Customer Reviews

Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation

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Martin has an acerbic wit and the tenacity of a yapping yorkie. This book is great fun to read, and he pulls no punches in pointing out the flaws in his foes' arguments. He's also a careful New Testament scholar who can beat literalists at their own game. Several of these essays have been published elsewhere. Most compelling are "Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18-32" and "Familiar Idolatry and the Christian Case against Marriage." A must-read if you're interested in issues of gender, sexuality and Christianity.

Excellent book--I recommend it highly because it makes a reader think. This book will upset all our biases. If it doesn't, then a reader's mind begins arguing with the author in the prologue and never stops long enough to take in what Martin says. One particular idea that is disrupting relates to the fact that Jesus and Paul both seemed to oppose typical family life.

Dale B. Martin is a fascinating teacher. If you don't know the difference between exegesis and eisegesis and can't tell a foundationalist from a fundamentalist, or hermeneutics from Hermetics, Dale is just the guy to set you `straight'. (Well, kind of...) I first met up with Dale when I took his on-line introductory course on the New Testament from the Yale Open University [...] . He is the first lecturer I have encountered to make the study of the Scriptures fun, interesting, and educational. The title of his book "Sex and the Single Savior" titillated my interest further.
In this excellent book of essays on the biblical interpretation of gender and sexuality, he out-does his classroom lectures with some surprising revelations. Did you ever wonder how Jesus of Nazareth interpreted Scripture? Dale gives us Jesus' take on divorce. In the Introduction he talks about the "anxiety of uncertainty" and cautions that "unethical readings of Scripture will abound." If you have ever wondered what the word `faith' really means, you will be mesmerized by his final chapter and conclusion on "the Risk of Faith."
Everyone will get something different from his book, but I found his analogy of "Scripture as a space: Museum" especially remarkable. He starts off by saying: "....we need to move beyond thinking of Scripture as a foundation for knowledge, as a rule book, a constitution, or an owner's manual. It is the work of our imagination." He compares Scripture to a museum or the objects in a museum. By the end of the chapter I had already begun to reexamine my views on the Bible.

This is the book, if you have been wondering about how our religion should tackle sexuality, this would be a good resource. Our church has not been honest with handling issues of sexuality especially homosexuality and I think Sex and the Single Savior is offering a better approach.

As a NT scholar myself, I wrestled with Martin's views for some time. I was taught the supremacy of the historical-critical method and unwittingly learned all the shaming rhetoric used against anyone with an open mind on this topic. I have stopped living with the illusions taught me in Bible College and seminary about these matters -- that the INTERPRETER plays an integral part in what "meaning" is "found" in the text of the Bible, and that entire groups have been socialized to read the Bible as anti-gay. The ancients thought about sex and sexuality so dramatically differently than we do, anyone making that claim is simply naive or misguided. It's time GLBT people be embraced by the church for who they are - not in spite of who they are. I hope Martin's book opens people's eyes to how they need to reconsider what they've been taught about gay people.

Dale Martin's Sex and single savior has been so useful for me in the field of hermeneutic and also how to engage sexuality in our discussion. it bring up the idea of what is "natural" and what is "unnatural". Often we think that things are just there and "natural" without thinking further about it. and many justify what is natural just simply because "it is written in the Bible" and used it to justify or condemn for instance homosexuality. this book is a good starting point to think beyond "natural" and offers a new possibility and alternatives to read the Bible in the topic of Gender and Sexuality.

There is probably no area of human relations more obscured by the fog of emotional response and uninterrogated cultural and personal bias than the subject of sexual mores. Twenty centuries of religion "by the book" have ceded Christianity a legacy of apocalyptic morality, patriarchal dominion, denigration of women, and a poisonous atmosphere of homophobia. This legacy has been alternately supported and challenged by agenda-driven exegesis, anti-historical readings of founding texts, and argumentation riddled with internal contradiction.

There is, however, some good news. In this collection of essays, Dale Martin raises the kindly light of reason to illuminate the boundaries of legitimate interpretive practice, exposing many flawed and some frankly dishonest examples in the process.

More importantly, Martin recognizes that in the end no methodology can lead to certainty. All people, believers and unbelievers alike, must finally live in a world of some moral ambiguity. We are all, believers and unbelievers alike, suspended above a moral abyss largely of our own creation, floating, in the words of Kierkegaard, "on 70,000 fathoms of water" (page 184).

This collection should be an indispensable text for anyone who presumes to interpret the teachings of the New Testament for others. It is also a "must read" for anyone willing to challenge the Christian fundamentalist campaign to have homosexuals declared a species of untermenschen.