This collection makes a refreshing change from the familiar ping-pong battle between liberals and conservatives about the ownership of the Judaeo-Christian tradition on sex and marriage. Nothing, it would seem, about the classical tradition – if indeed there can be said to have been a classical tradition – was ever quite as it may appear to have been. Or at any rate, scholarship retains that merciful gift of complexification which enables us for ever to have our cake and eat it. This rich diversity within and across the traditions is stressed by Mark Jordan in his Introduction. He also has to record the institutional difficulties which scholars encounter through exploring these areas. Here is analysis which resists reduction to slogans and stereotypes.
The tone of the individual contributions is set by Saul Olyan, already well known to readers in this area, in his paper ‘“Surpassing the Love of Women”: Another Look at 2 Samuel 1:26 and the Relationship of David and Jonathan’. Olyan takes a close look at the common assertion that the language of love here is related to covenant settings, but then goes on to uncover significant anomalies. The differences suggest that this relationship is signalled as something rather unusual. He then argues that the Hebrew Bible can be read as limiting rather than proscribing sexual relationships between men, a precedent at least for ‘sexual–emotional linking’ if not for later notions of gay marriage.
Dale Martin's paper, ‘Familiar Idolatry and the Christian Case Against Marriage’, is a powerful indictment against contemporary idolatry, worthy of any Old Testament prophet, not to mention John Knox. ‘The religious term for the identification of anything but God at the centre of Christian faith is idolatry. And the familiar idolatry of contemporary American Christianity is the familiar idolatry of the church's current focus on the family’ (p. 17). Jesus of Nazareth was not a family man. Marriage will be obsolete in the Kingdom of God. Both Luke/Acts and Revelation see the displacement of the family in the eschaton. Paul, especially Paul, rejects the pagan culture of the all-powerful family. For the Fathers, celibacy was the ideal. For the ideal of the patriarchal Christian family we have to thank the Puritans and this was as much down to state control as to any ideal of the autonomous romantic family unit. The conclusion could hardly be more stark: ‘I believe that both the state and the church should get out of the marriage business’ (p. 38). Queer Christians should not even go there.
Help is at hand (at least with some qualification) in the next paper. Mary Ann Tolbert writes on ‘Marriage and Friendship in the Christian New Testament: Ancient Resources for Contemporary Same-Sex Unions’. Tolbert sets out from the observation that marriage, as a way of setting up lifelong kinship relations, is always problematic for the New Testament, centred on the life of a celibate man. For Paul it is primarily a means of limiting collateral damage due to lust. On the other hand, the values of friendship figure prominently in the New Testament and might provide a way of reconsidering the value of marriage today, allowing a range of intimate friendship and defusing current hysteria. ‘We are told that if same-sex marriage is permitted, civilization as we know it will collapse’ (p. 50).
From the Jewish tradition, Daniel Boyarin provides a fascinating and whimsical analysis of ambiguous sexuality in his paper ‘Why is Rabbi Yohanan a Woman? or, A Queer Marriage Gone Bad: “Platonic Love” in the Talmud’. This is a carefully nuanced tale of ‘divine intercourse between rabbis’, an imaginative interaction within the brotherhood of the rabbinate in the Babylonian Talmud. Here the rabbis are one with Plato in valuing platonic eros as eros, while distinguishing it from the more passionate eroticism of other groups. ‘In all of this, queerness is itself queered. Pederastic homoeroticism may (not unlike gay marriage) inscribe a realm of male relationality that is superior to but still comparable to marital heteroeroticism’ (p. 67). Clearly not a soundbite from the school of Pat Robertson!
Perhaps the most convoluted of the papers is Laurence Paul Hemmings' ‘Can I Really Count on You?’ Does tradition consistently imagine a twofold understanding of sex and gender? How about say three, or something like two and a half? The dialectic of alterity can be limiting. Hemmings explores intersubjectivity from Plato to Heidegger and the myth of the androgynos in relation to eros. ‘There is more to be said of the meaning of the binary male/female than is current in much, especially religious debate, about the meaning and purpose of human coupling and combining, sexual or otherwise’ (p. 80). This might be the beginning rather than the end of a potentially fascinating conversation.
Steven Greenberg, ‘Contemplating a Jewish Ritual of Same-Sex Union: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Marriage’, dissects the components of blessing in traditional Jewish weddings, then re-imagines the Erusin, the Ketubah and the Nisuin. He envisages a liturgy of restoration of human partnership in the ritual of the sanctification of the new moon. This could provide a framework for commitment and sanctification for gay Jewish couples.
Mark Jordan himself now offers a typically incisive piece on ‘Arguing Liturgical Genealogies, or, The Ghosts of Weddings Past’. Here he demolishes, not what has passed for orthodox tradition on marriage but what has passed for the radical alternative, the history of same-sex commitment in the work of John Boswell and Alan Bray. Gay theology devouring its own children? Jordan is concerned that there should be no special pleading or happy accidents in this area of research. Gay liturgy must evolve for its own times and conditions, without ghosts or anachronisms. ‘A liturgical project of retrieval must consider the changing relations of rite to subject. If the text or symbols of an identity-linked rite are reperformed for different subjects, they will produce different effects’ (p. 119).
It would be strange if the current travails of the Anglican Communion were absent from such a collection. Katherine Tanner on ‘Hooker and the New Puritans’ offers no uncertain sound on this vexed issue. Hooker is a great respecter of tradition and is very wary of change. But here is the point ‘Hooker in Book Five of the Laws consistently opposes himself to all rigid application of church law by Puritans so as to exclude exceptions and special cases’ (p. 126). Particular texts should not be extrapolated into universal laws. Local areas may have local arrangements. We are not invited to totalising universalism. Wise sentiments, in this reviewer's opinion.
We move into more strictly theological territory. Susan Frank Parsons invokes the imago Dei in St Thomas to justify all sanctified Christian relationship. ‘A union of persons that is blessed is one that is led into this redemptive way by Christ himself, who calls us to be his disciples and, in walking along with him, to learn whereof we have been made – ad imaginem Dei.’ Eugene Rogers concludes the collection with a piece on ‘Trinity, Marriage, and Homosexuality’, arguing for the understanding of marriage, ‘including both same- and cross-sex marriage’, as a form of sanctification.
As Rogers understands it, ‘Sexuality, in short, is for sanctification, that is, for God’ (p. 158). Sanctification means community, co-humanity, participation in the Trinity. Same-sex relationships can highlight the dangers of the binary divisions of cross-sex relationships and help to retrieve a better Christian understanding of marriage. Both singleness and marriedness occur within relationality.
This is an impressive collection of powerful imaginative projects. It may not ‘solve’ any problems. But it certainly opens windows of opportunity for fresh reflection among the stereotypes.
