A British theologian Elizabeth Stuart (1963-) argues that theology is fundamentally “queer” enterprise since Christianity tells us the fact that all socially constructed “identities,” including sexual and gender identities, have no absolute importance. According to Stuart, whereas “gay and lesbian theology” attempts to interrogate theology based on one’s sexual or gender identity, “queer theology” attempts to interrogate the notion of sexuality and gender based on one’s Christian identity. In this paper, Stuart’s understanding of “queer theology” will be explored through an examination of her arguments about baptism, ecclesiology, and eschatology. I will also analyze her use of the term “queer” as well as the term “theology” and clarify some issues inherent in her understanding of “queer theology.”

The early Christian church struggled to understand the concept that a transcendent God could occupy space in the material world. Although Genesis stated that God manifested himself to mankind in the Garden of Eden, the creation story indicated that God could not be contained in any space or location. Clement of Alexandria tried to prove the transcendence of God and its relation to God’s appearance in a particular place through philosophical reflection. His argument consisted of two main points. First, God contains all things and is not contained by anything, and therefore, God could occupy any place that we can recognize and also be beyond that place. Second, the Son of God mediates between God the Father and the created world, but his way of mediating is not like subordinationism, in that the Son maintains his divinity. The Son, Christ, as the master who leads mankind to the truth was the center of Clement’s teaching.

Typically, Augustine is considered a person who, under the influence of Hellenistic culture, viewed the body negatively. However, recent research has demonstrated that Augustine came to consider the body in a positive light through his understanding of key Christian thoughts such as creation, the Incarnation, and the Body of Resurrection.

Nevertheless, the fall of man (hereafter referred to as “the fall”) is a serious matter for Augustine. Since the fall, the body has had a different nature from that in the Garden of Eden. According to conventional research on Augustine (e.g., by Margaret R. Miles), he believed that the problematic condition of the body could be solved only in future life. However, in actuality, Augustine also indicated that humans could improve the condition of their body in the present life. This paper clarifies how Augustine understood bodily improvement as occurring (by grace) in this life. It does so by examining his writings on the Pelagian controversy, which have not been sufficiently studied from this viewpoint.

In this article, I deal with the early four Bibles moralisées; the illustrated Bibles produced for the French royal family in the thirteenth century, and analyze the compositional changes evident between Bible images and moralization images in the scene of the Fall through the examination of texts and images, as well as poring through available manuscripts including the historical background. Every Bible image of the scene fundamentally places the serpent and the Tree of Wisdom between Adam and Eve. However, in moralization images, the first two manuscripts describe homosexual scenes, while the next two manuscripts depict idolatry and lust. There is no example of medieval manuscripts depicting homosexuality other than Bibles moralisées. Homosexuality was linked to "others", the targets of condemnation, especially to heretics, from the latter half of the twelfth century to the thirteenth century when the penalty for the sin of homosexuality came to be accepted as death. In addition, the subtle changes of Bible images, and the drastic change of moralization images can be explained from the circumstances of the recipients and the wedding of Louis IX.