David Hilborn is Principal of Moorlands College, UK. Moorlands is an interdenominational evangelical college based near Christchurch in Dorset, with regional training centres in Birmingham, Devon and Belfast. He was previously Principal of St Johns College, Nottingham and Assistant Dean of St Mellitus College. Before that he was Head of Theology at the Evangelical Alliance UK for nine years, also serving on the Executive of the World Evangelical Alliance Theological Commission. David is an ordained Anglican minister and was a member of the Church of England’s Faith and Order Commission from 2006-2016. He currently chairs the Evangelical Alliance’s Theological Advisory Group. He is a graduate of the Universities of Nottingham (BA, PhD) and Oxford (MA), and has led or served on the ministry teams of five local churches. He has authored or edited several books, including Picking Up the Pieces (Hodder), The Nature of Hell, ‘Toronto in Perspective, One Body in Christ, Movement for Change (Paternoster) and The Atonement Debate (Zondervan). David is a Londoner by birth and is married to Mia, a senior hospital chaplain. They have two grown-up children. He loves cricket and enjoys a wide range of music.

Church debates about same-sex relationships have been headline news for decades now. Countless books, papers, and reports have been published on this subject, and many congregations and denominations have been divided over it. Yet the focus of liberal and radical campaigning within and beyond the church has critically shifted of late, from recognition of gay male and lesbian partnerships to the much broader canvas of Queer Theory and Queer Theology. Rooted in European post-structuralist philosophy and intensified in the work of Judith Butler and others from the early 1990s, Queer Theory dissolves traditional distinctions of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and proposes a diverse and often daunting spectrum of trans, pansexual, polysexual, genderfluid, genderqueer, and other identities, all of which are presented as ‘performed’ and ‘constructed’ rather than as stable, innate, or given. This session will explore the development of Queer Theory and its adaptation into Queer Theology by an increasing number of scholars including Marcella Althaus-Reid, Patrick Cheng, Lisa Isherwood, and Linn Marie Tonstadt. It will also show how queer theological ideas are entering more mainstream church discourse around LGBT+ issues. In particular, it will show how these ideas are characterised by a more general shift of focus from creation to eschatology, and how classic Evangelicals will need to marshal counter-arguments in favour of biblical marriage and sexual chastity accordingly.

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