Doctrine, Adaptation, and the Fidelity Urge

Abstract

This paper identifies and critiques the way conceptions of fidelity and reproduction shape contemporary approaches to doctrine. As an interdisciplinary work, I draw tools from adaptation studies, queer theory, and theatrical practice. This allows me to demonstrate how, in recent debates over doctrinal expansion or inclusion, both liberal and conservative approaches operate within the logics of the fidelity urge and reproductive futurism. The result of these commitments is an emphasis on handing on the past to the future. The work of Paleo-Orthodox theologian Thomas Oden, and the recent debates over marriage rites in the Uniting Church in Australia serve as illustrations. In suggesting an alternative, I turn again to the theatrical practices of adaptation to resource new conceptions of fidelity (and, in turn, novelty and transgression) that resist a dichotomy between a stable, unified origin and dependent, derivative copies. In their stead, I connect the bisexual epistemology of Marcella Althaus-Reid to the task of doctrine. Such a move brings the present into focus, resisting the allure of reproduction through a doctrinal agenda of confusion, effusiveness, and obscenity. Doctrine, outside of the fidelity urge, is suggested to be an act of non-competitive adaptation, whose horizon is not bound by the past or beholden to the future but is directed to the needs of the present.

1. Introduction: Adaptation and the Fidelity Urge

In a detailed historical engagement, Glenn Jellinik traces the emergence of adaptation as adaptation (a literary/textual concept, rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon) to the early Romantic period in London (Jellinik 2017, p. 43).1 Importantly, Jellinik demonstrates how, through a series of polemics, the 1796 play, The Iron Chest, was positioned as the first adaptation within “the very first piece of fidelity criticism” (p. 43.)

Jellinik details the ways in which the early reception, arguments, and analysis of The Iron Chest inaugurate both a “source/copy binary” and a “backward or rear-view reading strategy” that underpin fidelity criticism and “dominate” adaptation studies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (p. 46). It is for this reason, Jellinik concludes, that despite repeated efforts within and beyond the guild to dismiss and move beyond fidelity as the governing criterion of the treatment of adaptations (c.f. Babbage 2018, p. 22),2 fidelity abides:

“The fidelity urge has proven so difficult to the field of adaptation to shake because our very definition of what an adaptation is emerged from reading adaptation through a fidelity lens. We recognize an adaptation as an adaptation only through the act of comparing it with its source (and finding it wanting). The game is rigged; the question of fidelity is begged.”

(p. 50)

Indeed, as Thomas Leitch has noted, as widely as fidelity is “excreted” within adaptation studies as a criterion of analysis, it is “just as widely adopted” outside the field (Leitch 2017, p. 7).3

It is necessary to observe that the prioritising or centring of the fidelity urge need not be conflated with a reactionary literalism (as if this kind of adaptation theory is evident solely in productions of Shakespeare where actors adorn Elizabethan garb and eschew acoustic enhancement). The obligation to fidelity, the privileging of rear-view reading, and the prioritising of the individual genius of the source are also observable in productions that take technological, textual, and casting liberties while nevertheless rearticulating the “qualities” of the source that “mattered most” to the original author and audience (Babbage 2018, p. 41).4

Such adaptations tend to be built on the belief that there is something vital, universal, and true in the source that ought to be brought from the past to the future and handed on to a new generation. Such passage permits a host of changes and inventions because these are enacted in the cause of fidelity, viewed as necessary steps to bring forth a rightful heir so that what was may be preserved for what is to come. Inevitably, these adaptations, even in their apparent progressivism and inclusivity, reify and reaffirm the very logics they often purport to undo. It is an adaptation of this kind, one which demonstrates both the commitment to handing on and the danger of the fidelity urge, to which I now turn.

A Night at the Theatre I: Michelle Terry and Gender Blind at the Globe

Michelle Terry, Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre, stated, “We have at our disposal a canon and a body of work that is essentially about the human being” (Tripney 2018). Terry’s comment reflects the broader cultural reception of Shakespeare in the West. According to Madhavi Menon, Shakespeare is the “canonical figure we [in the West] have inherited as the privileged signifier of the literary and the human. Deemed by the cult of canonicity to be ‘not of an age but for all time’” (Menon 2011, p. 1). This stature leads to a conservative impulse to circumscribe him as untouchable: timeless, universal, and natural. Indeed, as Marjorie Garber argues, “Shakespeare has scripted many of the ideas we think of as ‘naturally’ our own and even as ‘naturally’ true” (Garber 2009, p. 27).

From the perspective of conservative critics, Terry’s early ‘gender-blind’ productions at the Globe are often characterised as unfaithful adaptations, more concerned with identity politics and representation than the intent and tradition of Shakespeare’s plays. And yet, despite the potentially novel and progressive choices Terry demonstrates, her commitment to the privileged position of Shakespeare serves to honour the fidelity urge in new ways.

Recently installed as the Globe’s Artistic Director, Terry engaged in gender-blind casting in two 2018 productions (As You Like It and Hamlet). Gender-blind casting generally refers to a casting technique where actors can play characters that do not match their gender (for instance, a woman plays Hamlet). There is some inconsistency around the term, but in these cases, Hamlet is still a male character, and so the gender of the actor is ignored. What is less clear, according to Hailey Bachrach, is “whether this lack of sight is meant to apply to the artists or the audience” (Bachrach 2018).

Bachrach critiqued the seeming orderliness of this blind approach at the Globe, which had “carefully avoided any same-gender actor pairs in the main romantic couples” and chosen male actors for female parts who were the youngest men in the company. As neither was muscular nor deep-voiced, they were “the least transgressive choices in terms of gender stereotypes”. The casting was seemingly intended to create as little dissonance and disturbance for the audience as possible and avoid too many additional conversations on the nature of gender, sexuality, and the performance of both. It is thus difficult to maintain a concept of strict blindness on the part of the company. So, what then of the audience?

According to Robin Craig, despite the somewhat cautious casting choices, the reaction of the audience to the entrance of Jack Laskey in a large dress as Rosalind elicited laughter. Interestingly, when Bettrys Jones entered as Orlando, there was no laughter. Craig, in an illuminating paper (Craig 2021), argues that the regular appearance of trans-women as the butt of the joke in much C21st humour, coupled with a subconscious belief that femininity itself is artificial, a performed gender, lent itself to a transmisogynist response toward Laskey as one who failed to perform womanhood. I return to the conversations of gender performance and audience dissonance in a later section, so for now, the emphasis lies on the inability of the audience to be gender blind and the inability to hide the gender of the actor in that of the character. This emphasis draws attention to the inherent fault in the Globe’s approach to gender-blind casting: their own belief that there is a way to access a humanity within Shakespeare’s characters that reaches past or surpasses their gender.

In a promotional interview for the show, actor Shubham Saraf, who played Ophelia in Hamlet and Oliver in As You Like It, explained that “the cross-casting actually reflects a sense that, today, ‘we’re beyond gender’” (Tripney 2018). The way to approach the character then, for Saraf, is to “look at the character on a human level and open up whatever story that creates”. Saraf’s approach is consistent with Terry’s, which is that Shakespeare’s canon is about the human being, and Terry’s assertion that despite the “limiting constraints that [Shakespeare] was writing in”, he managed to create “timeless, mythic, kaleidoscopic worlds” (how precisely one is able to be at once timeless and constrained by the limits of one time is not fleshed out by Terry).

In much the same way that colour-blind approaches to race elide the systemic, structural, and cultural forces that create racial disparity, this belief that one can approach Shakespeare in a manner that is beyond gender, where a universalised humanity exists beneath or beyond the particularities of gender (both of the characters, playwright, actors, and audience) is the very assumption that leads to audiences treating Laskey as an intrusion, a failure, a joke. As Elizabeth Klett points out, “the body-both in real life and on stage [and we add to that the audience’s bodies]-cannot transcend or forget its gender” (Klett 2006, p. 182). That the promotional work of the play lent heavily on the gender-swapped nature of the production further undermines the stated intentions of director and cast alike.

The Globe’s production demonstrates the ways in which purportedly (and well-intentioned) contextual and casting choices serve to affirm the priority, supremacy, and logics of Shakespeare. As Nora Williams has argued, many attempts at gender-blind or expansive casting such as Terry’s exhibit an “incomplete dramaturgy” which fails “to recognise the ways in which early modern plays have misogyny baked in as an essential component of their dramaturgies”, a misogyny that “resides deep in the bones of these plays [and] cannot be ameliorated by merely adding women to the cast” (Williams 2022, pp. 1, 5). Far from being a foil to a conservative impulse to ascribe Shakespeare as untouchable, productions of this kind lend a progressive veneer to the claim that one man in C16th England is the “privileged signifier of the literary and the human”. Stated otherwise, if the argument for inclusive colour/gender-blind casting is made via appeals to Shakespeare’s timeless universality, then this only tends to affirm as similarly timeless and universal the naturalising political claims and boundaries Shakespeare has been employed to make. It locks the Bard within a politics of reception determined ahead of time by assumptions of his universality and priority over contemporary contexts and bodies.

In the case of the Globe, the maintaining of heteronormative relationships and gender binary and appeals to post (or perhaps pre)-gendered humanity, stifled the possibility of allowing the gender play to actually play with Will. The assumption of universal normativity thrust upon his work by a rear-view practice of adaptation constrained by the fidelity urge remains.

2. The Fidelity Urge and Rear-View Reading in Doctrinal Debates for Inclusion

It is too much of a drag to name it ironic that the most prominent contemporary site of the question of fidelity in Christian doctrine is found in the debates on marriage (and LGBTIQ+ inclusion writ large).5 These ‘debates’ and ‘discernments’ are often framed as a contest (and there are many victims in their wake), and yet, largely, both occur within the logic of (and commitment to) the fidelity urge.

The Uniting Church in Australia’s Marriage Decision as an Example

The conservative approach is perhaps more readily identifiable. In 2018, the Uniting Church in Australia endorsed two views on marriage: the existing one holding that marriage exists only between a man and a woman, and a revised rite whereby marriage could occur between two people. This allowed (depending on the conscious of ministers and church councils) same gender marriages in the Uniting Church.

Communicating the content of this decision to his congregation in a sermon, one Uniting Church minister said the decision reflected the Uniting Church’s stance that “it’s all good”. This quip illustrates a presumed conflict between liberal permissibility/rampant subjectivity and the long-standing, universal truths maintained throughout Christian (and wider) history (Abetz 2018). Decisions for inclusion are perceived as being built predominantly on personal experience (Bentley 2018, p. 14), and register a break from tradition, a disregard of the received faith in capitulation to a “radical social agenda” (Assembly of Confessing Congregations 2016).6 The texts of the past, be they the Bible, the writings of prominent figures within the tradition, or denominational papers, are drawn together in support of the continuity of the conservative doctrinal position with the plain meaning and overarching structure of the faith. In this way, we see the resemblance with the fidelity urge in adaptation studies, a rear-view reading strategy, a focus on authorial intent, and an original/source binary.

Despite pursuing contradicting ends on the question of doctrinal inclusion, the progressive approach shares in much the same logics of this conservative appeal to fidelity. Let me pause the scene momentarily and, a la Shakespeare, offer an aside to the audience. It is helpful at this point to briefly distinguish between the work of historical retrieval or the expansive reading of the past in light of present concerns and the operating logics of the fidelity urge. In the former, efforts are made to expand a deliberate narrowing of the history of a tradition or movement, looking to archives to find roots, precedence, or antecedents of what conservative detractors label as a modern fad or the result of cultural degeneracy.

Colby Gordon’s recent work, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature, is an excellent example of such. Searching for a “better secularism”, Gordon seeks to dwell on the “trans dimensions of religion” (Gordon 2024, p. 16) by examining transition as a dynamic theological category in Renaissance writing. He writes, “Against the assumption that transition poses a threat to traditional values, the readings of early modern religious writers… indicate that transness is not a new development incubated in medical settings arriving to corrupt theology from the outside”. Exploring the trans possibilities in theological doctrines and writings not only contravenes the charge of novelty but also refuses to surrender the ground of theology “to reactionary Christian activists” (p. 171). It also, Gordon suggests, resources the potential of a non-secular trans politics as an alternative to the liberal state (which, as a refuge, he notes, has mixed results at best).

The issue of appealing to history or antecedent in the advocacy of doctrinal change or ecclesial inclusion is not in the act of reading or retrieval. Problems and limitations emerge when ancestry is prioritised or presumed necessary as legitimising the contemporary concern, community, or campaign. If, for instance, we took the trans possibilities Gordon explores and made them prerequisites in the argument for visibility. As if the only way a present body warrants our attention and care is our capacity to see through it to an earlier body (Gordon himself makes this point, p. 33).

Unfortunately, and by way of turning from the audience to my impatient scene partners, this kind of logic has been observed in liberal arguments for LGBTIQ inclusion in churches. Linn Tonstad has contributed to a growing critique from within queer theology on the way “queer apologists share many of the same assumptions held by those who believe that Christianity has no room” for sexual and gender diversity (Tonstad 2018, p. 5). In her introduction to Queer Theology, Tonstad rehearses and troubles a host of common apologetic strategies from Christians arguing for inclusion, several of which (appeals to representation in Scripture and tradition, to trajectories—or the heart—of Scripture, and to previous breaks from tradition) can be seen to mimic the conservative approach (pp. 16–47).

I return fully to the scene to consider again the Uniting Church decision on marriage, now observing the case for doctrinal change. The B23 Assembly Standing Committee Report on Marriage and Same-Gender Relationships highlighted the continuity of expansions in the doctrine of marriage with the biblical tradition, exemplified in the Jerusalem Council’s decision to “adapt” Scripture to “point to the larger horizon of the purposes of God” (Uniting Church in Australia Assembly Standing Committee 2018, p. 33). The Working Group on Doctrine similarly argued for the fidelity of appeals to science and contemporary scholarship in the practices of significant figures in the tradition (23–24). The history of marriage itself was framed within a “history of changes” and the final appeal for same-gender marriage was made through reference to it being “consistent” with the gospel of Jesus Christ (49).

The danger of progressive arguments for inclusion that focus on legibility and proximity to the centre has been widely circulated at this point. Such appeals are demonstrated to “frequently enact the logics that they seek to combat” (Ernest 2023, p. 39), often operating on a strategy of inclusion by exclusion.7 In the case of the UCA’s marriage decision, for instance, as is the case in wider campaigns for marriage equality, the very emphasis on gaining access to marriage can be seen as reifying the institution without interrogating its heterosexual logics.8

To illustrate, the Working Group on Doctrine noted how the discussions brought “to a new prominence the values and practices of marriage for the first time in several decades” (Uniting Church in Australia Assembly Standing Committee 2018, p. 46). Further, the eventual decision which absorbed same-gender couples into a rite that stresses marriage as the location that “enables the full expression of physical love” (Uniting in Worship II, The Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia 2005, pp. 353–80)9 does little to secure the dignity, beauty, and significance of other forms of love, sex, and relationships formed in queer communities in the generations preceding marriage inclusion. As Tonstad notes, this approach takes as given the heterosexual value on marriage as higher than other forms of relating, one to which queer people “seek only to express and fulfil their deepest longings in the same way that heterosexual, married people already do… seek only to be allowed into the already-existing institution of marriage rather than to change it in any way” (Tonstad 2018, pp. 60–61). Indeed, that these “incomplete dramaturgies” attend not to the heterosexist logics at work in the church’s doctrine, or the consideration of never previously considered alternatives, means that there was little time between the decision on marriage and a new ‘debate’ on the rights of trans people (a pattern again, observable in the wider culture), nor has the question of polyamory or other forms of non-monogamy been broached.

3. Handing on: Doctrine Within the Politics of Reproduction

Putting these critiques to one side, I wish to draw our attention to the manner in which the logic of the fidelity urge not only relies on a backward reading strategy (which privileges the past) but is also one that bypasses the present through a fixation with handing on the faith to the future.10 It is this compulsion for continuity from past to future that deeply connects the approaches to doctrine gestured to thus far and the approach to adaptation outlined above. It is this, I will show, which also underpins much of the critique levelled against more transgressive forms of feminist and queer theologies. The commitment to fidelity begets a focus on reproduction, and this thrusts us from the logics of the fidelity urge into the politics of the Child.

3.1. Lee Edelman and the Child

On 23 July 2023, Elon Musk published what we used to call a tweet saying: “The childless have little stake in the future”. Musk provides about as succinct an example as you are likely to find of what Lee Edelman sets out to address in his influential 2004 polemic, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.11

Early in this work, Edelman observes a quality in debates regarding abortion in the US that mirrors what we have just observed in ecclesial debates for inclusion: “Even proponents of abortion rights, while promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political struggle, mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a ‘fight for our children - for our daughters and our sons’, and thus a fight for the future” (Edelman 2004, p. 3).

For Edelman, this demonstrates the consuming politics of the image of the Child. The Child, which is “not to be confused with the lived experience of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse” (p. 11). Contra the rights, needs, and pleasure of the women in the debate, “that figural child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (p. 11). The entire political field is defined within the terms of “reproductive futurism”, which casts queerness outside the political domain (p. 2). For politics (and here I suggest also doctrine), “however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order” (p. 3). In Tonstad’s idiom, it is the very “discourses for inclusion and equality, when extended to the marginalized, [which] help shore up the social reproduction of the body of the church” (Tonstad 2016, p. 3).

Doctrinal work determined by the fidelity urge places its emphasis on handing on what is received, on ensuring the faith is not lost. On the liberal end, this might be described as a process of separating wheat from chaff, of seeking the kernel of universal, liberative truth within the contextual limitations (the timeless extracted from the limits of time), of suggesting that “the various ideas about relationships, the body, marriage and sexuality in the Bible are framed by larger claims about the work of God in creation and redemption” (Uniting Church in Australia Assembly Standing Committee 2018, p. 47). Here, the task of doctrine is to capture and convey the best of what has been developed in past times and places (making contextual choices to draw out and communicate the core) so that it may then be gifted forward, reproduced as a rightful heir to the heart of the tradition.

The conservative approach often practices several of these same techniques. And yet it is also observable that recent theological movements have emerged which stress the virtue of preserving and protecting the past for the life of the future. It will be worth exploring this trend through the lens of one particular theologian, Thomas Oden, not only to observe its particularities but as a way of moving toward a larger claim: that concern with the social reproduction of the church, of the handing on of doctrine to future Christians, contributes to a particular anxiety toward theologians (and theologies) that are seen as non-reproductive, concerned primarily with pleasure and present.

3.2. Thomas Oden and the Vault

Thomas Oden led a battle on many fronts to promote the supremacy and necessity of classical consensual Christianity. Oden’s decade-long project made connections across and influenced mainline, evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox theologians, seminaries, churches, and publishing. For Oden, Christianity’s great tradition has been neglected and dismissed by theology’s infatuation with the modern and the new.

In his autobiography, he describes his conversion: “I had been enamoured with novelty. Candidly, I had been in love with heresy. Now I was waking up from this enthralment to meet a two thousand year old stable memory” (Oden 2014, p. 140). With this awakening, Oden devoted himself toward “making no new contribution to theology, but to adhere closely to the unchangeable, irreversible and unalterable apostolic tradition” (p. 205). His Paleo-Orthodoxy aims to hand on and preserve/protect classical Christianity. Oden sought a “deliberate unoriginality” (p. 175) and promoted “an unapologetic pride and cantor about being faithful guardians of religious tradition precisely amid the conditions of modernity” (Oden 1979, p. 94).

Such a guardianship has material impacts on the aforementioned sexuality debates. Oden encouraged members of the mainline to remain in their churches amidst debates and changes on sexuality, for quitting “forgets about the faithful generations who have given sacrificially to build those churches. It would be a dishonour to them to abandon the church to those with aberrant faith” (Oden 2014, p. 288). The only way, Oden notes, to correct the “contemporary doctrinal shallowness of modernity” is to “return to deep theology that has stood the test of time and links us to the prophets, apostles, saints and martyrs of the earliest times” (p. 299).

Despite its longevity (and one might suppose—should Oden be correct—the power of the Holy Spirit), Oden’s great concern is that this classical consensual Christianity will not be properly safeguarded and handed on. “Every generation of believers”, Oden writes, “has access to the vast store of practical wisdom bequeathed by Christian antiquity. Each generation is called freely to enter the vault and simply listen. Some have the duty to protect that vault and transmit its wisdom to future ages with fresh insight into its unchanging power” (pp. 150–51). This vault of wisdom, both unchanging and active, can call and speak to the contemporary Christian—most of whom are charged to listen and some to protect and transmit (an interesting pedagogical choice). This mix of attention and instruction is necessary to preserve ancient wisdom, perpetually under threat by those trying to “burn it down” (p. 151).

Oden demonstrates a particular concern with the fires of radical feminist theologies and “legalistic inclusivism” (p. 175). The vigilance and concern with this opposition, I suggest, reflects a theological (and in turn political) commitment to reproduction, continuity, and handing on across generations.12 Consider this reflection on a chapel service at his college seminary, which was going to focus on “Sophia” language in the liturgy and eucharist. Oden notes that many of the women who came to Drew University were “moderate to conservative believers from small towns. Many were devoted moms with growing families. Meanwhile a small cadre of feminists conceived of themselves as chosen to speak for all of the women in the seminary, regardless of age or experience” (p. 259).

In this brief passage, Oden contrasts faithful small-town mums with growing families (familial, pastoral, reproductive, natural, and pietistic language) with a cadre of feminists (militaristic language) who did not have families but rather “conceived of themselves” (unnatural reproduction language) as been able to speak in place of their elders (disrupting social norms and hierarchies, the procession of wisdom from old to young, ancient to modern). The liturgy they lead is, in Oden’s account, experimental, exclusive, arrogant, and sneaky, and it leads, eventually, to an invitation to come to the table that, in his estimation, comes not from the Lord of Glory, but a distinct goddess. The service, like these feminists, is thus out of continuity with the past and unconcerned with bringing new life to the future.13

For Oden, feminist/queer theologies are a particular risk because (like theology, like body) they do not reproduce. They are novel acts of pleasure that are trapped in the present, detached and ambivalent to the past (where Oden finds Christianity’s great truth) and the future (for which the Church is responsible). Oden has created another contrast here. The sneaky aggression of these feminist theologies is interruptive and hostile to the consensual nature of classic Christianity. In this way, without stating it explicitly, there is, for Oden, sitting in the pews at Drew, something non-consensual being performed against him and the devoted mothers. Rather than the missionary act of doctrinal reproduction, these feminists find pleasure in “liturgical experimentation” (p. 259).14

Oden is emblematic (and influential in the development) of both the recent conservative movement to the creeds and patristics and a strain of the conservative critique of the feminist and queer explorations of doctrine and liturgy. This critique asserts the intentional divisiveness of feminist and queer theologies (p. 261) and their inability to serve the sapiential/discipleship side of doctrine, i.e., they are too concerned with experimentation and pleasure in the present to build up (reproduce) the body (bodies).

This highlights the slippage from a concern for reproduction, continuity, and handing on of doctrine to theologians deemed non-reproductive, concerned primarily with pleasure and the present. In this light, the purpose of doctrine can appear as nothing but a layover between the past and the future, filled with risks. Contemporary concerns (be they inclusive language in worship, the neglect of socio-economic analysis in theology, or the ongoing reality of gender inequality) are regularly posed as infringing upon (perhaps even wielding torches against) a stable, authoritative, long-protected deposit, which must be preserved in order to be handed on to the church to come. And thus, to return to Edelman, we are “held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself”, waiting on a future that “is nothing but kid stuff”; that is, unless someone(s) decides to not fight for the children? (Edelman 2004, p. 30)

For Edelman, “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’, the side outside of the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (p. 3). Conservatives are able to acknowledge the potential/threat of queerness within these logics more than liberalism, “for conservatism preemptively imagines the wholesale rupturing of the social fabric, whereas liberalism conservatively clings to a faith in its limitless elasticity” (p. 14). Yet, for both accounts, “queerness… is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end” (p. 19), and so the “sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer” (p. 28)15 Queer(ness) however, which never firms up but only disturbs an identity, needs to take what its most ardent and obnoxious critics say about them, and start “taking seriously the place of the death drive we’re called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that we… do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future”. Instead, queerness must choose to not choose the Child, “that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die… [and] insist that the future stop here” (pp. 30–31).

3.3. Summary

To summarise and move us to the next scene, Edelman’s reproductive futurism offers language and logic that locates both the inclusivist and conservative approaches to the purpose of doctrine and thus debates on doctrinal change, as well as laying forth the challenge for something radically other (and outside of) this order. The imperative lies in observing how the tension and anxiety of a reproductive body (church) gets overlayed on those performing doctrine in bodies that are argued to not reproduce (queer/feminist). Tensions taking the form of charges of novelty, of masturbatory play, of infidelity.

There are, once again, parallels in the theatre. The most strident resistance directed at contemporary adaptations tends to be directed first and foremost to the bodies involved and the ways they come together on stage.16 This critique of racial or gendered casting (against the tradition) often precedes and precludes further critical engagement. The simple choice of casting suggests indecency and disrespect on the part of the creative team, an attack on the stable memory of the source and its tradition. This transgression hands off the responsibility to hand on, disregarding reproduction. And yet, perhaps far from that being a problem, Edelman’s call to embrace jouissance outside the logics of the Child provides our way forward. Instead of handing on, with its concern with fidelity and reproduction, we have encounters, often between strangers, pleasurable in themselves, spilling on the ground rather than bearing fruit. Could this instead be the location and horizon in which doctrine ought to occupy itself? An allegiance not to the past or future, but to the present?

If our earlier example of theatrical adaptation provided a warning of incomplete dramaturgies focused on expansive casting and inclusivist politics, our survey of Oden highlights the need to draw on richer theories and practices of theatrical adaptation in order to move past an obligation for reproduction. The practices of adaptation, that is, which move us toward a more present(pleasure)-focused conception of doctrine, one that does not equate novelty and exploration with faithlessness nor give primacy to the past and future over the present.

3.4. A Night at the Theatre II: Deborah Warner and Gender Transgressing the King’s Body

A more fruitful example for our constructive possibilities is found in the landmark 1995 Royal National Theatre production of Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw as the titular king. The production was met with a raft of conservative, negative reactions, motivated by an explicit fidelity urge and a resistance to non-reproductive bodies.17 Elizabeth Klett offers a summary of the many negative reviews that “demonstrated overt hostility to a woman playing a male Shakespeare role” (Klett 2006, p. 175). From accusations of gimmick casting to gender-hazy performance to fear of “Third Sexers”, this critical response indicated that the production was seen as dangerous “because it challenged the boundaries of legitimate or acceptable choices in performing Shakespeare on the contemporary British stage” (p. 175).

Compared to the Globe, which sought blindness in order to go beyond gender to grasp a more universal humanity, Shaw and Warner lent into the dissonance created by the casting. As Warner explained: “casting Shaw in the role meant that the one thing you were going to get for free was the discrepancy, the awkwardness, the person unfitted for the role because they were even the wrong gender… I wanted everybody who came across Richard to have a great big problem when they met this person who must be male through virtue of being a king, yet who looked like a woman and was effeminate” (p. 176). And yet the performance went further than this initial dissonance of having a woman play a man. Shaw’s Richard was “androgynous, embodying a wide spectrum of gender identities and unsettling the masculine/feminine binary” (p. 178). In Shaw’s disruption, violation, and questioning of maleness and masculinity, she drew attention to the performative nature of gender. Recalling Craig’s attribution of the audience response to Laskey’s entrance as a failure to perform womanhood (a gender already deemed performative and artificial compared to masculinity being “the thing itself”, (p. 178) free of artifice and unconstructed), Shaw’s embrace of female androgyne violated the normative assumption of Western masculinity’s neutrality, it unsettled the gender binary, and “alienated both gender and text, inviting audiences to read Shakespeare differently: not as transmitting an essentialist universality” (p. 179, emphasis added).

Warner used her production not to speak past gender, but to gender. The particular vehemence with which the production was met is comprehensible because, as Robin Craig recently noted, “Shakespeare has been used to naturalise the same boundaries that transness disrupts” (Craig 2021). Shakespeare is eternal and naturally true, transness is always emerging and new, meaning “The apparent timelessness of Shakespeare clashes with the perceived novelty of transness”. Not that Shaw’s Richard is explicitly trans, but her androgyny and gender disruption effected much of the same response as Craig has noted. It was her body—often defying ready categorisation—that was deemed inappropriate.

This illustrates what Frances Babbage observed when comparing adaptation to an act of critical interpretation. The adapter, for Babbage, exposes to an audience the contingent status of the text and the possibility of appropriating, scrutinising, or shifting said text into a specific light. Thus, the often passionate and hostile responses to an adaptation are “not necessarily because of how a source is read, but that it is read at all” (Babbage 2018, p. 30). Like the work of trans scholars “historicizing the emergence of cisness… rather than treating it as a timeless given” (Gordon 2024, p. 33), by allowing Shakespeare (and masculinity) to be read, Warner and Shaw unsettle the neutrality associated with the Bard and his views on sexuality, gender, and power. Shakespeare is not stable and timeless compared to the novel bodies and politics of the contemporary performer, adapter, and audience. Warner and Shaw do not introduce questions and claims of gender and sexuality into Shakespeare, they alert the audience to what is already there and offer a reading or performance built from the experience of the community. They demonstrate how, for instance, the Shakespearean telos of comedy being heterosexual marriage is not timeless compared to the androgynous Richard II, but both exist within the same ecosystem of text and intertext, performance and adaptation, of sexual stories.

In the next section, I will further develop this image of the ecosystem and explore how the theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid has elicited similarly hostile responses for the supposed imposition of questions and claims about sexuality into Scripture and tradition. This reflects the approach of Shaw and Warner, who critically examine the various sexual claims, assumptions, and imagery already present in text and tradition and draw them into conversation (and perhaps correction) via the sexual lives and experiences of those—such as the androgynous body of the king—deemed indecent. An act, which, according to Babbage, can be “comically liberating” (Babbage 2018, p. 31).

Thus, contra Terry and her cast—who sought to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s timeless humanity could subsume the gender of the actor—the intention of Shaw and Warner is to interrogate both the universalist claim that has been thrust onto Shakespeare and to problematise the accompanying (and dependent) universalist, normative claims we have made about gender (particularly masculinity). When performed effectively, gender play in Shakespeare is not about claiming that the role of Hamlet is so human that everyone could play him. Rather it aims to trouble this claim, spotlighting the idea that a Danish Prince written by an English Bard could stand in for the human. The casting does not aim to affirm the timeless blank slate universality of Shakespeare but to point to that claim itself and rupture it through the insertion of a body that transgresses the normative, which cannot be read as neutral. By doing so, the Shaw/Warner production “ultimately suggested that the cultural apparatuses we have for determining gender are stereotyped and faulty. [Shaw’s] performance showed that gender is a spectrum, not a binary, through her visual embodiment of that spectrum for the audience” (Klett 2006, p. 183). Shaw and Warner were not out to prove that a woman could play Richard II as well as a man, nor to affirm the timelessness of the Bard who wrote a Dick so malleable as to be played by any Jane, but to press on the same societal impulse that seeks to take as natural, universal, and normative both the works of Shakespeare and binary gender categories. In this, the production not only unsettles the heterosexual impulse to codify (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 117) but also demonstrates what Queer J. Thomas proposes as the value of queer adaptation, which engages “with unfamiliar subjects, methods, and queernesses—not only to disrupt extant thinking about the role of sexual construction in society, but also as a way to bring into the light queer adaptations already present in contemporary cultures and to foreshadow those yet to come” (Thomas 2019, p. 122).

4. Doctrine Spilled on the Ground

Shaw and Warner demonstrated the potential found in the ambiguous body, which unsettles categories often naturalised and rendered invisible. Their work, alongside the challenge of Edelman to not choose the Child, asks us to look for new alternatives to the task of doctrine outside of the politics of fidelity and reproduction, shifting the horizon to the present. There is something thrilling in shifting that horizon, since, as Jack Halberstam writes, the threat of having “no future” produces an “urgency of being [that] also expands the potential of the moment and … squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand” (Halberstam 2005, p. 2). So let us squeeze out some possibilities.

4.1. Sexual Theology, Indecency, and Incoherence in Marcella Althaus-Reid

Queer Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s work expands from two pivotal, interrelated, claims: “The Bible is a collection of sexual stories” (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 133) and “all theology is sexual theology”. Despite the way tradition and familiarity normalise and make invisible the sexual in Scripture, tradition, and ecclesial practice, “every theology implies a conscious or unconscious sexual and political praxis, based on reflections and actions developed from certain accepted codifications” (p. 4).

As such, and in an effort to organise sexuality and politics into the coherent categories of decent and indecent, theology became the “great theoretical discourse on hetero-normativity”, fuelling a “centuries-long struggle to fit homosexuality into a theological box”. And yet, this coherence proves elusive because “heterosexuality, like sex itself, is a very unstable category”, unable to adequately contain and codify the fullness of people’s sexual stories (p. 132).

It is thus from the everyday lives of people (without the exclusion of their sexual stories) that Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology begins. It is this theology that is able to “disrobe the underwear of heterosexual theology” (p. 19), disrupt the fidelity urge, and move us outside the politics of the Child to the kinds of sexual stories previously ignored or consigned as indecent and incoherent.

To be incoherent and indecent is a far cry from being included. In her sustained critique of Liberation Theology’s fetishization of the poor, and erasure of their sexual lives, Althaus-Reid argues that the frontiers of tolerance, “a category based on normative principles”, need to be dissolved (p. 45).

“… it is heterosexuality as a compulsory system in itself which is abnormal, not Queer, indecent people. Indecent people challenge precisely the unnatural and abnormality of the present sexual ideology, in all the consequences of this sexual and political theology. The fact is that our lives as heterosexuals, gays, or lesbians are always abnormal, that is, managed by remote control from idealism.”

(p. 131)

Althaus-Reid asks us to embrace indecency, to “confess and repent from normality and its policy of toleration… to stop the circle of the life-energy wasting process of trying to fit into that ideal heterosexual being we should be” (p. 131)18 And so, instead of apologetics, or arguments from representation or for legibility at the centre, Althaus-Reid offers “some theological perversions”, and the most important for this moment is her category of the Bi/Christ.

4.2. Bisexual Epistemology and Doctrine

The heterosexual patriarchal system works on an either/or basis (p. 13).19 As an example, Althaus-Reid describes the fears of her middle-class students in Edinburgh when learning about God’s preferential option for the poor. Their worry was based on the assumption that “once the poor are given their place of decision-making responsibility in church and theology, they will oppress the rest” (p. 115). And yet, for Liberation Theology, this is not an either/or category. Poor and non-poor are oppressed by structural sin, and both will be liberated in the overturning of the present form of this world. This understanding of the option for the poor, argues Althaus-Reid, “carries in itself a latent bisexual pattern of thought”. Such bisexual epistemology moves away from the dichotomies rife in theological thinking, “which come from that very basic structure of sex opposition” (p. 116). This means that instead of Oden’s crisis point between Sophia and the Lord of Glory, “there is not just The Christ but a diverse Ultra-Christ incarnated (located) in our specific time and communities” (p. 117).

Constrained by the either/or, heterosexist thinking tends to charge bisexuals with a mix of confusion, greediness, and obscenity. If, following Edelman, this charge is taken up as a theological agenda, such a claim suggests three key alternatives from what we have seen in doctrine within the fidelity urge. The first, confusion, points to the critical work of a bisexual epistemology in refusing either/or binaries. The unsettled “Bi/Christ may give way to new perceptions of coherence, outside of the coherence of binarism” (p. 119). It provides a starting point outside the logics of reproductive futurism, “contravening the normative vision of heterosexual difference” (pp. 117–18). In its confusion, “Bi/Christology walks like a nomad in lands of opposition and exclusive identities, and does not pitch its tent ever in the same place” (p. 119). It is thus unable to provide a safe and secure waystation to hand the past onto the future.

The second charge, or alternative, is that of greediness. The Bi/Christ, like the preferential option of the poor, points to expansiveness, to abundance, to new relationships—to stepping outside of competition. With a Bi/Christ, Althaus-Reid celebrates that a “Heterosexual Christ, or the Gay Christ or the Lesbian Christ, the Transgendered Christ and so on, do not need to be exclusive” (p. 116). The Christ who “gives us something to think about” is not behind us but among us, “located in the space/time of a community’s experience” (p. 116). This is a key temporal shift. Contrasted to the secure and stable memory, we have a plethora of Christ’s that were “needed at the time”.

“The Bi/Christ takes it all into his life: economic deprivation and social marginalisation, exacerbated by a kind of heterosexual excommunication from God with which people who happen to be sexual political dissenters are confronted. Excommunicated from love, not only the divine, but the love-solidarity of communities and neighbours, this larger Christ goes beyond ‘either this or that’, because there are so many sexual identities to which we do not have names to give.”

(p. 116)

The identification of and with Christ in and among various bodies and theologies does not cease at the moment of legibility and inclusion but continues to open and expand as new or untold sexual stories unfold. As Anderson Fabian Santos Meza states, this queer theology does not settle down but rather is a “disruptive practice that de-situates and re-situates theological work in other indecent locations and contexts” (Santos Meza 2023). This theological reflection on the Christ met in the space/time of a community’s experience exists outside the logics of the Child and the fidelity urge. Its meaning is found in the pleasure, need, and purpose in the present encounter.

The non-exclusive Bi/Christ is not solely in service of representation. As Althaus-Reid develops through an engagement with Sartre, such a Christ is also obscene. As the androgynous body of the king is exposed as contingent on a masculinity that had been presumed neutral, so too an obscene Christ appears as the “dis-covering of grace”, exposing the viscosity of materiality (p. 111). “Historically”, Althaus-Reid observes, “obscene Christs have appeared when people wanted to uncover the graceful pretences of current Christologies. The Black Christ of Black Theology was obscene because it uncovered racism under the guise of a white Jesus… The Christa is another example of obscenity” (p. 111). Importantly, as Althaus-Reid expands on the role of the Christa, it is significant “not as the female parallel version of Christ, but only when she uncovers the contradiction and difficulties of a female Christ”. When she exposes, that is, the heterosexual gaze, which still sees as sexual a naked female body even when nailed to a cross.20

The obscenity of the Christa and the Black Christ is not like the female Hamlet of the approach considered earlier (which only adds further layers of grace, covering the particulars of Shakespeare with claims to timeless universality). Rather, they are analogous to Shaw’s Richard II, which exposed both the king’s gender, the cultural apparatuses we use to determine gender, and the varying social and political laws and assumptions built on these graceful pretences. Images/Doctrines of Christ which transgress the stable memory, like casting choices against tradition, are regularly charged with obscenity, and yet what is dis-covered as obscene is the “symbolic construction of reality based on sexual and racial grounds” (p. 111). Canonical figures, be they the Son of Man or the Prince of Denmark, are presumed to require a canonical body, which is revealed to be a white male body, a reproductive body, a cis body presumed neutral, natural, and universal, against which the meaning, significance, and stability of all other bodies are derived and judged.

In contrast, Mercy Aguilar Contreras, in a work extending Althaus-Reid to centre bodily epistemology, notes that “Queer theologies position bodies as foundations or ontological grounds, foundational sites of God’s creative action” (Aguilar Contreras 2024). Bodies, plural, a proliferation of Christs and Christians and their surprising convergences both dis-cover the obscene and (contra Oden) can “give birth” to further theological bodies and “new possibilities for understanding and experiencing the divine, fostering communities of radical love, justice, and liberation”. Unintentionally describing the potency and appeal of subversive casting in theatrical classics, Contreras writes, “bodies destabilize cis-heteronormative regimes from the root since they recover the territory on which the whole edifice of hegemonic powers is built”. And with such a territorial recovery, we begin to reconfigure the work of doctrine grounded on a bodily and bisexual epistemology, embracing the charge cum agenda of obscenity as “disruptive and illuminating at the same time” (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 111).

5. Reception, Pleasure, and Non-Exclusivity in Althaus-Reid and Theatrical Adaptation

I began this article by recognising the grip that the fidelity urge has upon the approaches to and reception of adaptation. I then demonstrated the ways in which the fidelity urge, marked by a source/copy binary, an emphasis on a stable origin, and linear temporality with an accompanying stress on the importance of handing on and reproduction, marked both conservative and liberal approaches to doctrine. Such a view, however, not only disregards the reality of the messy temporality by which theatre-goers or Christians receive and engage with what has come before but also leads to hostility toward theologies and theatrical productions (and the bodies responsible for them) that are perceived as novel, transgressive, and non-reproductive. As an alternative, I drew on the work of Deborah Warner and Marcella Althaus-Reid to suggest we venture beyond the either/or, stressing the shared ecosystem of adaptation(s) and source, as well as the potency found in incoherence and indecency rather than inclusion, in confusion, excess, and obscenity rather than codification and reproductive futurism.

Althaus-Reid’s work, as I began to explore in the previous section on obscenity, connects constructively with recent adaptation practice and theory developed to shake the fidelity urge through greater attention to intertextuality and reception.21 Jane Barnette, for example, proposes a bodily epistemology of her own. Her spectator-based adapturgy (a construct of ‘adaptation’ and ‘dramaturgy’) is “designed from the point of view of reception, not authorship”. To avoid defaulting to the “familiar trap of fidelity” (Barnette 2018, p. 40), which determines value based on origin, her model shifts thinking about adaptation “from a linear consideration between source and adapted script” (one of those beloved dichotomies Althaus-Reid refers to) to something three-dimensional, positioning adaptation to the “spectator’s point of view” (p. 41).22 Speaking theologically, the idea of a stable origin (be that Jesus, church memory, or apostolic tradition) is disturbed, and the linear temporality of handing on is disrupted. The emphasis is instead placed on the reception, interpretation, and performance of Jesus and doctrine in and between the present community.

Adaptations (in their multitude), as well as their sources, are placed within the one ecosystem. This image unsettles a dichotomy between the stable and the novel, the consistent and the contingent, the tree and its acorns. It also reflects the more accurate reality by which audience’s engage adaptations and sources (which is rarely in any kind of linear order, or as discreet texts), and further highlights that the relationship between source and adaptation(s) is “reciprocally transformative” (Barnette 2018, pp. 46–47).

This last point is worth observing in some more detail. I will begin with an illustration from the field of adaptation before turning to how this shapes considerations of doctrine. Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen. An adaptation imprints and forever impacts an audience member’s relationship with an artistic product. Many audience members encounter an adaptation before the original. They see Clueless (1995, dir. Amy Heckerling) before reading Jane Austen’s Emma or watch Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001, dir. Sharon Maguire) before reading Pride and Prejudice. They sit in the audience for a production of The Taming of the Shrew only to remember (as they skim the plot synopsis in their programme) that this is just 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, dir. Gil Junger). For many, the source is just another adaptation of a story they have experienced and loved. Even when approached as an original, the experiences, expectations, imagery, and choices of the adaptations cannot be shed. And the ecosystem evolves the more adaptations and performances one sees, creating a more complex experience and stimulating more pleasure in observing the choices of the adapter. The experience of the source is thus dependent upon and shaped by the critical interpretations of these adaptations and the ways they live on and blend with other adaptations, parodies, and references in our memories.

And so it is with the deposit of the faith. Even if the great consensual tradition might be compared to a treasure in a vault, to which we might all visit and simply listen, few encounter the voices of the tradition before encountering an adaptation. For the Christian who comes to Calvin because of Serene Jones’ work on original sin and America’s systemic, institutionalised racism, her adaptation transforms Calvin in the eye of the reader (Jones 2019, pp. 24–62). The presence of her adaptation within the ecosystem draws the reader’s attention to find the familiar (as the one reading Emma wonders which character in Clueless is meant to be this Frank Churchill fellow) and leads them to pass by that which was cut from the adaptation (as obviously not the most important bits).

Althaus-Reid observes a similar messy temporality and reciprocal transformation in the way people read and experience the Bible. She notes that “amongst the people at the margins… the Bible is not a book, but a collection of sayings and vague moral prescriptions which people remember from the media and political discourse, but not from actually reading the text” (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 130). Reflecting on her work in Buenos Aires with a church, running a large free food programme, Althaus-Reid recalls:

“For a time, I was in charge of the Friday night Bible study, but I have never seen beggars carrying Bibles in their bags or pockets. Most of them did not even know how to read. However there is another Bible, that which has been created by five hundred years of Christianity in the continent. This is the Bible of popular proverbs and selected images. Many poor people at the margins in Buenos Aires know the story of Samson (in Spanish, Sansón). They have recreated it in their lives re-read it and it works as a biblical paradigm, more effective than the Exodus. They pray to San Son (‘Saint Son’) because he was a man of physical strength and that is something people need in their lives. The Bible can also be read through the legal and political traditions of the country, and in the engendering of political debates too. After all, for the debates on women’s votes in Argentina, the Congress made allusion to Genesis to put arguments about women’s subordination to men. Women facing crisis in patriarchal homes, or men with broken hearts who lose their jobs because they are gay, need to find a different dialogue with the Bible, outside of the familiar realms of Scripture-proving methods. The Bible does not mention Aids, but it mentions justice. Justice as integral to our conception of God forms a community dialogue with the Bible, outside the printed word.”

(p. 130)

This example demonstrates the difficulty with the rear-view reading strategy of the fidelity urge, which propagates a strict dichotomy between source and copy. The Bible is not, in the experience of these communities, a stable source or text but rather something that is encountered in its adaptations through a variety of means and media, traditions and institutions and is clung to for its purpose in speaking not then, but now. As Althaus-Reid notes earlier in Indecent Theology, in a conversation on Mariology and the popular theology of Santa Librada and La Difunta Correa, people show little care for consistency and contradiction in divine biographies and their related doctrines. The immaculate conception, Althaus-Reid argues, does not need to be “preserved and hegemonically cited and repeated… Dogmas are dead master narratives, and people’s popular theology discards them and modifies them according to time and social problematics” (p. 84).

Fidelity, reproduction, and the dichotomies of stable original and dependent adaptations are undermined by the messy temporality and reciprocal transformation of adaptation and popular theologies. The contemporary experience, the needs of the community, and the many ways in which Scripture and tradition are encountered, remembered, and employed exist interdependently within one ecosystem. All of which, again, pushes against the dismissive codification of tradition and novelty, drawing us out beyond the either/or of the fidelity urge and the heterosexual logics of reproduction.

To conclude, Althaus-Reid’s celebration of the non-exclusive and diverse Ultra-Christs, these varying incarnations of Christ in the space/time of a community’s location, can be fittingly described as an act of adaptation. An adaptation, as Linda Hutcheon described the act in her seminal work, is “a derivation that is not derivative - a work that is second without being secondary… repetitions without replication”. The repetition of Christ in leather bars and by lemon vendors, inside night clubs and outside church gates, is an act of “Christology of a Bi/Christ… a pattern of thought for a larger Christ outside of binary boundaries” (p. 117). That one of these communities’ Christs might be incomprehensible to another, let alone a community of the past, does not presume the necessity of conflict and purge but rather recognises that we have moved outside the politics of the Child and released the fidelity urge.

Following this, I suggest that doctrine, as an act of adaptation, gives up handing on, the image of the vault, social reproduction, and linear progression. Instead, doctrine as an art might be considered to conform more to Frances Babbage’s image of a web, where adaptations

“… look backwards, without being retrogressive; they extend and forge connections laterally, synchronically; and they also forge forwards, finding fresh means to speak old texts to new times. Each Three Sisters redraws and extends the map of Chekhov’s play, suggestively interconnecting with stagings prior and anticipated, local and far afield… the theatre has room for an infinite number and variety of Three Sisters, there are never ‘enough’: they freely accumulate, echoing and contradicting one another, their elements growing entangled in practice and memory with other productions and other media.”

(Babbage 2018, pp. 9–10)

This does not suggest the abdication of critical engagement and the appraisal of each new and old doctrinal expression. There are theatrical adaptations that can be bad plays (or at the very least, strike one as uncompelling). However, the resources and language employed to develop such a critical engagement are now asked to go beyond the fidelity urge and reproductive futurism. Critics are asked to resist the reactionary cries of infidelity based on bodies, the denunciation of making contingent what was once natural and invisible, or the charge of irresponsibility to hand on what has been received.

This requires a certain epistemological humility and curiosity on the part of the audience. Someone, sitting through an act of “liturgical experimentation”, like Oden for instance, is asked to entertain the possibility that the reason they cannot see the language of Sophia as an adaptation of the table set by Christ could lie in their reception. In a web as vast as the tradition of Christian doctrine and liturgy, no single Christian can see all the points of connection, nor every echo of repetition. And the inability to recognise a particular contemporary performance as the legitimate inheritor of a singular series of handings-on that goes back through Paul to Christ does not render it illegitimate. Others present on that same day or perhaps another will find points of connection and residue with their experience, with other performances, with other convergences of their body with the body of Christ needed at the time. Outside of the fidelity urge and reproductive futurism, the audience member frustrated with their experience of the performance needs only to contend with what they might be missing rather than what this performance might be neglecting from the past or robbing from the future. At this point of frustration, the invitation is to explore with generosity and curiosity what the adaptors are doing, what wells they draw from, and to what communities they are beholden. That is to say, their place in the web. Adaptations require a knowing audience, and so one of the first questions asked by the audience member giving up the fidelity urge is what they might yet need to know.

6. Conclusions

Queer theology and adaptation make good bedfellows in this explication of doctrine outside the fidelity urge. As Pamela Demory helpfully observes,

“Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary, somehow less authentic. To identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else—something prior, something that for at least some people is more original and more true. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to something that seems to have been already established as ‘normal’ or ‘straight’.”

(Demory 2019, p. 1)

What we have developed thus far denotes the difficulty of maintaining such a strict dichotomy. An original (or source) comes to be considered such through the existence of an adaptation. So too, it has been observed, does the category of heterosexuality depend on the development of the homosexual, and the orthodox comes into clarity in reaction and relation to the heterodox or heresy.

The easy dismissal of the trans body on the Shakespearean stage, or the Sophia language at the table of grace, or the gay Christ at the leather bar as acts of novelty or transgression, or as intrusions upon a timeless memory, relies on a faulty and idealistic picture of universality, temporality, and reception. Instead, as Demory observes, key concepts in the field of adaptation (and in some of the theology observed and developed in this article), such as the “pleasure in promiscuity, resistance to singular definitions”—the incoherence and indecency—“suggest that adaptation is already queer” (p. 3). The already queer forges a new starting point, beyond the fidelity urge and outside of the politics of the Child. Adaptation, so rendered, troubles the all-too-easy and common assumptions about source and copy, definitive and derivative, timeless and novel, and consensual and contingent, suggesting a horizon for doctrine not bound by the past nor beholden to the future.

To bring down the curtain, let me offer an exploratory note in the programme on adaptation and the task of Christian doctrine: Doctrine, as an act of adaptation, informed by the indecency and incoherence of the Bi/Christ, is not bound by the heterosexual logics of handing on but instead lives as though it was not married (1 Cor 7). Without a vault to lay its head, it is located in the space/time of a community’s experience. Doctrine lives for the present and gives up the concerns of reproduction, legacy, and handing on (in this way it lives before an eschatological horizon rather than an ecclesial one, for the present order of the world is passing away). If doctrine is to reproduce, it does so horizontally—giving over the authority of its body to the other who has need (still 1 Cor 7). Such abandon need not be frightening. As Chelsea Pellegrini argues, when the body can be conceived as “something other than a perfectly bounded whole, as something that allows exchange and extends the self in reaching toward others, [we] may be able to view ambiguity and fluidity as empowering rather than threatening” (Pellegrini 2019, p. 111).

If doctrine perseveres, beyond a then to a now, or a now to a then, let it be through the surprising impression left by the pleasurable touch of the stranger; the residue remaining from the contemplation of God based on “existential bodily narratives” (Rebecca Parker 2021, p. 3); memories of moments where two or more gathered together, and their Christs that were needed at the time meet a new need; where something surprising remains, if only by accident, not tucked away in a vault awaiting pilgrimage, but walking around in the open, vulnerable and ambiguous, fluid and exposed; doctrine occurring in the encounter between bodies, in the messy temporality and reciprocally transformative ecosystem in which the source and adaptation exist together; new life in new stories, new bodies, and new relationships that are never to the exclusion of all others.