That is: The church did not appear in history in fully mature form; it is still far from fully mature.  Were the infant churches of the apostolic age Christian churches? Did the troubled Corinthian congregation count as a Christian communion?  Galatia?   We should say Yes, since Paul treated these churches as churches.

Infant churches are Christian churches, immature and inadequate though they may be.  Ergo….

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?

It is, as Walsh says, impossible to keep up with the lovers: “They are at home, out in the street, alone, together, in a pasture, atop a mountain, talking with others, in Jerusalem, near En-Gedi, talking to themselves, in a vineyard – all seemingly in a matter of seconds.”  Just how life feels when we are full of desire: “Time speeds up and slows without your consent, locations shift, details are lustfully ignored under desire’s influence. . . . desire is never a clear-cut progressive journey, and the abrupt scene and voice changes testify to that truth.”

Desire’s power is so great that it is even capable of tampering “with the text that has it as its central theme.”

Jeremiah 16 provides a clue.  In verse 2, Yahweh instructs Jeremiah not to take a wife or raise children “in this place,” because Yahweh is bringing distress on the fathers, mothers, and children who are born in doomed Jerusalem: “They will die of deadly diseases, they will not be lamented or buried; they will be as dung on the surface of the ground and come to an end by sword and famine, and their carcasses will become food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth” (v. 4).   In view of the present distress, Yahweh says, Jeremiah ought not marry or have children.  Jeremiah would remain unmarried as a prophetic sign of Yahweh’s determination to withdraw peace from His bride (v. 5).

As Paul makes clear in various places, he is an apostle like Jeremiah, not only in being called from the womb but also in his singleness, a sign of the approaching doom on Jerusalem and Judaism.

As Larry Lyke notes, “Following the events of chapter 20, it is hard to miss the significance of Abraham’s complaint that Abimelech has taken his ‘well.’  The juxtaposition of these texts is as close as our text comes to making explicit the association of women and wells in our narratives.”  Reinforcing this is the fact that the well is named Beer-sheba, the well of the oath or the well of seven – a reference to the seven ewes that Abraham gives to Abimelech: “The association of the well of Beer-sheba with sheep connects this passage to the betrothal scenes.  This all suggests that the cultural and literary competence that informs these texts strongly links women, wells, and sheep – all symbols of fertility.”

Gregory will have none of this.  The whole point of his treatise against Eumonius is to show that “our concepts are only remote analogies, approaches to the infinitely rich reality of God, symbolic signs, which point out a direction without ever reaching their object.”  For Gregory, knowledge of the creation is of the same sort.  We never conceptually possess the creation: “The ‘logos of creation,’ the essence of things, always escapes us.  God alone knows it.”  Human beings strive for mastery, but this striving must be given up to attain knowledge: “Human knowledge is therefore true only to the degree it renounces by a perpetual effort its own nature, which is to ‘seize’ its prey.”

Yet Gregory develops all this without a hint of skepticism: “The great, eloquent passages in which Gregory demonstrates to Eunomius that we do not know the smallest essence of any thing, of any element, not even the smallest little shoot of a plant, have no agnostic flavor to them.”  Rather, “they are atremble with the great mystery of the world and end in silent adoration . . . before the incomprehensible beauty of God.”  In place of the grasping epistemology of Zeno, Gregory offers an epistemology of wonder, a doxological epistemology, in which faith is “the only knowledge that conforms to our condition.”

The Galatian crisis erupted when “certain wicked people persuaded [gentiles] that they could not be saved without these words of the law,” that is, without circumcision and other rites and traditions of Judaism.  Paul insisted that they should not be “burdened by any such observances,” knowing that “adults fears such unheard-of practice, especially circumcision, and those who were not born so as to be initiated into such sacraments would have been deterred from the faith if they were made converts according to the earlier rite, as if those mysteries sill promised that Christ was coming.”  When the apostles decided that “gentiles should not be forced into such works of the law, certain Christians from the circumcision were displeased.”  They could not recognize that if the rites continued to be imposed on Gentiles, then “people would suppose either that they were not instituted as promises of Christ or that they were still promising Christ.”

New Perspective on Paul?  Hardly.

What impresses Augustine about language, though, is not its ability to communicate.  Early on, in fact, he wrote a treatise (de Magistro) demonstrating that words teach us nothing, but rather the only Teacher is the Christ within.  He didn’t stick with that model of language, but neither did he completely abandon the argument of de Magistro. What impresses Augustine about words is not so much their capacity to communicate as their temporality.

In the passage in Contra Faustum 19.16 where he identifies sacraments as “visible words,” he immediately adds:

“what else are certain bodily sacraments but but certain visible words – sacred, of course, but still changeable and temporal.  For God is eternal, and yet the water and all that bodily action which is carried out when we baptize, and which takes place and passes, is not eternal.  There again, unless those quickly sounded and passing syllables are spoken when we say ‘God’ [i.e., Deus], there is no consecration.  All these take place and pass away; they sound and pass away.  Yet the power that works through them remains constant, and the spiritual gift that is signified by them is eternal.”

The temporality of words is at the heart of Augustine’s argument in Book 19.  He is addressing the Manichean misunderstanding of Jesus’ declaration that He came to fulfill and not destroy the law, and argues that sacraments of the old law were prophetic of the Christ to come.  Now that Christ has come, the old rites are no longer necessary, and they are in fact forbidden to Gentiles who did not receive the gospel through the medium of the law.  He defends this view by drawing an analogy between the conjugation of verbs and the change in the sacraments of the church.  Under the old covenant, it was correct to say “Christ will come”; under the new, that declaration is conjugated to “Christ has come.”  Just so, it was correct to practice the prophetic rite of circumcision so long as Christ was yet to come, but now that Christ has come we no longer practice the rites of anticipation.

Sacraments are visible words, in short, because a) they are passing, temporal bodily actions, just as words are evanescent vibrations of air and b) because sacraments conjugate.

The redoubtable Diane Ackerman (A Natural History Of Love) suggests that what happens after the victim shrieks and runs reveals the motivations: “The flasher rarely runs away.  Flashing the woman fills only the smallest part of his need.  His real goal has many aspects, including the woman’s upset and disapproval; the humiliating arrest; the appearance in court; the embarrassment to his family; the risk of losing his job.  These are the critical elements of exposure for the flasher.  A flasher is nearly always someone with low self-esteem, a bankrupted version of his sexual worth, and a deep sense of failure as an individual.  In his own eyes, he is the unmanliest of men, a limp member of society, a worthless male.  By hauling out his penis in public and causing consternation, shock, chaos, he proves to himself how important his penis is after all, important enough to stop traffic, to make a woman faint, to get him arrested, to ruin his career.  That’s a mighty powerful penis; so he must be quite a man after all.”

Flashing allows the castrated to imagine himself a phallic god.

Then we allegorize, in light of Revelation 3:20, where it is Jesus who knocks at the door of the church at Laodicea.  That too is the voice of the beloved knocking, for Jesus is the incarnate voice of Yahweh, the incarnation of the voice that spoke creation, that shakes the cedars, that resounds like the thunder and the waterfall.

He suggests that “Jeremiah’s use may suggest that the term was heavily loaded with associations to the temple and vestments appropriate to it; its use became all the more shocking when associated with exposed nakedness.  We cannot be sure that Jeremiah or Lamentations implies an association with the temple with this term, but its use in the latter . . . followed as it is by the invasion of the emple by unauthorized visitors, is highly suggestive indeed.”

The garments of Israel are the garments of the priests, and it’s the abominations of the priests that render the whole of Jerusalem unclean, the whole bride clothed in filthy skirts.

1. Israel in bondage, longing for her sleeping Lord to awake, 1:2-2:7.

2. Yahweh comes and calls Israel to the springtime, 2:8-17.

3. Yahweh’s absence = Yahweh’s withdrawal from Israel because of Israel’s grumblings, 3:1-4.

4. The construction of the tabernacle and the beginning of Israel’s love-feasts with Yahweh, 3:6-5:1.

5. Israel’s rejection of Yahweh and Yahweh’s withdrawal during the time of the judges; Yahweh’s eventual return and re-covenanting, 5:2-6:3.

6. Yahweh and Israel restored to fellowship under David and Solomon; temple, elevation of the bride, 6:4-7:10.

7. Yahweh’s Love stronger than death, 6:5-7.

The climax of the history of Israel so far, then, is the Davidic dynasty and Yahweh’s dwelling in the temple.  At the same time, this history from Exodus to Solomon is a type of Israel’s history as a whole, and so Yahweh’s withdrawal from His bride in chapter 5 is also a preview of the exile.

That is only an extension of natural reality: Earth passes through the fire of the sun and the many waters of rain in order to produce fruit.  Earth is plowed and planted, divided and broken in pieces, to produce fruit.  Seeds must die to produce trees and vines.

Which might mean: The Song is set between Eve’s creation and Adam’s awakening.  Or, the Song is set on Holy Saturday.  Or, the Song is set between Jesus’ “building” of His bride and His “awakening” in judgment.  Or, tropologically, between our entry into the king’s chambers and the wedding feast.

If we want a love poem that more literally illustrates the theme of 8:6, it would be closer to Sleeping Beauty than the Song of Songs.  8:6 is genuinely summarizes the Song if the Song is taken allegorically/typologically.  8:6 makes sense only if we recognize that the relatively minor threats to the bride in the poem actually point to more serious threats.

A lover’s absence is painful.  It is not deadly.  Suppose that lover is Yahweh, though, and everything changes.  Yahweh’s absence is death for bride Israel, and the separations that the bride suffers in the Song become cries of dereliction.

With that in mind, we can offer this typological overview of the Song, a Song of Yahweh fiery love triumphing over deadly absence:

1. 1:2-2:7: Israel in bondage, longing for Yahweh’s presence (perhaps Egypt, perhaps the oppressions of the era of the judges).

2. 2:8-17: Advent of Yahweh (Exodus, deliverance from enemies).

3. 3:1-5: Yahweh’s absence (Shiloh to Ichabod?).

4. 3:6-5:1: Solomon’s wedding day = temple dedication.  Solomon as friend of the Bridegroom, Yahweh, who enjoys a love-feast with His bride.

5. 5:2-6:3: Yahweh’s absence again (divided kingdom, exile).

6. 6:4-7:10: Yahweh restores relationship with bride (restoration).

7. 7:11-8:7: Love as strong as death, the theme of Israel’s history.

The same sequence is replicated in the sacrificial system.  When an adam wants to draw near to Yahweh, He needs to do it through an animal, an animal that gets divided and turned into smoke in the altar fire (Leviticus 1:2).  Each Israelite adam, made from earth, has to be divided in two and inflamed before he can be near Yahweh.  He must be transformed from adam to ‘ish through the ‘esh of Yahweh.  He has to be transformed by fire into bridal food, ishishah.

The crises that the bride suffers in the Song are crises of absence.  The lover has gone from her bed, he knocks and then leaves her.  Just so, Israel’s national crises are fundamentally crises of Yahweh’s absence.  Shiloh becomes Ichabod, the glory leaves the temple for Babylon. 

Yahweh’s absence might seem to be unremittingly bad, but the Song indicates otherwise.

But in chapter 5, in one of the narratives about the bridegroom’s absence and the bride’s desperate search, the bride enlists the help of the daughters of Jerusalem in seeking her lover.  They’re initially skeptical (5:9), but then join in (6:1). 

Just when Yahweh is absent, the daughters of Jerusalem turn from a passive backdrop to active allies to the bride.   In John 9 the blind man grows into an apologist when Jesus walks away; so too, Jerusalem wins her daughters to Yahweh when Yahweh leaves her.

Now, could Solomon himself have written this?  It seems odd that a man could have written about himself in this fashion.  Can you say “hubris”?

But, consider:

1. Yahweh promised David to set David’s son on his throne after him, and promised too that this son would be the son of Yahweh.  Solomon is that son, to be sure, but the promises to David are pretty expansive.  “This is the charter of humanity” is how one scholar translates 2 Samuel 7:19.

2. Solomon comes along, accomplishes a lot, builds the house for Yahweh’s name, is Yahweh’s beloved, His son.  But Solomon is aware of his limits, as Ecclesiastes 2 shows.  He knows that his achievements are vapor, and that must mean that he realizes that he doesn’t measure up to all that Yahweh promised David.  He might naturally come to the realization that, for all his greatness, he is only a pale shadow of another Son of Yahweh, another Son of David, yet to come.  Solomon thus writes of Israel’s longing for a new and better Solomon.

3. Hubris? No; rather humility.  Solomon’s typological consciousness – his consciousness of himself not as the final realization of the Davidic covenant but only as a sign of a future realization – is a realization of his limits and failures.

Solomon, though, is not merely a giver of wine, but in giving the wine of his love to Israel, he makes Israel into a nation of wine-givers.  During his reign, every Israelite sits (enthroned) under a vine and fig tree.  Every Israelite has his own vineyard, his own domestic “temple” and house of wine.

The Song depicts this by its transfer of wine imagery from the lover to the beloved.  In the first three references to wine in the Song, it is the lover’s love that is intoxicating like wine (1:2, 4); he brings her to a “house of wine” (2:4).  But then the bride becomes the wine-giver; her love is better than wine (4:10) and her mouth is the best wine (7:9).  Eventually, she takes him to her “house of wine” (8:2).  Elevated to royalty, her love becomes an intoxicant for her lover the king.