Jonathan's Loves, David's Laments

Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference

von der Horst

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498244855
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Jonathan's Loves, David's Laments uses early modern musical interpretations of David's Lament over Saul and Jonathan to deepen the historicist foundations of contemporary feminist and gay relational theologies. After laying out how gay theologian Gary David Comstock connects the story of David and Jonathan to the theology of lesbian theologian Carter Heyward, the argument interrogates both theological and exegetical problems in making those connections, which include contradictory theological stances with regard to modernity and history as well as the indeterminacy of the biblical text. Early modern musical interpretations of the text allow for a double move of engaging the texts through a sensual medium, thus reinforcing queer possibilities for meaning-making from the biblical text, and staying attuned to the fact that the history of interpretation reinforces the indeterminacy of the text, thus keeping queer interpretations aware of the relativizing function of historical difference.

Chapter 1

Jonathan and David as Emblematic of Erotic Relational Theology

Since the mid-twentieth century, readers have connected the love of Jonathan and David depicted in 1 Samuel to queer identities. This connection has strengthened the quest to reconcile biblical faith and gay identity, perspectives that often seem at odds. One way scholars have bridged these perspectives is to cede religious and spiritual questions of ultimacy or holism to a strictly psychoanalytic/cultural understanding of the text.47 Roland Boer provides a particularly good example of this “secularizing” approach to queering the Bible in his intertextual weaving of biblical motifs, Lacanian psychology, and popular cinema.48 In contrast, theologians working within various queer perspectives attempt to connect the homoerotic elements of the biblical text with a theological sense of ultimacy.49 They seek to push a quality of relation—love or mutuality—to the farthest possible reach of the imagination, that symbol which speaks both to cosmic holism and personal spiritual transformation, God.50 This chapter will elaborate the theological hermeneutics with which gay and lesbian theologians approach the stories of Jonathan and David and demonstrate that the theological position underlying the hermeneutic can not be separated from historicist presuppositions.51 Yet, relational theology holds an ambivalent position with regard to historicism. Fault lines between presentist and historicist modes of thought within relational theology require a rethinking of the relation between contemporary relational theology and various aspects of historical existence.

For several gay, lesbian, or queer-friendly theologians, the relation between Jonathan and David is paradigmatic for the concept of mutual relation at the heart of their work. That is, they understand God to consist in concrete relations of mutuality—a quality that goes beyond egalitarianism in its dynamism. The emphasis on concreteness in relational theology means that it finds its primary expression in praxis, “the total complex of action, including all the reflection embedded in that action,” rather than in formal logic.52 The praxis in question is both social and sexual; these theologians see God both in socialist struggles against transnational corporate capitalism and the dynamics of sexual friendships. This emphasis on praxis is the main reason a turn to music will be a logical move later in the argument. Music requires performance, in which thought and action are inherently, if often only implicitly, conjoined. This combination of thought and action is definitive of praxis.

How do relational theologians get from the friendship of Jonathan and David to God? A very simple version of this movement can be found in Elizabeth Stuart’s articulation of a gay and lesbian theology, Just Good Friends.53 She moves from a reconsideration of various aspects of the Christian tradition, including a revaluation of Jonathan and David’s friendship as a biblical precedent for gay relationships, to a discussion of the “Friend God.” In Engendering Judaism, Rachel Adler explores ways in which the feminist theories of object-relations that are widely used by relational theologians can re-envision the method and meaning of halacha, the legal aspect of Talmudic literature.54 She uses the covenant between Jonathan and David in her “Lover’s Covenant,” an alternative to conventional—or even halachic—marriage that is equally applicable to same-sex and different-sex couples. Her proposal here arises from critiques of marriage that make the interconnection between sexism and heterosexism clear.55 While the gay theological use of Jonathan and David often occurs within an attempt to stake out a specifically queer space within the biblical tradition, Adler offers a transformed version of sexual politics that does not simply assimilate queers into straight spaces, but transforms the common ground between us. In this case, Jonathan and David are representative of an approach to ethics that sees rules within relational commitments, an approach intimately connected with the theological positions of relational theologians.

The gay theologian Gary David Comstock makes the most explicit assertion that this particular story reveals the nature of the divine, and it is his explication of this relationship that will form the primary point of departure for the argument of this book. In arguing that Jonathan and David manifest the love that is God, Comstock goes far beyond simply claiming them as a legacy for gay men. Rather, he invests their relationship with a theological position that has very specific components rooted in late-twentieth century social and religious struggles. A detailed look at the work Jonathan and David have to do in Comstock’s theology is necessary to make the real and deep differences between his work and the perspectives of early modern composers discussed later in the book clear. The following chapter will grapple with problems raised by Comstock’s approach to Jonathan and David. Comstock forges a “non-apologetic” gay theology that aims to fit the Bible and the Christian tradition into queer experiences. His model of biblical reading is engaging it as a friend. Just as our disagreements with friends do not negate our commitments to our friendship, within Comstock’s commitment to biblical faith, he sees an ethical mandate to challenge it on its homophobia.56 He builds something like a systematic theology by moving through arguments that engage specific books of the Bible, though not in canonical order. He treats the Exodus and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as norms by which he judges the rest of Scripture. He then proceeds to do exactly that in a direct confrontation with the well-known admonitions against homoerotic practice, in each case setting aside apologetic arguments and stating that the admonitions are wrong.57

In addition to confronting biblical heterosexism, Comstock retrieves various passages as points of positive dialogue. In particular, he singles out Queen Vashti from the Book of Esther and David and Jonathan from 1 and 2 Samuel. For Comstock, Vashti, who refuses to obey an order to show herself before the king’s guests and then disappears from the narrative altogether, mirrors the marginalization of queer people in heterosexist society. She also models direct rebellion as opposed to the more pragmatic approach of Queen Esther. He highlights Jonathan’s role as an “unconventional nurturer,” a description which unites resistance to social norms and an ongoing commitment to social relations. He builds a Christology, not on the person of Jesus, but on Jesus’ mandate to build a community of friends.58

When Comstock pulls the argument together and applies it to the categories of systematic theology, the relationship of Jonathan and David assumes pride of place in explicating the doctrine of God. He describes the covenant they make with each other, noting that they make it without refe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jonathan and David as Emblematic of Erotic Relational Theology
• Chapter 2: The Conflict of Interpretations Surrounding David and Jonathan in Biblical Studies
• Chapter 3: Queer Musicology and the History of Biblical Interpretation
• Chapter 4: Retrieving the Past and Making a Self
• Chapter 5: Weelkes’s “O Jonathan” in Early Modern England
• Chapter 6: Handel’s Saul and Ironies of Identification
• Conclusion
• Bibliography