Wei-Jen Chen

Harlot is not only an occupation in Hebrew Bible, but it also refers to the promiscuous behavior of disobedient toward YHWH worship. Harlot Rahab plays an important turning point in the narrative of gaining the Promised Land for Israelite. Moreover, she is mentioned many times in New Testament: the ancestor of Savior Jesus Christ and the woman who has good behavior and faith from Apostle Paul’s perspective. This thesis will use the perspective of postcolonial feminism to focus on the analysis of the conflicts of intertextual reading in bans and violation, intersections in gender, race, religion and class, and the outer contexts. The trade between Harlot Rahab and the Israelite spies is not only by materials but also by the colonization of ideology and substation of the original. Moreover, then, the thesis will take the living experiences of the prostitutes as text, and take the concepts of justification to oppose the legalization of the sexual transaction, the promotion of sacred life, the request of repentance, and conversion as context, in order to state the tensions between the issues of sex-workers and the Christian churches are the colonization and oppression from patriarchy as the result. However, just as the in-between position of Harlot Rahab in the scriptures brings the extension of life and the paradigm of faith, Christian Right in present time should abandon the patriarchal ethics due and rebuild the faith of hospitality and inclusion for the second substitution.

With individual observations, the objective of the thesis is to realize how the developmental traces in LGBT-inclusive churches are and what the crisis has shown by comparative with mainline denominations via stealing sheep and backdoor condition in Taiwan's context. This thesis will review the social setting and the core debates concerning LGBT, Christianity and society in the 1990s Taiwan. Then, it will concentrate on conflicts of LGBT-inclusive churches which point out the dilemma of inclusion in theological opinions and methods of pastoral praxis in present social-political context. This phenomenon will be examined by using queer postcolonial perspectives to conclude three factors: Homonormativity, Kyriarchy, and the shadow of Western queerness. These factors create the conflicts inside the LGBT-inclusive churches non-inclusive at all. Queer Theologies should reflect the multiplicity of LGBT members from previous hetero-oriented or homo-oriented theologies and decolonize the churches from those restraints and heading towards a more inclusive embodiment inside out. Living as the others of the mainline denominations, the challenges for LGBT-inclusive churches are not merely touching diverse sexual identities, but also doctrinal heresy within a hybrid Taiwan context.

This essay exercises a queer cross-textual reading of lesbian-identified hermeneutics from When Deborah met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics (Deryn Guest 2005) and a queer feminist perspective from Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Lynne Huffer, 2013) to critique and to improve the approach of “lesbian-identified hermeneutics.” There are four principles of lesbian-identified hermeneutics: resistance, rupture, reclamation, and re-engagement that Guest aimed at revealing the invisible experiences for a new study, keep using hetero-suspicion to challenge the assumptions within the texts and commentaries, and ground on lived realities and challenge those which sustain the oppressions (Guest 2005, 109-110). Huffer’s personal experiences and reflexivity bring us “silence, passivity, and betrayal” to the global sisterhood and racial issue within feminist ethics, which reveals the issues of “justice, mutual respect, reciprocity, and queer love” (Huffer 2013, 144, 148) as a queer critique of Guest’s method. Furthermore, the concepts of “love’s labor” reveals the failure of love among sisterhood, white women’s loyalty to patriarchy, and black women as a subordinated other (Huffer 2013, 153) which has revealed Huffer’s intention of querying the Western Subjectivity and the acknowledgment.

While lesbian-identified hermeneutics argues to problematize the naturalization and to destabilize the lesbian signifier, Huffer provides the question of the sameness of the ‘we’ and difference of the other, especially “Other’s Other” and the repetition of ‘the queer we’ (Huffer 2013, 64-65, 67). The subjectivity (texts) is open to the other to read and is always a negotiation between identification and disidentification, an intertextuality repetition (Huffer 2013, 70-71). Although Guest worried about the presentation of the specific lesbianism, however, “that ‘presenting’ is never static or temporally fixed” (Huffer 2013, 72), while the first step of lesbian-identified hermeneutics is to resist heterosexualism perspective and framework, this behavior might erase the other within the subjectivity afterward and never free from that haunting others.

This essay wants to challenge the prejudice of Christianity toward non-YHWH/Jesus worshipers within Paul’s interpretation of the narratives of Hagar, Sarah, and their sons through lesbian-identical interpretation and postcolonial perspective. It also points out how Israelite centric identity used the narratives to shape Western Christianity through the parallel reading with the Gentiles, in order to help the reader understand how Christian teachings used the narratives to justify their oppressive and prejudiced opinions and behaviors against the others. In (1) resistance and hetero-suspicion reading, the conflicts between Sarah and Hagar caused by Abraham now are duplicated between Paul and the false teachers arguing for the son, in Galatians. In (2) rupture, the justification reinforces the oppression and exclusion of Hagar and sons of Ishmael, not only in the scriptural context but also in current time. In (3) reclamation, the heterosexual-dichotomy and hierarchal system of the interpretation of Galatians plays a role as "text of terror" toward indigenous Taiwanese LGBTQ community (Pai-Wan). In (4) re-engagement, the biological imitation is not a taboo but the witness of a miracle from YHWH which connects with the Holy Mt. Da-Wu, Mt. Sinai, Mt. of Gods, and Mt. of Hagar. Just like the experiences of Hagar who suffered from Sarah, Abraham, and God’s agreement, queer (indigenous) people’s sufferings should be treated in another way because queer people experienced what Paul has experienced in Galatians. Thus readers might reflect on their own advantages over the others, liberate themselves and the others from the toxic thoughts and conditions, and re-engage Christianity with an alternative queer perspective.