating that one’s identity qua an interpreter is unintelligible apart from the habituated practices that prevail within the communities of which one is a member. The upshot of this argument is that in order to be both queer and evangelical, one must engage textual objects like the Institutes in such a way that one’s own interpretations are continuous with, but not slavishly reiterative of, the interpretive practices of others, even when those practices produce homophobic readings. Building towards that conclusion, I turn in the second section to the question of how the members of reading communities inherit texts, elabor- ating here upon the distinction between heirs and fanatics apropos of the hermeneutics of suspicion (as the latter manifests both in contemporary critical theory as well as in Chris- tian theological discourse). Harmful canonical texts present special problems of interpretation, I contend here, because one must take responsibility for them even whilst endeavoring to transform them into sources of life. I consider Calvin’s Institutes in its own right in section three, bringing the account of piety therein into conversation with Sedgwick’s delineation of reparative reading practices so as thereby to formulate an interpretive modality of trust. I then return, briefly, to Packer’s corpus and the Nashville State- ment, outlining the implications of my argument for the manner in which queer evangelicals interact therewith.

How to do things with texts Interpretation is as much an act and an affective disposition as it is a discourse: What one does to and with a text is at least as significant as what one actually says about that text, if not more so. Readers do things to texts by following set procedures to produce intelligible readings thereof; while at times this is a mechanical operation (particularly when the interpreter is new to the procedures in question), it more often unfolds in ways that, although conforming to recognizable paradigms of interpretive method, are marked by a minimum of spontaneity and individual variation. For community-external (or, to invoke a term from the social sciences, etic) observers, the procedures that prevail amongst a given subgroup of readers reveal the basic (and often unacknowledged) assumptions those readers hold about what it is for a text to be meaningful at all (i.e. about how texts mean). On the other hand, readers do things with texts by allowing THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 169 those texts to inform and condition their own embodied dispositions: their behaviors, beliefs, customs, and affective states and responses; in short, their ways of life. In this latter case, a reader’s comportment is itself an interpretation of those texts with purchase on her life, an interpretation, note, that need not be construed as any less insightful or tex- tured than the treatises that that reader might compose to expound the meaning(s) of said literary entities.13 “Interpretive scripts” are clusters of routinized strategies for doing things to/with texts that circumscribe domains of interpretive intelligibility.14 At once specific to and constitutive of individual reading communities, these scripts establish the conditions under which readers (can) become interpretive subjects by defining the actions that those readers must perform if they are to generate interpretations that are legible as such. Said communities are networked constellations of texts and interpreters that gain their structure and cohesion from the links scripts establish between the elements therein.15 These groupings exhibit a substantial diversity of sizes and forms, with examples ranging from the program units at scholarly conferences, to book clubs (including church-run Bible studies), and even to couples whose sexual foreplay involves reading (and perhaps mimicking the contents of) erotic short stories. In each case, a community consists of select interpreters applying select strategies in select ways to produce relatively homogeneous interpretations of select texts, a dynamic that, repeated over time, creates and then reinforces an interpreter-text nexus such that the interpretive acts peculiar to a community become both reflexive and obvious to those with an emic view thereof (i.e. to those who view the community from the perspective of the subjects who dwell therein, rather than from that of external observers).16 As these illustrations further suggest, whilst an interpreter is always a member of some community (otherwise she would produce interpretations that, although perhaps intelligible to her, are utterly incomprehensible to everyone else, thus making her only trivially an interpreter), it is unlikely that, at any given time, she is a member of only one community. Likewise, texts can and do figure nodal points in multiple constellations, a point evidenced by the inclusion of such “classics” as Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through it on the reading lists of both coffee-house book clubs and graduate-level seminars in departments of English literature.17 Rather than distinguish interpretive communities according to the elements of which they are comprised, then, which could be identical, it is more precise to base such distinctions on the particular relationships between those elements that a given community’s interpretive scripts establish; adopting this approach has the advantage of allowing us to account for the salient differences that obtain between constellations that might otherwise appear to be identical. With few exceptions, the existence of an interpretive community implies that one or more interpretive scripts are already in place to demarcate the discrete identity of that grouping. Those claiming membership therein may adhere to these scripts or refuse to do so. However, whether one can pass as a genuine member of that community is contingent on how closely one’s own interpretive acts align with the idealized performances that the scripts depict.18 Noticeable divergence from the latter, whether through the sudden interpolation of new elements or the omission of expected ones, invites, at a minimum, the suspicion of other members within the community, who can be expected to doubt whether one’s interpretations carry any legitimacy at all. In instances of extreme deviation, as when one adopts postulates that are incompatible with the existing framework of 170 C. DALWOOD interpretive intelligibility, one’s interpretations may be construed not only as illegible, but also – and more seriously – as acts of violence against the text(s) in question, charges that, depending on the community’s valuation of those texts (on which see below), will potentially yield one’s marginalization within, or expulsion from, that body of interpreters. It is, consequently, necessary to maintain continuity between one’s own interpretive acts and the interpretive traditions on which the self-identity of one’s community is founded. This demand does not, however, entail that one remain slavishly obedient to established customs (the mark of a neophyte). To the contrary, one acquires authority within a given body of interpreters through a process of creative engagement in which one introduces new principles whilst continuing to observe existing rules, innovating in such a way that the interpretive modalities one models remain recognizable to other members of the community as within the accepted limits of the tradition.19 I am arguing, in short, both that participation in some set of reading communities is non-optional for interpreters, and that that participation conditions the ways in which those interpreters engage (and even, as I shall contend below, perceive) texts. Among the implications of these theses that bear upon my discussion of Packer and the Institutes is that the distinction between texts as such and interpretations thereof – although real – is a weak one.20 It is weak because readers, being finite and embodied, are only ever capable of construing texts from the epistemological vantage points of their own temporally and spatially situated subject positions, the consequence being that readers’ particular socio- historical locations both inflect and constrain the interpretations these persons produce.21 The chief such locations are the interpretive communities of which readers are members; for, insofar as the uninterpretable text is a meaningless and, ipso facto, trivial one, when interpreters speak of texts they always speak of texts qua readable and, in most cases, qua read, with interpretive scripts providing the interpretive grammar that allows for that readability.22 Hence, interpreters apprehend texts not as objects in themselves, but, instead, as readings; that is, said persons have mediate rather than direct access to the textual entities within their purview. While it would therefore be somewhat more precise to characterize as harmful not Calvin’s Institutes per se, but, rather, particular ways of interpreting the same (e.g. Packer’s), for those who inhabit the communities in which those interpretations prevail, Calvin’s text just is its destructive readings. I shall argue below that leaving such spaces in order to inhabit others in which the Institutes is some other set of readings is not as viable an option for said persons as it might appear at first glance. For now, it suffices to note that those intent on continuing to dwell therein must needs maintain recognizable continuity between their own readings of Calvin and the harmful ones they might otherwise reject wholesale; which is to say, they have an obligation to – in some sense – take ownership for, and give further viability to, those interpretations, and not just the textual objects thereof. I reserve for subsequent sections a more elaborate statement of what assuming that ownership looks like as a constructive interpretive strategy. Before turning to that discussion, however, it is necessary to render into more concrete terms the theoretical argument I have thus far developed, demonstrating by way of example the manner in which interpretive scripts govern readings. To that end, I shall momentarily turn my attention away from my principal case study and consider, in its place, contemporary biblical scholarship. Among my reasons for doing so is to give evidence that the existence of interpretive communities of the sort I have THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 171 described here is not restricted to the evangelical contexts to which I have been referring. For the regularization and codification of interpretive performances in the form of scripts is ably illustrated, also, by the current state of professional biblical scholarship, within which increasingly-specialized subfields prescribe the exegetical maneuvers that scholars affiliated therewith must execute in order to produce “responsible” readings of biblical (and, in many cases, extrabiblical) literature.23 Gordon Fee’s New Testament Exegesis offers one particularly crass example of the latter. Insisting that “[t]he key to good exegesis is the ability to ask the right questions of the text in order to get at the author’s intended meaning,”24 Fee sets forth in painstaking (and often obtuse) detail “all the steps”–from word-studies to delimiting the length of a pericope and locating it within its “historical-cultural background”–that scholars and pastors ought to follow in the course of their analyses.25 Although his work is self-consciously Christian in tenor and audience, the interpretive prescriptivism that Fee espouses is by no means unique to those whose scholarship is confessionally religious, a fact demonstrated by the ongoing controversy over the place of theological inquiry within disciplinary biblical studies. Michael V. Fox’s 2006 article for the online SBL Forum is in this respect instructive. Juxtaposing “Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study,” Fox rails against the “sophistry” of those “conservative religionists” who see the growing acceptance of ideologically-driven interpretive modalities as an opportunity to legitimize the theological interpretation of Christian Scripture by casting this as but one more lens through which to interpret texts, a lens, on this view, with no less validity than those supplied by queer or postcolonial criticism.26 For Fox, “faith-based study” (by which he means avenues of research and analysis predicated on axiomatic foundations that are neither dis- provable nor subject to revision in light of evidence obtained through subsequent investigation) “has no place in academic scholarship” because it represents “adifferent realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it.” Since the conclusions reached through faith-based scholarship are “predetermined,” the exclusion of such scholarship from the academy is necessary even if those conclusions are found to be correct, this because the postulates on which faith-based inquiry is founded have no purchase on those outside of faith communities themselves. Hence, “[t]he best thing for Bible appreciation is [a] secular, academic, reli- giously-neutral hermeneutic,” which allows the results of biblical criticism to contribute to discussions in a multiplicity of interpretive bodies regardless of those communities’ confessional commitments (or lack thereof).27 Notwithstanding his polemical tone and suspicion of the latter’s project, Fox shares Fee’s concern to define “acceptable” biblical criticism primarily in terms of how critics ought to interpret the Bible (i.e. what questions readers should ask of the biblical text, and, in turn, what sort of answers they should then expect) rather than according to the specific claims those critics ought to make about the meaning or veracity of the materials therein (not that either is entirely averse to stipulating the latter, of course). For neither scholar is the adequacy of competing readings to be ultimately adjudicated on the basis of whether or not those readings are “correct” or “incorrect.” This is so because correctness itself is secondary to the more salient contrast between what might be termed the “legible” and the “illegible,” that is, between those interpretive acts that are recognizable as such – because e.g. they follow “the steps” that Fee delineates – and those that are not.28 Thus, in an overt application of this logic, Fox dismisses theologically 172 C. DALWOOD driven readings of the Bible not, strictly speaking, by falsifying their results; but, instead, by denying their very status as interpretations, a move that constitutes an implicit rejection of the possibility that their results might have truth-values qua interpretations. Within Christian settings, the aforesaid contrast is more often articulated in terms of the binary between orthodoxy and heresy (even if, as is the case with the Nashville State- ment, the terminology employed is more oblique), with a community’s doctrines reflecting the scripts to which its members are required to conform.29 Hence – and in a manner similar to Fox’s exclusion of “faith-based” readings of the Bible from the domain of interpretive legibility – amongst those for whom it is self-evident that fidelity to the biblical text requires the exclusion of LGBTQ persons from the church catholic, efforts to construe the inclusion of LGBTQ persons within the church as, say, an appropriate extension of the biblical witness to divine love are not merely wrong (although they are certainly that). More importantly, such efforts are incomprehensible as ways of interpreting the Bible (in any of the senses of “interpretation” given above). Judgments of this sort about the validity of particular interpretive approaches are a function of one’s membership in a particular reading community, through which one becomes accustomed to participating in, and witnessing, performances that comport with the demands of that community’s interpretive idiom. Repeated exposure thereto results in the internalization of the scripts that govern these performances such that one acquires an interpretive grammar with which both to make sense of texts – including those one has not previously encountered30 – as well as to determine when an interpretation differs from accepted norms. Once assimilated in this fashion, these scripts become reflexive and, eo ipso, seemingly “natural.”31 This transformation in turn facilitates the merger of these scripts with interpreters’ own self-conceptions, the result of which is that a community’s interpretive strategies become putatively essential elements of its members’ identities. And it is in this way that, for instance, heterosexist discourses and comportments come to be conflated with evangelical subjectivity. Queer evangelicals thus occupy a precarious position. Insofar as they are evangelicals (especially of the more conservative variety), they are subject to scripts that, enacted, are ostensibly incompatible with the actualization of queer identities (this even if these persons would prefer simply to renounce their membership in their particular evangelical community, as we soon shall see). But, insofar as they are queer nonetheless, they must engage in creative actualizations of those scripts – and, hence, in creative engagements with the evangelical tradition – in order to survive as such. It is the question of how to do so that concerns me in the remainder of this article.

Of heirs, fanatics, and canonical texts A standard way of contesting an argument is to demonstrate that the premises on which that argument is based do not support the conclusion(s) derived therefrom. When the premises in question are texts, as is often the case for Christian theological arguments, two particularly powerful ways of launching such a genetic critique (in the sense of a critique of an argument that appeals to its origins) are through contextualization and reinterpreta- tion. In the first case, one establishes that although a given ideological or theological position follows from a sound reading of the texts on which it is predicated, that position is only viable within the specific socio-historical circumstances in which those texts were first THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 173 produced. In the second, one establishes instead that an ideological or theological position is founded on a faulty reading of the texts adduced in its support; after offering this initial objection, the most effective versions of this reasoning will then proceed to prove that a proper interpretation of the texts in dispute ought to lead one to adopt a different (perhaps mutually exclusive) position. This reinterpretive line of critique is founded on the assumption of textual neutrality, that is, the belief that however a text might have been understood and appropriated over the course of its reception history, there remains an ur-meaning the ethical value of which is unaffected by later readers’ interpretations of that text. In instances in which this assumption does not hold, strategies of rein- terpretation lose their force;32 for if the ideological position one wishes to challenge is embedded within, and inextricable from, a text, attempts to reinterpret that text along different lines will prove ineffectual.33 While contextualizing an ideologically-problematic text allows one to sidestep this difficulty, adopting this approach limits that text’s purchase to those communities within and for which it was originally produced, a problematic outcome if the text is foundational for the identity of other, temporally later interpretive bodies of which one is a member. Much Christian engagement with canonical texts (including especially the biblical corpus) proceeds along one of these lines, particularly when, for reasons that will become apparent below, that engagement is conditioned by the hermeneutics of suspicion. However, as we shall presently see, neither strategy is suitable for emic challenges to harmful canonical texts. In this latter regard, it is worth noting, first, that when one is initiated into an interpretive community, one inherits not only a set of scripts but also a set of texts. The latter include, on the one hand, those texts that are fundamental to a community’s self-understanding and which, consequently, must be interpreted in the prescribed manner if one is to remain a member of that interpretive body (canonical texts).34 And, on the other hand, those texts that, if they are interpreted at all, must not be explicated using the community’s scripts (proscribed texts), with material that a community identifies as “obscene” often falling under this second rubric. Of course, the vast majority of texts do not fall neatly into either of these categories (which represent the two ends of a continuum), and may be engaged without the risk that an infelicitous interpretation thereof will result in one’s expulsion from, or marginalization within, one’s community.35 These sets are given to new members of a community upon their entrance thereto. However, insofar as they are admitted qua interpreters, those members are not passively assimilated into a static, immutable interpretive tradition. Such persons rather occupy the position of inheritors or heirs whose heritage is both assigned and, through the acts of critical engagement and selective appropriation that are necessary to keep that heritage alive, chosen.36 Impelled by what Jacques Derrida describes as the “double injunction … to receive and yet to choose,” the heir adopts a stance unlike that of the conservator of a tradition. Instead of preserving her heritage in toto, the inheritor instead makes a decision

to select, to filter, to interpret, and therefore to transform; not to leave intact or unharmed, not to leave safe the very thing one claims to respect before all else … Not to leave it safe: to save it, perhaps, yet again, but without the illusion of a final salvation.37 In this way, she chooses to animate her heritage even whilst remaining unable to elect that heritage as such (“since what characterizes a heritage is first of all that one does not choose 174 C. DALWOOD it; it is what violently elects us”38), her interpretive acts investing her inheritance with “an unforeseeable future-to-come.”39 The condition of inheritance’s possibility – as well as that which makes it inevitable that all persons will face demands to become heirs (this even if they ultimately reject those demands; see below) – is the universal human experience of finitude. Her existence cir- cumscribed by nothingness, the finite being, when cognizant of her own contingency, finds herself threatened by non-being in the form of both death and the radical doubt that would evacuate her spiritual life of meaningful content.40 Rather than capitulating to these threats, however, the finite being qua heir assumes the role of one who inherits that which transcends her own finite existence,

receiv[ing] what is larger and older and more powerful than [s]he. But the same finitude obliges [her] to choose, to prefer, to sacrifice, to exclude, to let go and leave behind. Precisely in order to respond to the call that preceded [her], to answer it and to answer for it – in [her] name as in the name of the other.41 In these respects, the heir differs from the figure Derrida identifies as “the infinite,” who cannot inherit because there are no elements that antecede it or otherwise exceed the compass of its being.42 Lacking contingency, moreover, such an entity has no reason to inherit, except, perhaps, to perform a kind of suicide; for if such an entity were to execute the duties of an heir, this would necessarily involve destroying elements of its own self, casting them into a nothingness of its own creation, and thereby rendering itself finite. The inheritor is also qualitatively dissimilar from another category of beings, namely, the fanatic (a descriptor I borrow from Paul Tillich). This is so because the heir selectively appropriates her inheritance without abnegating her own responsibility for choosing to preserve the life of that which is assigned to her.43 The fanatic likewise responds to the threat of non-being by relating himself to a transindividual – but nevertheless finite – entity. However, the fanatic does so by surrendering his selfhood in order to identify with that entity. Equating the tradition he has received with that which transcends being itself in order to exempt it from the very threats of destruction and doubt that he is attempting to escape, the fanatic radicalizes his inheritance, “flee[ing] from his freedom of asking and answering for himself to a situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed on him authoritatively.”44 Amongst contemporary critical theorists – including those who, by disciplinary affilia- tion, self-identify as theologians or biblical scholars – a nearly fanatical devotion to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” prevails.45 Its pretensions to dispassionate objectivity notwithstanding, guardedness, aggression, and, as Paul Ricoeur’s phrase suggests, suspicion are the defining affects of such scholarship,46 which relentlessly parses texts in an effort to reveal the nefarious projects with which those texts are surreptitiously complicit. As a reading practice, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick teaches us, methodological suspicion of this sort follows from the paranoid position that interpreters adopt apropos of the literary objects within their purview, a position, that is, in the Kleinian psychoanalytic sense of a “characteristic posture that the ego takes up with respect to its objects.”47 Inhabiting a world that she perceives, rightly or wrongly, to be populated by entities that threaten her survival as a subject, the hermeneut of suspicion adopts a paranoid stance not merely for the putative epistemological payoff of thereby being able to achieve novelty of thought (although, as others have already pointed out, one often finds authors who THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 175 equate a disposition of “chronic negativity” with originality, intelligence, and academic rigour48); ultimately, she does so as a means of self-protection. That which a text obscures, the reasoning goes, is a potential source of harm for the interpreter. Consequently, it is incumbent upon the critic to master that text by exposing its manifold layers, such exposure being understood here as a means in its own right of identifying and thereby defusing any threat that the text might pose.49 Unsurprisingly, the attitude of interpretive suspicion that I am describing here has had particular purchase on those communities marked by the experience of trauma: for queer theorists, historic and contemporary violence against LGBTQ persons and communities, and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis.50 Nonetheless, there is reason to doubt the efficacy of exposure as a strategy of self-defense, for, as Sedgwick also observes, paranoid critique is tautological. The critic, knowing in advance that a text is dangerous, follows a script of interpretive suspicion only to thereby find vindication within the text for her initial fears. True to her paranoid disposition, no amount of contrary evidence (for instance, the seemingly-benign character of the text’s surface rhetoric) can convince her to view the text otherwise; if she can identify nothing dangerous therein, it is simply because she is not being sufficiently paranoid.51 Locked in this self-reinforcing cycle of dis- trust, practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion are remarkably unwilling to concede the value (in some cases, even the possibility52) of alternative interpretive modalities.53 As an illustration of this totalizing thrust, Graham Ward’s account of critical theory’s import for theology is germane:

For the study of theology, … [critical theory] poses new lines of questioning. It raises to the surface of theological texts and interpretive strategies those theoretical and methodological considerations frequently concealed. There is no conceivable limit to what critical theory cannot comment upon, nor what form that comment can take. Every discipline and cultural phenomenon is swept into its purview and all representation is viewed as both ideological and a form of commentary.54 While the heir’s engagement with her inheritance might have surficial similarities to the hermeneutics of suspicion, it differs in that it is inflected by an apprehension of finitude (both that of the tradition and of herself) that is absent from Ward’s understanding of critical theory (the heritage to which he lays claim here) as an enterprise without limits. It is this recognition of the contingency and limitedness of her heritage (and, indeed, of all entities) that allows the inheritor to navigate the unique challenges that arise when the canonical texts of her own community prove to be sources of the violence perpetrated against her. The difficulty with interpreting such texts is that they can neither be abandoned nor ignored: Despite one’s best efforts to suppress them, they live on, making their presence known even after one has largely forgotten their contents.55 This is so even if one is willing to forsake membership in the community in which those texts are canonical. Having been interpellated as an interpreter through participation therein, one cannot simply renounce the purchase of that community’s practices on one’s life;56 regardless of the other communities one might subsequently join, one’s identity will always have been constituted, at least in part, by the scripts that prevailed in the interpretive constellation from which one ostensibly left (hence the impossibility of truly being, for instance, an “ex-evangelical”). This sense of indebtedness is all the more pronounced (and onerous) 176 C. DALWOOD when one is unwilling or unable to depart in this fashion. Since fanatical identification with that community’s traditions would foreclose the possibility of challenging its canon in order to effect the renewal of those texts as something other than a cause of suffering, one must instead take up the role of an inheritor. However, in choosing to preserve the life of those traditions the heir is obliged to take responsibility for her community’s history of violence. For, although she has been a victim thereof, that violence is an element of the heritage that has elected her. Informed by these still rather abstract remarks, let us return to this essay’s motivating question of whether queer evangelicals ought simply to burn Calvin’s Institutes along with Packer’s writings. That Packer understands himself to be an heir of Calvin’s text is indicated in his interview for The Gospel Coalition, cited in the article’s introduction. By thus construing Packer’s relationship to the Institutes as one of inheritance, we can more precisely account for the manner in which Calvin’s text is implicated in Packer’s heterosexism: While the Institutes did not originally speak to modern questions of human sexuality, Packer’s interpretive acts (which include, note, his support for the Nashville Statement) have given this text a future quite unlike the one Calvin could have imagined for his work. Enticing though it is to counter this transformation of the Institutes by deploying a genetic line of critique, however, this strategy will accomplish little if one intends to remain a member of a community in which (a) the Institutes is canonical and (b) Packer’s interpretation thereof indexes the scripts that prevail therein. This is so because, as I argued in the preceding section, for an interpretation to be legible – and thus at least potentially correct – it must be recognizable within a given community as in continuity with the traditions and norms of that body of interpreters. To draw a sharp distinction between how one’s community interprets a text (especially when that text is canonical) and what that text “actually means” is to jeopardize one’s membership in that interpretive constellation. It is for this reason that a defining mark of canonical texts is their lack of neutrality; the meanings of those texts are – at least for those readers who inhabit the communities in which they are canonical – inextricable from the interpretations that have accreted to them as a result of their reception. Rather than consign either Packer’s works or the Institutes to the flames, then, queer evangelicals and their allies ought instead to take both sets of texts as elements of their inheritance and learn to perform them in ways that, without sacrificing interpretive intelligibility, transmute those texts into sources of beneficence. This task is best accomplished by adopting an affective disposition unlike that which characterizes practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion, or so I shall contend in the subsequent section.

Saving Calvin’s Institutes from the flames Writing in an article for The Gospel Coalition, Timothy Keller reflected on his experience of reading Calvin’s Institutes in its entirety over the course of a single calendar year.57 Having previously “treated the [Institutes] like an encyclopedia or dictionary that one dipped into to learn about specific topics,” and cognizant of Calvin’s carica- tured “reputation as a pinched, narrow-minded, cold, and cerebral dogmatician,” Keller was pleasantly surprised to discover that not only are the contents of the Institutes thoroughly grounded in the verbiage of Scripture, but the text as a whole is markedly “doxological:” THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 177

Calvin’s writings don’t read at all like a theological treatise, but like a man’s meditating on the Scripture before God. The language is filled with reverence and awe, and often tenderness. That means that, despite the close reasoning of so many parts of the material, Calvin was all about the heart.58 Although Keller was not a signatory of the Nashville Statement, his views on human sexuality are consonant with the contents thereof. The Bible proscribes homosexuality, he argues, not because its authors were “motivated by animosity toward people with same sex attraction,” but, rather, “because homosexual practice doesn’t fit with God’s wonderful purposeful design for sexuality in our lives.”59 That design is threefold: (1) Sex is a means of achieving “whole life covenant bonding” between two persons and, consequently, is appropriate only within the institution of marriage; (2) since that bonding is intended to reunite “complementary but separate genders,” it is to be further restricted to marital unions between male and female persons; (3) finally, within these heterosexual relationships sex is to serve a procreative function.60 Given the overt heterosexism of Keller’s position, readers could perhaps be forgiven for assuming that I have introduced it in conjunction with his admittedly moving meditation on the Institutes so as to raise doubts about the prospect of Calvin’s text being anything other than a dangerous one for queer evangelicals. To the contrary, I wish to enlist Keller as an unlikely ally in my efforts to save the Institutes from the flames. For however tempting it may be to suggest that those harmed by Calvin’s text ought simply to discard it, we have seen already that this strategy is untenable for those whose identities qua interpreters are predicated on the canonicity of the Institutes. In order to flourish, such persons are better served by opening themselves àlaKeller to the possibility of being surprised by Calvin’s text, for better and for worse. This is a treacherous course to plot, to be sure, but it is fortunately one that benefits from resources within the Institutes itself. The Institutes might always be dangerous (and not only for queer readers); yet, as Bruce Gordon rightly reminds us, one of the book’s principal strengths remains its inex- haustible ability to “defy expectations, even among those unwilling to accept its conclusions.”61 The interpretive disposition I am proposing leverages (and in so doing inherits) Calvin’s notion of “piety” to construct a hermeneutic with which to engage not only the Institutes itself but canonical texts at large. On Calvin’s account, piety is closely linked to the knowledge of God, the latter being understood as “that by which we not only con- ceive that there is a God but also grasp what befits us and is proper to his glory, in fine, what is to our advantage to know of him” (Inst. I.ii.1). To know the Divine in this way is to apprehend God’s “powers” (including wisdom and truth) by witnessing God’s works in creation (Inst. I.v.1,10), rather than to penetrate the depths of God’s essence (Inst. I.ii.2).62 While such knowledge, which follows initially from an awareness that God created and sustains the universe, inevitably leads people to ascribe some reverence to the Divine, Calvin is insistent that

it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good, and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him. (Inst. I.ii.1) Knowing God in this second sense entails “tast[ing] his fatherly love” (Inst. I.v.3), that is, apprehending Divinity as the source and cause of all wisdom, righteousness, and truth and 178 C. DALWOOD responding in the only possible way: with gratitude as we “love and worship [God] in return” (Inst. I.ii.1–2; I.v.3,9).63 Piety, then, is “that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces” (Inst. I.ii.1). Less a set of propositions to which one subscribes than an affective disposition towards the Father God (see, e.g. Inst. I.v.9), piety gives rise to “pure and real religion,” for in coming to know God, people learn “to seek every good from him, and, having received it, to credit it to his account” through worship, obedience, and prayer (Inst. I.ii.2).64 The potency of Calvin’s account of piety (especially as expressed in Inst. I.ii.1–2) derives in large measure from the performative quality of Calvin’s language, which enacts the very sense of awe that the reformer seeks to evoke in his readers vis-à-vis Divinity. Adopting what Serene Jones terms the “doxological voice,”65 Calvin deploys first-person plural pro- nominal forms to transform his readers from passive observers into active participants in his own rhetorical performance of the reverence he enjoins: God “nourishes us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends us with all sorts of blessings,” and it is “we” who, by fixing our sights upon God’s providential care, may thereby “learn to await and seek all these things from him” (Inst. I.ii.1, emphasis mine).66 Stirring though it is to be swept into this display of piety, however, one’saffective experience of this passage is contingent on whether or not one is ultimately characterized by a pious mind. The opening lines of Inst. I.ii.2 are in this respect germane. Having delivered a series of doxological exhortations, Calvin abruptly switches to an inquisitorial tone, demanding to know “how … the thought of God [can] penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him?” To apprehend God and respond other than by submitting oneself to God’s service is a signal of one’s cor- ruption, Calvin warns, whereas it is the mark of a pious mind that one not only comports oneself with the divine will but further “trusts that [God] is [one’s] guide and protector, therefore giving [oneself] over completely to trust in him.” The tenor of Calvin’s second-person address reinforces this contrast: For the impious, this section, which reads as a cross-examination, can only inspire anguish as they realize through introspec- tion that they lack the piety Calvin has just endeavored to evoke within them. By compari- son, for the faithful Calvin’s direct appeal has a decidedly pastoral quality, encouraging these persons to have confidence in the benevolent care of God.67 It is with a spirit of trust and gratitude analogous to that which distinguishes the pious mind that, I suggest, interpreters should engage harmful canonical texts. In appropriating Calvin’s account of piety to formulate this strategy of interpretation, it is necessary to stress at the outset that texts (the objects of “interpretive piety”), unlike God, are finite and, therefore, are never unambiguous sources of goodness;68 the converse also holds true, namely, that the ambiguity of texts69 is such that they are never so entirely evil as to be devoid of the potential for beneficence.70 Cognizant of this ambiguity, the pious interpreter is one who repeatedly turns to her community’s canonical texts as foundational elements of her own identity despite the damage those texts have wrought. She is obliged to do so, for she is who and what she is because she was elected by this heritage; to paraphrase Calvin, she owes her life to it (Inst. I.ii.2). Far from reflecting a willful naivety apropos of such texts’ capacity to effect destruction, however, the posture of interpretive piety she adopts is predicated on the knowledge (derived from personal experience) that those texts have wounded her (and others) in the past and are likely to do so again in the future. THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 179

Yet, unlike practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion who seek to obviate potential harms by comprehensively mastering texts (and thereby foreclosing the possibility of being caught off guard), the pious interpreter desires instead for those texts to conduce to her own growth and healing by speaking in unforeseen and, perhaps, ultimately cath- artic ways. This desire translates into what Sedgwick terms “a reparative impulse” in which, fearing “that the culture surrounding [her] is inadequate or inimical to [her] nurture,” the interpreter “wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”71 A position in the Kleinian sense of the term given above, reparativity here describes a constructive set of relationships between a reader and a given group of texts in which the former neither permits her past engagements with the latter to determine future ones, nor insists that any such past interactions that were violent or destructive were exclusively so. Directing her interpretive energies towards her heritage in the belief that – following the critic’s intervention – it can yet contribute to her own unending process of becoming, the reparative (like the pious) reader adopts, in other words, a posture of hope: hope not only “that the future may be different from the present,” but also that “the past, in turn, could have happened differ- ently from the way it did.”72 Another term for the latter expression of that hope is gratitude. Thankful for the influence of a community’s canonical texts and interpretive scripts on her own formation as a self, the pious interpreter commits herself to inheriting those traditions, optimistic that they have yet more to contribute to who she is. For, however much said traditions have wounded her, she cannot imagine her life except as a member of her community and an interpreter of its canon. Out of love for her heritage, she consequently works to heal (or repair) that community’s traditions in order that those traditions might be a source of healing for herself. It is this “future-to-come” that the pious queer interpreter of the Institutes not only dares to dream but endeavors to actualize,73 a project that requires her to begin, like Keller, by reading Calvin’s text and finding herself surprised.

*** Informed by the foregoing, let us return, briefly and by way of conclusion, to Packer’s writings and, more particularly, to the Nashville Statement. It would be an overstatement, I think, to characterize either as canonical in the way I have been using that term, although it could perhaps be said that, within conservative evangelical circles, they fall closer to the canonical end of the spectrum than to that end’s proscribed/obscene antipode. Nonetheless, the interpretive principles I have described and enacted here are capable of guiding queer evangelicals as they interact with these more pointedly homophobic writings. This is so, in the first place, because said principles raise doubts not only about the possibility of such persons freeing themselves entirely from these texts, but also, and perhaps more significantly, about the desir- ability of pursuing that end; and once the limits of liberation are recognized, opportunities emerge for queer evangelicals to engage in an innovative and nuanced sort of coalitional politics.74 Refusing to renounce their claims to being both queer and evangelical, such persons could, instead, renegotiate the content of these terms as a collocation with an eye towards rendering the phrase “queer evangelical” sufficiently capacious to include those people who self-identify with that moniker without also dissociating it entirely from the views of those who, like Packer, equate evangelical Christianity with reactionary 180 C. DALWOOD views on gender and sexuality. Rejecting the notion that discourses that oppress them must necessarily do so, as well as the assumption that harmful texts can only ever be destructive, said people might, to this end, take it upon themselves qua heirs to appropriate both Packer’s corpus and the Nashville Statement as allies in the cause of articulating their own subject positions. What I am proposing, in short, is a praxis of critical reception that denies both Packer and the other framers of the Nashville Statement the last word on the meaning and import of their respective contributions to the evangelical heritage, and which thereby asserts the authority of queer evangelicals as creative contributors to the evangelical tradition. There are, no doubt, many ways of accomplishing this task. But one that seems especially prom- ising is to transform the premises of those authors’ arguments such that the arguments themselves become sources of queer flourishing. If, as I have argued here, Calvin’s Insti- tutes lends itself to being inherited along such lines, then it might just be that queer evangelicals can muster the resources of a repaired Calvin in order to effect the reparation of Packer, the Nashville Statement, and, ultimately, themselves. The prefatory remarks that frame the Nashville Statement’saffirmations and denials provide some clues about how such readers might do so. In these, the Statement’s framers both acknowledge that God – qua the “Creator and Lord of all”–is the one to whom “every person owes glad-hearted thanksgiving, heart-felt praise, and total alle- giance,” and subsequently confess their belief that God’s providential governance of the cosmos “bring[s] us the greatest good;”75 comments that, together, recall the key moves that, on Calvin’s account, the pious mind makes when it apprehends the Divine. A reparative intervention into the Nashville Statement done in the light of the reparative reading of Calvin I undertook in this article might begin, therefore, by accepting these elements of the Statement’s construal of God, wagering on the possibility that they allude also to the State- ment’s relationship with its evangelical readership, and thereby finding some grounds for optimism. From there it would remain – as was the case with the Institutes itself – for interpreters to make good that hope: tracking the trajectory of this Nashville-piety as it unfolds – somewhat ironically, perhaps – across the subsequent rhetoric, but without pre- determining, for good or for ill, the outcome of doing so.

Postlude: interpretation as a way of life I hesitate to criticize those who would simply do away with texts and interpretive strategies that, like the Nashville Statement and – as a result of the actions of such inheritors as Packer – Calvin’s Institutes, have been the causes of trauma. However, I cannot subscribe to a course of action that would respond to destruction with yet more violence. To do so might be a way to die, but it is no way to live. If interpretation is as much a matter of how one conducts oneself as what one says, an interpreter who works to obliterate a text has adopted a troubling interpretive strategy indeed. In this article, I have sketched the con- tours of an alternative interpretive modality, one that is deﬁned by love, hope, and gratitude rather than anger, suspicion, or a demand for vengeance. Using Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion as simultaneously a case study and a guiding interpretive framework in its own right, I began to perform the role of the heir for whom this text must needs be allowed to speak in unexpected, unintended, and perhaps even unsettling ways in order to become a source of life. Less a manual than a manifesto, this essay is a call for that THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 181 performance (brief as it was) to be continued rather than imitated, with diverse interpreters in diverse settings reading the Institutes and allowing themselves to be transformed.

Notes 1. “Nashville Statement,” under “Preamble.” 2. “Nashville Statement,” Articles 1–2, 9. 3. Ibid., Article 10. 4. See, e.g. “A Liturgists Statement”; Blumberg, “Evangelical Leaders Release Anti-LGBTQ Statement on Human Sexuality”; McLaren, “Why I Applaud (and Fervently Deny) the Nash- ville Statement.” 5. See the preamble in “Christians United In Support of LGBT+ Inclusion in the Church.” 6. See, e.g. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness, 139; Packer, Engaging the Written Word of God, 126. 7. See Taylor, “J. I. Packer to Be Suspended from the Anglican Church of Canada.” The Diocese authorized the creation of a rite of blessing for same-sex unions at its 2002 synod; for Packer’s reaction to that decision, see Packer, “Why I Walked.” 8. Taylor, “The Five Authors Who Have Most Influenced J.I. Packer.” For the purposes of this article, references to the Institutes, hereafter given as parenthetical in-text citations, are to Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. 9. A point exploited for humourous effect in a 1983 “interview” with the reformer printed in Vanity Fair. For a discussion of this parody and its implications for understanding the power of the Institutes to “continue to draw new readers,” see Gordon, Calvin’s Institutes, 8–12. 10. For a discussion and critique of this trend, see Tonstad, “Ambivalent Loves,” 472–3 and passim. That tendency is such that Kathryn Lofton was recently led to ask the provocative question of whether it can now be said that “anything Christian [is] not queer?” (Lofton, “Everything Queer?” 195). To which I would answer: Yes; much. 11. For a now-classic statement of the centrality of evangelicalism within American religious history, see McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. Scholarly accounts of that centrality have, however, been severely critiqued, most notably in Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith; Butler, “Historiographical Heresy”; Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit. 12. Which, if we accept David Tracy’s reasoning, might well include “all” those engaged in “contemporary systematic theology.” See Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 104 and passim. 13. My emphasis here on embodied interpretation is broadly informed by the cognitive turn in recent interpretive theory, and especially by conceptual blending theory. For a now-classic statement of that theory’s principles and applications, see Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think. 14. In employing the notion of domains of intelligibility, I am informed by the discussion of frames, recognition, and intelligibility in Butler, Precarious Life; Butler, Frames of War. 15. See, further, Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 14, 338–55. 16. Thereby contributing to the formation of that community’s habitus. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, esp. chaps. 8–10. 17. For a helpful comparative study of university seminars and book clubs as distinct, if at times overlapping, interpretive communities, see Berg, “What do You Know?” 18. On “passing,” see Goffman, Stigma. 19. Max Weber’s discussion of “traditional authority” is helpful in explicating this point. For Weber, [i]n the pure type of traditional authority it is impossible for law or administrative rule to be deliberately created by legislation. Rules which in fact are innovations can be legitimized only by the claim that they have been ‘valid of yore,’ but have now been recognized by means of ‘Wisdom’.(Economy and Society, 1:227) 182 C. DALWOOD

See further the discussion of elders’ authority in McNally, Honoring Elders, chap. 4 (esp. 163–5). 20. The distinction is real because a text’s being exceeds its interpretations, a point that can be argued on the grounds of object-oriented ontology. For a statement of the principles of that philosophical approach with reference to literary studies and literary objects, see Harman, “The Well-wrought Broken Hammer”; Harman, Dante’s Broken Hammer. 21. The argument I am making in this paragraph is a correlationist one, to borrow a term that Quentin Meillassoux uses, critically, to characterize the Kantian philosophical project. See Meillassoux, After Finitude. 22. It is no objection to this argument to note the existence of texts that a given interpretive script is unable to render intelligible. When one encounters an entity and construes it as a text, one assumes that there is some script that governs its interpretation; much as when one encounters marks and construes them as language, one assumes that there is some linguistic grammar that governs their interpretation. In neither case must one assume that one’s own script/grammar is that governing framework. It might well be that one must learn/ assimilate the principles of another script/language in order to interpret this particular text. 23. See also Liew, “When Margins Become Common Ground”; Moore and Sherwood, The Inven- tion of the Biblical Scholar. 24. Fee, New Testament Exegesis, 5 (emphasis mine). 25. That he understands his account to be exhaustive is indicated in ibid., xv. 26. Fox, “Bible Scholarship and Faith-based Study.” For a more sophisticated account of the relationship between conservative ideological movements and critical theory, see Latour, “Why has Critique Run out of Steam?” 27. Fox, “Bible Scholarship and Faith-based Study.” For a somewhat-more conciliatory vision of biblical scholarship along similar lines, see the concluding paragraphs of the 2015 SBL Pre- sidential Address, published as Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals,” 17. 28. When speaking of interpretations, one might also adopt J.L. Austin’s language of felicitous and infelicitous acts; see Austin, How to do Things with Words. 29. On this last remark, see also Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 74. 30. In this way, an interpretive grammar allows for interpretive creativity àlalinguistic creativity. On the latter, see Noam Chomsky’s remark that “an essential property of language is that it provides the means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for reacting appropriately to an indefinite range of new situations” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 4). 31. See Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, 249. 32. Special thanks are due to Ayesha Ramachandran for drawing my attention to the question of textual neutrality. 33. This is especially likely if the text is monosemous. On monosemous texts, see Ricoeur, “The Problem of Double Meaning,” 71. 34. My definition of the canonical text differs somewhat from David Tracy’s construal of the classic (as outlined in Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, esp. ch. 3). For Tracy, the classic is timeless insofar as it possesses both a surplus of meaning as well as a “permanent timeli- ness.” Each of these appears, on my reading of Tracy, to be a property of texts themselves. Thus, while Tracy recognizes, rightly, that “[e]very classic lives as a classic only if it finds readers willing to be provoked by its claim to attention,” he insists that the text’s “excess of meaning” itself “demands constant interpretation and bears a certain kind of timelessness” (102). To be sure, these properties matter. However, for a text to be canonical, on my view, it must be recognized as such by some body of interpreters; and it is this perception of canonicity—rather than any objective facts about what certain literary objects have or do not have; are or are not—that has priority in the definition of canonical texts I supply above. 35. The degree to which the threat of expulsion is present or absent will, of course, vary from text to text. 36. See Derrida, Specters of Marx,18–25; Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow,3–8. 37. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow,3–5. 38. Ibid., 3. THEOLOGY & SEXUALITY 183

39. Ibid., 4. 40. Tillich, The Courage to Be, chap. 2; Tillich, Systematic Theology 1, 191. Tillich further enu- merates a third threat posed by non-being, namely, that which produces the anxiety of guilt and condemnation; see The Courage to Be,48–51. 41. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow,5. 42. For Derrida’s discussion of “the infinite,” see Specters of Marx, 18. 43. On responsibility apropos of inheritance, see ibid., 5–6. 44. Tillich, The Courage to Be,46–7. See, further, the related discussion of authoritarianism apropos of dogma in Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 99. 45. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” was first described as such by Ricoeur, Freud and Philos- ophy: An Essay on Interpretation, esp. 32–6. 46. Felski, The Limits of Critique,20–1; Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading.” 47. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 128; quoting Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 394. 48. So Linfield, Cruel Radiance, 10. Felski, in The Limits of Critique, is particularly effective at diagnosing and decrying this assumption. 49. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 138–9. 50. Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 638–9. 51. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 130–1, 133–6. Applying Sedgwick’s analysis to biblical studies, Jennifer Knust demonstrates how readings of Gen 9:18–27 that treat it as “a text of terror that invites diverse forms of sexualized racism, seemingly without end” evince a similar tendency towards tautology; see Knust, “Who’s Afraid of Canaan’s Curse?,” esp. 407. 52. E.g. Drew Milne’s remark, quoted in Felski, 147, that “[t]o be postcritical is to be uncritical; the critical path alone remains open” (Milne, “Introduction,” 18). 53. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 147–50. 54. Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, xviii. 55. In this sense, they are what Sedgwick terms “fantasy books,” namely, those that “have a presence, or exert a pressure in our lives and thinking, that may have much or little to do with what’s actually inside them” (“Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 625). 56. Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, 249. 57. For a discussion of this example in relation to contemporary trends in the interpretation and appropriation of the Institutes, see Gordon, Calvin’s Institutes, chap. 12 (esp. pp. 208–10). Note that at the time of the article’s publication (November), Keller had not yet completed his reading of Calvin’s text. 58. Keller, “The Counterintuitive Calvin.” 59. Keller, “Christianity and Homosexuality.” 60. Ibid. (emphasis original); cf. Keller and Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, e.g. 205, 284. 61. Gordon, Calvin’s Institutes, 217. 62. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, 104. 63. Ibid. 104–5. 64. Ibid. 106. 65. Jones, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, 132. 66. Ibid., chap. 4. 67. So ibid., 139–40. 68. It is the confusion of the finite with Divinity that Tillich rightly terms the demonic; see Tillich, Systematic Theology 1:140, and passim. 69. Ambiguity, as used here, is not to be confused with polysemy. 70. See further the discussion of the secular in Tillich, Systematic Theology 1:218. 71. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 149. In Sex, or the Unbearable,41–6, Lee Edelman critiques Sedgwick’s account of reparative reading for remaining within the very “dualistic thinking she associates with paranoia.” Correctly, he notes that “the reparative aes- thetic emerges by breaking from the breaking characteristic of paranoia,” and that it thereby reduplicates the structure of paranoia itself. While that reduplication implies that the 184 C. DALWOOD

reparative is, by virtue of being so, also a paranoiac (although not that the paranoiac is a reparative), it does so because it indicates that the reparative reader is inheriting a paranoid critical tradition. Sedgwick acknowledges as much when she recognizes “the centrality” of both D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (her two principal examples of paranoid reading practices in “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading”) “to the development of my own thought, and that of the critical movements that most interest me” (“Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 129). Sedgwick’s delineation of reparativity is, in other words, indebted to the marquee statements of the very critical practices it challenges; more, as Edelman astutely discerns, it advances the same stream of methodologically suspi- cious interpretive theory to which it objects. All of which is to say that it exempliﬁes the sort of creative, but recognizably continuous, engagement with the tradition that elected it that, I have argued here, the inheritor performs, with Sedgwick qua heir assuming responsibility for a paranoid theoretical archive the contents of which she thereby undertakes to repair. That “reparativity repeats the schizoid practice it claims to depart from” (Berlant and Edeman, Sex, or the Unbearable, 44) is thus not so much its undoing as that which allows the reparative to speak so powerfully to critics in the contemporary theoretical moment. 72. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” 146. 73. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow,4. 74. In thinking through the possibilities for coalition building between progressive and conservative groups and discourses, I ﬁnd a productive conversation partner in Smith, Native Amer- icans and the Christian Right. 75. “Nashville Statement,” under “Preamble.”

Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to Bruce Gordon and Ayesha Ramachandran, who oﬀered helpful comments, suggestions, and critiques at various stages of the writing process. I am grateful, as well, to Kent Brintnall and the anonymous peer reviewer at Theology & Sexuality for the insightful and constructive feedback they provided as this article approached publication.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor Charlotte Dalwood is a graduate student at Yale University; she is pursuing a Master of Arts in Reli- gion with a concentration in theology through the School of Divinity, and a Certiﬁcate in Anglican Studies through Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. Her research traverses the ﬁelds of biblical studies, Christian theology, and contemporary critical theory. Her other publications include articles on Biblical Hebrew linguistics and the Song of Songs, which have appeared in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures and the Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages.

ORCID Charlotte Dalwood http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4948-5523

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