Song of Songs (2): a little hymn and a little history

Song of Songs doesn't get a whole lot of air time in the churches I've been to. And for a text that's identified as a 'song', it doesn't get sung much. The one exception I can think of is a chorus we used to sing in Sunday School, 'His banner over me is love'. For which I still have a soft spot! Historically, however, there have been a few attempts to make the Song 'singable' - one of the few is by the godfather of hymn-writing, Charles Wesley.
Let me start with a little context for this hymn. It comes from a series of hymnbooks that Charles Wesley published in the mid-eighteenth century, entitled 'Short Hymns on Select Passages of Holy Scripture'. Together, these hymnbooks make up a kind of poetic commentary on the whole of Scripture. They include 21 hymns on the Song of Songs. The following is the first hymn in the series (the title indicates which verse Wesley is responding to).

'The song of songs, which is Solomons - i. I.
1. Hence ye profane! far off remove
Ye strangers to redeeming love,
Sinners, who Jesus never knew,
The song of songs is not for you!
Away ye worldly goats and swine,
Who trample on this pearl Divine,
Which only wisdom's sons esteem,
While fools and infidels blaspheme.

2. With deepest shame, with humblest fear,
I to Thine oracle draw near,
To meet Thee in the holiest place,
To learn the secret of Thy grace:
Now, Lord, explain the mystery,
Display Thy precious self to me,
And when Thou dost the veil remove,
My heart shall sing the song of love.

3. Thou heavenly Solomon Divine,
To teach the song of songs is Thine,
Thy Spirit alone the depths reveals,
Opens the book, and breaks the seals:
O might I find the bar removed,
And love my Lord as I am loved,
This moment gain my heart's desire,
The next within Thine arms expire!

What I find most interesting about this hymn is the tension about the text that it communicates. Anxiety that it will be misunderstood by 'the profane' (presumably those unbelievers who read the Song as a poem about human sexual experience), but also concern that it will be unintelligible to the believer. It is a text that must be approached 'With deepest shame, with humblest fear'; the language of veils, depths, seals and bars suggests that its meanings are hidden. Even when understood as an allegory, the use of the erotic as a metaphor is one that Wesley clearly experiences as dangerous.
Wesley's hymn certainly supports my overall suggestion that Song of Songs has historically been seen as a disruptive text. Why? Well, plenty of other people have written about the historical and theological reasons that Christians have worried about sex. In the Methodist context, though, I think the erotic is particularly dangerous because it's a threat to self-control. Early Methodists placed a very high value on the mastery of one's own body and emotions. Sex was one of the greatest challenges to that mastery (the other, I would argue, was suffering). How frightening, then, to read a text that deliberately describes and evokes sexual desire. And how important to begin any reading with a strong denunciation of 'profane' interpretations and with an attitude of 'shame' and 'fear'.

The Song of Songs (1): Disruption

My dove
in the clefts
of the rocks
the secret
of steep ravines

Come let me look at you
Come let me hear you

Your voice clear as water
Your beautiful body


Poem 10 in Marcia Falk's translation of The Song of Songs.

In reflecting on the Song of Songs over the next week, I am responding to my own experience of the book as disruptive. Read as a description of erotic love (particularly in careful and evocative translations such as Marcia Falk's) it is a book that sits profoundly uncomfortably within traditional Christian ideas about sex (and, to a lesser extent, gender). This is made obvious by the almost 2000 years of allegorical interpretation that Christians have developed, in which the poem(s) becomes an extended description of the relationship between the human soul and the divine lover.

In being disruptive, I think the Song fits well with other texts that are characterised as 'wisdom literature'. My own experience of teaching and studying Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes with evangelicals is that they are each experienced as problematic. I well remember the anxiety created in a bible study group I was leading over the question: 'In what sense are biblical proverbs true?' More dramatically, Job offers no easy answers to the problem of suffering and Ecclesiastes is an almost unrelentingly bleak vision of human experience. The attempt to summarise these books within a simplistic system (eg. Ecclesiastes is the viewpoint of a person who doesn't know Yahweh; Job provides a watertight theodicy; the Song is about the delights of conjugal love) does violence to the complexity of the texts and, I assume, to their purpose.

Modern scholars like myself delight in disruption and tension, and it's possible to just embrace these texts as overturning any attempt at systematic theology. But the anxieties these books create do reflect real pastoral issues that any Christian should be deeply concerned over. For example, simply celebrating the erotic adventures of the characters in the Song as a vindication of wholehearted sexual expression may insensitively ignore the agonies, longings, humiliations and doubts that bedevil most people's experience of sexual desire in this life.

So this week, I don't plan to explain the text, or preach it, or simply ogle it. Rather, I want to sit with it for a while. In particular, I want to reflect on a number of responses to the text and the issues it raises - in a movie, in a hymn, in a modern song, in Marcia Falk's amazing translation, perhaps even in a papal encyclical! And also, I hope the responses of those of you who continue to read my ramblings.

Tomorrow: an eighteenth-century hymn on the Song.

sex and spirit: a week on song of songs

Well, I am taking my courage in both hands and preparing to start a week of blogging on that fascinating biblical text, the Song of Songs. I'm not planning anything like a systematic theological discussion, rather a series of responses (including some historical stuff, a movie review and some modern lyrics) that represent different angles on the text. I hope to start tomorrow or the next day, and I'd certainly appreciate your company as I step into dangerous territory!

justice and beauty

On Friday night we went to hear N T Wright speak on 'Justice and Beauty'. It was a talk clearly aimed at a general (Christian) audience, rather than a rigorous theological exploration, but good nonetheless. Below is a skeleton outline of his talk...

Wright began by discussing human longings for justice and beauty, and the way that these longings have been explained and responded to in major philosophical and religious traditions. He identified three basic philosophical responses to the desire for justice (and beauty):
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is simply a projection of childish fantasies; there is no such thing as absolute justice (or beauty) and maturity requires us to accept that.
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a sign of a perfect world which has no relation to this one
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a call from a person who is committed to bringing true justice to the world.
He differentiated justice from beauty more strongly than I have, but it will do for a summary!

He then suggested that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the way God begins his transformation of this world into a place of perfect justice and beauty. The resurrection is particularly important in this regard, because it means that there is continuity between this creation and the new creation. If God is committed to the transformation of this creation, then we must not simply see ourselves as killing time here, waiting for another, perfect world. Instead we need to be part of God's work in this world, which has been begun through Jesus' death and resurrection, is continued in the world now, and will be completed when Jesus comes again.

In regard to justice and beauty, we (Christians) need to consider two questions:
1. how can we implement God's justice?
[From my notes]: A commitment to justice is part of recognising the meaning of the resurrection. The resurrection is revolutionary (here he compared the politically active Pharisees and the politically quietist Sadducees). Christians have gone to two extremes in regard to justice:
- seeing preaching the gospel as the only really significant task for Christians, with 'bandaid' charity as a response to justice issues
- trying to bring in the kingdom here and now by our own efforts (trying to pull the world up by its bootstraps!)
Instead, we need to demonstrate a commitment to justice while understanding the framework of God's work in the world. Wright said he wanted to go on the record as saying that the international economic imbalance was the biggest justice issue for Christians today and we must be involved in debt relief and other measure that will address these inequalities.
2. how can we celebrate God's beauty?
[straight from notes again] Beautiful things are more beautiful when you know the beautiful purposes they are made for. eg. a violin
Christians need to see art not as an 'extra' in life, but as an integral part of responding to God's world. To continue to affirm that there is beauty in the world is to testify that it is God's world. We need to avoid the extremes of sentimentalism and brutalism, both of which deny the realities of life. In the question time he gave some examples of art that manages to avoid these extremes, both among Christians and others. Interestingly, most of the questions were about beauty, whereas I would have liked to ask about justice... I'll collect my thoughts and blog about that soon.

the archbishop on history

[T]he very effort to make any kind of historical narrative can be seen as a sort of act of faith, faith that massive disruption does not in fact destroy the possibilities of understanding, and thus the possibility of a shared world across gulfs of difference... this also helps us see why for a Christian the writing of history is bound to be theological in some ways. It is not that considerations of doctrine decide the results of research; God forbid. But the possibility of telling a consistent or coherent story about how God's people have lived is inescapably, for the believer, the possibility of seeing two fundamental theological points. God's self-consistency is to be relied on (ie. God is not at the mercy of historical chance and change); and thus relation to God can be the foundation of a human community unrestricted by time or space, by language or cultural difference.

Rowan Williams, 'Why Study the Past', p.22.

made me laugh

On the weekend, Andrew and I drove to my parents' place and had to stop at a set of traffic lights just around the corner from their house. The lights were red for an incredibly long time, so we sat and waited, and waited, and waited. After a few minutes of this, Andrew sighed impatiently and said, 'OK, now I am officially bawdy'.

holy terror

It's been a full couple of weeks - writing, teaching, avoiding the Commonwealth Games and visiting our families up north for a wedding. All good stuff, but not very conducive to blogging. One interesting little kerfuffle I would have liked to comment on, was the debate over the Crusades that blew up in The Australian newspaper. Particularly interesting to me at present, as I've just been discussing the Crusades in the church history tutorial I run. The newspaper reported that a history text being used in some Australian schools draws a comparison between the Islamic terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers and the twelfth century Crusaders. Now that comparison may be useful in exploring us-and-them assumptions in high schoolers, but it is entirely weak from a historical viewpoint - it ignores the development of strategies of terror as a means of waging war over the past hundred years or so. I was fascinated, however, by the response to this article, which was to debate the merits of the Crusades. A number of senior scholars came out to defend the Crusaders (see the article linked above) and The Australian also published an editorial defending them. I'm amazed at the extent to which this twelfth-century European Catholic escapade is still clearly part of 'our' conscious history, with all these emotive connotations!

religious worlds

I've been reading Robert Orsi on the weaknesses of religious studies as a discipline:

"Any approach to religion that foregrounds ehtical issues as these are now embedded in the discipline obstructs our understanding of religious idioms because religion at its root has nothing to do with morality. Religion does not make the world better to live in (although some forms of religious practice might); religion does not necessarily comform to the credal formulations and doctrinal limits developed by cultured and circumspect theologians, church leaders, or ethicists; religon does not unambiguously orient people toward social justice. Particular religious idioms can do all of these things. The religious motivated civil rights movement is a good example of a social impulse rooted in an evangelical faith and dedicated to a more decent life for men and women. But however much we may love this movement and however much we may prefer to teach it (as opposed to the "cultic" faith of Jonewtown or the "magical" beliefs of "popular" religion) this is not the paradigm for religion, nor is it the expression of religion at some idealized best. There is a quality to the religious imagination that blurs distinctions, obliterates boundaries - especially the boundaries we have so long and so carefully erected within the discipline - and this can, and often does, contribute to social and domestic violence, not peace. Religion is often enough cruel and dangerous, and the same impulses that result in a special kind of compassion also lead to destruction, often among the same people at the same time. Theories of religion have largely served as a protection against such truths about religion."

Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, 191.

Oscars

I watched a bit of the Oscars last night. I've only watched them once before, and I hadn't remembered them being quite such an exercise in self-congratulation. Certainly, the line-up of contenders this year (movies like Goodnight and Goodluck, Syriana, Brokeback Mountain, Transamerica, North Country) tackle some significant issues in courageous ways. But the general tone of the evening seemed to be 'aren't we all so politically subversive, socially aware and culturally progressive'. This is Hollywood we're talking about! The MC, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show, seemed to be the only person questioning this self-indulgent perspective. My favorite moment was when he commented on Charlize Theron's role in North Country: he quipped that after making a movie about a world where women were judged on the basis of their looks and paid significantly less than men, it must be a real relief to leave that world behind and get back to Hollywood. You could have heard a pin drop - not a snicker to be heard! Message to Jon: it's all very well criticising those bigots in Wyoming, chauvinists in middle America or corrupt politicians in Washington, but not pointing out a few obvious home truths!

N T Wright

OK, this I am very excited about!

N T Wrights Visit to Melbourne:

Renowned New Testament scholar N T Wright is visiting Melbourne 23-26 March 2006.

Teaching Nights (7.30-9.30pm)

Hawthorn Town Hall, 360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn

Thursday 23rd March 2006

Evil & the justice of God.

Friday 24th March 2006

Beauty & Justice - using the arts to rethink & re-express the Christian faith in a postmodern world.

Seminar (10am - 4pm)

Friday 24th March 2006

Rethinking Resurrection: Hope for the world & for now

the cross and the crown

One of the most influential historical 'takes' on early Methodism was that offered by E.P. Thompson in his book 'The Making of the English Working Class'. Thompson was a Methodist minister's son and a Marxist, and he offered a compelling and (in many ways) insightful portrayal of nineteenth-century Methodism that was almost entirely hostile. Methodism, he argued, was the method by which the English working class was transformed into a docile industrial workforce. Methodism taught the English poor that life was crucifixion, and that disciplined work was the path to salvation. Thompson used the memorable phrase 'psychic masturbation' to describe the outpourings of emotion at Methodist meetings: these 'Sabbath orgasms of feeling' were the result of a week-long repression of all normal emotion in the disciplines of work.
Now Thompson was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about the 'life as crucifixion' bit. His main argument is based on Charles Wesley's hymns, which do encourage Methodists to believe that suffering is the only path to sanctification, and so Christian life will be a pattern of cross followed by heavenly crown. In the chapter I've just rewritten, I've been assessing Thompson's argument from a number of angles: was he right about the message of the hymns, do they represent broader Methodist opinion, and did the construction of life as crucifixion really lead to political quietism. The answers, for anyone who's interested are yes, not entirely and possibly.
While I agree with Thompson in parts, I am arguing strongly that the 'cross and crown' model of life does not always lead to acceptance of the status quo. In fact, quite the opposite. I end my chapter with the story of Dorothy Ripley, a Methodist woman who sailed from Whitby to America alone in 1801 to campaign against American slavery. Ripley spent the next 30 years working against slavery, crossing the Atlantic nine times, speaking to Congress, confronting angry slaveholders, starting schools for ex-slaves and eventually campaigning for prison reform and the protection of Native American rights. At the beginning of her first journey to America, she wrote in a prayer: 'And if great suffering be my allotment to ally me to thee, let me never shrink from the bitter cup offered in mercy.' For Ripley, the conviction that 'great suffering' was a valuable part of sanctification helped sustain her through the pains and demands of a life of activism.
I've written before about my ambivalence about the history of evangelical activism: often paternalistic and ignorant, doing much harm as well as good. But there is no doubt in my mind that evangelicals have sustained the kind of passionate, difficult, sacrifical activism that they have because of precisely the conviction that Thompson decries. The cross is inevitable but it leads to the crown. While writing this chapter I had my argument confirmed by a quote from Charles Marsh's book about faith-based activism in the US, The Beloved Community. Marsh quotes a Pentecostal activist, working in community development in urban ghettos, who says in regard to Christian unwillingness to work for and with the poor: 'People don't want to accept that the cross comes before the crown'.

relationships

The Relationships Foundation is an organisation I've been interested in for a while now. They are a 'think and do tank' that starts from the principle that relationships are the most important thing in life. They are therefore interested in promoting good relationships at all levels of society, in families and workplaces, between different social and racial groups, as well as between nations. A big task! They provide training and consultants for organisations and communities trying to think and work more relationally, and have been involved (in the past) in peace negotiations in various trouble spots. If you're interested, check out their website for info, resources and to sign up for their newsletter.

Leviathan

Andrew and I have just finished reading Boris Akunin's novel Leviathan - another great read from the Russian crime novelist. Leviathan is a variation on the theme of the classic English detective novel - a terrible crime, a set number of possible murderers all on board a gigantic cruise ship, a bumbling French detective, and the dashing Russian diplomat Erast Fandorin on hand to unmask the villain. It's funny and it's clever and the translation is extremely skillful. We recommend!