In this excerpt from my book The Forgotten Books of the Bible: Recovering the Five Scrolls for Today, I explore the Song of Songs as an antidote to the church’s posture of shame-based control of human sexuality.

Our culture has a sex problem, and the church is partly to blame. From the street to the casting couch to the Oval Office, men feel entitled to women’s bodies. Sexualized images of women pervade media and advertising, communicating expectations that women should be sexually available to men. These toxic attitudes about sex and sexuality put lives at risk. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that nearly half of women and one in four men will experience some form of sexual violence during their lifetime.

In this environment, the church needs to talk about sex, sexuality, and bodies in positive, thoughtful, theologically rich ways. Yet, rather than promoting healthy attitudes toward sex and sexuality, the church too often focuses on restriction and repression, producing guilt and shame rather than helping people embrace the sexual side of being human.

Between the sexual objectification that pervades mainstream culture and the shame-based sexual purity that characterizes much of church culture, there are healthy ways of viewing sex as a mutual, pleasurable, shame-free expression of the joy of being human—as  a gift of God, even. Yet, Christians aren’t accustomed to thinking of sex and bodies as holy. It’s easier to talk about when we should and shouldn’t have sex and who we should and shouldn’t have sex with. We lack the language to speak of sex as a divine gift or as something that brings us closer to understanding God.

The Holiest of the Holy

Yet in the Song of Songs, we have a holy book about two young lovers entranced by the allure of human bodies and enthralled by the passion of sexual desire. That the book is even in the Bible has been viewed as scandalous   by some. The third-century Christian theologian Origen warned in his Commentary on the Song of Songs that all but the most spiritually advanced people should abstain from reading the Song, so powerful is its sexual allure. Yet the great Jewish rabbi Akiva once said,

The whole world  is not worth  the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the Writings  are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of the holy.

Akiva was probably thinking of the traditional interpretation of the Song of Songs as a love story between God and Israel or, for Christians, between Christ and the church. But I like to think Akiva was right about the Song of Songs even in its most literal interpretation. I like to think of the Song of Songs as the holiest of the holy precisely because it invites us to celebrate the goodness of human sexuality, the uninhibited joy of sexual passion, and the intrinsic beauty of the human body in all its shapes, sizes, and skin tones. While the Song of Songs is not perfect, I believe it can help us learn to talk about sex, bodies, and God—all  in the same holy breath.

The Joy of Sex

The two young lovers of Song of Songs, with their flirtatious, passionate, mutually respectful lovemaking, provide a refreshing counterpoint to the Bible’s often negative views of sex and sexuality. Too often the Bible is presented as though it were a stodgy old school marm, wagging a judgmental finger whenever someone thinks sex might be beautiful or pleasurable or—God forbid—fun. Leviticus provides exhaustive lists of who you can and cannot have sex with (your wife, yes! Your mother-in-law, no!). Paul recommends avoiding sex altogether (1 Corinthians 7). But here at last is a biblical text that relishes in human sexuality, joyfully and playfully and without shame. It simply celebrates the pleasure of desire and consummation, of bodies entwined in passionate embrace, of lovemaking pure and simple.

Imagine if this text were to be taken seriously in discussions about biblical views of sex and sexuality. No longer would the conversation be dominated by the sex police who guard the boundaries of “proper” sexual expression, wielding Leviticus and Paul like billy clubs. Song of Songs could make room for those who enjoy sex, who find it pleasurable and beautiful, and who refuse to feel shamed for that enjoyment. It could allow us to speak of desire and pleasure   as goods in them- selves, affirmed by this holiest of biblical books. If there is a place in the Bible for this unabashed appreciation of sexual enjoyment, surely there could be room in the church as well.

Reading the Song of Songs as a book of love poetry gives biblical expression to the goodness of human sexuality, an emphasis that is too often lost in both the contemporary church and in the culture at large. It is odd that in a Christian culture often obsessed with issues of sex and sexuality, the Song of Songs is rarely brought into the discussion. Perhaps it is our discomfort with sex that leads us to ignore the Song of Songs, focusing instead on texts that regulate or control sexuality. Or perhaps it is that our ignorance of the Song of Songs contributes to our discomfort with sex, limiting our theological language for discussing sexuality in thoughtful ways. The Song of Songs reminds us that the “biblical perspective” on sex and sexuality is not merely about anxiety, purity, and restriction but also about desire, enjoyment, and the full expression of our sexual selves.

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