The church has been asking, 'What does the Bible say about trans people?'The church has spent decades asking what the Bible says about transgender people. Rev. Dr. Joelle Henneman thinks that is the wrong question—and that asking the right one changes everything.
imagoThey: A Liberative Gender Theology expands the Christian doctrine of imago Dei—that all people are created in the image of God—to encompass gender diversity as sacred revelation. Drawing on Black liberation theology, feminist theology, and queer biblical scholarship, Henneman develops an original transgender hermeneutic that reads familiar Scriptures with fresh eyes: the story of Joseph, the bond of Ruth and Naomi, the Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza, the unnamed water-bearer in Mark 14, the Sophia/Wisdom tradition running through the whole of Scripture. In each of these figures, she finds what patriarchal theology has too long obscured—that feminine, queer, and transgender lives reveal dimensions of holiness hidden by the church’s own blinders.
With a blend of scholarship, storytelling, and prophetic critique,
imagoThey confronts the violence of exclusion while offering a vision of sacred embodiment rooted in inclusion. It also offers a queered reading of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, re-centering lived experience as a theological source in a way that will resonate deeply with United Methodist and mainline Protestant readers.
This is a book of hope. A book of liberation. A book of wonder. And above all, a book that insists that God’s story—and ours—is far more expansive, diverse, and beautiful than we have been taught to see.
