MetaCatholic

I’ve just finished reading Dale Martin’s new book Sex and the Single Savior, and am still digesting it. Like all his work, it’s both fascinating and persuasive in its historical readings of the scriptural text, and deeply provocative in its interpretations of them.

This book brings together a mix of material mainly published elsewhere, but does manage to weave the variety of essays into a coherent whole. His knowledge of the range of ancient literature is impressive, and, as in his previous work The Corinthian Body, he draws heavily not only on popular philosophical work and other standard “background” material, but on the medical literature of the time. Many of his positions here echo that earlier work, but he focuses on understandings of gender and sex, and particularly homosexuality. Disappointingly, except for one eponymous essay, he does not particularly reflect on Jesus’ singleness.

He tackles a number of the texts which have been drawn on as proof-texts in the debate on homosexual relationships in the church and raises some significant questions that have been inadequately addressed by others. His conclusions are not always predictable in terms of the debate, and he often criticises liberals as well as conservatives: there’s a clear example of the former in his chapter on “The Queer History of Galatians 3:28″

To my mind, his examination of the ancient text is at both its best and its most challenging in the chapters “Paul without Passion,” and “Familiar Idolatry and the Christian Case against Marriage.” It’s a little disappointing then, that having shown the strangeness of the biblical text to any modern sensibility and ethical use of it, he doesn’t spend long enough bringing it into dialogue with contemporary views.

Having explored Paul’s rejection of passion as a critique of American views of the self, desire and reason, he then simply says Paul’s view is “Not for me, thanks.” He is a little more attentive to the case against marriage as a critique of what he sees as the idolatry of the modern nuclear family, but too quick to dismiss the embarrassment of the ancient texts that find sex shameful. (I’m not suggesting that we should accept it, rather that it offers as much a critique of modern idolatries of sexual “fulfillment” as it does of those of the family.

I’m also not entirely sure where I stand in relation to Martin’s assertive non-foundationalism, and particularly his attack on scriptural or textual foundationalism. I think he offers the most persuasive argument for a community-bounded reader-response criticism that I have yet heard, not least because he takes the communion of saints in history as part of that reader-response community.

And yet … I agree with him that “the original meaning” of the text is always for us a reconstruction, and that the scriptural text itself bears witness to experience as the interpreter of scripture. But I do also think I want to give more weight, in between all the competing readings, to our reconstructed readings of the text in its socio-historical context. I’m just not entirely sure how I justify that, and perhaps its either some latent evangelical or modernist hangover. I think, however, it may also be taking seriously the witness of past readers to how this text (in their many diverse readings) has addressed them in blessing and judgement, in affirmation and disruption, and through that attentive hearing of the other in the text, they have heard and encountered the living Other.