#polyamorous christ

[a-queer-seminarian]

Excerpt from “Proleptic Sexual Love: God's Promiscuity Reflected in Christian Polyamory” by Robert Goss, 2004

[Read entire article here]

[Monasteries] have been erotic communities where men have fallen in love with God and with one another. If we consider how Catholic male monastics and religious men have been socialized over the ages, then it becomes apparent that the bridal mysticism so engrained in the formation process of monastics and priests has contributed to a polyamorous atmosphere. 

Men were taught to pray and live as the brides of the male Christ. The language of the Song of Songs, conflated with the intertextual image of Christ as bridegroom from the Christian testament [e.g. Ephesians 5:25-33], is used as the primary text, which already has strong erotic scenes of penetrative and oral sex between two lovers. ...

Monastic males engaged Christ in contemplative prayer as his bride, and there is no question that this passionate love stimulated erotic feelings and carnal love of Christ.

Medievalist scholar Barbara Newman writes, 'If monks wished to play the starring role in this love story, they had to adopt a feminine persona —as many did—to pursue a heterosexual love affair with God'.

...There are as many gender or transgendered anomalies in the notion of the church as bride as in the male monastic expressions of bridal mysticism. For example, Virginia Mollenkott observes:

In Ephesians 5...the male Christ is said to have a female body—the Church… Again and again in early Christian writings gender is played out and broken open in order to reveal the nature of the redeemed ecclesial person[…]

…When the church is understood as a collective of countless men and women, married and unmarried, with a variety of sexual orientations and gender expressions, then Christ becomes the multi-partnered bridegroom to countless Christian men and women. ...

This polyamorous Christ may be more faithful to the reading of the sexual abnormalities of the Song of Songs. The lover is a sexual outlaw, not a bridegroom as [in] the sanitized Jewish and Christian [readings of] the text. ...

This illicit relationship between a man and a dark skin woman in the Song of Songs was transformed into an ecciesial romance between a bridegroom and a bride, between Christ and the soul. In the process of this transformation, the radical transgressiveness of the Song of Songs was lost.

[a-queer-seminarian]

“The polyamorous Christ: on the sexual ethics of incarnation”  David W. Congdon, 2025

[Full article here]

If we take the doctrine of incarnation, as well as the corresponding doctrine of the marvelous exchange, as our image for the new age inaugurated by Christ and the basis for Christian ethics, then our theology of love ought to reflect not a hierarchical, mononormative sexual ethic defined by competitive scarcity, but rather a polyamorous ethic defined by noncompetitive abundance. 

A second, third, or fourth partner does not detract from the love available to the first partner, nor does the love for the first partner mean that only scraps of love are available to others.

A person can be wholly in love with one person and wholly in love with another.

Humans are already fully aware of such abundance when it comes to families: a second or third child does not require loving the first child any less.

The human capacity to desire and love others is not constrained by any inherent limitation in the nature of love itself, though it may certainly be constrained by our finitude – we only have so many hours in the day and so many years in our life.

From a Christian theological perspective, we can say that this infinite capacity for human love is a creaturely reflection of God’s infinite capacity for – and actuality of – love. 

Polyamory here does not mean that each person must have multiple loves, any more than the Spirit’s outpouring means that every Christian must speak in tongues or that the marvelous exchange means that every person must confess faith in Jesus.

The point is that the abundance is always available and the invitation to share in that abundance is always on offer. Similarly, for sexual ethics, anyone may choose to be monogamous, but no one is compelled into it; monogamy, like nonmonogamy, is optional, not compulsory. And the same is true in the reverse: nonmonogamy is an option, a holy option that is as sacramentally reflective of the Christian gospel as monogamy or celibacy. 

Put another way, my account of the polyamorous character of the incarnation is not so much an argument for polyamory as it is an argument against mononormativity.

Christ embodies and proclaims a noncompetitive way of being in the world, so the ethical norm that follows from faith in Christ would be the conviction that divine and human goods, including romantic and erotic love, are not scarce resources. 

We can thus speak of the polyamorous Christ, not because Jesus himself was polyamorous – though one could perhaps find a kind of asexual polyamory in the intimacy of his relations with his disciples, including both men and women – but because the person and work of Christ according to the catholic-conciliar tradition provides us with a polyamorous logic.

In his person, as the union of divinity and humanity, Christ represents the principle of noncompetition. The vertical noncompetitiveness between God and the world translates into a horizontal noncompetitiveness between human and human.

The account of the early Jesus movement in the Acts of the Apostles shows how this principle took concrete form in the community’s decision to hold everything in common. ...

Christ, moreover, is polyamorous not only in his person but also in his soteriological work.

The superabundant overflow of divine grace to humanity extends the theology of noncompetition into a theology of superabundant pleasure.

...A Christian sexual ethic that begins with a theology of abundant, noncompetitive pleasure will recognize that intimacy, desire, and love have no inherent limits. Sexual and romantic bonds are no more limited to one person than divine grace could be so limited.

[a-queer-seminarian]

“The polyamorous Christ: on the sexual ethics of incarnation”  David W. Congdon, 2025

[Full article here]

[In scripture,] images of noncompetitive plurality abound [...that are] powerful resources in Christology for developing a theology of polyamory. 

Take, for example, another common eschatological image, one used frequently by Jesus according to the synoptic Gospels: the great wedding feast.

The synoptic Jesus uses this story to describe how God’s coming kingdom is good news for people typically excluded: ‘both good and bad’ and ‘the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’

But the wedding feast image also highlights the way God’s love is both abundant and noncompetitive. There is room enough for all types, and the inclusion of one does not require the exclusion of another.

Linn Tonstad calls this the ‘banquet without borders.’ The ‘promise of Christian existence,’ as exemplified now by the practice of eucharist, is a banquet where ‘multitudes may be present in the same space,’ where ‘one need not move aside to make room for the other, for there is enough space for all.’

This version of the eschatological vision of Christianity is noncompetitive, open to an infinitely vast number of persons who do not need to compete for divine grace and blessing. ...

Another relevant image from the New Testament is the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles.

According to the text, the Holy Spirit filled each person gathered on the day of Pentecost, and tongues of fire ‘rested on each of them.’ Famously, those filled by the Spirit could be heard speaking in the native language of each person listening. This story likewise illustrates divine abundance and noncompetition:

God’s Spirit is not a scarce resource that can only fill one person to the exclusion of another, but rather the Spirit is able to equally fill each person, giving each a similarly powerful cloven tongue. 

...The doctrine of Christ’s two natures also serves a soteriological function, exemplified by the doctrine of what Martin Luther called the ‘marvelous exchange,’ though its roots go back to the second century.

According to this ancient belief, ‘God became human so that we might become divine.’ God takes on the limitations – including suffering and death – associated with humanity, so that humanity might receive the benefits – eternal life – associated with divinity. Early Christian theologians connected this exchange to Christ’s two natures [i.e. fully human and fully divine]. 

The marvelous exchange demonstrates divine abundance in an unsurpassable way. The images of the wedding feast and Pentecost have some inherent limits: Jesus’s parables include some while excluding others, and most feasts have a limited number of spots; and the Babel-like Spirit at Pentecost apparently only filled those Jesus followers who were gathered at Jerusalem with the gift of multilingual tongues.

By contrast, the soteriological exchange in Christ represents an infinite abundance that is cosmic in scope, inclusive of all humanity in principle. 

[a-queer-seminarian]

"Despite the sexlessness of the canonical Jesus, he is still an erotic figure in the sense of his profligate desire to be in intimate proximity with all manner of people, especially sex workers and those considered lower on the social hierarchy.

Robert J. Karris says that ‘Jesus’ promiscuous table fellowship’ is seen as ‘an act of perverting the people.’

David W. Congdon in “The polyamorous Christ: on the sexual ethics of incarnation” (2025)