Queering Wesley, Queering the Church

Keegan Osinski has genuinely broken new ground with Queering Wesley, Queering the Church. I know of no other published book that directly engages with how Wesley himself might be read and understood queerly and the implications of that for churches in the Methodist and Wesleyan traditions. She is Librarian for Theology and Ethics at Vanderbilt University and a member of the Church of the Nazarene. Her work comes from a deep engagement with the Wesleyan tradition and inheritance of theology. This book is truly distinctive, but it builds on Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love and recognizes Pamela Lightsey’s Our Lives Matter as ‘the first major published work integrating Wesleyan theology with a constructive theology’ (4). At a time when globally the Methodist family—and the Christian church more generally—continues to wrestle with questions of gender and sexuality, this book makes a vitally important contribution.Osinski offers queer reflections on ten of Wesley’s sermons, including ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’ and ‘The General Deliverance’, covering a wide range of theological topics, together with an introduction and conclusion. Osinski’s selection of sermons is unashamedly queer, describing the mystery of queer attraction as being the guiding star for her choice. In some cases, this was ‘a sparkle of treasure’ (12), and in others a sense that the sermon ‘felt queer’ (12; emphasis original). The resulting collection, being limited to ten, is inevitably partial. However, Osinski nevertheless manages to cover the breadth of Wesley’s theology admirably.The reflection on each sermon is Osinski’s own queer response to Wesley’s text. In some places her reading is very much in tune with the direction of the original; in others she reacts against it. She draws on a broad range of queer theologians, including Marcella Althaus-Reid, Patrick Cheng, and Mark Jordan. She describes the process of her queer reading of the sermons as being ‘to read with Wesley against Wesley’ (129). Following José Miguez Bonino, she acknowledges this may even be deliberately to ‘mis-read’ Wesley in order to create new and liberative theologies. At the same time, a thoroughly Wesleyan hermeneutic of grace, love, and holiness permeates her work. Even when reading ‘against Wesley’, she does so in a Wesleyan way. Quite rightly, she recognizes the Wesleyan inheritance as a source of inspiration and challenge, which offers possibilities for us as we engage with the call to be disciples today. The work of grace in us is a work of transformation. In Osinski’s reading this is both a core part of our tradition and who we are called to be as followers of this tradition.Osinski expresses the hope that her work may be a ‘springboard for conversation toward a robust queer Wesleyan theology that is both unapologetically queer and faithfully Wesleyan’ (131). Too often, in my experience, the assumption has been that those things are mutually exclusive. Her readings of these sermons offer ways of being both of these, provided that the Wesleyan tradition is understood as one that lives and grows. As the work for which she hopes develops, engagement will be needed with many more of Wesley’s sermons and his other writings. To support this, I would have appreciated some more discussion of the methodological issues around queer readings of Wesley, as the conversation for which she hopes will clearly need to engage with these questions.In this book, Osinski has given us an enticing invitation to consider the Wesleyan inheritance in a new and compelling way. I very much share her hope that this will be the beginning of a much broader engagement with queer approaches to Wesley and look forward to seeing its results.

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