FEMINIST

THEOLOGY
Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://FTH,sagepub.com
Vol. 15(3): 289-301
DOI: 10.1177/0966735006076167

Queering the Cross:

The politics of Redemption and the External Debt*

Professor Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid

Altt}[email protected]

ABSTRACT

This article examines the connections between a theory of redemption as

indebtedness and the wider political/economic realities of indebtedness.
In order to illustrate the argument the author demonstrates why it is nec-
essary to even question the roots of theories since they too carry a wider
agenda. The author contrasts a debt economy with an economy of love.

Keywords: Christology, redemption, queer theology, debt, salvation.

The 'Doing' of Queering Theology

There is a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar which
deals with greetings. The story says than when a man meets another
man and greets him, he may think that he is greeting someone but
in reality, he is not. What happens, say Cortazar, is that the greeting
has been invented, and the only thing that a man can do is to fit into
the invented form of greeting (Cortazar 1978). Cortazar was a Marxist
novelist and had no doubt read his Althusser before writing this story,
originally published in 1962. In fact, Cortazar is making a point about a
concept which has become the cornerstone of Queer theory and theol-
ogy, namely, performativity. The role of performativity in theology has
moved our attention to the strategies of repetition and subject-forma-
tion in Christianity. We do not do theology, but rather we are locating
ourselves into a fitting discourse in which strategies, paraphrasing
Judith Butler, have meaning which exceeds their original purposes
(Butler 2000: 33). While early femirust and liberationist theologies tried

* A version of this article appears in Lisa Isherwood and Rosemary Radford

Ruether (eds). Weep Not for Your Children: Essays on Religion and Violence (London:
Equinox, 2007).
290 Feminist Tlxeology

to reform the ideological core or centre of privileged discourses in the-

ology. Queer theologies understand the need to step aside. The core
ideologies and their methods need to be refused, not reformed.
We theologize. Theology is a genre or literary discourse which
coveys (hetero) normativity in issues of the political, social and reli-
gious life of our communities. It requires particular structures (for
instance 'Christology') and applies rules and norms of style. The aim
of the theological genre is to produce a particular action in the reader
of theology who is usually considered 'the implied believer/would
be believer'. This could be conversion or guilt for instance. We do not
greet: we fit into the greeting. We do not do theology: we fit into the-
ology. However, the doing of Queer Theology has challenged all this.
It is not just about changing greetings: that would be the approach of
the old plea to use 'inclusive language', for instance. We should hope
that Queer Theology has finished with greetings altogether. After all, it
comes from a foundation of dissenting orthopraxis.
Although we have already mentioned Judith Butler, the foundations
of Queer Theology lie in an experiential, militant core rather than an
academic theory. The Queer Movement and its ideas arise from the life
experiences of people at the margins. Historically, what we now call
Queer Theory started in the late 1980s amongst the Chicanas and Black
lesbian activists in California, rebelling against 'gay identity.' That Gay
identity was based on race (whiteness), and also socio-economic status.
'Gay identity' had become a greeting, a 'How do You Do' from Cortd-
zar's story, into which people fitted questioningly. More alarmingly, in
the theological context, the believer's desires and identity, even God's
own identity were conditioned. Queer Theology has been born from a
distinctive consciousness about social and political formations. This is
reflected by the term^ 'Queer' which carries the original experience of vio-
lence or terror amongst the Queer community. This is a very important
issue, because the strength of Queer Theology lies also in this counter-
discourse from the margins concerning multiple layers of oppression.
These are produced by ideological alliances of heterosexuality, racism,
classism, colonialism and genderism.
Queer theologies can be characterized by features such as irrev-
erence; camp styles (such as the use of irony) and a different way of
naming the Kingdom and denouncing structures of injustice. However,
it is the naming of sexuality which makes of Queer Theology an outcast,
lawless theology, and each of its Queer reflections, illegitimate produc-
tions. In that lies the strength, creativity but also strategy of the Queer
Movement in theology. It ensures that the whole of the apparatus of
systematized theology can be refreshingly 'queered', or using the much
more graphic Spanish term, torcido (twisted/bended).
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Cross 291

Twisting Crucifixions
If we consider the praxis of Jesus in the New Testament we need to
concede that a new order of things (not a modification of the old one)
was desired by the Messianic community who accompanied him until
his end. That is to say, Christology needs to queer the basic tenets of
our Christian experience, and that includes the politics of crucifixions.
As there is more to crucifixions than an ancient Roman colonial policy
of repression (and some perverted practices), we need to reflect on how
popular alternative practices amongst the poor and marginalized may
contribute to the queering of crucifixion, and to the hetero-normative
understanding of lives in debt.
We begin by referring to the popular crucifixions which have been
occurring in Latin America from the end of last century. There have been
scenes in public parks, where groups of people literally queued at lunch
time to be participants in 'mock crucifixions'. Men and women, young
and old, have patiently stood still, with arms and legs tied up with ropes
to the wooden spars of home-made crosses. Visible to the passers by were
handwritten cards placed under some of the crosses. Each one carried
the name and the social problems of the person who voluntarily cruci-
fied herself, such as unemployment and the loss of savings during the
collapse of the national banks. In many of the crucifixion scenes, priests
have been queuing amongst the crowds. They also waited their turn to be
crucified during lunch time. After they have completed their crucifixion
hour, another group made up of yet more neighbours with further sets of
cards would arrive, helping one another to be tied to their crosses.
These were lunch time crucifixions in times of economic crisis
within the process of Globalization. They were 21st century Golgotha
scenes that lasted for whole afternoons when people queued for nrock
crucifixions in a humble town park in Argentina.^ The message was
clear. Wooden crosses expressed the reality of authentic crucifixions
in the life of ordinary people suffering under the conditions of the
Market, the reality of external debts and the disregard for human life
which pervades their proponents. Curiously, these crucifixions hap-
pened in La Quiaca, where months earlier a priest was deposed from
his parish for putting a white headscarf on the head of the statue of
the Virgin Mary, thus making of her a 'Mother of the Disappeared'.^

1. The mock crucifixions as a means of protest still continues today. At the time
of writing this article I have read that 110 unemployed workers in the border between
Argentina and Bolivia have crucified themselves in protest while near 300 people have
gathered to show them support.
2. 'Mothers of the Disapeared' (Mndres de los Desapnrecidos or Madres de Plaza de
292 Feminist Theology

As the Salvadorean theologian Jon Sobrino would say, these scenes

should remind us that we are in the presence of the crucified people of
Latin America (Sobrino 1978). However, these cruci/fictions are much
more than theatrical performances. In other words, they may be par-
taking at some levels of the skills of a 'Theatre of the Oppressed',^ but
at some point they also engage with an unfortunate Christian peda-
gogy of violent debt, which has been passed from generation to gen-
eration of Latin American people. For behind those mock crosses there
are the shadows of external debts, public debts as well as private and
individual brokenness. The fact we need to Queer is that a whole the-
ology of debt has been used in Christianity to mediate a relationship
between people and God. As a result of this, God and humanity have
been reduced to be best understood through a specific economic axis
and ethos. Such is the axis of debt and the ethos of redemption.
Using a discourse from ideology in theology, we may say that as it
is in Heaven, so it is on Earth. Global Capitalism may be built around a
similar axis of debt and redemption, although the cost of such redemp-
tion is a very different one. Are we then supposed to understand the
world as a relationship of interdependence with an economic (market)
worldview? In that sense then it would be part of our Queering of the-
ology to ask if the doctrine of redemption partakes of a reductionist
economic worldview which obscures an ideological process of inver-
sion in Christian salvation: as if sexuality and love have something to
do with it.

Redemption as an Ideological Inversion

Debt prepares the ground on which the seeds of conflict fall, watering the
martial crop as it grows.
(Dan Smith in Selby 1997; 92)

If truth is always a concrete truth, we can also say that the truth in
Christianity has always been in the struggle against processes of reifi-
cation, that is, ideological statements which render people powerless
while doctrines grow strong. As Queer Theologians, we are against the
grain of the normal, and in this case, against Redemption as an eco-
nomic metaphor for salvation. What kind of salvation is this? If the

Mayo) refers to a group of women from Argentina who protested against the military
regimes of the 1970s demanding justice against the abductions of people suspected of
opposing the regime. They are recognized for wearing a white scarf on their heads with
the names and/or photographs of their missing relatives.
3. Theatre of the Oppressed refers to the theatre techniques of Augusto Boal in
Brazil, who has developed it as an instrument to facilitate social changes. Cf. Augusto
Boal 'Theatre of the Oppressed' (London: Penguin, 2000).
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Cross 293

medium is the message, the doctrine of salvation needs to be consid-

ered as based on a commercial culture of oppression. This blurs the
borders between the understanding of the production of the means of
life (and the regulation of relationships and affection which result from
that), and the kind of relationship expected from gods.
In Christianity it means the relationship between a creator God as
a producer of life as a supreme good and a humanity subjected to a
violent ontological external debt. Because the main foundation of theol-
ogy is and has been sexuality ('theology is a sexual act') that ontological
debt is also sexual. But this does not mean that it needs to refer only to
issue of individuals or communities. No. It has to do with the under-
standing of economic relations.
The doctrine of redemption may have been the earliest attempt by
Christianity to sacralize a patriarchal economic order based on debt.
Here we can detect the origins of what we can call a 'judicial theology',
or a lawyer's account of the rights and wrongs of commercial spiritual
transactions. But more than that, an ontological substratum where debt
is part of the cultural, economic and religious horizon of expectations.
In other words, there is no understanding in Christianity of life
without debt. And debt implies a normalcy —a spiritual state to which
we should aspire. Such a debt could be theoretically abolished (as in
the redemptive act of Christ) but the expectation of debt survives, onto-
logically ingrained in a Christian economy of relationship. Debt, in this
case, is more foundational for Christianity than love, for it even pre-
cedes love. It was Chairman Mao who once suggested that to under-
stand a system we should find a foundational contradiction in it. In
the doctrine of redemption, the contradiction is grace or freedom.
Why? Because the covenant or pact of Grace (the 'free' transaction as
opposed to the commercial one) is heavily dependent on a theology of
debt based on approved social loving agreements between contracting
parties. God has then become the God of good will, and the incarnation
of a divine sponsor or 'surety' in Jesus. Grace (freedom) is precisely
what is lacking here.
Our doctrine of salvation seems to be a product of the hybridity
between an understanding of debt in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Chris-
tian event and Roman jurisprudence. This is where Giorgio Agam-
ben's thought becomes illuminating. In his book Homo Sacer III (1998)
Agamben highlights the fact that theological categories are indebted
to judicial ones. For instance, the problem is not what economic order
is present in the thinking of redemption, but that an economic order
has become the hidden narrative and 'Grand metaphor' of our relation
with God. Moreover, that that economic order is subjected to the fluc-
tuations of violent exchanges. In the symbolic mock-crucifixions of the
294 Feminist Theology

poor in Argentina we have the paradox of a people whose life moves

around the key element of the present economic universe of the market,
debt. What we have here is a piece of Roman jurisprudence, where the
surety of a commercial transaction can be exercised in two different
ways: afidejussor and an expromissor. The fidejussor was the person who
took responsibility to pay as a guarantee in case the original debtor did
not pay what was owed. The expromissor was a more generous guaran-
tor who took upon themselves the responsibility to pay no matter what
(Agamben 1998:16).
The problems with theological inversion are basically the following:
(1) It tends to conceal the fact that there is a sexual violence pre-
vious to an economic foundational violence in a religious
discourse, which haunts any relationship of gratuity which
Christianity has tried to establish with the Sacred. It comes
back to haunt economic expectations and taints the discourses
of the neoliberal 'no alternative' to Globalization.
(2) It creates a judicial theology, depending on obligations.
This foundational economic violence means that the shadow of debt
threatens Grace.
Two distinguished British theologians have already questioned the
deep implications of using the 'debt' metaphor in theology. Timothy
Gorringe, in his book God's Just Vengeance: Christ, Violence and the Rhet-
oric of Salvation (1996) and Bishop Peter Selby in his book Grace and
Mortgage (1997). For Gorringe, the image of a God as part of a retribu-
tive strategy of justifiable punishment requires serious rethinking. For
Selby, the message of forgiveness through Christ's act of redemption
needs to be understood in all its depth, including the consequences
that this may have for our current economic system. That is, the divine
assurance of the good news of the Kingdom of God as a true economy
of Grace and freedom, and 'the hope of a world where debt will not
rule' (Selby 1997:163). The debts have been forgiven. Someone (Christ)
has paid the price with blood.
However, we still need to further question the difficulties of having
the mastercode of the debt narrative as foundational for our relation-
ship with God and with the world. It may be argued that the indebted
countries of the world, which are paying the price of usury more than of
a genuine debt at this moment, are following the same bloody road. For
the external debt has become quasi-ontological and it seems to require
a multitude of human sacrifices to be redeemed. The amount of people
sacrificed by the Global Capitalist system is of such magnitude in terms
of suffering and numbers that it can only be compared to the suffer-
ing of a tortured god dying on a cross. How different would it be to
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Cross 295

have a divine economic metaphor based on the gift economy of many

countries such as Rwanda or Peru? Queer theologians understand that
revelation should be discerned in the world, and not only in a theo-
logical attempt to discern God's Word in the institutionalized church.
The economic system is one of these areas in which the revelation of
God is particularly visible, because economy is by nature a way of rela-
tionships, of loving exchanges and the production and distribution of
life. To go outside an economy of redemption means to go outside an
economy of debt. In our current market economy, that means to go
outside the system. However, one does not need to consider the pos-
sibility or impossibility of a different economic system, if we consider
how in other cultures not taken into account by western theologies,
there are different models of economies which are also rooted in the
spiritual. What the redemption model does not acknowledge is that dif-
ferent forms of imagining love and relationships outside a narrow debt
model such as the one Christianity has developed. This may lead us to
somehow different and more creative understandings of God and life
outside the patterns of, for instance, work and debt and high property
values in general which pervade Christian theology. Different forms of
loving relationships mean also that we may value property in different
ways. This could lead to a sense of exchanging solidarity among men
and women and not just relationships based on a debt economy. This
in turn might contribute to the rediscovering of the face of God in the
current capitalist system. It may also affect the structures of organiza-
tion of the church.

The Peruvian Economy ofTenderness/DEJAR de LADO

It may be that a theology of the land needs to stand against a theology
of debt. In Latin America, issues of land have been at the forefront of
the agenda of many churches and church inspired movements, such as
The Landless Movement (Movemento Sem Terra), whose origins can be
traced to the Ecclesial Base Communities. In the past years differences
between campesinos and hacendados (peasants and landowners) in Latin
America and in particular in Peru, have been and continue to be tense.
People have become divided along issues of land, property and pro-
duction resources including technologies. However, even if relation-
ships amongst campesinos have changed in the new terms imposed by
the Globalization of capital, in the sense that there are divisions related
to the control of land and orchard properties even amongst themselves
(and not just with the landowner), it seems that an economy and spiri-
tuality of Grace has prevailed. The traditional relations of economic
and affective reciprocity amongst indigenous cultures in Peru have
296 Feminist Theology

demonstrated strength and have even produced many challenges to

the market system. For that, we need to reflect on the institution of
economic reciprocity used at the level of peasants' interchange which
is called the Ayni or 'tenderness.' (Fioravanti 1973). The Ayni is a gift
economy based on a type of ritualized friendship which interrelates
traditional spiritual and social issues and is manifested at the level of
relations of production among the Peruvian peasant societies. The Ayni
relies on rituals of friendship which include the use of special words of
greeting amongst peasants, and also the exchange of food and/or pres-
ents. How does it work? For instance, if someone needs help during the
harvest season, a relative, friend or a neighbour can be asked to perform
that service. The person who is soliciting the help for the harvest will,
when required, reciprocate by offering her or his own services to those
who have helped during the seasonal work. The only expectation is in
reality, reciprocity, and following this example, it would not be neces-
sary to reciprocate with helping the neighbour in the harvest, but in
any other need. In fact, in this system anybody can somehow recipro-
cate, even older people, the sick or the children. They all belong to the
system of tenderness in their community.
The ritual of the Ayni works as follows: The person who needs help
for the harvest visits a relative or any member of the community to
ask for help. The relatives or neighbours of that person who have been
asked and have agreed to help with the harvest will accompany him
or her to the field, bringing with them an offering that in Spanish can
be translated as el carino (love or tenderness). The 'tenderness' might
consist of aguardiente (a traditional alcoholic drink), some cigarettes
or any other present considered suitable (Fioravanti 1973: 122). The
person whose service is required takes with him or her this 'love' or
'tenderness' as the beginning of the reciprocity cycle of mutual service
between two people and two families. It is interesting to note that when
the person goes to work in the harvest, other people who are not going
to work, accompany him or her symbolically, to show that behind that
worker there is a community happy to serve a neighbour in need. The
highly ritualized cycle of reciprocity has something sacramental in it.
It is a community sharing work, but not just that. There is a sense of
spirituality in working in the field that belongs to the Inca cultures, and
which pervades the system of the Ayni. In a way, the Quechua people
have an authentic theology of Land in which God's grace is manifested
in the harvest but also in the midst of the community work. Without
reciprocity, there is no spirituality.
This is not a system which is based on debt but, as the name says, on
love. The Ayni subverts the master/slave dialectic present in the 'debt
economy' of redemption and converts it into gift and mutuality. The
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Cross 297

violence which is implicit in a doctrine of redemption is here subsumed

by an understanding of a relation of a celebratory nature. That relation
is remembered and celebrated in the traditional/I'estos which signal the
end of the service given to someone in need, without the expectation of
an economic reward. In that way, poor peasants never lack workers for
the harvest, and even when workers are paid for their services, people
still tend to respect the carino, by giving offerings and presents to the
paid workers and celebrating the end of the work with a fiesta. The fact
is that in any Peruvian community, the element of reciprocity organizes
labour because labour is part of a wider spirituality of the land.
The Ayni is part of the reciprocity system of many Latin American
communities, but its challenges penetrate deeply into the social and
economic structure of the market economy. However, the Ayni is also
part of a Quechua spirituality. Reciprocity in community is understood
as part of a process of spiritual development. Feelings and emotions
such as love or tenderness are considered important to manifest the
soul of a person. The Ayni is in itself, a path and a liturgy of spiritual
and material growth in a culture where the dualism of soul and body
does not exist as such. Theologically we are challenged by the presence
of God in the midst of a different way of conceiving labour and family
relationships, as also economy and society ."* The redemptive implica-
tions of this system set us apart from the ethos of a society where profit
is present in all transactions. The Ayni is about giving without receiving
profit, based on rituals of expenditure of the accumulated, given away
with happiness, with grace, in the fiestas of celebration organized for
the work done (Godelier 1971:102). The economic goal of the Ayni is to
minimize economic inequalities in the community by graceful giving,
while improving people's living conditions. Redemption has all too
often been reduced to a welcome to an economically based order that
should be questioned. What would happen if we had a redemption
narrative which did not presuppose indebtedness but gracious giving
and celebration of the giving as in the Aynil

Redemption without Debts

Could we have redemption without debt? Much has been said about
the use of Christologies of oppression which were used in colonial Latin
America to subjugate and make of free indigenous nations, nations
condemned to be debtors. Yet little has been said about the fact that
the Inca Empire was based on an agrarian socialism [agrarismo) charac-

4. For a more developed reflection on the theological implications of the Ayni see
Althaus-Reid, Vie Queer Cod (2003), especially chapter 7.
298 Feminist Theology

terized by the collectivisation of fertile land; the common property of

water sources and woods and the cooperation of all workers in harvest-
ing. These had a distinctive religious base as the agrarismo is intimately
connected to the Inca religiosity: and this is not a coincidence. People's
spirituality carries economic connotations. In Christianity, for instance,
to redeem is a specific action to be located in a situation of debt. In the
Hebrew Scriptures, a person who has been enslaved can be set free
by paying a sum of money. In the current times of external debts, the
'Jubilee 2000'^ campaign tried to ask for the remission of the interest
of the international debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for
the most impoverished countries of the world.^ Christ's redemption
cancels the debt of humanity, but we are still struggling here with the
ideology of debt. How we get free from debt by God's forgiveness or
mutual forgiveness (as in the Jesus prayer) is not the issue, but why
we assume that debts can and should be contracted. This takes us into
another reflection, one of a God who does not recognize debts, being
rather a God of reciprocity. Does the queering of relationships and love
provide us with an alternative wisdom here? How much of the system
of 'debt' do we carry in our loving relationships? How much queer,
twisted potential is there for thinking without a debt mentality? Is
redemption a redundant theological concept that we need to reject?
To think about Christ and salvation outside hetero-normativity
leads us to think about how Christologies relate to economic systems.
The symbolic crucifixions we mentioned at the beginning show us how
deep debt and redemption are related to a Christian understanding.
The point is that no economy of freedom and no alternative Basileia
or Kingdom of God can happen while Christ continues to be associated
with an economy of debt, as in the case of redemption, which has serious
cultural and economical limitations. There is a need for a radical break-
through in the understanding of human relationships and humanity's
relationship with God, which needs to reconsider economic and theo-
logical experiences outside the Western and straight way of thinking
and living. Unfortunately, the problem with religious metaphors con-
cerning the cancellation of debts is that they do not cancel the existence
of a system of debt. We may consider ourselves or our communities
free from debt or redeemed, but we will still perceive others as in debt.

5. For the Jubilee 2000 campaign see M.J. Dent, Jubilee 2000 and Lessons of the World
Debt Tables (1994).
6. It is curious to note that in April 2002, James Wolferson, President of the World
Bank said that the moment has come for the World Bank to act, and not to speak and
to 'educate for love' (see BBC webline, http://www.news.BBC.co.uk/Hi/Spanish/
business/newsid.stm, April 2002). The concept of love used by Wolferson is dependent
on a world view very different from that of the Ayni system of reciprocity.
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Gross 299

The core of colonial theology is based on that perception which divides

the world between the free from debt and those who need to be told of
their 'debts' even if they did not partake of such a theology of debts in
the first instance. From theological debts to economic debts, it seems
difficult to conceive of a world where debts are not just abolished but
where an alternative order of reciprocity, gift, expenditure without ret-
ribution is created, in sum, an economy of Grace in which debt does not
exist. In fact, it is Grace that has been cancelled by a debt ideology and
not vice versa.
The challenge is a challenge to the assumed (and sacralized) eco-
nomic universe of the Scriptures.'' However, it is more than that for it
represents a challenge to the way we conceive God, and God in Christ.
A challenge to a theology which is more Roman jurisprudence than
Freirean,^ and that needs the dialectical, less hierarchical worldview of
reciprocity, solidarity and tenderness. The cross at Golgotha, and the
lunch time crucifixions of the excluded people from Argentina, dying
under the heavy weight of the external debt and the Structural adjust-
ment Programmes, have something in common. They denounce the
system of debt as violence against humanity, and also, Christ's cruci-
fixion as violence inflicted against God Godself. If theology is a way of
actions and reflections, there is then hope that the understanding of the
inhumanity of the economies of debt in the Global Market may help us
to reconsider our theological doctrines, using more appropriate eco-
nomic metaphors to understand the love and the constant presence of
God among the marginalized.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, a theological reflection engaged with present debt
structures presents us with three distinctive challenges. First, the chal-
lenge to consider if our current Christologies (including some Liberation-
ist approaches) should depart from cultural and economic metaphors
which cannot challenge the economic structures of sin in our world.
Moreover, they may have contributed to it. Should the churches repent
of their contribution to systems of indebtedness in society? At least, this

7. It is obvious to say that there is more than one economic system in the Scrip-
tures. We are referring here only to the ideology of redemption as it contributes to our
understanding of Christ, but the redemption system in biblical times needs to be studied
in its different contexts too.
8. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher of education, developed a method of
education for liberation based on a dialogue for conscientization. Its style of work was
non-hierarchical but dialogical and egalitarian. Theology has still to learn to rethink its
categories from a dialogical perspective. See Freire, Pedagogy of tlie Oppressed (1993).
300 Feminist Tlteology

should be a call to be aware that there are economic alternatives. The

reality of economic alternatives is what Global Capitalism does not want
to accept, but the good news of the Kingdom is more than a concrete
historical project, it is a call to alternatives. Second, and closely related
to this point, we may need to reflect on the place that culture should
have in our praxis of theological action and reflection today. This is not
a case of advocating a 'Gospel and culture' approach, which usually
succeeds in leaving Christianity culturally intact, although adapting to
another culture. In this case the demands should be higher. Theology and
culture, sadly, have been used as a way to transmit a Christian message
while keeping its cultural baggage intact (or even sacralized). To thirik
about the Ayni, is to think a different Christology and even ecclesiology.
For instance, the churches would have a different structure if they had
respected and taken seriously many of our indigenous organizational
patterns. To think Christ outside the economic model present in the
metaphor of redemption, while finding that same Christ in the economic
system of tenderness and retribution of gifts, enlarges our understanding
of the Messiah amongst us. It helps us to re-discover a bigger God and
a bigger Christ, while untangling the hegemonic historical relationship
between theology, ideology and culture which has contributed so much
to injustice and oppression.
We may ask if Christianity could survive such disentangling of ide-
ology and Christology. Obviously, this may have serious consequences
for theology. The question to ask is how pivotal is a dominant cultural
and economic viewpoint for our faith? Theology has never been cultur-
ally neutral, but the cultures of the coimtries of the Global South have
been ignored or distorted. Yet, as we may see, they have more to contrib-
ute to our understanding of Christ than a hegemonic Western theology
had thought. The final challenge may be to ask: 'Would Christ survive
a post colonial theology?Would Christ survive a non-redemption the-
ology?' If we recognize that redemption as a doctrine is dependent on
a cultural and economic metaphor of limited value, then the answer is
yes. In this case, we will be referring to theology as poiesis, creation and
possibility and not as a fixed ordered corpus of divine understanding.
As I have said elsewhere, in theology it is a sense of discontinuity which
brings revelation, not un-revised traditions.
It is not the future of theologies, not even of Queer theology, which
should be concerning us, but the future of real people, the people of
Christ. In other words, if what concerns us is Christ when thinking
Christology at a time of Global Capitalism and social exclusion, then
we have forgotten Christ in the process. If our concerns are the lives
of the poor and marginalized, the ones that Christ loved and still does,
then the answer is clear. To think Christ amongst the disposessed of
 Althaus-Reid Queering the Cross 301

today calls us to a different understanding of the alternative Kingdom

of God, as announced by a Messiah who may need to be able to tran-
scend the limitations of the economic models which still permeate our
understanding of his life and work. The magnitude of the current crisis
of the world requires Christological kenosis and postcolonial suspicion,
as well as courage to produce a different theological praxis amongst
the excluded of Global Capitalism. The spirituality of the Ayni (and the
spirituality of many cultures based on the gift economy) should give us
food for thought.

REFERENCES
Agamben, G.
1998 Homo Sacer III: El poder soberano y la vida desnuda (Spanish translation and
notes by Antonio Gin:ieno Cuspinera; Valencia: Pre-Textos).
Althaus-Reid, M.
2003 The Queer Cod (London: Routledge).
2006 'On Dying Hard: Lessons from Popular Crucifixions and Undisciplined
Resurrections in Latin America', Concilium 2006/5.
Boal, A.
2000 Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press).
Butler, J., with Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham
2000 'Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification',
//\C 20:4: 731-65.
Cortazar, J.
1978 Cronopios and Famas (trans, from Spanish by Paul Blackburn; London:
Boyards).
Dent, M.J.
1994 jubilee 2000 and Lessons of the World Debt Tables (Published by M.J. Dent,
Deptment of Politics, Keele University).
Fioravanti, A.
1973 'Reciprocidad y Economia de Mercado', Allpanchis, Vol. v: 121-31.
Freire, P.
1993 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin).
Godelier, M.
1971 'Q'est-ce que definir une "formation economique et sociale": L'example
des Incas', La Pensee, no. 159, October.
Selby, P.
1997 Crace and Mortgage: Tlie Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (London:
Darton, Longman & Todd).
Gorringe, T.
1996 Cod's just Vengeance: Christ, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press).
1990 Discerning Spirit. A Theology of Revelation (London: Trinity Press).
Sobrino, J.
1978 Christology at the Crossroads (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books).