MetaCatholic

This is a follow-up to my post on Sex and the Single Saviour, and in particular to John Hobbins‘ comment on that post which has helped me clarify the unease I expressed towards the end. John wrote:

He is not afraid to name the otherness of the text, and then kiss it goodbye. The usual approach is the opposite. Pretend the text is not so other, and then kiss up to the heavily diluted version.

It is this willingness, once the strangeness of the text has been elucidated, “to kiss it goodbye” that really troubles me about Martin’s work. I feel it is masked by the lucid defence of non-foundationalism and community-bounded reader-response criticism. It is less the theoretical and well-defended approach that bothers me, and more that I find myself wondering if Martin isn’t actually giving a disguised foundational privilege to certain aspects of contemporary culture, or one’s own personal preferences.

If different readings of a text are truly in play within the reading community spread across time, shouldn’t more attentiveness be given to precisely those readings which are strange to our time. Befriending a strange text is about recognising its otherness, and still welcoming it to a place in the discussion.

For example, in Martin’s reconstruction, which I find well-worth considering, Paul is very negative about human passion and erotic desire, and far more attention is given in Paul’s argument to (what we would call) heterosexual passion, than to (what we would call) homosexual passion. This is the strangeness of this particular text which makes it unwelcome in today’s culture, but was still a significant part of many other traditional readings of it up to the Reformation.

Being honest, as Martin is, that scripture is often a stranger to us, is refreshing in a church where its strangeness often goes disguised and unrecognised. But if we are truly to practice a community-bounded reader-response criticism in the communion of saints, then it must be a stranger who is welcomed at the table.

That leaves a lot of theological work to be done with our diverse responses (as befitting a diverse community across time and space) reading the same text. The relationships, as we conceive them, between creation and new creation, body and spirit, and an Adam-Eve mutuality being in the image of God contrasting with a single man as God imaged in flesh are among the significant areas of discussion.

The sexual delight of horny teenagers in the Song of Songs is set together in the same scriptures with Paul’s asceticism. Traditional church readings that privileged the asceticism to read the songs as allegory are not the only ways to read these texts together. The creation of a canon of scripture invites intertextual play, and recognising authority (or authoritative experience) in the texts, and not just one interpretation of them, encourages us to read each in their integrity, as well as hear them together.

At the same time, Paul’s asceticism, together with traditional readings of the virtue of apatheia as a mimesis of God’s impassibility, may want to ask questions of a culture in which sexual imagery is so all-pervading, and people seem to assume that living a fully human life involves being sexually active.

If (and here I use a shorthand I normally seek to avoid) failing to recognise the strangeness of the text is the conservative temptation, failing to welcome the strange text may be the liberal one.