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The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
The erotic intensity of the Song is, these days, an argument against allegorizing. Walsh rightly argues the opposite: “Desire for an absent lover pulsates throughout eight chapters in a heady mixture of glee, frustration, exhaustion, and surrender. Experientially, readers would be able to relate to these descriptions with the desires they themselves harbor for love, harvests, or the most absent object of all, God. In this biblical thirst for otherness, the supernatural other cannot help but be recalled, if only as a phantom memory. . . . A Song devoted to the impassioned longing for an absent lover . . . cannot help but resonate with any latest desire a reader of the Bible feels for God.”
Which raises a question: What assumptions about sex are behind the common opinion that the Song is only an erotic poem, only a celebration of human sexuality and marriage, full stop? (Tremper Longman: “There is absolutely nothing in the Song of Songs itself that hints of a meaning different from the sexual meaning.”) When commentators express such opinions, are they already implicitly assuming a materialist view of sexuality? Are they coming to the text with a presupposition that sex has no inherent transcendent meaning? To put it the other way round: Doesn’t sex itself hint at a meaning different from the sexual meaning?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 2:47 pm
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