“Carl Jung once remarked that when people brought sexual questions to him they invariably turned out to be religious, and when they brought religious questions to him they always turned out to be sexual.” (Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God, p. 15)
“As theologian Sarah Coakley has so brilliantly said, ancient Christian reflection on desire shows that Freud is exactly wrong: Talk about God is not repressed talk about sexuality; talk about sex is, in fact, repressed talk about God.” (Jason Byassee, “Not Your Father’s Pornography,” First Things, January 2008)
How should Christians read the enigmatic book usually called “The Song of Songs” which is found in their Old Testament Scriptures? The proper approach to both the explicit sexual imagery found within these pages, and to the equally unbounded celebration of the sheer goodness of erotic love, is neither allegory (i.e. the whole thing is really about God and His people, and not the mutual delight between spouses) nor literal (i.e. sexual love is secularized and entirely disconnected from its relation to God’s covenant with Israel). Rather, the Song simultaneously celebrates both forms of covenant love (human and divine), simply because the erotic love of spouses in marriage is itself already typological and symbolic of divine love for Israel by virtue of creation and redemption. From the beginning, “sex” and “spirituality” have always been mutually interpreting and intimately linked to each other. Every unfolding stage of the biblical metanarrative only serves to further establish and explain this foundational logic. For Christians who think rightly about their story, this much must be said: in talking about the one (either sex or spirituality), the other subject is always necessarily in view as well. Neither can be understood or experienced rightly in splendid isolation.
Robert Jenson strikes the right balance:
“The Song’s poesy of sheer bodily delight, invoked in order to speak of the Lord and his people joined passionately in the temple, simultaneously evokes human love as it would be, were we lovers in Eden or in the garden the temple depicted: it would be the joyous image of God’s love for Israel.” (Robert W. Jenson, “Male and Female He Created Them,” in I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, eds. Braaten and Seitz, p. 185)
And Stephen Barton appeals to the inherent symbolism of human sexuality in the Christian story for the “multiple levels” approach to the Song of Songs:
“Nor is sexuality limited to our relations with one another. It has a mystical dimension whereby it is able to become fundamental to our relations with God as well. That is why the Song of Songs has always been interpreted both as a celebration of love between a woman and a man, and also as a celebration of the relation of mutual desire between God and the people of God.” (Stephen C. Barton, “‘Glorify God in Your Body’ (1 Cor 6:20): Thinking Theologically About Sexuality,” in Life Together: Family, Sexuality and Community in the New Testament and Today, p. 80)
Similarly, Richard Davidson contends that:
“Those who have resorted to an allegorical interpretation to legitimize the existence of the Song in Scripture have missed the crucial point—the Song of Songs in its plain and literal sense is not just a ‘secular’ love song but already fraught with deep spiritual, theological significance.” (Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament, p. 621)
For instance, the strong allusions to and echoes of the Garden of Eden in the Song point beyond the particular love of this anonymous couple, back to God’s original creational intentions for all of humanity which were scarred and frustrated by sin:
“In the Song of Songs we have come full circle in the Old Testament back to the garden of Eden. Several recent studies have penetratingly analyzed and conclusively demonstrated the intimate relationship between the early chapters of Genesis and the Song of Songs. In the ‘symphony of love,’ begun in Eden but gone awry after the fall, The Song constitutes ‘love’s lyrics redeemed.’ Phyllis Trible summarizes how the Song of Songs ‘by variations and reversals creatively actualizes major motifs and themes’ of the Eden narrative: ‘Female and male are born to mutuality and love. They are naked without shame; they are equal without duplication. They live in gardens where nature joins in celebrating their oneness. Animals remind these couples of their shared superiority in creation as well as their affinity and responsibility for lesser creatures. Fruits pleasing to the eye and tongue are theirs to enjoy. Living waters replenish their gardens. Both couples are involved in naming; both couples work…Whatever else it may be, Canticles is a commentary on Gen. 2-3. Paradise Lost is Paradise Regained.’” (Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament, pp. 552-53)
Finally, in her wonderfully lucid commentary on the Song, Ellen F. Davis provides much grist for the mill for confused modern readers:
“The task of writing a theological commentary on the Song of Songs is a daunting one. Is it the least ‘biblical’ book in the Bible, or the most? There is in the whole book not a single overt reference to God, to prayer, or to any aspect of Israel’s religious practice or tradition…Overwhelmingly, modern interpreters read the book as purely secular love poetry, even soft pornography. Yet, taking a longer view, Christians have through the centuries regarded the Song of Songs as one of the most religiously profound–and most difficult!–books of the Bible. Except for Genesis and the Psalms, the Song has generated more commentary than any other book of the Bible…
The approach taken in this commentary is that the Song of Songs is, in a sense, the most biblical of books. That is to say, the poet is throughout in conversation with other biblical writers…The Song is thick with words and images drawn from earlier books. By means of this ‘recycled’ language, the poet places this love song firmly in the context of God’s passionate and troubled relationship with humanity (or, more particularly, with Israel), which is the story the rest of the Bible tells. Far from being a secular composition, the Song is profoundly revelatory. Its unique contribution to the biblical canon is to point to the healing of the deepest wounds in the created order, and even the wounds in God’s own heart, made by human sin. Most briefly stated, the Song is about repairing the damage done by the first disobedience in Eden, what Christian tradition calls ‘the Fall’…Vritually all the books of the Bible bear traces–one might say ‘scars’–of the great and terrible experience of exile as a result of disobedience to God.
The theological importance of the Song is that it represents the reversal of that primordial exile from Eden. In a word, it returns us to the Garden of God. There, through the imaginative vehicle of poetry, we may experience the healing of painful rupture [in our relationship to both other human beings and God]…The lovers’ garden of delight is the very opposite of the harsh world into which Adam and Eve ‘fell’…The lovers’ graden is subtly but consistently represented as the garden of delight that Eden was meant to be, the place where life may be lived fully in the presence of God.
Because healing must occur at multiple levels, the language of the Song of Songs plays simultaneously upon several registers…The poem uses language and symbols that elsewhere in the Bible represent the love that obtains between God and Israel…In my judgment, interpreters of the Song are always in danger of becoming doctrinaire in one of two directions. Modern commentators tend to adhere rigidly to a sexual interpretation, decoding the highly metaphorical language of the Song into a serires of physically explicit references. The suggestion that religious experience is part of what the poet had in mind is regarded as foreign, if not hostile, to the Song’s celebration of faithful human love. Their ancient and medieval counterparts erred in the other direction. For them, the poem was an allegory, a coded account, of religious experience. So every image had to be decoded: the two breasts that are ‘more delightful than wine’ (1:2) were the Law and the Prophets, the Old Testament and the New Testament, Christ’s mercy and truth, and so on…
The sexual and the religious understandings of the Song are mutually informative, and each is incomplete without the other. For a holistic understanding of our own humanity suggests that our religious capacity is linked with an awareness of our own sexuality. Fundamental to both is a desire to transcend the confines of the self for the sake of intimacy with the other. Sexual love provides many people with their first experience of ecstasy, which literally means ‘standing outside oneself.’ Therefore the experience of healthy sexual desire can help us imagine that it might mean to love God truly–a less ‘natural’ feeling for many of us, especially in our secular society. On the other hand, from what the Bible tells us about God’s love we can come to recognize sexual love as an arena for the formation of the soul. Like the love of God, profound love of another person entails devotion of the whole self and steady practice of repentance and forgiveness; it inevitably requires of us suffering and sacrifice. A full reading of the Song of Songs stretches our minds to span categories of experience that our modern intellects too neatly separate.
Yet the Bible itself often allows the two realms of human love and religious experience to interpenetrate. It is telling that the metaphors by which the prophets–who were themselves poets–most commonly characterize God’s relations with Israel are those of courtship and marriage, and also adultery, divorce, and difficult reconciliation…
The recurrent tragedy of biblical history is that human love and responsiveness to God repeatedly weakens and fails. The Song of Songs answers that tragic history, stretching all the way back to Eden. What we hear throughout–and only here in the Bible–is mutual love speaking at full strength…The Song affirms as incomparable the joy of faithful sexual relationship…[and] the images of the Song underscore throughout the lushness of sexual exclusivity (5:1, 6:9)…The lovers’ mutual delight is completely nonutilitarian. The Song shows us love in its purest form. This is the only place in the Bible where the love between man and woman is treated without concern for childbearing or the social and political benefits of marriage. Of course, in this world, all love, including the love of God, is inevitably ‘tainted’ by an awareness of practical benefits. Perhaps this is why the Song has no clear story line (despite the attempts of numerous commentators to give it one!)…
The Song affirms that the desire for loving intimacy both in sexual relationship and in relationship with God is fundamental to our humanity…Perhaps the greatest religious value of the Song of Songs for our generation is to make the [original] perspective from the Garden real and compelling…
The Song of Songs is, more than anything else, like a dream transcribed. The scene shifts constantly and without apparent logic; characters appear and disappear abruptly; fragmentary images are left unintegrated. Yet the images, though jumbled together and sometimes bizarre, are not random. Dream images are rooted in a personal and social history, and working with them inevitably leads below the surface of awareness, often revealing surprising connections. So it is with the Song: its images are deeply contextualized. Their roots can be traced into ancient Near Eastern religion, art, literature, and history, and the physical geography of Israel, as well as through many books of the Old Testament. Like our most important dreams, the Song reaches far back in order to say something startlingly new. Therefore it resists simple decoding and invites us instead to ponder, puzzle, draw connections, and push beyond what we thought before. In short, it encourages the vigorous exercise of the religious imagination, while assuming that our imaginations have already had some ‘training’ in biblical tradition.” (Ellen F. Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, pp. 231-38)
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