Priscilla Papers 32.1 | Winter 2018

P

riscilla

The academic journal of

P

apers Vol 32, No 1 | Winter 2018

CBE International

Song of Songs

3 Green-Eyed Lovers:

A Study of Jealousy in Song of Songs 8:5-7

Havilah Dharamraj

10 A Biblical Example of a

Sexually Healthy Woman for a World Where Unhealthy Sexuality Makes Headlines

Sara Barton

15 My Resounding “Yes� to God

and Embracing My Sexuality: Singleness and the Song of Songs a sermon by Elizabeth Gentry

18 Mutuality, Mystery, and Marriage: Love in the Song of Songs

a sermon by Dawn Gentry

21 A Review of Commentaries on The Song of Songs Christine Marchetti

23 1 Corinthians 14:33b-38 as a Pauline QuotationRefutation Device Kirk MacGregor

29 Book Review:

The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity, by Kevin Giles

Denise Cooper-Clarke

Priscilla and Aquila instructed Apollos more perfectly in the way of the Lord. (Acts 18:26)

Well-known New Testament scholar and friend of CBE International, Scot McKnight, in his Jesus Creed blog entry on July 19, 2016, mentions three measures of biblical “teaching about male-female relations.” One of the three is how often the Song of Songs is mentioned.

The following pages add significantly to what Priscilla Papers has already published on Song of Songs (see, for example, the articles by Arthur Lewis and Aída Besançon Spencer in volumes 11.2 and 28.3, respectively). We open this issue with an article by Havilah Dharamraj which demonstrates that Song of Songs bolsters a wife’s right to expect fidelity, among other virtues, from her husband. Sara Barton then describes the healthy sexuality Song of Songs promotes—sexuality in which both women and men benefit from knowledge, embodiment, and agency. Following are tandem sermons by Dawn and Elizabeth Gentry, a mother and daughter who bring their skill as interpreters and their experience as ministers to the Song of Songs. Christine Marchetti then summarizes and evaluates three prominent commentaries on this unique Old Testament book.

• In addition to an emphasis on the Song of Songs, you will find two additional items toward the end of this issue. One is Denise Cooper-Clark’s review and recommendation of a recent book

by Kevin Giles, The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity (Cascade, 2017). The other is an important article by Kirk MacGregor on 1 Corinthians 14.

MacGregor describes Paul’s words about women’s silence and shame as a quotation-refutation device. That is, Paul first quotes a statement and then refutes that statement. MacGregor agrees and disagrees with aspects of the arguments of Phil Payne, well-known from Payne’s influential book, Man and Woman, One in Christ (Zondervan, 2009) and his 2017 article, “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5,” published in the journal New Testament Studies and available online through CBEInternational.org. MacGregor’s interaction with Payne’s scholarship reminds us of a central purpose of academic journals—to foster scholarly discussion and thereby move toward the truth of important and difficult matters.

• Finally, allow me to introduce an addition to our Peer Review Team—the group of scholars who give of their time and expertise to help ensure the quality of our articles. Karen Strand Winslow teaches biblical studies at Azusa Pacific University in southern California. She holds a master’s degree from Asbury Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Washington. In addition to extensive experience in the field of biblical studies, her academic interests also include early Jewish Christianity, sociology of religion, and women in religion. Dr. Winslow is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church.

• I am writing this editorial during Advent, and I pray for our readers all the blessings of this season of joyful anticipation of Christ’s first and second comings.

DISCLAIMER: Final selection of all material published by CBE International in Priscilla Papers is entirely up to the discretion of the publisher, editor, and peer reviewers.

Please note that each author is solely legally responsible for the content and the accuracy of facts, citations, references, and quotations rendered and properly attributed in the article appearing under his or her name. Neither CBE, nor the editor, nor the editorial team is responsible or legally liable for any content or any statements made by any author, but the legal responsibility is solely that author’s once an article appears in print in Priscilla Papers.

Editor: Jeff Miller Associate Editor / Graphic Designer: Theresa Garbe President / Publisher: Mimi Haddad President Emerita: Catherine Clark Kroeger† Consulting Editor: William David Spencer Peer Review Team: Lynn H. Cohick, Havilah Dharamraj, Tim Foster, Susan Howell, Jamin Hübner, Loretta Hunnicutt, Adam Omelianchuk, Chuck Pitts, Marion Taylor, Karen Strand Winslow On the Cover: The second leaf of Canticum Canticorum

by Unknown, probably Dutch [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Priscilla Papers is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database® (ATLA RDB®), http://www.atla.com, in the Christian Periodical Index (CPI), in New Testament Abstracts (NTA), and in Religious and Theological Abstracts (R&TA), as well as by CBE itself. Priscilla Papers is licensed with EBSCO’s fulltext informational library products. Full-text collections of Priscilla Papers are available through EBSCO Host’s Religion and Philosophy Collection, Galaxie Software’s Theological Journals collection, and Logos Bible Software. Priscilla Papers is a member publication of the American Association of Publishers.

2 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

Priscilla Papers (issn 0898-753x) is published quarterly by CBE International 122 W Franklin Avenue, Suite 218, Minneapolis, MN 55404-2451 www.cbeinternational.org | 612-872-6898 © CBE International, 2018.

cbeinternational.org

Green-Eyed Lovers: A Study of Jealousy in Song of Songs 8:5-7 Havilah Dharamraj

Famously, jealousy is the theme of Shakespeare’s Othello, a plot that turns around a husband tormented by the thought that his wife might be unfaithful to him. This is a theme so common in real life that it makes one pause to ask the question: is a wife also “allowed” to be jealous of her husband? I ask the question from the context of a predominantly Hindu society, one in which it is acceptable for a man to have an “official” wife and family, and in addition, a “little house.” This latter is a secondary setup which houses a mistress and any children born within that relationship—clearly, out of wedlock. With polygamy illegal in India, these alternative arrangements are fairly common, and more often than not, all the parties seem quite content. The man demands that all his women be faithful to him, but the woman understands that she must make do.

In the narratives of the OT, a wife understands and accepts that she may not be the only woman with whom her husband cohabits. Within the extended household, she must make room for other wives, for concubines, and for surrogate wives. Thus, we have the sisters Leah and Rachel vying for Jacob’s affection (Gen 29:31–30:24), trading with each other to spend a night with him (Gen 30:14–17), and even squabbling a bit (Gen 30:15). However, all of this happens backstage—Jacob is not expected to intervene.

Then, there is Abimelek, who can claim that Gideon is his father because his mother was Gideon’s concubine (Judg 8:29–31; 9:1– 2). Another example is Sarah, who is comfortable with the idea of arranging for her slave Hagar to be a surrogate wife to her husband, Abraham, and takes exception only when she thinks Hagar is moving above her station. Similarly, Rachel and Leah offer their personal handmaids to bear them sons by surrogacy—thus are birthed the twelve tribes of Israel. If these are the situations within the household that call for accommodation, outside the household a wife may also be expected to tolerate her husband visiting prostitutes, perhaps having children by them, and even bringing those children home to be raised with hers. This is the case of Jephthah, who eventually supersedes the “legitimate” sons of his father to become judge over Gilead (Judg 11).

These quick examples give us a fairly good sense that jealousy within marriage was a male prerogative. The legal codes even had a procedure for husbands who suspected a wife of unfaithfulness— quaintly but rightly called a “jealousy offering.” This was a procedure in which the wife might even die if she had indeed been unfaithful (Num 5:11–31). That there was no due process for a jealous wife simply underlines the fact that there was not room for such in that society. She, like some Hindu women in presentday India, had to make do—that is, to accommodate to jealously and even infidelity as a male privilege.

The OT accommodates these social contracts, but does not necessarily endorse them. It legislates regarding them in order to provide channels for issues that otherwise might be settled by prevailing custom, often to the disadvantage of the party that is lower on the social hierarchy—the woman. Thus, though the OT describes polygamy and concubinage, surrogacy and prostitution, it should not be read as prescribing them. On the contrary, the

cbeinternational.org

OT balances its accommodation to existing systemic realities with depictions of the ideal.

This article makes a case for the counter-cultural and egalitarian position the OT endorses using the example of an emotion common in romantic relationships, jealousy. Our text comes from Song of Songs—the book that attempts to untangle itself from societal constraints so that it can lay out what romantic love looks like in the ideal.1

Song of Songs 8:5–7 Song of Songs 8:5–7 is rather peculiar in its vocabulary and imagery. Replacing the stock word pictures of the love-speak in the seven chapters previous, this poem in the final chapter is dense with new vocabulary, some even at odds with the familiar terms. So, we have here: “seal,” “death,” “cruel,” “grave,” “jealousy,” “flame,” “fire,” “rivers,” and “wealth.” Chapter 8 even includes a word found nowhere else in the OT (shalhevethyah, 8:6) that confounds translators and that even Marvin Pope’s massive commentary prefers to leave un-translated.2 Friends 8:5a: Who is this coming up from the wilderness / leaning on her beloved?

She 8:5b: Under the apple tree I roused you; there your mother conceived you, / there she who was in labour gave you birth.

8:6: Place me like a seal over your heart, / like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, / its jealousy (qin’ah) unyielding as the grave.

It burns like blazing fire, / like a mighty flame (shalhevethyah).

8:7: Many waters cannot quench love; / rivers cannot sweep it away.

If one were to give / all the wealth of one’s house for love, / it would be utterly scorned. (NIV–UK) Most agree that 8:5b–7 is atypical of the Song’s style, with the speaker unexpectedly trading her gauzy veil (4:3) for the gear of a sage,3 her words addressed to an audience well beyond her usual world-of-two. What is more, commentators burst into applause when they come to this section—“the beauty of this passage puts it beyond interpretation.”4 But interpret it we must, not least because this is arguably the highpoint of the Song, and because it intriguingly promises a woman who is as jealous as any male in the OT. While we read the Song as applying to human love relationships, we should, in all fairness to centuries of tradition, also read it allegorically as referring to the deity-devotee dynamic across the OT which casts YHWH as divine husband and Israel as his human wife. The two readings are not independent of each other. The ideal in man-woman attachments is described

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 3

in engagement with the ideal in the divine-human relationship.

So, our unpacking of Song 8:5–7 treats both literal and allegorical readings, each informing the other.

Jealousy (qin’ah) in Song of Songs 8:5–7 Song 8:5 nicely sets the stage for the focus on jealousy.

8:5a: Who is this coming up from the wilderness / leaning on her beloved?

8:5b: Under the apple tree I roused you; there your mother conceived you, / there she who was in labour gave you birth. (NIV-UK) The woman makes her entrance “leaning on her beloved.” Some read this as a happy dependency of the female protagonist upon her male lover,5 but interestingly, the lines that follow will establish the woman as remarkably independent. She will remind the man of times when she “roused” him; she will construct her own definition of love, pronounce herself worthy of courtship, and assert that she will give her “vineyard” to whom she chooses. Given these, her “leaning” on her lover seems more a public declaration of her choice. As such, it may be a notice of possession.6 At the very least, the description conveys the woman’s lack of reticence— which one would expect in an Eastern setting—in matters of romantic attachment.

If her public display of affection is unconventional, her opening line is a bit of a shock to the system. “Under the apple tree I (a) roused you,” the woman reminisces. Given the use of the same verb in the Song’s refrain, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires” (2:7; 3:5; 8:4), and given the apple tree—the Song’s favourite aphrodisiac7—we gather the woman is not talking about irritably nudging awake a snoring partner. “The claim by a woman that she has ‘awakened’ the man’s love would . . . be extraordinary, particularly in an ancient Near Eastern poem,” says Günter Krinetzki.8 Thus some prefer to amend the grammar of the Hebrew text here in order to place the words in the mouth of the man rather the woman.9 But, unsettling as it may be to some readers ancient and modern, here is a woman who is bold enough, both in public and in private, to make the man hers.

At this point there is talk of conception and child-bearing: “There your mother conceived you, there the one who gave you birth conceived you” (author’s translation). This is regularly noted as being the only reference to pregnancy in the Song, odd in a canon that mentions sex mostly as a preamble to begetting offspring. Commentators seem unsure what this line is about.

In positioning her love life in tandem with that of a generation previous, is the woman assuming a role of “keeper of the family tree”?10 Or, is she reminding her beloved that their union also serves to “maintain and regenerate society”?11 Could she perhaps be anticipating bearing her man’s child? In Eastern societies, ancient and present-day, bearing a child traditionally legitimates the woman’s claim on the man. She expects that he owes her attachment for this reason alone, if not any other (e.g., Gen 29:32– 34; 30:20). It is possible then, that as the beloved leans on her lover, her thoughts turn on possessing his affections to her satisfaction.

This may find support in the lines that follow: 8:6a i: Place me like a seal over your heart, / like a seal on your arm (NIV-UK) 4 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

Taking a cue from Egyptian love poems, and considering that seals were either worn on a cord around the neck or as a finger ring (Gen 38:18; Jer 22:24),12 some read this as a wish for nearness: “If only I were her little seal-ring / the keeper of her finger! / I would see her love each and every day. . . .”13 A second alternative is to understand the seal as one that marks ownership, such as the engraved seals made of semi-precious stone used to stamp on the wet clay of a jar.14 So, in asking to be worn on the man, is the woman pleading to be in constant proximity to him (the sense in Hag 2:23),15 so as to find satisfaction in his nearness, or—like the Egyptian poet—to experience his “love each and every day”? Or, more aggressively, is the woman sealing her ownership of the man? Since there is no grammatical indication of mere entreaty in her (“set me . . . !”), the imperative suggests insistence rather than plea. The woman has shown a keen sense of ownership so far: “My beloved is mine” (2:16; 6:3). Seals on heart and finger will thoroughly mark him as her territory.16 She can secure her claim and preempt rivals.

The vocabulary and intent of the woman’s speech remind us of Deut 6:6–8. Here, YHWH requires that his instructions to Israel must figuratively “be on your hearts” (cf. Deut 11:18; Prov 3:3; 7:3) and, as physical symbols, be worn on hands and foreheads. The requirement is made in the context of the creed which declares Israel’s exclusive relationship with YHWH—“YHWH is our God, YHWH alone”—and demands Israel’s whole-hearted devotion: “Love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:4–5, author’s translation).

Medieval Jewish mysticism catches the essence of YHWH’s demand and responds to YHWH in reciprocation using the language of the Song’s woman: “For as the imprint of the seal is to be discerned even after the seal is withdrawn, so I shall cling to you.”17 Conversely, the Deuteronomy text warns Israel not to “follow other gods” for YHWH “is a jealous God” (’El qanna’, Deut 6:14– 15). When they ask to be affixed onto the object of their affection, are the woman of the Song and YHWH motivated by the same emotion, jealousy? We must seek an answer in the imagery that follows: 8:6a ii: for love is as strong as death,18 8:6a iii: its19 jealousy as unyielding as the grave (she’ol).

(NIV-UK) The pair of lines startles the imagination with stark equivalencies: “love” with “death,” and “jealousy” with “grave.” The nouns are reinforced with a matching pair of adjectives:20 love jealousy

strong death unyielding grave

What must we make of this?

In other parts of the canon, “death” is the default superlative for intense emotions. Samson is “sick to death” of Delilah’s questions (Judg 16:16); Jonah is vexed to the point of death with God’s dealings with Nineveh (Jonah 4:9); in Gethsemane, Jesus is sorrowful to the point of death (Matt 26:38).21 Further, as in this Song text, “death” is often paired in parallelism with the grave (she’ol) to express their common distinctive—both death and the grave are unassailable (Pss 49:14; 89:49 [v. 48 in English]; Hab 2:5).

Indeed, the next line describes the “grave” as “unyielding,” or as

cbeinternational.org

Cheryl Exum prefers, “adamant.” The “grave” is a force that cannot be resisted, and is as undefeatable as in the combative contexts that use this adjective (Judg 4:24; 2 Sam 2:17; Isa 27:1, 8; Job 9:4).22 We infer then, that the woman is placing the irresistible inevitability of “love” and “jealousy” on par with that of “death” and the “grave.”

That brings us to the paired terms “love” and “jealousy.” “Love” is simple enough, but the Hebrew qin’ah needs unpacking. The standard choice in English versions follows the Greek Septuagint in its use of the basic sense:23 “to be jealous” (e.g., KJV, NAS, NLT, NIV). Those who are either uncomfortable with the negative baggage this word carries, or wish to keep qin’ah strictly parallel to “love,” instead use “passion” (e.g., NET, NRSV, TNK) or suggest “ardour” (NIV-UK footnote).

Exum argues strongly for rendering qin’ah as “jealousy,” which is a “violent emotion, usually aroused when a rival . . . is felt to threaten an exclusive relationship.” In other parts of the canon, it stirs up ferocious anger, which may be turned against the rival24 or even against the beloved partner, who is seen as a possession.25 Exum supports her case with Prov 27:4, which, like the Song, describes jealousy as a force that cannot be withstood: “Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy (qin’ah)?”26 The woman’s stance and speech so far (8:5–6a i) indicate her desire for exclusive rights to the man. Her emotional state accommodates starry-eyed “love” just as much as green-eyed “jealousy.” Fidelity is a non-negotiable demand in a relationship such as the woman describes and can be used to nail down the difference between “love” and “jealousy”: “Fidelity is clearly honed in the term ‘passion’ [or ‘jealousy’] in a way that is not the case for ‘love,’” and it thus communicates the inability of one partner to “tolerate receiving divided loyalties.”27 If so, the context here suggests that qin’ah is better rendered “jealousy” than, say, “passion” or “ardour.”

Tremper Longman rightly observes that jealousy is a “potentially appropriate reaction” in only two relationships, both of them conjugal: one is in human marriage; the other is in the biblical reflection of human marriage, the divine-human nuptial metaphor.28 Thus, as much as YHWH articulates his “love” for Israel, he also speaks about his “jealousy” (qin’ah). Deuteronomy 32:21–22 even shares the vocabulary of Song 8:6 in expressing YHWH’s jealousy over unfaithful Israel:29 They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols . . . a fire will be kindled by my wrath, one that burns down to the realm of dead below. It will devour the earth and its harvests and set afire the foundations of the mountains.

In a Christian equivalent, the twelfth-century theologian Honorius of Autun transposes the woman’s emotion onto the Christ-church relationship and places the Song text in Christ’s mouth: “just as hell is stronger than all bitter things . . . so jealousy is unconquerable—I mean my own envy, by which I envy the Devil because he possesses you, my Bride. . . .”30 But we may have run ahead of ourselves in making the transition from the Song’s human female protagonist to the canon’s divine bridegroom, whether YHWH or Christ. So, we return to the poem.

cbeinternational.org

8:6b: It [love] burns like blazing fire, / like a mighty flame (shalhevethyah).

8:7a: Many waters cannot quench love; / rivers cannot sweep it away. (NIV-UK) The Hebrew is achingly beautiful to the ears with the sh sibilant of the previous line (8:6a iii) continuing its lyrical sweep into this one (8:6b), slowing down the reader only at the unfamiliar noun shalhevethyah with which the line climaxes.31 The tantalizing possibility is that here at last, in a book from which any reference to deity is absent, is the poetic abbreviation of the sacred name: YAH. But, after carefully considering the options for translation,32 we end up with the recommendation that shalhevethyah be rendered “a blazing flame.” This is disappointingly mundane, stripped as it is of any association with YHWH,33 but the furthest we can go is along the lines of “almighty flame”34 and “god-awful flame.”35 Two considerations soften our disappointment. First is the common observation that the woman’s description of love (8:6–7) tingles with allusions to a selection from the slew of deities that populated the world of its time. The NASB places YHWH (Lord) among these: love is as strong as death (Mavet), Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes (reshafim) are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord (Yah). Many waters (mayim rabbim) cannot quench love, Nor will rivers (neharot) overflow it (boldface added) Mot or Mavet is the god of death who is retrieved from the underworld by the unyielding love of Anath. Further, death and She’ol are sometimes twinned personifications.36 Resheph is the god who shoots arrows (reshafim) of plague and pestilence. The “many waters” echo Marduk’s triumph over Tiamat, goddess of the chaotic deep. Yam or Prince River (Nahar) is the god of the Sea. Why could not the poet have smuggled in an echo of his national deity, Yah?37 The second consideration by which we may associate shalhevethyah with YHWH is tied into the term “jealousy.” The forms qanna’ and qanno’ are used only in description of YHWH, to mean “a jealous God”: ’El qanna’ in Exodus and Deuteronomy,38 and ’El qanno’ in Joshua and Nahum.39 The occurrences of these terms across Genesis-Joshua are invariably in the context of Israel switching her devotion from YHWH to other gods. Just as invariably, YHWH’s response is unnervingly violent. Particularly relevant to the Song’s shalhevethyah (“a god-awful flame”) are images of his jealousy as burning anger (Deut 6:15) and his anger as a devouring fire (e.g., Isa 30:27, 30; cf. 33:14). He does not intend an amicable separation with his unfaithful spouse. In this zero tolerance of infidelity lies the juncture of divine “love” with divine “jealousy.”

As Terence Fretheim explains, jealousy, by definition, has both an inner and outer reference, the inner being the prior one. God cares deeply about Israel; therefore he cares about what she does with her allegiance.40 God’s aggressive response to her rejection of him is an index of his passionate love for her. Given this, it makes sense that in every instance, YHWH presents his jealousy as the reason Israel must not attempt to be unfaithful to him. “Do not worship any other god because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod 34:14).

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 5

The story of Phinehas in Num 25 illustrates how YHWH’s jealousy plays out in one specific situation, and may reinforce our reading of the description of human love in the Song text.

“Jealousy” in Numbers 25:1–1541 Numbers 25 relates how at the city of Shittim Israel began to “play the harlot” with Moabite women. This verb is frequently used as a metaphor for idolatry.42 Soon enough, Israel was worshipping Baal of Peor. As a result, YHWH’s anger “flared up” (ISV, NAB, NET) and a deadly plague swept through the camp. Even as Moses took steps to control the damage and Israel wept at the tent of meeting, an Israelite named Zimri openly brought in a Midianite woman named Cozbi.

The scene is set to narrate Phinehas’s act of “jealousy,” the deed for which history would celebrate him.43 Phinehas picks up a spear, follows the Israelite into the “tent” (qubbah) and skewers the two in the act—in flagrante delicto.

Opinion is divided over the nature of Zimri’s sin. Commentators variously propose that it could have been illicit sex,44 marriage to a non-Israelite,45 a cultic offence,46 or a combination. Numbers 25:6 does not specifically point in the direction of any particular sin. However, the story provides clues.

First, we must work out what a qubbah is—a term which occurs only here in the OT. Three distinct suggestions are that it could have meant a regular tent,47 the tent of meeting,48 or a portable shrine.49 The second suggestion is the least likely, since Phinehas and the congregation assemble at the door of “the tent of meeting” (Num 25:6), but it is into the qubbah that Phinehas follows the offenders (25:8). It is unlikely that two different terms would be used for the same structure within the space of three verses. On the contrary, the two nouns possibly distinguish between one tent and the other. The suggestion that qubbah is neither more nor less than a regular tent is weakened somewhat by the narrator’s preference for this unusual term over the usual usage for “tent,” ’ohel. This leaves the possibility that the tent could have been a non-Yahwist shrine.

Secondly, Moses’s order to the “judges” is to “put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor” (Num 25:5 NIV-UK). If one assumes that Phinehas acts on this command, it favours the presence of a religious component in Zimri’s act of defiance, in addition to any other motivations there might be.

Thirdly, Zimri is “Zimri son of Salu, the leader of a Simeonite family” (Num 25:14 NIV-UK). This recalls Num 25:4, in which YHWH commands punitive action against “all the leaders of these people.” This could be either because of their direct involvement with Baal, or because of their failure to keep their people from unfaithfulness, or both. What is significant is that the action against the leaders is meant to effect the turning away of divine wrath, and since YHWH’s wrath is in reaction to Israel’s association with Baal of Peor (25:3), the offence of the chiefs is strongly linked to Israel’s infidelity.

Fourthly, Zimri’s death immediately stays the plague consequential to Israel’s worship of Baal (cf. Num 31:16; Josh 22:17). This again points to a connection between Israel’s collective offence and Zimri’s.

The likelihood then, is that Zimri, a leader in Israel, has set up a qubbah (“shrine”) among the tents of his clan (since he brings 6 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

the woman “to his brothers,” Num 25:6), within sight of the tent of meeting. While Moses and the congregation wait on YHWH at the door of the tent of meeting, Zimri brazenly continues the liaison with Baal of Peor by bringing Cozbi into the camp; or worse, Zimri, being a member of a chieftain’s family, takes responsibility in this crisis and seeks recourse to another oracle in order to find an alternative solution to the plague.50 Either way, Zimri flagrantly challenges the exclusive worship of YHWH. This is what stirs Phinehas to his violent deed.

The story attaches value to Phinehas’s deed by multiple devices. Intertextually, the incident resonates, point for point, with that of Israel’s idolatry of the golden calf (Exod 32). At the level of the story, Phinehas’s line is rewarded—on the spot—with a “permanent right to the priesthood” (Num 25:13 NLT). More significantly, Phinehas is acknowledged at the most authoritative level—by the most reliable character in the narrative, YHWH. It is enormously to Phinehas’s credit that YHWH sees his own jealousy active in Phinehas’s. YHWH’s declaration is that “he [Phinehas] was jealous with my jealousy” (Num 25:14 NASB). A. H. McNeile describes the satisfaction achieved: “His [Phinehas’s] jealousy was so deep and real that it adequately expressed the jealousy of Jehovah, rendering it unnecessary for Jehovah to express it further by consuming Israel.”51 Phinehas’s character is subsumed into YHWH’s. He is more than merely YHWH’s representative.

His jealousy, at that moment, is the very jealousy of a thwarted YHWH, and so, even though the deed is not commissioned by YHWH, it meets with his full, even extravagant, approval. Indeed, that Phinehas acts voluntarily only adds to his merit.

Our toes may curl with discomfort at this portrayal of YHWH as the spurned lover.52 Still, we understand better now how love’s jealousy can be as relentless and as irresistible as the grave.

Lovers with Green Eyes Dipping her brush in three paint-pots, the Song’s heroine expresses herself with the elemental colours of Death, Fire, and Water. On her canvas, “love” and “jealousy” dissolve into each other. They form a substance as unyielding as the underworld, an emotion like a raging fire barely under control, whose red-hot blaze cannot be doused by floodwaters, not even by the ocean. As we admire this woman’s art, we need to appreciate that it is from “jealousy” that the portrayal of “love” gains its depth.

How strange that the woman should speak of a jealous love, and that too of unrelenting, fiery jealousy. Exum reminds us that there are no biblical examples of women displaying jealous wrath.53 In a social environment in which exclusive rights were a male prerogative, women limited themselves to backstage bickering (e.g., Gen 30:14–16). It is highly unusual that the Song’s protagonist, with her talk of seals on sundry body parts, should demand full reciprocation of her love. Rather than cause jealousy, it appears she can exercise it. So startling is the idea that a woman can express herself thus, that even a modern grammarian such as Paul Joüon—as well as the early Christian translation into Syriac and several early Christian interpreters—would rather adjust the grammar in favour of the male lover being the speaker of these lines.54 The canonical significance of this woman who jealously insists on her lover’s undistracted affection is twofold. First, when

cbeinternational.org

the Song is read literally, as a prescription to male-female human relationships, it allows the two sexes equal opportunity to make a sole claim on the other. The woman is permitted not to share her man among a slew of other wives and concubines. She is entitled to the kind of jealousy that is not only legitimate in love, but defines that love as exclusive. Given the world of the OT, this levelling of conjugal privileges is extraordinary.

Secondly, when the Song is read allegorically, its expositors cannot miss the astounding contribution it makes to the YHWHIsrael marriage metaphor that permeates the OT. Its contribution is that it sets out Israel as the ideal beloved. YHWH’s wife, Israel, as we remember vividly from the rest of the OT, is constantly found in beds other than her own. Unashamed and unrepentant, who could imagine her sitting down to compose a poem on jealously-guarded reciprocal fidelity? The Song is, as Blaise Arminjon describes it, a “lyrical transposition”55 of the otherwise negative metaphor of YHWH and Israel as lover and beloved, foregrounded so dramatically in the prophets.56 No wonder Jewish tradition recommends that one must read the Song only after having first read the rest of the canon.57 One would otherwise miss the theological freight of a book in which Israel behaves and speaks like YHWH. The Song abandons, even resists, the cultural accommodation that the rest of the OT makes to the male prerogative of jealousy within romantic love. This egalitarian ideal is amplified into the human-divine metaphor, offering the devotee a claim to the undivided affection of God, the same affection that he expects of his devotee. The Song looks forward to the ideal of lovers perfectly matched. Green eyes and all.

Notes 1. I have argued in another article that even the Song of Songs refrains from becoming divorced from the cultural realities of its time.

As such, it can only be said to move towards an idyll rather than being one. See Havilah Dharamraj, “The Idea of the Idyll: Why it May Not Work for the Song of Songs.” ExpTim 124, no. 9 (2013): 417–24.

2. Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 653. Notice that the final syllable, yah, is half of the divine name, presenting a translation issue further discussed below.

3. For elements of wisdom, see Edmée Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: A Study in Biblical Intertextuality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71–72.

4. Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God, 278.

5. E.g., Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 208; Duane Garrett, Song of Songs, pp. 1–265 in Song of Songs, Lamentations, Duane Garrett and Paul R. House, WBC 23B (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 253.

6. Tom Gledhill, The Message of the Song of Songs, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, UK: InterVarsity, 1994), 219.

7. Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs: A Continental Commentary, trans. Frederick J. Gaiser (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994) from Das Hohelied, ZBK (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1986), 88, 82–83.

8. Günter Krinetzki, Kommentar zum Hohenlied: Bildsprache und theologische Botschaft, BBET 16 (Frankfurt am Main and Bern: Peter D Lang, 1981), cited in Keel, Song of Songs, 267.

9. As in the Syriac translation, followed by a minority of scholars, e.g., Blaise Arminjon, The Cantata of Love: A Verse by Verse Reading of the Song of Songs (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1983).

cbeinternational.org

10. Keel, Song of Songs, 269.

11. Gledhill, Message of the Song of Songs, 223.

12. Robert Gordis, The Song of Songs and Lamentations: A Study, Modern Translation and Commentary, rev. ed. (New York: Ktav, 1974), 74.

13. Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Lyrics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 38.

14. The majority of scholars agree on the first and second readings. E.g., J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs: A Commentary, OTL (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 2005), 250.A third alternative is to understand the seal as a talisman, an amulet that protects the wearer. Keel, Song of Songs, 272–73. This is plausible considering that the request is followed up with a causal clause: “For (or because) love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as Sheol” (8:6a ii). The woman’s love, worn on the man’s heart and/or arm will ward off the underworld or, at least, an untimely descent into it. This reading would be possible but for the fact that the description of love immediately continues into another simile. Love is not only like death, but it also burns like a raging fire. This second simile does not accommodate the apotropaic evil-averting function of the seal. Thus, the “for” is best read as asseverative or declarative rather than causal, and is best left untranslated. Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 118.

15. Exum, Song of Songs, 250.

16. It is pointed out that the “heart” and “arm” of Song 8:6 refer to thought and action respectively, which taken together make a synecdoche for the whole person. E.g., Longman, Song of Songs, 210.

17. From the Jewish Kaballah. Gershom G. Scholem, Zohar: The Book of Splendour (New York: Schocken, 1949), 70.

18. Some scholars read “love is stronger than death.” E.g., Longman, Song of Songs, 212. Most prefer an equation between “love” and “death.”

19. Since love (’ahavah) is the theme that unifies vv. 6–7, I see the usefulness of the NIV-UK’s insertion of the pronoun “its.” It is in line with the fem. sg. Hebrew pronouns in v. 7.

20. The line echoes with assonance in the first half, swishes with sibilants in the second, the alliterating k sound enmeshing the two cola.

21. D. Winton Thomas, “A Consideration of Some Unusual Ways of Expressing the Superlative in Hebrew,” VT 3 (1953): 220–21.

22. Exum, Song of Songs, 252.

23. Qin’ah has a spectrum of meanings, all of them circling around deep emotion. (The cognate roots in Akkadian and Arabic mean “to become intensely red” or “become red with passion.”) Thus, with reference to the context, qin’ah has been rendered “jealousy” (Prov 6:34; 14:30; 27:4), “competitiveness” (Eccl 4:4; 9:6), “anger” (Num 5:14, 30), and “zeal” (2 Kgs 10:16; Pss 69:10; 119:139; Job 5:2; Sir 30:24), HALOT. The analogy between divine and human jealousy lies in the demand for exclusive possession or devotion and the central meaning of qin’ah relates to jealousy as applicable to a marriage relationship, this relationship being used metaphorically to describe the bond between Israel and their God. Though most strongly developed in Hos 1–3, Jer 3, and Ezek 16 and 23, the language of conjugal jealousy sometimes describes God’s feelings for Israel in the Pentateuch as well.

24. Prov 6:34; Ezek 36:5–6; 38:19; Zech 1:14; 8:2.

25. Num 5; Ezek 16:38, 42; 32:25.

26. Exum, Song of Songs, 251–52. Similarly, e.g., Longman, Song of Songs, 211.

27. Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 165.

28. Longman, Song of Songs, 211–12.

29. Barry Webb, “The Song of Songs: A Love Poem as Holy Scripture,” RTR 49, no. 3 (1990): 98n.18.

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 7

30. Richard A. Norris Jr, ed., The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, The Church’s Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 285.

31. Thomas, “A Consideration of Some Unusual Ways of Expressing the Superlative in Hebrew,” 209–24. Examples of ’elohim: “a mighty wind” (Gen 1:2), “a mighty prince” (Gen 23:6), “a great struggle” (Gen 30:8), “a great fire” (Job 1:16), “an exceeding great city” (Jonah 3:3). Examples of ’el: “the mighty mountains” (Ps 36:7) and “the mighty cedars” (Ps 80:11).

Examples of yah suffixed: “darkest gloom” (Jer 2:31), “mighty deeds” (Jer 32:19; Ps 77:12).

32. Derived from the verb lhv (“to blaze”). It has an unusual sh prefix, a fem. th ending, and a debated yah suffix. This last is read in three ways.

First, as an abbreviated form of the Tetragrammaton functioning as a genitive of source (“the flame of YH,” see Murphy, The Song of Songs, 191– 92). Secondly, as the divine name expressing the superlative or intensive in the same way that ’elohim and ’el are sometimes used: “a most vehement flame” (KJV), “a mighty flame” (RSV, NIV), “a blazing flame” (NJPS, cf.

Jer 2:31; 32:19). However, both possibilities are weakened by the absence of the expected maqqef (hyphen) and mappiq (a dot marking an h as a consonant), which occur only in the Ben Naphtali tradition. See M. Saebo, “On the Canonicity of the Song of Songs,” in Texts, Temples, and Traditions, ed. Michael V. Fox et al. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 275. That leaves us with the third possibility: the yah is an intensive adjectival suffix as in some cognate languages (iy, ay, and awi are intensive adjectival suffixes in Aramaic, Akkadian, and Arabic, respectively). This best explains Song 8:6, Jer 2:31 (“darkest gloom”), and Jer 32:19 (“mighty deeds”). Sabatino Moscati et al., An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1969), 81 §12.18, and 83 §12.23.

33. Pope concedes the difficulty of choosing between options. Pope, Song of Songs, 653.

34. Exum, Song of Songs, 254.

35. Longman, Song of Songs, 213.

36. Judg 16:16; Jonah 4:9.

37. Walsh lists six themes “that hint at the possibility of God’s presence in a text that never names him”: the ambiguous identity of the male lover; phrases that recall theophanies such as fire, and the phrases “cleft of the rock” and “column of smoke”; the metaphoric use of “vineyard”; and imagery that evokes the temple. Walsh, Exquisite Desire, 203–10.

38. Exod 20:5; 34:14; Deut 4:24; 5:9; 6:15.

39. Josh 24:19; Nah 1:2.

40.

Terence E. Fretheim, First and Second Kings (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1999), 310.

41. This section is largely taken from Havilah Dharamraj, A Prophet Like Moses?: A Narrative-Theological Reading of the Elijah Cycle, Paternoster Biblical Monographs (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2011), 57–60.

42. See Phyllis Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Enquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. P. L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 75–94.

43. For example: Mattathias “burned with zeal for the law, just as Phinehas did against Zimri son of Salu” (1 Macc 2:26 NRSV). “Phinehas son of Eleazar ranks third in glory for being zealous in the fear of the Lord, and standing firm, when the people turned away, in the noble courage of his soul; and he made atonement for Israel” (Sirach 45:23 NRSV; cf. 4 Macc 18:12).

44. F. C. Cook and T. E. Espin, The Fourth Book of Moses called Numbers, The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, vol. 1/2 (London, UK: Murray, 1871), 750; C. F. Keil, The Book of Numbers, trans.

J. D. Martin et al. (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1869), 205.

45. L. E. Binns, The Book of Numbers, WC (London, UK: Methuen, 1927), 178; A. Noordtzij, Numbers, trans. E. van der Maas, BSC (Grand

8 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 241; Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary, trans. J. D. Martin, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), 198; J. Sturdy, Numbers, CBC (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 184; Philip J. Budd, Numbers, WBC (Waco: 1984), 280.

46. Gordon J. Wenham, Numbers: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1981), 187; J. Milgrom, Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (New York: JPS, 1990), 212, 214, 476–80; F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 201–3; Stephan C. Reif, “What Enraged Phineas?,” JBL 90 (1971) 200–6.

47. Cook and Espin, Numbers, 750; Keil, Numbers, 206; Noordtzij, Numbers, 241; Noth, Numbers, 198.

48. Sturdy, Numbers, 184–85.

49. Budd, Numbers, 280; Reif, 200–6; Cross, Canaanite Myth, 201–3.

These follow J. Morgenstern, who proposes a parallel between the ’ohel mo‘ed and the pre-Islamic qubbah, a sacred tent. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod and the Tent of Meeting,” HUCA 17 (1942–43): 153–265; Morganstern, “The Ark, the Ephod and the Tent of Meeting,” HUCA 18 (1943–1944): 1–52.

50. Reif, “What Enraged Phineas?,” 205; Barbara E. Organ, “Pursuing Phineas: A Synchronic Reading,” CBQ 63 (2001): 203–18, here 208–9.

51. A. H. McNeile, The Book of Numbers: With Introduction and Notes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 144.

52. The OT’s depiction of jealousy-fuelled violence within the YHWHIsrael marriage relationship is a hermeneutical issue that requires separate treatment. In my forthcoming book with Fortress Press, Altogether Lovely: A Thematic and Intertextual Reading of the Song of Songs, I examine the so-called pornoprophetic texts: Hos 2, Ezek 16 and 23.

53. Exum, Song of Songs, 252–53.

54. Paul Joüon holds that the woman has been unfaithful earlier (5:3), and the male lover here requires her fidelity. Joüon, Le Cantique Des Cantiques: Commentaire Philologique Et Exegetique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1909), 315. See also R. F. Littledale, A Commentary on the Song of Songs from Ancient and Mediaeval Sources (London, 1869), 355–57.

55. Arminjon, The Cantata of Love, 41.

56. Kingsmill frequently shows correlation between the vocabulary of the Song and prophetic texts in an attempt to demonstrate that “a network of biblical allusions is being woven in the Song for the purpose of conveying a picture opposite to that we find in the prophets who, confronted by the continual ‘adultery’ of Israel, poured forth their condemnation with unwearying passion.” Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God, 6. Andre LaCocque’s Romance She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1998) is another commentary that demonstrates intertextuality between the Song and the rest of the OT canon, but directed towards a naturalistic (rather than metaphorical) reading of the Song.

57. Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 27.

HAVILAH DHARAMRAJ is Academic Dean and Professor of Old Testament at South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies in Bangalore, India. Her academic degrees include an MS in biochemistry, an MA in Christianity, and a PhD from the University of Durham, UK. She is author of various articles and the book, Altogether Lovely: A Thematic and Intertextual Reading of the Song of Songs (Fortress, 2018), as well as an editor of South Asia Bible Commentary: A One-Volume Commentary on the Whole Bible (Zondervan, 2015). Dr. Dharamraj serves on the Peer Review Team for Priscilla Papers.

cbeinternational.org

cbeinternational.org

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 9

A Biblical Example of a Sexually Healthy Woman for a World Where Unhealthy Sexuality Makes Headlines Sara G. Barton

Contemporary Western culture is rife with public stories about unhealthy sexuality. The 2016 US presidential election, for example, reverberated with the recording of then-candidate Donald Trump boasting about how he could grab women’s genitals because he was rich.1 As 2017 wore on, high-profile incidents of sexual harassment and assault continued to surface, bringing the nation to what some experienced as “a national moment of reckoning for abusers and creeps.”2 During rushed, pre-print conversations, journalists debated appropriate words for front page articles. Around dinner tables, parents explained adult terminology to their children. Via Facebook and Twitter feeds, the #metoo movement revealed how many mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends experience sexual harassment and abuse. Behind pulpits and closed doors, church leaders decided how to publicly respond and privately care for some who are triggered and others who are emboldened.

In my work as a university chaplain, questions regarding the relationship of sexuality and spirituality arise regularly. As people explore their relationship with God, conversations often surface about pornography addiction, commitments to celibacy, processing of purity culture and first sexual encounters, sexual identity, and the sexual trauma of rape. How we experience our bodies as sexual beings profoundly shapes our lives as spiritual beings. Yet, as I pastor, I find few readily available resources for holistically connecting these fundamental aspects of our humanity.3 Consideration of sexuality and spirituality certainly applies to both men and women, but I focus here on women’s experience. For the past several years, I have worked to provide better guidance and care regarding what it means to be a spiritually and sexually healthy woman. For example, when sexual trauma such as rape or harassment has occurred, women need spiritual and religious processing. When the perpetrator was someone they knew and trusted, for example, women have questions about how the Bible’s teaching regarding forgiveness applies to their situations. When women committed to celibacy have sex before marriage, they have spiritual concerns related to guilt and shame, or they have questions about whether social and moral expectations regarding celibacy are different in today’s society than they were in the ancient cultures of the biblical world. Women who experience pregnancy, childbirth, or menopause often need spiritual guidance as their bodies and emotions change. Even the most sexually inexperienced women are trying to understand the intersection between spirituality and sexuality. Because women are routinely marginalized and demeaned through public language and social media, those with pastoral hearts must be ready to spiritually affirm and empower women when this abuse causes pain and fear. In short, 10 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

all women have reasons to contemplate what it means to be sexually and spiritually healthy. In the context of my ministry, I have turned to the example of a sexually healthy ancient woman who is, perhaps surprisingly, found in the Bible. The Song of Songs, generally dated around the fourth century BC,4 is a poetic and dramatic collection of love songs that is entirely monologue and dialogue between characters—the Shulammite woman and her lover—with no additional narrator.

Like most poetry, the Song elicits a wide variety of interpretations. Early Christian leaders such as Origen, Hippolytus, and Gregory of Nyssa, initiated a long tradition of interpreting the Song allegorically, largely because of discomfort with such explicit sexual language in the context of religious life.

During the eighteenth century, John Wesley summarized how the majority interpreted Song of Songs when he noted that if the Song was literally sexual, “it would be absurd and monstrous.”5 An emphasis on the allegorical sense led to the neglect of the literal, sexual content of the poem, which only recent scholarship has begun to celebrate and consult concerning what it might teach us about sex.

While allegorical interpretations of the Song are important, so are literal interpretations.6 The Song is clearly about sex, and the characters in the Song do not find it absurd or monstrous.

They present physicality and sexuality openly and without apology. The female speaker, often referred to as the Shulammite woman (Song 6:13), speaks the first four verses of the Song which appeal directly to the body’s corporeal senses: hearing a song, touching one another, smelling the fragrance of oil, and tasting one another in kisses.7 Physicality is central to the Song, starting with these first few lines. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) any discomfort that physicality provokes, readers must grapple with how the sexuality in this text informs spiritual and religious lives. Engaging the Song holistically provides valuable insight into healthy sexuality, including healthy female sexuality.

The World Health Organization describes healthy sexuality as “a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality, including a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, and the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.”8 While the Shulammite woman, or any person for that matter, is not perfectly sexually healthy, she is an excellent example, in a world nearly void even of mediocre examples, of a woman who experiences and expresses her sexuality, and this notably takes place in the biblical canon—an explicitly religious context. Due to the well-established patriarchal context of the biblical world, it may be surprising to find a sexually healthy woman so clearly depicted and given such a strong voice, but there she is, singing

cbeinternational.org

her song for all to hear—and I am convicted that we have much to learn from her.

One factor to consider when talking about sexual health is women’s gender ideologies. “According to feminist theory, femininity ideologies can be defined as ideas, norms, and restrictions about what constitutes ‘normal,’ acceptable and ideal womanhood.”9 Particularly of concern in my context of Christian ministry is the idea of traditional femininity ideologies “which emphasize women’s passivity, compliance, concern for others, and agreeableness.”10 The Shulammite woman offers a strong voice and normalizes female sexuality, disrupting unhealthy femininity ideologies that have shaped women’s understandings of their sexuality. In my exploration of how the Shulammite woman in Song of Songs can inform our understanding of healthy sexuality, I discuss three aspects of sexual health: knowledge, embodiment, and agency.11

Sexual Knowledge First, the Shulammite woman models healthy sexual knowledge.

Women have traditionally been expected to be passive sexual gatekeepers who should not be knowledgeable about sex. Their primary role is not to seek out information about sexuality because their role is primarily summed up in saying “no” to men who are more sexually knowledgeable, and thus they function as the sexual gate openers.12 Of course, saying “no” is indeed an important aspect of sexual health, but when it is tied to femininity ideologies that require women’s passivity, compliance, and agreeableness, it can be negative, disempowering, and dangerously coupled with an inability to connect with and communicate one’s own needs and desires.13 Sexual knowledge is central to healthy sexuality, a connection often overlooked in traditional femininity ideologies that associate sex with shame. Because parents may associate sex with shame, they often avoid talking about it with their children, leading to a lack of healthy knowledge. Unfortunately, when Christian parents do not talk about sexuality, they reinforce media images of sex, “as something separate from spirituality,”14 and adolescents go outside their religious contexts to gain knowledge about sex, increasing the unhealthy experience of the spirit-body dualism and a cycle of shame. Without spiritual and religious grounding for sexual relationships, they are then more likely to encounter unhealthy sexuality because of unhealthy teaching.15 I have noticed this effect is particularly challenging when young women who have been told to guard their virginity and remain naïve about sex are then expected to change all of that in one night when they get married.

The Shulammite woman, in contrast to traditional expectations of female sexuality, is not cast in the role of naïve gatekeeper and has much more to say than “no.” Simply counting the lines spoken by each character makes this clear. The Shulammite woman and the “daughters of Jerusalem” speak more than the male lover and the brothers.16 The Song is sometimes referred to as the Song of Solomon, because it has at least some connections to King Solomon, though the timing and direct connection are disputed. Yet Song of Songs is a better name for the text, since

cbeinternational.org

it so freely celebrates love from a woman’s perspective. This title should be understood as a superlative—a most excellent song, an exemplary song—and the woman’s prominent role is central to its goodness and wholeness. The woman’s prominent role is especially salient considering the patriarchal contexts of the Bible with texts shaped primarily by men. The Song of Songs is the only book in the Bible in which a woman clearly speaks more than a man or men. Her words begin and end the Song, she speaks throughout in the first person “I” and “myself,” and she refers to “my soul” and “my heart” far more frequently than the male speaker does.17 The Shulammite woman illustrates qualities of a healthy sexuality, which Nicola Curtin and her coauthors describe as a woman who knows when to speak and is empowered to speak instead of staying silent.18 The Shulammite models what it means to have and use one’s voice: She communicates her desires and seeks her beloved in the city streets (3:2), she advises her friends not to awaken love until it is ready (2:7, 3:5, 8:4), and she boldly holds her lover and will not let go, leading him openly into her mother’s house (3:4). This is a woman who voices both her needs and her boundaries, thus modeling healthy sexual knowledge.

In contrast to being knowledgeable, if a woman remains ignorant about sex, then sex is primarily about a man’s pleasure, needs, and experience, and the woman becomes a tool for his needs. It is worth noting that Bible translations sometimes refer to intercourse as “knowing.” For example, the KJV translates Gen 4:1 as, “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she became pregnant.”

Sometimes, the sexual experience is translated as “had sexual relations” or “made love.” “Knowing,” however, could be the most healthy and holistic terminology for reciprocal knowing, giving, and receiving as the standard of sexual health. If knowing is ongoing openness to learning one’s partner and oneself, then sex cannot center more on one person or the other in the relationship. There is a problem if sex becomes about only one person’s pleasure or needs. Rather, knowing and learning one another in a relationship where neither is the primary gatekeeper or gate opener is healthy. Seeking to know a partner’s voice and sharing one’s own voice in safety and freedom, as the couple in Song of Song models, enables healthy sexual knowledge.

Sexual Embodiment Second, the Shulammite models healthy sexual embodiment.

Sexual embodiment concerns a person’s comfort with her or his body during sexual encounters.19 Because body image plays an important role in sexual pleasure and function, researchers argue that people who are distracted by concerns about their physical appearance experience lower levels of sexual pleasure, arousability, assertiveness, responsible condom use, as well as ambivalence in sexual decision making and sexual risk taking.20 In cultures where women are valued largely based on physical appearance, they can “experience their bodies more as observers than as actors, focusing on how their bodies look on the outside rather than on how they feel or function.”21 Unhealthy

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 11

sexual embodiment leads to a disconnect from one’s body and contributes to silence in regard to one’s own needs, eventually leading to sexual dysfunction.22 The Shulammite woman, however, is confident in her sexual embodiment. While the daughters of Jerusalem wonder what her male counterpart sees in her (7:1), the Shulammite woman is not insecure. She asserts her beauty in spite of the fact that she has worked in the hot sun, weathering her skin and hands.

Daphna Arbel argues that it is with pride and confidence that the woman proclaims: “I am black and beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar” (1:5).23 Renita Weems similarly suggests that the Shulammite woman has overcome the physical stereotypes and biases that sometimes cause physical insecurity, prompting the reader to “examine our prejudices against women on the low end of the economic totem pole who have to do day work, menial work, and back-breaking labor to pay the bills.”24 The Shulammite woman also exhibits healthy embodiment by showing no signs of shame concerning her sexuality.

Historically, Christians have tended to view the body as an enemy instead of a gift, and this overemphasis on the dangers of embodiment “tends to result in anxiety, shame, and objectification of others (seeing others as commodities to be used for our own purposes or as frightening obstacles to our own right living).”25 Combined, these realities create unhealthy purity cultures that contribute to unhealthy perceptions of sex and sexuality.

Popular Christian author and blogger Sarah Bessey describes a disturbing experience with purity culture that exemplifies a danger I often hear from young women in my own ministry.

Bessey was nineteen years old and “crazy in love with Jesus” when she heard a preacher speak about the importance of staying sexually pure for marriage. As an illustration, he passed around a cup of water and asked everyone to spit into it. Bessey describes how some boys hawked their worst into the cup while everyone laughed. She writes that the preacher then

sexual experiences were those of molestation and rape. Thus, when talking to women of any age about sexuality, pastors in particular and the church in general must discuss how to make healthy sexual choices without resorting to judgment, shame, or stereotyping. The Song of Songs offers a powerful and positive model of healthy sexual embodiment that is absent of shame and refuses to adhere to unhealthy patterns and outcomes of purity culture.

Sexual Agency

Lastly, the Shulammite woman models healthy sexual agency. In unhealthy sexuality, women do not initiate sexual relationships or assert their needs and desires.27 Instead, they are unknowledgeable and passive, yet available. Acceptance of these norms interferes with women’s sexual agency and subsequent sexual health.28 Because of their exposure to traditional femininity ideologies that undermine agency, women need models of healthy sexual agency. The Shulammite woman provides healthy examples by taking sexual initiative in ch. 8 of the Song. Here she awakens her lover under an apple tree (8:5) and speaks freely of kissing him and leading him to the privacy of home (8:1–3). She is uninhibited by the stereotypes traditionally attributed to women who initiate romantic and sexual activities.29 Phyllis Trible points out that the Shulammite woman’s agency exemplifies what it looks like when there is no male dominance, no female subordination, and no stereotyping of either sex. Specifically, the portrayal of the woman defies the connotations of “second sex.” She works, keeping vineyards and pasturing flocks. Throughout the Song she is independent, fully the equal of the man. Although at times he approaches her, more often she initiates their meetings. Her movements are bold and open.30 The Song of Songs paints a picture of a fully egalitarian sexual experience that does not allow for objectification of either partner. It is a broken and unhealthy sexuality that makes dull objects of life-filled humans created in the image of God. The Song celebrates a relationship in which both partners know and held up that cup of cloudy saliva from the crowd and are known, not as objects or tools for the other person’s pleasure, asked, “Who wants to drink this?!” And everyone in but as fully respected and dignified human beings who mutually the crowd made barfing noises, no way, gross! “This is and consensually give and take. Neither the Shulammite woman what you are like if you have sex before marriage,” he nor her lover wields exclusive power. For example, ch. 5 and ch. said seriously, “you are asking your future husband or 7 demonstrate that both partners take turns initiating intimacy. wife to drink this cup.”26 When he initiates intimacy in ch. 5, she initially hesitates, Bessey was not a virgin, and she shares how it took her years to saying, “I had put off my garment; how could I put it on again? overcome the shame of that well-intentioned talk about sex. If I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them?” (5:3 NRSV). She women hear messages that their bodies are polluted—or another is tired and has already settled in for the night. Later, however, theme of purity culture, that they she regrets her hesitation and runs The Song proclaims that sexual intimacy, are stumbling blocks for men—then after him. Then in ch. 7, she is the one women may struggle with unhealthy a central human experience, is appropriate who invites him to the garden to see sexual embodiment. After all, years of religious conversation for God’s people. if the blossoms on the vine are open sexual shame and repression cannot (7:12), a thinly veiled sexual metaphor. and do not instantly disappear when people get married. It Sex can become a tool for abusive power when one partner must should also be noted that some women hearing such messages always initiate and the other partner always holds the sex key. had no choice in their own virginity status because their first It is important for sexual health and agency that both partners

12 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

cbeinternational.org

sometimes initiate and that both have the freedom to decline.

Both should have moments of running after the other, not only sexually but emotionally and spiritually as well. The Song of Songs models this mutuality and healthy sexual agency for both partners, because both have the ability to initiate sex, consent to sex, and decline sex, while still being honored and cherished in the relationship.

Conclusion The Song of Songs is an “exceptional text,” as it provides ancient— yet profoundly relevant—insight into an intimate relationship in which there is an “absence of dominance and hierarchy” and a “blurring of boundaries and distinctions.”31 However, many still see sex and religion as fundamentally incompatible. I regularly read the Song with college students in a Bible course I teach.

While many students appreciate the discussion, a few still insist that sex is not an appropriate topic for Bible class or even for the Bible itself. Some even vote for removing it from the canon. I often overhear at least one student say, “That was awkward,” as they walk out of the classroom. It is ironic that “locker-room talk” is forgiven in our sex-saturated society but talking about sex in Bible class is uncomfortable. The fact that we can be surrounded by sexual talk and images in every aspect of culture but feel like we must pretend sex does not exist when we pray, open the Bible, or walk into a chapel testifies to the failure of the church to engage in the reality of sexual experience in a healthy way.

The solution to this problem will have to be multifaceted, but a good place to start is to teach the Song more often. It instructs us the most when we simply let the poem say what it says and do what it does, which is celebrate sexuality in a spiritual context.

It educates us about God and Israel, and about Christ and the church. It also helps us imagine a fuller definition of intimacy— physical, emotional, spiritual intimacy. The Song of Songs offers a counter-balance to the stories in scripture about women who are “scandalized for their sexuality, confined to procreation without fulfilling sex, and forgotten because of their submission to repressive gender roles.”32 In the Song, however, women find permission to initiate, enjoy, and long for the erotic. The Song proclaims that sexual intimacy, a central human experience, is appropriate religious conversation for God’s people.

Because of the prevalence of traditional femininity ideologies that have subjugated women and shamed them for their sexuality, and because of unhealthy sexual narratives in our daily news, it is vital to teach an alternative spiritual narrative. The Song is an example of lovers who talk about sex and intimacy in a healthy mutual exchange. Women who are overcoming teaching, language, or experiences that have sexually disempowered them can be encouraged by the sensual and passionate Shulammite woman who takes initiative, for she seeks her lover, she is responsive to him, she wants intimacy, and she is intimate. She illustrates that healthy communal relationships—friendship, conversation, and support from other women, including her mother—are central to her health.

cbeinternational.org

Wise and self-aware, she teaches about the mighty flame of her sexuality and is knowledgeable about her own body, her lover’s body, and the natural world. She also makes it clear that for her, love is more important than wealth or status. As she talks about kissing, touching, tasting, and smelling her lover, the Shulammite woman does not use crass or vulgar language, exemplifying how it is possible to speak unapologetically and appropriately about healthy sex and intimacy. Put simply, she, together with her lover, models a remarkably healthy, equitable, sexual relationship for a world in dire need of such examples.33

Notes 1. David A. Fahrenthold, “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation about Women in 2005,” Washington Post (Oct 8, 2016).

2. See, for example, Editorial Board, “Editorial: A National Moment of Reckoning for Abusers and Creeps,” Chicago Tribune (Nov 17, 2017).

3. Resources I have found useful include Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); Lauren Winner, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (New York: HarperOne, 2016); and Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (New York: HarperOne: 2012).

4. Robert Alter, Strong as Death Is Love: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. W. Norton, 2015), 4.

5. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (Bristol, 1765), quoted in Tremper Longman, Song of Songs, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 34.

6. Also important are interpretations that bridge the divide, as is the case in many places in this issue of Priscilla Papers.

7. Jonneke Bekkenkamp, “Into Another Scene of Choices,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine (Sheffield: JSOT, 2000), 86.

8. World Health Organization, Defining Sexual Health: Report of a Technical Consultation on Sexual Health, 28–31 January 2002 (Geneva, 2006).

9. When I first began to recognize a need for resources regarding healthy sexuality in young women, the following article began to shape my response to emerging adults in the university setting: Nicola Curtin, L. Monique Ward, Ann Merriwether, and Allison Caruthers, “Femininity Ideology and Sexual Health in Young Women: A Focus on Sexual Knowledge, Embodiment, and Agency,” International Journal of Sexual Health 23, no. 1 (2011): 48–62.

10. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 49. Cf. H. Amaro, A. Raj, and E. Reed, “On the Margin: Power and Women’s HIV Risk Reduction Strategies,” Sex Roles 42 (2001): 723–49; G. L. Fox, “Social Control of Women through a Value Construct,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (1977): 805–17.

11. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 49.

12. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 50.

13. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 49.

14. K. A. McClintock, Sexual Shame: An Urgent Call to Healing (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 12.

15. McClintock, Sexual Shame, 12.

16. Renita Weems, “The Song of Songs,” NIB, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 5:364.

17. Iain M. Duguid, The Song of Songs, TOTC (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2015), 24.

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 13

18. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 56.

19. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 51.

20. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 51.

21. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 51.

22. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 57.

23. Daphna Arbel, “My Vineyard, My Very Own, Is for Myself,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 93.

24. Renita Weems, What Matters Most: Ten Lessons in Living Passionately from the Song of Solomon (West Bloomfield: Warner, 2004), 51–52.

25. Glen G. Scorgie, Simon Chan, Gordon T. Smith, and James D. Smith III, eds., Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2011), 746.

26. Sarah Bessey, “In Which I Am Damaged Goods” (Jan 29, 2013), http:// sarahbessey.com/in-which-i-am-damaged-goods/, emphasis original.

27. K. Greene and S. L. Faulkner, “Gender, Belief in the Sexual Double Standard, and Sexual Talk in Heterosexual Dating Relationships,” Sex Roles 53 (2005): 239–51.

28. Curtin et al., “Femininity Ideology,” 54.

29. Arbel, “My Vineyard,” 95.

30. Phyllis Trible, “Love’s Lyrics Redeemed,” in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 161. See also Longman, Song of Songs, 66 (“The implication of a canonical reading of the Song is that the book speaks of the healing of intimacy . . . one of the most remarkable features of the Song is the confident voice of the woman as

14 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

she pursues relationship with the man. The man responds in kind, and it is fair to characterize their relationship as egalitarian.”) and Arthur H. Lewis, “Equality of Sexes in Marriage: Exposition of the Song of Songs,” Priscilla Papers 11, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 45 (“As an Old Testament scholar, I am concerned to point out the equality of the bride with her husband in this story mainly to correct the common idea that in a biblical view of marriage the man must be the aggressor or initiator, and that he should always exercise a more dominant role.”)

31. Alicia Ostriker, “A Holy of Holies: The Song of Songs as Countertext,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, 49.

32. Renita Weems, Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 168.

33. Robin McCall, “‘Most Beautiful Among Women’: Feminist/ Womanist Contributions to the Reading of the Song of Songs,” RevExp 105 (Summer 2008): 420.

SARA BARTON is University Chaplain at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She holds a Doctor of Ministry from Lipscomb University’s Hazelip School of Theology and a master’s degree in Spiritual Formation from Spring Arbor University. Dr. Barton has authored A Woman Called: Piecing Together the Ministry Puzzle (Leafwood, 2012), a memoir about her call to ministry.

cbeinternational.org

My Resounding “Yes” to God and Embracing My Sexuality: Singleness and the Song of Songs A Sermon by Elizabeth Gentry

“A sermon on Song of Solomon! But single people aren’t supposed to read that book!” This was my friend’s surprised and sarcastic reply as I told him I was working on this sermon. I laughed one of those rather somber “this is too real” kind of laughs, realizing the great irony of writing a sermon on a book that has had a painful history of being repressed or denied for those of us who are single.

I grew up in the I Kissed Dating Goodbye era of evangelical church history (for which my mother has recently apologized for ever having me read).1 The purity culture was a strong force in my childhood and adolescent years, teaching all of us that sex and any form of sexual expression was to be feared.2 Men were highly sexual beings and therefore women tossed on their loose turtlenecks, baggy pants, and wore little makeup to make sure we didn’t become labeled “temptress.”3 Now before I get too far, I need to dismiss some concerns you may have about where my sermon is heading. Before my words are dismissed as the ramblings of a progressive twenty-six-year-old pastor who’s too easily swayed by modern culture—I am (at least partially) grateful for my conservative evangelical upbringing when it comes to my sexuality. For all the flaws I see within it, the purity culture did indeed keep me safe. My fiancé and I are indeed abstaining from sex before marriage and we would both advise others to do the same.

But the purity culture also, inadvertently, taught me to embrace shame. Something I didn’t realize until my fiancé kissed me for the first time and my physical reaction made me blush, lower my eyes, and feel as if I had done something wrong.

From conversations I’ve had with many other single women— both older and younger—I’m not the only one wrestling with this experience. It seems as though, for single women, our sexuality is to be repressed until the marriage bed (which, of course, is then supposed to simply explode out of us on our wedding night), and up until that point we dare not let our sexual bodies speak! Knowing how hard this has been for me, who, as my fiancé and I are discussing marriage, can “see the light at the end of the tunnel” so to speak—how much more challenging for women who are not dating and deeply long for such a relationship!

And so the question I’m asking of myself, of single women, and of all those who care about a woman who is single is, “how is this working for you?” I’ve spent many years in extreme confusion for what God truly desired for my life. I am not convinced this repression of sexuality while I’m single will lead to a healthy embrace of sex in all its goodness once I am married. We cannot train our bodies to live in shame our whole lives and then simply turn off that shame once we marry. And more importantly, I do not believe a God who came to save us

cbeinternational.org

from our fear, guilt, and shame (and furthermore, a God who created sex and calls it “good”) would ever desire a single woman (or man!) to live this way. Therefore, it was with a bit of fire in my bones that I approached this sermon on Song of Songs and singleness as a subject severely lacking but desperately needed in our churches today. May God use this text to release us in our singleness to shout a resounding “yes,” both to God and to our own sexuality. So if you are single and haven’t spent much time, if any, reading Song of Songs—do so now. (And do so before you finish reading this sermon.) Perhaps you’ll notice a few of the things I noticed myself.

We have a history in the church of turning this erotic love poem into an allegory for God and Israel or God and the church, sometimes even believing this allegorical interpretation was indeed the author’s original intent.4 Now, by no means do I intend to dismiss the interpretive work of many scholars who have presented the text in this way. Reading this poem as God speaking to God’s people presents a beautiful and loving image of our God, and allegory is not out of the question. In fact, after reading the text closely I discovered the lyrics to one of my favorite worship songs actually comes from Song of Songs!5 However, when anyone reads it—even when searching for allegorical and theological meaning—we all say, “wow, this is extremely sexual,” and start to squirm in our seats. It’s the elephant in the room everyone sees but no one wants to discuss.

Therefore, without denying the work of many wise scholars and Christian leaders, I believe we should also engage the text at face value. This is a poem about two people expressing their sexuality.

Can it not be both allegory and a lens into our own humanity?

As my professor, Scot McKnight, says, “No matter how hard some well-intentioned parent, Sunday School teacher or pastor tries to convince the young Christian kid that this book—smack dab in the Bible—is an allegory of our relationship to God, it sure does sound like love poetry. So it is.”6 Until we stop denying or masking the overt sexual imagery in the text, we will not be able to see God’s good design for human sexuality and what this means for us as single people.

We don’t have to look far for a redeeming point for female sexuality—the woman speaks first! “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:1 NRSV). Throughout the poem, the woman longs for, speaks to, and initiates sexual intimacy.

Furthermore, there is little indicating these lovers were married in the first place!7 As a woman who grew up believing female sexuality was to be repressed, ashamed of, and always on the passive side of a relationship, this bold expression of her sexuality was eye opening. Yes—women are sexual beings too and it is acceptable, even encouraged, to express this and feel this way!

To find such sexual language coming from a single woman in

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 15

scripture is astounding, considering how the world of scripture was steeped in patriarchy. And yet, here is a woman, refusing to be passive, initiating love and proclaiming her desires regardless of what her society around her would want her to do. A far cry from the passive woman who “kissed dating goodbye”—a mere recipient of the love of a man. We are not called to live out the constraints of the fall where women are “simply ‘Eve,’ defined by her role as mother and destined to relate to her man only as powerful superior.” Instead, we are equal persons, designed by God to both experience and express sexuality without shame.8 The problem I’ve so often run into, not only pastoring in this purity culture generation, but living it out as well, is the extreme swing many women make to the opposite end of the spectrum in embracing their sexuality. Upon coming to the realization that, yes, female sexuality is to be embraced and delighted in, caution and wisdom are thrown to the wind. Any and all teaching that smells of a conservative sexual ethic is immediately disregarded as shameful. No one can tell me what to do with my body! This is one central reason the church must begin reshaping how we talk about sexuality! As long as sexuality continues to be repressed and seen as shameful for single people, we will continue having a broken and ungodly sexuality. One commentator writes on this saying, “The collateral damage that the attempt to use Christian faith to repress important aspects of our humanity causes is huge, for if faith and humanness are set in conflict with each other, sooner or later a human being will find the attempt to manage conflict intolerable and will choose humanness.”9 I like how theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it in a rather humorous way, “no ethic, not even the most conservative, should be judged by its ability to influence the behavior of teenagers in the back seat of a car.”10 Traditional evangelical answers to sexual ethics are no longer helpful in a post-Christendom world, and the church must now open people’s imagination for what godly sexual transformation can look like.11 Perhaps there’s a way we can redeem sexuality in the way God intends without swinging the pendulum quite so far. “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or wild does: do not store up or awaken love until it is ready!” (Song 2:7 NRSV). At first glance, her words sound like the same rhetoric of sexual repression I’ve been trying to refute this entire time!

And it is indeed a warning. Love and sexuality is a great and powerful gift from God not to be taken lightly or out of the correct time and circumstances.12 But even these daughters of Jerusalem celebrate and engage in their own sexuality by rejoicing with the couple in their love.13 Therefore, I read these words and hear them quite differently from the “don’t have sex before you’re married” speeches I heard growing up. Because all of those messages, at the end of the day, stem from the fear and shame of spoiling your marriage bed.

What if, instead, our conversation around singleness and sexuality revolved around answering the question—what kind of people are we becoming? Sexual ethics is not a matter of “what can I do and not do as a single person.” It is a matter of “how can I live out the life God has called me to because I love 16 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

God and desire to do so?” I wouldn’t normally quote so heavily from a commentary in a sermon, but Iain Provan’s commentary and reflection on Song of Songs says this too well not to share.

Christians are called, therefore, to proclaim a resounding “yes” to sexual expression, in the context of a resounding “yes” to God. It is in this proclamation, rather than repression of humanness and in our preaching of negative rules, that the goodness of God will be seen by others. . . . We have presented God to the world . . . as a God of unreasonable prohibition (Gen 3:1) rather than as a God who blesses us with freedom.14 When we proclaim a resounding “yes” to sexual expression as single people, it must first and foremost be in the context of our original resounding “yes” to Jesus Christ and living into the life for which we were truly created. We let go of the fear and guilt and shame and embrace who we are as sexual human beings within the context of who God has created us to be. My fiancé and I are not abstaining from sex because some pastor told us to or because we’re afraid it will someday ruin our marriage. We’re abstaining from sex because we love God first and foremost and desire to experience the life God has for us! I would be lying if I told you neither of us ever struggle with shame. However, not a day goes by that I am not filled with an inexpressible joy and love for him as we pursue each other and God together and embrace our sexuality in godly ways.

But before I end this message, I feel the need to say one final thing. I’m fully aware there are single godly women everywhere whose struggle with embracing sexuality is entirely different from and much more challenging than mine. I even hesitated sharing several comments about my fiancé and me because, well, I guess in a way I’m not truly single. While I am only twenty-six, I spent many years angry at God and believing the worst in myself because I was single and had no hope of a future relationship. And in those days, reading Song of Songs only brought more tears of frustration and loneliness, not an embrace of my sexuality. To these women (and men) who read my words, I refuse to make any empty (and unbiblical) promises of “just follow God and God will give you what you desire” or “just be content and God will bring you the relationship you need.” I heard these messages all the time and none of them were ever helpful. Know that I see you, have felt your pain, and haven’t forgotten how challenging sexuality can be within singleness.

But God still desires to give us a new imagination for how we all embrace sexuality—single, dating, or married—one without fear, shame, or guilt and certainly without despair.

Perhaps the best definition of sexuality I’ve ever heard comes from Friar Ron Rolheiser. On his blog, Rolheiser presents a godly embrace of sexuality for which everyone—regardless of relationship status—can strive. He writes, Sexuality is a beautiful, good, extremely powerful, sacred energy, given us by God and experienced in every cell of our being as an irrepressible urge to overcome our incompleteness, to move towards unity and

cbeinternational.org

consummation with that which is beyond us. It is also the pulse to celebrate, to give and to receive delight, to find our way back to the Garden of Eden where we can be naked, shameless, and without worry and work as we make love in the moonlight. . . . Sexuality is not simply about finding a lover or even finding a friend. It is about overcoming separateness by giving life and blessing it.15 Embracing our sexuality while single is not about sexual conquest and denying the life God would have for us. Embracing sexuality while single is the ability to see where our lives and our world are incomplete and finding ways to give and receive life in the midst of the brokenness. Does this image Rolheiser presents take away the sting and pain of loneliness? No, not always. But slowly and surely God begins to open our imagination to see the transformation of our desires begin to take shape around what God has for us. So may we all learn how to embrace our sexuality by giving the best of ourselves to all relationships and all goodness in life. May our resounding “yes” to God ring out and show the world a godly sexuality in all its fullness—whatever form that may take.

Notes 1. See the sermon by Dawn Gentry in this issue of Priscilla Papers.

The reference is to Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2003).

2. There is an excellent article in The Washington Post about the reaction to Joshua Harris’s book and the subsequent effects on women.

See Liz Lenz, “‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye’ Told Me to Stay Pure until Marriage. I Still Have a Stain on My Heart,” Washington Post (July 27, 2016), sec. Acts of Faith. Opinion.

3. Consider, for example, the “loose woman” described in Prov 2:16–19.

4. Robert W. Jenson, Song of Songs, IBC (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 11.

cbeinternational.org

5. “You Won’t Relent,” words and music by Misty Edwards, quotes Song 8:6–7.

6. Scot McKnight, “Love in the Key of Delight 1,” Jesus Creed blog (April 2, 2007).

7. Many scholars have noted the lovers in Song of Solomon are single and the poem itself is about “sexual attraction and physical beauty.” Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, AB (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 205.

8. Iain Provan, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 275.

9. Provan, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, 251.

10. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 182.

11. This topic merits a whole other sermon. For further insight into our modern culture, I recommend Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2004).

12. Provan, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, 286.

13. See Song 1:4, 5:1, 9.

14. Provan, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, 252. Emphasis mine.

15. Ron Rolheisher, “A Mature Sexuality.” http://ronrolheiser.com/ a-mature-sexuality (May 28, 1998).

LIZ GENTRY holds a BA in Bible from Milligan College and is currently a Master of Arts in Theology and Mission student at Northern Seminary near Chicago, Illinois. She served as Pastor of Hospitality at NewStory Church in Chicago, though she recently entered a time of sabbatical. In the meantime, she finds herself pastoring as a full time barista and is excited to see where God may lead her next. Liz’s mother, Dawn Gentry, also authored a sermon for this issue of Priscilla Papers.

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 17

Mutuality, Mystery, and Marriage: Love in the Song of Songs A Sermon by Dawn Gentry

When I was a teenager, I wrote dozens of love songs. Sappy, insipid love songs. Actually, I shouldn’t even call them love songs, since most were about heartbreak more than love. As my young life progressed between various relationships (let’s just call them crushes), there were months of pining, dreaming of what could have been, mourning what was lost, or . . . you get the picture. I was educated in the ways of love by music, movies, and Teen Beat magazine. Perhaps I am not alone in this matter, which would explain the popularity of so-called chick-flicks and the Hallmark Channel. Love songs made up the soundtrack of my life and, more often than not, emphasized loss and longing over long-term relationships.

This emphasis on love songs should not be surprising, since poetry has been the universal language of love for centuries.

The oldest known example of love poetry is a Sumerian text titled The Love Song for Shu-Sin. It’s from about 2000 BC, thus predating Solomon by about 1000 years.1 While the Song of Songs is traditionally attributed to Solomon, most modern scholars believe it is more likely a collection of poems assembled long after Solomon, perhaps between 500 and 300 BC. Commentators Athalya Brenner and Marvin Pope assert that at least one author is female2 and discern a “plurality of voices” as well.3 Whoever its author, the Song of Songs is a love poem in the tradition of other ancient near-eastern writings, and its provocative language (while sometimes guarded) leaves no question of the author’s intent.

While God is not mentioned in the Song,4 the book is one of the most theologized and preached in all of scripture. The long-presumed allegorical interpretation probably facilitated its acceptance into the canon.5 Additionally, Ellen Davis suggests the Song’s frequent use of quoted scripture texts, “in many cases connected phrases, vivid images, and terms too specific for their other contexts to be forgotten by those familiar with Biblical language,” as reason for its approval.6 Whatever the reason for its inclusion in the canon, the Song is a lyrical and extraordinary addition to an already diverse collection of scripture texts.

Regardless of its often-preached status through the centuries, I can count the number of sermons I have heard on this book on one hand. This is odd, in a sense, because in the conservative churches of my youth, marriage was expected, desired, and normative. But the romantic, even erotic voice of the Song was unwelcome on Sunday mornings. Sex was not a topic for the worship assembly, unless we were being reminded to save it for marriage. Sex was one of many dangers we were expected to “just say no” to, including especially serious matters such as drugs and alcohol, as well as other activities such as dancing and mixed gender swimming. Evidently the True Love Waits people had not read the Song’s explicit language closely enough to realize that both lovers are single.7 The scandalous reality of their singleness stands in sharp contrast to the cultural values 18 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

of evangelical purity culture in which I raised my teenagers. I’m ironically thankful not to have realized this when they were still at home asking questions about sexual morals.

In fact, the Song shows us a “love unconnected with marriage or procreation,” as opposed to some parts of the OT which view women as breeders or property.8 Indeed, the description of these young lovers is offered with no “reticence, moral judgment, or great deference to legal or social constraints.”9 Another scholar agrees, noting the Song simply delights in “physical beauty and sexual attraction.”10 While many twentieth-century preachers have ignored its message, its very presence in the canon and its healthy emphasis on mutual, pleasurable sex is worth consideration for modern Christians, whether married or single.

The Song’s language speaks plainly, but also draws many metaphors from nature. “Winter is past,” says he (2:11) as they revel on a green couch under beams of cedar (1:17). With spring’s arrival they are free to roam the vineyard again (2:15). Indeed, the rural setting with its description of flowers and fruit trees in bloom reminds us of the garden—Eden—which was lost, but is now found. The Song’s poets engage all the senses to describe their delight in love: the taste of apples and raisins (2:5), figs (2:13), honey and milk (4:11), and the best wine (7:2); the smell of spices (1:13, 4:14), pine (1:17), blossoms (2:13), and oils (4:10); the sound of singing, of turtledoves (2:12), and even her voice (2:14); and the touch of a lover who “would not let him go” (3:4), whose “right hand embraced” (2:6, 8:3), and whose kisses are praised throughout (1:1, 4:3, 11, 7:9, 8:1). The passages where the lovers describe each other (e.g., 5:10–16, 7:1–9) are so explicit it seems likely to be a narration of their touch, and not just their sight.

Yet for those who grew up being warned against sexual expression, getting married does not necessarily flip a switch to “turn on” the passionate love described in the Song. The all-ornothing approach, often expected of teens in various generations including my own, did not well prepare some of us to enjoy our spouses fully in the marriage bed. In regard to sexuality we are too often torn between these extremes of fiercely repressing or blindly obeying the desire to have sex and, in that regard, perhaps the Song can help us find a better way.11 A middle way where we accept the body we have in order to fully appreciate the body we share with another. When we abandon the “cultural blinders” that cause us to ignore the message of the Song, we might find “that this ancient text has something new to teach us about how to redeem sexuality and love in our fallen world.”12

Mutuality—A Reversal of the Curse One clear redemptive move in the Song is its mutuality between lovers in contrast to the fall and punishment of Gen 3. Pope asserts that in the Song, “love has its end in itself” and is not merely a tool for procreation. The lovers have an “alliance” and live in a “free and reciprocal face-to-face relation” where they

cbeinternational.org

“alternate [taking] initiative.”13 This mutuality leaves no room for “male dominance, female subordination, or stereotyping of either sex.”14 Alicia Ostriker agrees, noting the “egalitarian image of mutual love and desire” which reflects a “powerful connection which is not subordination.”15 These readings of the Song look back to the earlier creation account where God “created humankind in his image . . . male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) and then gave them both dominion over the earth, where “indeed, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). This mutual sexuality is celebrated by Adam and Eve “without shame,” a vision to which modern married couples can aspire.16 Additionally, and importantly, the song overturns the punishment given to the woman in Gen 3:16 (“your desire shall be for your husband . . .”) by using nearly identical language in Song 7:10 (“his desire is for me”). “Man and woman now meet in full mutuality,” affirms Davis. “As [the lovers] come together in the garden of the Song, every terrible exile, from Eden and Jerusalem, is reversed.”17 Brenner affirms this assessment, claiming you cannot understand one or the other fully without reading them in tandem.18 “The love relationships in the Song of Songs are a return to a psychological (internal) Eden through the redeeming power of love,” concludes Brenner. “In that garden, gender inequality, together with material and social conflicts between the sexes, pale into insignificance.”19 This describes a “new creation” existence to which we can aspire. Wouldn’t you like to live into the reality of the Song rather than “settling for the reality of [our] fallenness”?20 For Christians who wish to lean into God’s “new creation” rather than concede defeat to the fall, the redemptive message of the Song is indeed good news.

Mystery—A Return to Eden’s Intimacy Another way love and marriage can be redeemed through the message of the Song is by embracing the mystery of intimacy.

Though modern scholars focus on the straightforward reading of the text, for many hundreds of years it was viewed almost exclusively as an allegory of Christ’s love for the church (or God’s love for Israel).21 Yet the allegorical reading is not inherently bad. As one encounters meaning behind the plain text of the Song, it is allowed to point forward in the grand narrative of scripture.22 This metaphorical interpretation may then instruct modern readings as we consider the inherent mystery of married, sexual intimacy. Pope notes, “it is in the reality of this human love that the reality of the divine love is shown.”23 Rather than dismiss the allegory altogether, Pope insists that if we fail to see and understand the sacred element of the text, it becomes only a secular, sexual, profane poem. Yet, if we fail to see and understand the sexual element of the text, it becomes only an allegorical poem about Christ and the church. “They can only be understood together,” he concludes.24 Those who have experienced “one flesh” in a committed marriage—where one plus one equals one, not two—may understand how the sexual encounter can move us closer to God. The mystery is illustrated by the Song’s celebration of “a love so intense [it is] perhaps as close as mortals can come to

cbeinternational.org

participation in something divine.”25 Another scholar agrees, noting that love in the Song is “simultaneously natural and spiritual.” Along with other mystical traditions, we may “speak of God as the beloved . . . [just as those] in love see the beloved’s face and form as holy,” highlighting this intersection between sexual and sacred.26 The Song provides us with words that help us “meet God as Lover, as the mystics have always known.”27 The intimacy known by Adam and Eve in the garden includes an unbroken, intimate relationship with both God and each other.

Likewise, the Song’s imagery alludes to “a return to the garden from which we were first exiled.”28 In her book Embracing the Body, Tara Owens suggests that Adam’s “knowing” Eve in Gen 4 is “the first reparative act outside the garden of Eden . . . [it is] a hope for more intimacy restored.” In the same way, married, sexual intimacy can point us back toward the “intimacy in which we’re intended to live, intimacy with each other and with God.”29 This inherent mystery of marital intimacy should not surprise those familiar with NT texts on marriage. When Paul addresses husbands and wives in Eph 5, he explains that the reason for a husband’s sacrificial love is that she is a “member of his body” (5:30). Paul even describes the marriage relationship as a mystery as it illustrates Christ and the church (5:32). While some scholars prioritize the topics of headship and submission in this chapter, Paul’s focus is not on headship, but on oneness. Husband and wife are “one flesh,” which enriches our understanding of Paul’s words in Eph 4 that Christ is the head “from whom the whole body . . . is working together” (4:15–16). Marriage is meant to be a “picture of one being . . . an image of unity.”30 The Song’s poetry reflects the mystery of oneness and unity between lovers, and in so doing, returns the reader to Eden’s intimacy.

Marriage—A Reflection of God’s Love This mystery of married love through sexual intimacy may help us understand the depth of love God has for us. Even though we may not know God’s essence or “how our penultimate human love is like God’s,” Robert Jenson reminds us that God’s love helps us “know truth” about the love we share in marriage.31 Our sexuality is an important factor in that truth, even if painful memories or unhealthy relationships sometimes overshadow its benefits. “Our sexuality is an essential part of being human,” notes Owens, “a part that has been sadly unintegrated by the church and scandalously over exposed by society.”32 Human sexuality is one way we can embody the reality of being created in the image of God, male and female. As our sexuality draws us together in “connectedness and intimacy,” we reflect the “image of the interwoven Trinity.”33 Our willingness to redeem sexuality from society’s misuse can allow God’s love to be reflected through us into the lives of others.

When Brenner describes love in the Song, she acknowledges it, somewhat amusedly, as a “basically fulfilling experience if not always easy to handle.”34 Marriage can sometimes be challenging, but we can still embrace the “enjoyment, celebration, and sensuousness” that sexual intimacy provides.35 “When lovers

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 19

have joy in the garden,” Davis reminds us “all the ruptures that occurred in Eden are healed.”36 These ruptures may include emotional abuse, unrealistic expectations, repressed shame, failed communication, and many more. We recognize our brokenness outside the garden. “Apart from our relationship with God, we are deeply aware of our own loneliness, the fact that we’re cut off from something we deeply desire.”37 This longing that remains—even in the best of marriages—points us toward a desire to experience God’s love through intimate fellowship.

In order to move toward this goal and reflect God’s love in our marriages, only daily self-sacrifice will do. Paul describes this love as “looking to the interests of others” and “emptying oneself” (Phil 2:4–7). Owens expands on Paul’s definition, saying that true marital intimacy cannot happen “without repeated movement toward one another, a practicing of the self-giving love and vulnerability that builds oneness . . . [which happens] over years of choosing for one another in all areas of our lives.”38 Making choices on behalf of our spouse includes our realization that “not all longings are meant to be fulfilled”39 and frees us of the unrealistic expectation that our spouse can or should meet every need, or fulfill every desire. Even in the Song, she sometimes “sought him, but found him not” (3:2, 5:6). Our marriages do not “complete” us, contrary to what the romantic comedy “Jerry McGuire” would have us believe. Our marriages serve as a testing ground that can help us become more like Christ, as we lay down our lives daily for those we love.40 While our marriages are imperfect and incomplete, they still obtain the capacity to reflect the love of God which is perfected and completed in Christ’s sacrifice for us. While the sexual intimacy of marriage can add to our incomplete knowledge of God, someday we will “know fully, even as [we] have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). As the Song reminds us through its garden imagery, the curse has been reversed and Eden’s intimacy can be regained in Christ. We can embrace mutuality, vulnerability, and authenticity in our marriages. Our daily decisions to put spouse before self manifest the perfect, faithful love of God, which never fails. And God is still in the business of making all things new.

Notes 1. https://www.ancient.eu/article/750/the-worlds-oldest-love-poem/.

2. Athalya Brenner, Song of Songs, OTG (Sheffield: JSOT, 1982), 13– 18; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 22–25.

3. Brenner, Song of Songs, 29. See also John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 481.

4. Also true of the book of Esther.

5. “The Song of Solomon,” Harper Collins Study Bible, ed. Wayne Meeks (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 903.

6. Ellen Davis, “Losing a Friend: The Loss of the Old Testament to the Church,” in Jews, Christians, and the Theology of the Hebrew Scripture, ed. Alice Bellis and Joel Kaminsky (Atlanta: SBL, 2000), 93.

7. Collins, Introduction, 483. Note the woman’s search for her lover in 1:7, 3:2, 5:7, and 7:10—they do not cohabitate.

8. Alicia Ostriker, “A Holy of Holies: The Song of Songs as Countertext,” in The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd series), ed. Brenner and Fontaine (Sheffield: Academic, 2000), 44.

20 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

9. Robert W. Jenson, Song of Songs, IBC (Louisville: John Knox, 2005), 1.

10. Pope, Song of Songs, 205.

11. Tara M. Owens, Embracing the Body: Finding God in our Flesh and Bone (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2015), 212.

12. Marcia Falk, Love Lyrics from the Bible: A Translation and Literary Study of the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Almond, 1982), 86–87, quoted in Brenner, Song of Songs, 92.

13. Pope, Song of Songs, 203.

14. Pope, Song of Songs, 208.

15. Ostriker, “Holy of Holies,” 37, 50.

16. Brenner, Song of Songs, 27.

17. Davis, “Losing a Friend,” 94.

18. Brenner, Song of Songs, 79. Brenner credits Phyllis Trible noting this juxtaposition first.

19. Brenner, Song of Songs, 84.

20. Owens, Embracing the Body, 209.

21. Davis, “Losing a Friend,” 93.

22. Jenson, Song of Songs, 5.

23. Pope, Song of Songs, 204. Cf. Deut 6:5, Lev 19:18, Hosea 1–3, Esther 5, Matt 22:37–40, John 13:35, 1 John 4:19.

24. Pope, Song of Songs, 202.

25. Collins, Introduction, 484.

26. Ostriker, “Holy of Holies,” 37.

27. Davis, “Losing a Friend,” 94.

28. Davis, “Losing a Friend,” 93.

29. Owens, Embracing the Body, 214.

30. Sarah Sumner, Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 164. See also Owens, Embracing the Body, 216.

31. Jenson, Song of Songs, 13.

32. Owens, Embracing the Body, 130.

33. Owens, Embracing the Body, 210.

34. Brenner, Song of Songs, 28.

35. Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2016), 138.

36. Davis, “Losing a Friend,” 94.

37. Owens, Embracing the Body, 215.

38. Owens, Embracing the Body, 216.

39. Owens, Embracing the Body, 152–23.

40. On this idea, see Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), whose premise is that marriage is designed to make us holy, not happy.

DAWN GENTRY holds an MA from Cincinnati Christian University and an MDiv from Emmanuel Christian Seminary. She has been active in church leadership, especially in children’s and worship ministry. She is on the faculty of Nebraska Christian College near Omaha, Nebraska, and also teaches adjunctly at Milligan College in eastern Tennessee. Dawn and her husband, Harold, live in Johnson City, Tennessee. Their daughter, Elizabeth Gentry, is the author of another sermon in this edition of Priscilla Papers.

cbeinternational.org

A Review of Commentaries on The Song of Songs

Song of Songs: A Commentary

by J. Cheryl Exum, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 2005)

Song of Songs

by Richard S. Hess, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Baker Academic, 2005)

Song of Songs

by Tremper Longman III, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2001) Reviewed by Christine Marchetti The Song of Songs stands alone among the books of the Jewish and Christian canons as an unabashed exploration of sensual human love. Yet this interpretation was repressed for centuries, and the Song was instead read allegorically. Tremper Longman’s commentary notes evidence of early arguments that the Song deals with God’s relationship with humanity, and by AD 100, the allegorical interpretation was firmly established: Jews believed the poem reflects the relationship between God and Israel or between God and the individual soul; Christians followed suit, claiming the lovers’ romance symbolizes Christ’s love for the church. However, Cheryl Exum, Richard Hess, and Longman join a consensus of modern scholars who reject an allegorical interpretation, and they do so for similar reasons. Allegory assigns arbitrary meaning to poetic images: for example, Rashi, a medieval rabbi, suggests the woman’s breasts in 1:13 represent the cherubim that stood over the ark; Cyril of Alexandria believed that the breasts represent the Old and New Testaments. However, Exum, Hess, and Longman argue that the most significant problem with an allegorical interpretation is that it suppresses the Song’s clear literal meaning—erotic love. Allegory, Longman writes, imposes a “foreign meaning” on the text (22). Each of their commentaries emphasizes different aspects of the Song, but all of them regard it as a joyful celebration of human love.

Exum sees the entire poem as a movement toward the climactic statement that “love is as strong as death” (8:6), and she regards the Song as a unified whole. Hers is a systematic study of male and female gender differences and the role they play in the Song. She praises the poet’s literary skill, through which the two lovers represent all lovers, and “ultimately, love itself ” (3).

The Song, she avers, is sensual, but so clothed in poetic metaphor that it encourages aesthetic appreciation while it discourages voyeurism. Longman describes the Song as poetry that reveals the power of love as well as its pain, and he sees it as an anthology, a sort of “erotic psalter” (43). He maintains that the Song deals with sexual love strictly in the context of marriage. Although he rejects an allegorical interpretation, he claims the Song’s theological message focuses on the marriage metaphor: in the Bible, the relationship of husband and wife is often an analogy for the most important relationship of all, the relationship of

cbeinternational.org

“God and his people,” Longman writes (xiii). Hess agrees that the Song is “sublime love poetry” (34), and he sees it as a unified collection. Like Exum, he believes a literal interpretation frees the lovers’ enjoyment of their sexuality from allegorical censorship without cheapening it in any way. But unlike Exum, Hess finds a clear and compelling theological message in the poem: the couple’s experience of human love is a “signpost” that points to something greater—to “the One who is love” (107). Hess notes that the Greek translation of the Hebrew text renders the Hebrew word for “love” in the Song as agapē, and this, he asserts, forms the basis of the NT understanding of God’s love for believers.

Though all translation involves interpretation, and the use of agapē rather than the Greek alternative eros may simply represent an early attempt to allegorize the Song, Hess affirms the poem’s importance for Christians today: in a fallen world, where the first couple was banished from the garden of Eden, the Song gives hope that couples may recover some of that garden and see their love as a good gift from God. Exum, Hess, and Longman discuss the Song in relation to ancient Near Eastern love poetry, particularly Egyptian love lyrics, but all three commentators observe striking differences as well. Unlike other ancient love lyrics, the Song consists entirely of dialogue, and the woman’s dominant role is unique: the woman initiates the action and openly expresses her feelings. This characterization has led feminists to hail the Song as an expression of sexual equality in a culture dominated by patriarchy, Exum explains. Because the poem describes being in love from both a woman’s point of view and a man’s, it portrays gender relations as “fairly egalitarian,” Exum writes (68). But, she adds that we cannot know how accurately it describes actual gender relations in ancient Israel. The scriptures primarily reflect the views of those who held religious and political power—the male elite. So while the Song challenges some ancient Israelite gender roles, it reinforces others, Exum contends.

Nevertheless, patriarchal attitudes are apparent. The woman’s brothers try to control her sexuality, and her chastity is an issue (8:8–10) but the man’s is not. The man has freedom of movement and social autonomy (2:8–17), but the woman does not. It is the woman, not the man, who suffers for love at the hands of male

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 21

missing in the Song: love, once perverted, is now redeemed. authority (5:7). The Song of Songs sees desire and sexual pleasure The man and woman are naked but unafraid. Despite the Song’s as mutual, and it affirms a woman’s effort to gratify her desires, erotic content, it does not condone free love; nor does it describe Exum observes, but suggests that the poem may have been marriage, Hess maintains, though the lovers’ total commitment written to encourage young women to marry despite the burden to each other and the frequent occurrence of the word “bride” in marriage and childbearing imposed on women in the ancient the text hint that the society in which the lovers lived expected world. And while the Song celebrates a woman’s erotic power, marriage. What the Song does do is demonstrate that sex is not elsewhere in the Bible men sometimes try to control it. Exum “inherently evil” and not limited to procreation alludes to Phyllis Trible (God and the Rhetoric (35). Human sexual love is a gift from God, one of Sexuality [Fortress, 1978]), who argues that “the Bible takes the reader that reflects a greater love, the love of God for the Song as a whole, and 7:10 in particular, from the consequences of humankind, Hess concludes. His excitement reverses the consequences of sin in Gen 3:16 and redeem human love from the distortion primeval rebellion . . . to the is so contagious that readers might not notice of the fall. But Exum believes 7:10 is merely a unconditional delights of love” a few flaws in his work, such as his use of masculine pronouns in reference to God, and variation of the refrain of mutual possession in the fact the he claims the woman and the man in Gen 3 are cursed 2:16 and 6:3. In short, she is ambivalent about the Song of Songs

by God, when it in fact it is only the serpent and the ground that as an egalitarian text, and concludes that it can be “hazardous to are cursed (Gen 3:14, 17). To his credit, Hess acknowledges that the a feminist’s critical faculties” (81). lovers, who enjoy physical love as something created by God and Longman seems to affirm male and female equality, and therefore valuable, are celebrating not God but rather, creation; he reads the Song as an egalitarian text. Like Exum, he notes from a theological perspective, this is “incomplete,” he writes (74). the woman’s dominant role in the poem, and he points to the However, the entire text of scripture addresses this deficiency, he mutuality of desire and pursuit. Longman agrees with Trible’s adds, and rightly so, for it takes more than physical love to save claim that the Song reverses the consequences of the fall and one’s soul; it takes Jesus Christ. restores love’s harmony and balance, and he discusses Trible’s Exum has the best interest of women at heart; she is cautious thesis in detail, but his comments on the word “desire” (teshuqa in and acutely aware of the complexity of the text as well as the Hebrew) might give the reader pause. Teshuqa occurs only three persistence of patriarchal influence in both its composition and times in the OT (Gen 3:16, 4:7, Song 7:10), and Longman cites an interpretation. The Song may affirm gender equality in physical intertextual link between Gen 3:16 and Gen 4:7, where sin’s desire love and romance, but it is silent about gender relations in all for Cain is “crouching at the door, desiring to overtake Cain.” other spheres of human life, Exum contends; the poem “does Women, Longman insists, have a similar desire to dominate and not move beyond courtship and more intimate erotic encounters control men. But scholars such as Joel Lohr and Susan Brayford to describe other aspects of women’s and men’s day-to-day have studied teshuqa carefully and do not see the woman’s lives” (67). Longman says the Song of Songs portrays sexuality desire in Gen 3:16 as domination. Trible’s view—that the woman as “redeemed” and describes the healing of intimacy, but he desires to return to the intimacy and mutuality she enjoyed adds that human redemption is not fully accomplished; it is an before the fall—is probably more correct. Longman’s admission “already—not yet” proposition (66). He writes for professional that Trible might not approve of his use of her material reflects clergy and serious Bible students, but his commentary may both academic honesty and perhaps understatement as well. reflect the tendency of some modern scholars, pastors, and He alludes to Hos 2:2 and Ezek 23 matter-of-factly, apparently church members to attempt to embrace gender equality, though insensitive to the effect the stereotype that women are more inadequately. Readers who consult Longman are encouraged to prone to sexual sin than men may have on female readers. Thus examine other commentators as well for a balanced view of the his contention that the marriage metaphor is a theological theme Song and its portrait of gender relations. Hess’s book, intended in the Song, and his use of masculine pronouns when referring to for scholars, ministers, and seminary students, is sure to inspire.

God, compound his potential to be off-putting to certain readers.

He is exuberant about the Song and optimistic that through it, Hess is enthusiastic about the Song, and he affirms that its “the Bible takes the reader from the consequences of primeval impact must be understood in terms of full gender equality and rebellion . . . to the unconditional delights of love” (35). Can the independence. It is the woman who speaks first and her words Song lead the reader to an experience of heavenly love? Hess contain imperatives for her lover and for others, Hess observes; suggests that human love indeed holds the potential to approach, the woman’s role as speaker and actor dominate the poem. Hess and with God’s grace, to encounter the divine. dismisses David Clines’s claim that the Song is “soft pornography,” written for men’s entertainment and allegorized to secure its place in the canon (20), and he is unmoved by Exum’s concern that the CHRISTINE MARCHETTI has been training and teaching Song may not reflect the reality of life in ancient Israel. As a piece since 2004. She received a BA in theology from St. Joseph’s of poetry, the Song reflects reality even as it creates a reality of College of Maine and an MA in biblical studies from its own, Hess remarks. He agrees with Trible that the patterns of Hartford Seminary. domination and submission established in Gen 3:16 are clearly 22 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

cbeinternational.org

1 Corinthians 14:33b–38 as a Pauline Quotation-Refutation Device Kirk R. MacGregor

From the third century to the present, 1 Cor 14:34–35 has been a standard proof text for those who wish to preclude women from various positions of authority in the church. One significant response to this development contends that 1 Cor 14:34–35 is an interpolation, an insertion made by someone other than the author. The interpolation hypothesis is perhaps most persuasively articulated by Philip Payne.1 Payne argues, quite rightfully in my judgment, that a number of factors necessitate the conclusion that 1 Cor 14:34–35 is a non-Pauline sentiment with which Paul sharply disagreed.2 But interpolation is one of two possible explanations of this fact, the other being that Paul is quoting the position of the Corinthians from their letter in order to refute it.

This article maintains that the interpolation hypothesis sets a dangerous precedent for textual scholars who evaluate manuscripts, a precedent which would, albeit unintentionally, threaten the authenticity of many sound NT passages attested by the earliest relevant manuscripts but not by later manuscripts.

Rather than following the interpolation hypothesis, this article argues that 1 Cor 14:33b–38 is best understood as Paul’s quotation and subsequent refutation of the Corinthian men’s position that women ought to be silent in the assemblies, a position which originated in the Judaizing faction of the church.

Review of the Manuscript Evidence The earliest known copy of 1 Cor 14 is the manuscript called Papyrus 46 (abbreviated P46), which contains the beginning of v.

34, followed by damaged papyrus of precisely the space needed for the middle of v. 34, then resuming with the end of v. 34 and vv. 35ff. It is therefore undisputed that P46 originally contained vv. 34–38 in its entirety without any indication of doubt about its authenticity or placement.3 The next three manuscripts of 1 Cor 14 are P123, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Vaticanus, all from the early to middle fourth century. P123 and Sinaiticus both indisputably attest to the authenticity and placement of 14:34–35.4 At this juncture it should be emphasized that the presence of 1 Cor 14:34–35 in P46, P123, and Sinaiticus, even if (contrary to fact) absent from Vaticanus and all subsequent manuscripts, would be deemed by most scholars sufficient to establish 1 Cor 14:34–35 as almost certainly belonging to the original composition.5 But the case for the authenticity of 1 Cor 14:34–35 is far stronger than the earliest relevant manuscript and two of the three next earliest manuscripts. Indeed, the content of 1 Cor 14:34–35 is present in every extant manuscript, with the following three qualifications. Vaticanus (fourth century) attests its authenticity but notes through a symbol in the margin adjacent to 14:33 the existence of a variant reading.6 Codex Fuldensis (a Latin manuscript from AD 541–544) contains the text but was corrected

by Bishop Victor of Capua, Italy, either to delete vv. 34–35 or alter the wording of vv. 36–40.7 “Western” manuscripts (from the sixth

cbeinternational.org

century onward) plus at least one other (manuscript 88, dating to the twelfth century) place the content of vv. 34–35 after v. 40.8 Taken by themselves, even these three qualifications render the content of 1 Cor 14:34–35 more plausibly authentic to the original composition than inauthentic. Whatever the variant known to the original scribe of Vaticanus, the scribe still placed 14:34–35 in the text, a placement the scribe did not give to readings he or she deemed unreliable. When the scribe of Vaticanus placed a symbol in the margin adjacent to John 7:52, for example, John 7:53–8:11 is not included in the text, which instead proceeds directly to 8:12 because the scribe judged the story of the woman caught in adultery to be an interpolation. Likewise, when the scribe placed a symbol in the margin adjacent to Luke 14:24, he or she omitted the interpolated “for many are called but few are chosen” and proceeded directly to Luke 14:25.9 Shifting to Codex Fuldensis, even if the manuscript’s corrector believed that 1 Cor 14:34–35 was inauthentic, it is a standard principle of textual criticism to prefer a manuscript’s original reading over a correction proposed by a later corrector.10 Thirdly, the placement of vv. 34–35 after v. 40 in “Western” manuscripts and manuscript 88 only shows that, at some point in the history of the “Western” textual tradition, a scribe observed that these verses stuck out like a proverbial sore thumb in Paul’s argument, interrupting its chiastic flow.11 Believing these verses to be Paul’s own sentiment, the scribe moved them to the place in the chapter where they would make logical sense and hence, in the scribe’s mind, back where they originally must have stood.12 The use of “properly” (euschēmonōs) and “in order” (kata taxin) in v. 40 could readily be viewed as a natural introduction to vv.

34–35. This scribal movement probably occurred by the early fourth century and was precisely the textual variant known to the scribe of Vaticanus. Manuscript 88 is most simply explained by proposing that its scribe knew both at least one “Western” and at least one other manuscript. Assuming the Pauline origin of vv.

34–35, the scribe took the “Western” location to be more likely than the other location but acknowledged through appropriately placed slashes the alternative possibility. Hence the unanimity of the manuscript evidence, including manuscripts with qualifications, in favor of the authenticity of 1 Cor 14:34–35 makes the probability of this conclusion overwhelmingly high.

Assessing Payne’s Case for Interpolation Payne’s case for interpolation is based on both internal (contextual) and external (physical) evidence. The internal evidence only demonstrates the non-Pauline origin of 1 Cor 14:34–35, which interpolation and quotation-refutation explain equally well.

Hence the internal evidence cannot be used to decide between these two hypotheses. Thus we turn to the external evidence adduced by Payne.

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 23

Notwithstanding Vaticanus’s inclusion of vv. 34–35 at the typical location (a location substantiated by P46), Payne argues that Vaticanus’s adjacent distigme-obelos (the technical term for two [di] dots [stigme] and a horizontal bar [obelos]) indicates that the scribe regarded vv. 34–35 as an interpolation. This implies the scribe had knowledge of a manuscript lacking these verses, hence furnishing Payne with a hypothetical pre-Vaticanus manuscript supporting interpolation. Noting the absence of a distigme-obelos adjacent to v. 40, Payne reasons that if the symbol adjacent to v. 33 had signified the “Western” position, putting vv. 34–35 after v. 40, “there should have been a second distigme at the end of verse 40 to identify the equally great difference in the text there.”13 On the contrary, however, the scribe would only have placed a distigmeobelos at v. 40 if the relevant variant were not already present in the text he or she took to be authentic. There would be no point in indicating that something should be in the text that was already in the text. Thus the symbol at v. 33 is all we should expect from the scribe’s knowledge of the “Western” placement. Accordingly, I argue that the hypothetical pre-Vaticanus manuscript inferred by Payne did not exist.

From the surmise that Victor of Capua rejected the authenticity of vv. 34–35 (which I grant for the sake of argument), Payne concludes that Victor must have known a manuscript that did not contain these verses, thus furnishing Payne with another posited manuscript supporting interpolation. However, it is simpler to suppose that Victor, who, as a careful textual critic, likely recognized on stylistic and contextual grounds that vv. 34– 35 could not have been Paul’s sentiment,14 felt on this basis alone that it must be an interpolation, ignorant of any other option of accounting for these verses. So there is no reason to postulate the existence of a hypothetical manuscript known to Victor. Payne also proposes a hypothetical manuscript lacking vv. 34–35 to account for manuscript 88’s treatment of the passage, a proposal shown above to be unnecessary.

Turning to early Christian authors, Payne attempts to undermine the authenticity of 1 Cor 14:34–35 by noting that none of the Apostolic Fathers cite the text. Payne goes so far as to argue that Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150–215) possessed a manuscript missing 1 Cor 14:34–35. For when Clement discusses the behavior of women in church (Paedagogus 3:11), he cites 1 Cor 11:5, 13 but not 1 Cor 14:34–35, even though elsewhere in the same work he cites 1 Cor 14:6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 20. But Clement’s failure to cite 1 Cor 14:34–35 is better explained by the following proposal, which also explains its absence from the Apostolic Fathers: Clement and the Apostolic Fathers before him knew that 1 Cor 14:34–35 was not Paul’s position but was a quotation of the Corinthians’ position that Paul proceeded to refute. So of course they did not cite 1 Cor 14:34–35 as authoritative. This explanation is supported by the fact that Tertullian (c. AD 200), writing at about the same time as Clement, cites 1 Cor 14:34–35, as do the Greek church leaders Origen (AD 253–254), Chrysostom (AD 407), and Theodoret (AD 466).

Despite Payne’s assurance that interpolation “provides the most satisfying answer . . . and it does so on a factual, 24 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

not speculative, basis,”15 Payne’s defense of the interpolation hypothesis is, in the end, based on speculation—albeit carefully considered speculation. We have seen that the evidence for the existence of hypothetical manuscripts lacking 1 Cor 14:34–35 is weak. Moreover, Payne’s date for the proposed interpolation strains credulity. Since the earliest witness to 1 Cor 14:34–35, P46, likely dates between AD 126–138, Payne needs for the interpolation to have occurred at an extraordinarily early date.

And this is exactly what he proposes: The gloss could have been entered into the margin of any manuscript that became the exemplar . . . of the first copy of Paul’s collected letters as a codex. The gloss could even have been written into the very first codex collecting Paul’s letters sometime late in the first century.16 Payne defends this proposal on the grounds that it alone adequately explains the entirety of the manuscript evidence and fulfills the foundational principle that the form of the text best explaining the emergence of all other forms is most likely the original.17 But my thesis better explains the manuscript evidence, requiring no hypothetical manuscripts for its plausibility: 14:34–35, though pre-Pauline, was original to 1 Cor, and near the turn of the fourth century a “Western” scribe who wrongfully believed these verses to be Paul’s opinion, but saw that they interrupted the chiasm of Paul’s argument, moved them back where he thought they originally must have stood.

Contrary to Payne’s assertion that an interpolated 1 Cor 14:34– 35 “does not undermine the reliability of any other passage,”18 the most troubling aspect of the interpolation hypothesis is that one could use the same type of logic to falsely threaten the reliability of numerous recognizably sound NT passages contained in the earliest relevant witnesses but omitted from later witnesses.19 Limiting myself to examples from the Gospels, this logic would allow one to make interpolation cases—even stronger than the case for 1 Cor 14:34–35—for Matt 21:44 (“And whoever falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and anyone on whom it falls will be crushed”), Matt 27:16–17’s identification of Barabbas’s given name as “Jesus,” Mark 1:1’s identification of Jesus as “the Son of God,” Mark 10:7’s phrase “and be united to his wife,” Mark 14:30 and 72’s description of the cock crowing “twice” and “the second time,” Luke 17:24’s phrase “in his day,” Luke 22:19b–20 (“‘which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ And in the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’”), John 1:18’s identification of Jesus as “God,” John 9:38 (“Then the man said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him”), and John 13:32’s phrase “If God is glorified in him.”20

The Quotation-Refutation Device Hypothesis We now turn to an exposition and defense of the hypothesis that 1 Cor 14:33b–38 stands as a quotation-refutation device, where vv.

33b–35 comprise Paul’s quotation from the Corinthians’ letter to him, while vv. 36–38 constitute the decisive refutation of that quotation. In the process, we shall answer the objections to this

cbeinternational.org

hypothesis raised by Payne. I hold that the quotation-refutation device begins in v. 33b rather than v. 34 because of the break in thought marked by “As” (hōs) which begins v. 33b. Contra Payne’s suggestion that v. 33 is a complete sentence, v. 33b is most naturally taken as the first clause of the sentence continued in v.

34.21 Following the paragraph divisions and punctuation of two standard editions of the Greek NT (NA28 and UBS5), a woodenly literal translation of 1 Cor 14:33–38 follows: 33For God is not of disorder but of peace.

As (hōs) in all the assemblies of the saints, 34the women should keep silent in the assemblies; for they (autais, fem. pl.) are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, just as the law says. 35But if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in an assembly.

36Or (ē) did the word of God originate with you (humas, pl.), or (ē) to you men only (humas monous, masc. pl.) has it come? 37If anyone seems to be a prophet or spiritual, let that one recognize that what I write to you (pl.) is a commandment of the Lord; 38but if anyone disregards this, let that one be disregarded.

Paul introduces both rhetorical questions in v. 36 with “or” (ē), which he does six times elsewhere in 1 Corinthians to argue against the Corinthians’ position (1:13; 6:16; 9:6, 8, 10; 11:22) and five times to express disapproval of a Corinthian practice (6:2; 9, 19; 10:22; 11:13). We shall now make some important observations which, though not relevant for deciding between my hypothesis and the interpolation hypothesis, conclusively rule out the complementarian view that 1 Cor 14:34–38 is both authentic and is specifically addressed to women.

Complementarians typically hold that in v. 36 Paul chides women because, by seeking to dominate the worship services, they act as though they alone have received a word from God. But this interpretation is grammatically impossible. As an inflected language, the gender of Greek adjectives must agree with the gender of the words modified. Thus if Paul had meant to direct v. 36 to women in particular, he would have used the feminine plural monas, “women only.” But instead Paul employs the masculine plural monous, which can either be translated “men only” or “people only” (because groups of men and women are referred to by the masculine plural). If, as this article has argued, 14:34–35 is not an interpolation, then the translation “people only” is incoherent, for 14:33b–35 specifically concerns women and is not addressing the Corinthian church as a whole. Now if 14:34–35 were an interpolation, then monous would indeed mean “people only,” as vv. 29–33 are addressed to the entire Corinthian church. However, given the evidence that 14:34–35 is not an interpolation, the meaning of monous is “men only,” since this alone furnishes a coherent grammatical contrast between the women concerned in 14:33b–35 and the men rebuked in v. 36.

Since the gender of monous is the same as the term it modifies, namely the second-person plural pronoun humas (“you,” which is genderless in isolation but whose gender must be otherwise

cbeinternational.org

determined), humas in v. 36 is masculine as well, denoting “you men” rather than the generic “you.” These observations disclose Paul’s intended meaning of v. 36: “Or did the word of God originate with you men, or to you men only has it come?”

This twofold rhetorical question provides the key to unlocking the remainder of the passage, for it indicates in no uncertain terms that Paul disagrees sharply with the preceding thoughtunit or paragraph. The contrast between the women addressed in v. 34—seen in the feminine plural “they” (autais)—and the “you men only” censured in v. 36 for their position in 14:33b–35, further demonstrates that 14:36–38 stands as a condemnation of 14:33b–35 and the Corinthian men who proposed it.

Far from attempting to silence women, therefore, Paul is rebuking the Corinthian men for prohibiting women from speaking in the assemblies, for he regards such a restriction as tantamount to alleging that the word of God belongs properly to the men and merely derivatively to any woman married to one of them. Paul summarily exposes the absurdity of this allegation with each part of the rhetorical question, whose form (not to mention the context) requires a negative answer to each part.

Obviously, the word of God neither originated with men nor has come only to men; hence it is ridiculous, and contrary to the character of the gospel, to act as though the word belongs properly to men by disallowing women from discoursing about it or asking questions about it in church. For these reasons, the preceding thought-unit is shown not to belong to Paul, but is rather Paul’s quotation of the Corinthians’ position from the letter they had previously sent him, his response to which letter constitutes in large part the purpose of 1 Corinthians.

This conclusion explains perfectly the paragraph breaks in our translation (hōs [“as”] and ē [“or”]), as Paul would clearly compose two shifts in thought when alternating from his own counsel to the position of the Corinthians back to his own counsel again. Hence Payne’s complaint that “none of the other Corinthian quotations Paul refutes are nearly this long”22 has no purchase; the paragraph breaks make clear that vv. 33b–35 are a separate thought-unit. Likewise, the shift of vv. 33b–35 is apparent by its interrupting the chiasm spanning vv. 26–40.

Through this interruption, Paul makes it quite clear that vv.

33b–35 do not represent his thoughts, as opposed to his thoughts throughout the chiasm. Contrary to Payne’s objection that nothing in vv. 36–38 requires that it refutes vv. 34–35 if these verses were authentic,23 the “or” (ē), the “you men only” (humas monous) and its implications, and the two-part rhetorical question cumulatively require that v. 36 begins a thought-unit refuting what precedes it.

Quotation-Refutation Devices Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians The accuracy of our conclusion is secured by the undisputed presence of this device five other times in 1 Cor (6:12–13; 7:1–2; 8:1, 8; 10:23), in which Paul quotes a position from the Corinthians’ letter with which he disagrees and then refutes it.

We shall abbreviate this quotation-refutation device as QRD. Assessing the grammatical structure of these five instances

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 25

of new discourse governing the Corinthian quotation and an logically necessitates the presence of QRD in 14:33b–38, for four interjecting term governing the Pauline refutation—while of the five are widely regarded as QRDs in spite of being lesseach of the four established QRDs in 6:12–13, 8:1, 8:8, and clearly so than 14:33b–38. The most explicit instance is 7:1–2, 10:23 contains only one of these species. the recognition of which led to the scholarly discovery of the other four instances during It is one of the most tragic Only the foundational QRD in 7:1, like the last century: “But concerning (Peri de) that ironies in the history of biblical 14:33b–38, features both, along with the which you wrote about, ‘It is good for a man not interpretation that the very unique acknowledgment of the Corinthian to have sex with a woman.’ But because of (dia text Paul penned to guarantee correspondence as the source material of de) sexual immorality, each man should have sex the unrestricted ecclesiastical this and all other QRD quotations. The with his own wife and each woman should have participation of women has linguistic evidence, then, permits no doubt sex with her own husband.” Here Paul employs often been unwittingly yet that 14:33b–38 is a QRD and hence that the the phrase “but concerning” (peri de), which effectively falsified to deny prohibition against women speaking in church is non-Pauline, a conclusion which introduces a new topic, then clearly identifies women this right. can only be avoided by denying the existence the extra-Pauline source of this topic’s discourse of four of the five firmly attested QRDs in 1 Corinthians. as “that which you wrote about” (hōn egrapsate), and finally To the possible objection that Paul did not explicitly identify shifts to his refutation with the interjecting phrase dia de. First 14:34–35 as a false Corinthian statement, we respond that there Corinthians 8:1 is similar but less overt: “But concerning (Peri was no need for such introduction, for the Corinthians knew de) food sacrificed to idols, ‘We know that we all have esoteric what they themselves believed and had written. Just as in 6:12– knowledge.’ Esoteric knowledge causes conceit, but love builds 13, 8:1, 8:8, and 10:23, the Corinthians required no reminder up.” With the exception of the new discourse introduced by that 14:33b–35 was their own position being refuted. Moreover, peri de, the presence of QRD is indicated by content alone apart the contextual evidence led the Apostolic Fathers, who had no from any grammatical markers. Likewise, the QRDs in 6:12–13 access to the Corinthians’ epistle to Paul, to precisely the same and 10:23 are substantiated largely by contrast in content with conclusion. It is to this contextual evidence that we now turn. only one grammatical indicator, here the indicator—“but” (all’) conjoined with the negator “no” (ou[k]) or “but” (de) alone— Contextual Evidence qualifying Paul’s rebuttal rather than the Corinthians’ stance as Equally strong as the grammatical evidence in decisively in the former instances. Thus the original shift from the position ruling out Pauline origination of 14:33b–35 is the contextual of Paul to that of the Corinthians goes initially undetected and evidence. In 11:3–16 Paul argues that women should have their is only perceived in retrospect after reading or hearing the “heads covered” when praying or prophesying in church, which Pauline interjection: covering he identifies as “long hair” (v. 15).24 Here Paul explicitly “Everything is permissible for me,” but not (all’ ou) states his view that women should pray and prophesy in church. everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for Such overt advocacy by Paul of religious speech by women in me,” but I will not (all’ ouk egō) be mastered by anything. church illustrates the impossibility of Paul’s expressing his own “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food,” but perspective in 14:33b–35, as it would render Paul guilty of self(de) God will destroy them both. (6:12–13) contradiction. Further, 14:33b–35 contradicts Paul’s central point “Everything is permissible,” but not (all’ ou) in 1 Cor 14 that in the church everyone, regardless of gender, everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible,” but should be instructed by everyone else: “What is the outcome not (all’ ou) everything is constructive. (10:23) then, brothers and sisters? When you assemble, each one has a hymn, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, or has an In the same way, the QRD in 8:7–8 goes undetected until Paul’s interpretation. Let all this be done for edification. . . . For you can “neither” (oute): all prophecy one by one so that everyone may be instructed and Since some have become so accustomed to idols, they encouraged” (14:26, 31). still think of the food they eat as having been sacrificed We shall now call attention to the basis on which 14:33b–35 to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled: restricts women from speaking in the assemblies, namely, “Food will not bring us close to God.” Neither (oute) are adherence to the Jewish oral Torah, which was closely associated we worse off if we do not eat, nor (oute) are we better with the Pharisees: “They are not permitted to speak, but should off if we do. be in submission, just as the law says.” That “the law” here Of special note is the Pauline two-part refutation, which denotes the Jewish oral Torah (later to become the Mishnah) comprises a direct structural parallel to the two-part refutation and not the written Torah is evident by the facts that no OT text in 14:36. The “neither . . . nor” (oute . . . oute) qualifying both precludes women from speaking or demands their submission halves of the 8:8 refutation is analogous to the “or . . . or” (ē . . . ē) in assemblies. More to the point, both mandates (silence and qualifying both halves of the 14:36 refutation. submission) are explicit in the oral Torah. The Mishnah (M. In sum, 14:33b–38 features both of the two possible species Ketub. 7:6) states that it is sinful for a woman to “speak with any of grammatical indicators possible in QRDs—an introducer 26 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

cbeinternational.org

man” in assemblies, and the first-century AD historian Josephus (Ag. Ap. 200–1) relates the following instruction from the oral Torah: “The woman, says the law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive.” As Payne observes, “although 1 Cor 14:34 is out of harmony with Paul’s use of ‘the law,’ it fits Jewish appeals to oral law perfectly.”25 The same is true of 14:35, “But if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home,” which is directly paralleled by the first-century AD Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, in a comment on the oral Torah, “The husband seems competent to transmit knowledge of the laws to his wife” (Hypothetica 8.7.14).

In addition, the rationale of 14:33b–35 flies in the face of one of the dominant themes running throughout the entire Pauline corpus: the freedom of believers from the oral Torah. Far from exhorting believers to keep these rules, Paul consistently admonishes his congregations not to observe them, even going so far as to state that embracing them spells rejection of Christ.

The following portions of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians are representative: Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back to the weak and miserable principles, whose slaves you want to be once more? You are observing special days, months, seasons, and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain. . . . It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. . . . You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. (Gal 4:9–11; 5:1, 4) In light of Paul’s emphasis on liberation from the oral (and even the written) Torah, coupled with his warning that observation of the oral Torah could only be required on pain of alienation from Christ, it is unthinkable that Paul would have demanded the ecclesiastical silence of women by virtue of obedience to the oral Torah. Among the Corinthians, rather, it seems clear that 1 Cor 14:33b–35 originated in the Judaizing faction of their church, which stressed obedience to the oral Torah as necessary for salvation and which Paul vehemently opposed. Regarding these Judaizers who identified themselves as “belonging to Cephas” (1 Cor 1:12) and disputed Paul’s apostleship (1 Cor 4:1–5, 9:1–18), Paul inveighed against them as “false apostles and deceitful workmen who masquerade as apostles of Christ” (2 Cor 11:13) and warned their fellow Corinthians that such self-proclaimed “super-apostles” (2 Cor 11:5, 12:11) preach a “different Jesus,” a “different spirit,” and a “different gospel” than the Way which leads only to damnation (2 Cor 11:3–4).

Conclusion The foregoing evidence demonstrates that in 1 Cor 14:33b–38 Paul is not forbidding women to speak in church, but in the opposite vein is harshly reprimanding the Corinthian men for their arrogance in attempting to ecclesiastically silence their female equals and

cbeinternational.org

is insisting as a commandment of the Lord that women play the same roles in worship as men. A growing number of scholars are coming to accept this view.26 It is one of the most tragic ironies in the history of biblical interpretation that the very text Paul penned to guarantee the unrestricted ecclesiastical participation of women has often been unwittingly yet effectively falsified to deny women this right—an irony which stands whether Payne’s interpolation theory or my QRD theory is correct.

Notes 1. Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul’s Letters (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 217–67; Payne, “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5,” NTS 63, no. 4 (2017): 604–25.

2. Payne, Man and Woman, 253–62.

3. Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett, eds., The Complete Text of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 266–67 (pp. 276–77 in the revised edition [Wheaton: Tyndale, 2001]).

Scholars date P46 as early as AD 81–96 (Young Kyu Kim, “Palaeographical Dating of P46 to the Later First Century,” Bib 69 [1988]: 248–57) and as late as the early third century (UBS5, 13*). I concur with Comfort and Barrett that P46 can be dated to AD 126–138 (Comfort and Barrett, Earliest New Testament Manuscripts, 196–67).

4. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 67–8.

5. Secondary, derivative evidence should not be used to overturn the findings of early, primary evidence. Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee, Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 157–58.

6. Payne, Man and Woman, 232–33.

7. Philip B. Payne, “Fuldensis, Sigla for Variants in Vaticanus, and 1 Cor 14.34–5,” NTS 41 (1995): 243–45.

8. Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 699.

9. Payne, Man and Woman, 233. “Western” manuscripts include those which are Latin or bilingual (Latin/Greek). Because many manuscripts written in Syriac (hence eastern) are also included in this family of texts, the title “Western” is typically placed in quotation marks.

10. As Constantin von Tischendorf famously put it, “If one reading appears to be an intentional correction, the reading which invited such a correction is best” (Robert B. Waltz, The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism [St. Paul: Robert B. Waltz, 2013], 99).

11. A point observed by Payne, Man and Woman, 254–56. Chiasm is inverted parallelism, which here takes the following pattern: A (v. 26) B (vv. 27–28) C (vv. 28–30) D (v. 33a) (vv. 33b–35, not part of the chiasm) C΄ (vv. 36–38) B΄ (v. 39) A΄ (v. 40) 12. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1994), 499.

13. Payne, Man and Woman, 233.

14. Victor’s stature as a textual critic is documented by F. H. Blackburne Daniell, “Victor, Bishop of Capua,” in A Dictionary of

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 27

Christian Biography, 4 vols., ed. W. Smith and H. Wace (London: John Murray, 1877–1887), 1:1126.

15. Payne, Man and Woman, 225.

16. Payne, Man and Woman, 266.

17. A principle established by Johann A. Bengel in the early eighteenth century.

18. Payne, Man and Woman, 227.

19. This is the maneuver made by Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1977), in arguing for the superiority of the “Majority Text” over the “critical text,” a maneuver rightly rejected by virtually the entire guild of textual critics.

20. Translations of all NT passages are my own.

21. Many egalitarians accept that v. 33 is one sentence. I should note that my argument does not stand or fall on whether the quotation begins at v. 33b or v. 34.

22. Payne, Man and Woman, 225.

23. Payne, Man and Woman, 225.

24. Kirk R. MacGregor, “Is 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 a Prohibition of Homosexuality?” BSac 166, no. 2 (2009): 202–17. Independently of my exegesis (both my article and his book were published in the same year), Payne (Man and Woman, 199–215) draws exactly the same conclusions about 1 Cor 11:2–16 as I do.

25. Payne, Man and Woman, 258.

26. E.g., Gottfried Fitzer, Das Weib schweige in der Gemeinde: über den unpaulinischen Charakter der mulier-taceat-Verse in 1.

28 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

Korinther 14, in Theologische Existenz Heute, Neue Folge 110 (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1963); Neal M. Flanagan and Edwina Hunter Snyder, “Did Paul Put Down Women in 1 Cor. 14:34–36?” BTB 11 (1981): 10–2; D. W. Odell-Scott, “Let the Women Speak in Church: An Egalitarian Interpretation of 1 Cor. 14:33b–36,” BTB 13 (1983): 90– 3; Chris Ukachukwu Manus, “The Subordination of the Women in the Church: 1 Cor 14:33b–36 Reconsidered,” NRTh 106 (1984): 23–58; Charles H. Talbert, Reading Corinthians (London: SPCK, 1987) 91–5; Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, SP 7 (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1999), 514–17, 521–23; Michel Gourgues, “Who Is Misogynist: Paul or Certain Corinthians? Note on 1 Corinthians 14:33b–36,” in Women Also Journeyed with Him: Feminist Perspectives on the Bible, ed. Gérald Canon et al. (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2000), 117–24; Paul J. Achtemeier, Joel B. Green, and Marianne Meye Thompson, Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 345–46; Gilbert Bilezikian, Beyond Sex Roles: What the Bible Says about a Woman’s Place in Church and Family, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 110–16.

KIRK MACGREGOR holds a PhD from the University of Iowa and teaches philosophy and religion at McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas. He is the author of four books and over twenty articles.

cbeinternational.org

Book Review

The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity

by Kevin Giles (Cascade, 2017) Denise Cooper-Clarke

The terms “page turner” and “doctrine of the Trinity” would not often be found in the same sentence, but they are appropriate in the case of Kevin Giles’s most recent book on the issue. I found this five-chapter account of a recent theological dispute absolutely riveting, even though I already knew how it would end! It is an extraordinary story, told by a major player in the drama.

Like many good stories, this one begins with a puzzling question: how was it that a majority of Reformed evangelical theologians changed their minds on an aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity, almost overnight? As Giles says, “On 1 June 2016 it seemed that the complementarian hierarchical doctrine of the Trinity had won the day” (8). The few dissenters, of whom Giles was the most vocal, were dismissed as “evangelical feminists” and accused of framing the co-equality of the three persons of the Trinity and thereby providing a foundation for their egalitarian views on gender. But everything changed two days later when “a deep and sharp split among those who call themselves complementarians suddenly and unexpectedly appeared” (35).

The split was not about the subordination of women to men, but about their understanding of the Trinity. Some complementarians (including, ironically, two women theologians, Rachel Miller and Aimee Byrd, who both wrote endorsements for Giles’s book) had been raising concerns about the doctrine of the eternal (functional) subordination of the Son to the Father. But the real crisis arose when Liam Goligher, a self-described “biblical complementarian,” denounced the teaching of the most well-known proponents of this view, Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem, accusing them of “reinventing the doctrine of God” and departing from “biblical Christianity as expressed in our creeds and confessions.” What complementarians had not been able to hear from Giles for years was at last being heard, and “the evangelical blogosphere exploded” (37).

If the fall of the complementarian doctrine of the Trinity took place in 2016, when was its rise? Giles dates its genesis to George Knight III’s 1977 book, New Testament Teaching on the Role Relationship of Men and Women (Baker). In an effort to justify the exclusion of women from positions of leadership and teaching in the church, based in an understanding of male headship that meant wives should be subordinate to their husbands, at a time when appeals to male superiority and female inferiority were no longer culturally acceptable, Knight introduced the novel idea of men and women having different “roles” in spite of their equality.

By “role” he meant simply that men’s role is to lead and women’s is to submit.

But this raised the question, how can the permanent subordination of women be reconciled with their (newly recognized) equality with men? Knight responded that the relationship between man and woman is analogous to the relationship between the Father and the Son, who are equal, yet the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father in function or “role.” He based this on a unique interpretation of 1 Cor 11:3, “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman

cbeinternational.org

is man, and the head of Christ is God” (NIV), which, he argued, establishes a hierarchy within the Trinity as well as between men and women. Thus, for Knight and the complementarian theologians who embraced this idea, the question of the relationship between men and women was inextricably linked to, indeed based on, a hierarchical understanding of the Trinity. Yet complementarians accused egalitarians of corrupting the doctrine of the Trinity in order to support their views! Giles says he knows of no egalitarians who have argued from the relations within the Trinity to an egalitarian understanding of the relationship between men and women.

By 1994 a hierarchical view of the Trinity had become integral to the complementarian case. This was fully articulated in Grudem’s influential Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Zondervan, 1994), the most widely used theology text in evangelical Bible colleges and seminaries worldwide. Ware’s 2005 book, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Crossway) spoke of the “priority” and “pre-eminence” of the Father. These scholars were widely praised as champions of the “orthodox” doctrine of the Trinity that Giles rejects. In 2013, Denny Burk (current president of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood) wrote on his blog: the analogy between gender roles and Trinity derives not from mere speculation, but from the Bible. The central text in this regard is 1 Corinthians 11:3. . . . The apostle Paul himself invokes the analogy, and our challenge is to understand it and receive it. . . . the link between intratrinitarian relations and gender relations is transparently biblical.1 But by August 2016, Burk had changed his mind. He wrote, “I believe in eternal generation, a single divine will, inseparable operations, and the whole Nicene package,” noting that he did not agree with “some of [Grudem and Ware’s] particular formulations” and that “it is good and right to leave behind the language of ‘subordination’ as a label.”2 Since June 2016, the position of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has been that belief in a hierarchically ordered Trinity is no longer central to complementarians.

If you want to know exactly how things changed so drastically, including Giles’s role and the role of two complementarian women theologians, you’ll need to read the book. One of those women, Aimee Byrd, endorses Giles’s book with these words: I wish complementarians would read this book! While I can happily disagree with his argument that the eternal subordination of the Son was the complementarian position on the Trinity, Kevin demonstrates how pervasive it was. . . . This is a book that demands the church to uphold first-order doctrines and warns it never to be led again by a social agenda. (back cover)

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 29

Apart from telling the story, Giles includes a chapter titled, “Doing Evangelical Theology,” because he is convinced that Grudem and others arrived at a wrong doctrine of the Trinity because they had “a wrong understanding of how evangelical theology is ‘done’” (67). This errant understanding limits itself largely to simply establishing what the Bible teaches, without reference to tradition or reason. In formulating the doctrine of the Trinity, tradition as expressed in the creeds and confessions of the church is especially important. The next chapter then outlines the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the first four centuries of church history, which was considered the orthodox view until corrupted by complementarians late in the twentieth century, and now, thankfully, has been recovered by at least some complementarians.

What does all this now mean for complementarianism?

According to complementarian theologian Carl Trueman, it is in crisis. “But this is a crisis of its own making—the direct result of the incorrect historical and theological arguments upon which the foremost advocates of the movement have chosen to build their case and which cannot actually bear the weight being placed upon them.”3 British complementarian Andrew Wilson thinks the crisis brings a positive challenge, the opportunity for a radical reappraisal.4 Giles hopes that it will prompt rethinking of the complementarian position on the subordination of women.

But things might not be so straightforward. Changing our minds is difficult.5 A fundamental question raised by The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity is, “Why did it take so long for complementarian theologians to call out this doctrine as unorthodox?” How did Grudem and Ware go unchallenged for so many years? Giles discusses five possible reasons.6 One of the reasons is that the cost for complementarians of challenging the “consensus” was too great in terms of potentially “splitting” the community, being marginalized or even shunned.

As Giles recounts:

2. Denny Burk, “My Take-Away’s from the Trinity Debate,” A Commentary on Theology, Politics, and Culture, Aug 10, 2016 (http:// dennyburk.com/my-take-aways-from-the-trinity-debate/).

3. Carl Trueman, “Motivated by Feminism? A Response to a Recent Criticism,” Mortification of Spin, June 14, 2016 (http://alliancenet.org/ mos/postcards-from-palookaville/motivated-by-feminism-a-responseto-a-recent-criticism#.WjksXExFzIW).

4. Andrew Wilson, “Complementarianism in Crisis?,” Think, July 6, 2016 (http://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/complementarianism_in_ crisis).

5. For further insights on resistance to changing one’s mind, see Simone Richardson, “Why It’s So Hard to Change Our Minds,” Eternity, Aug 7, 2017 (https://eternitynews.com.au/opinion/why-it-is-so-hard-tochange-our-minds/).

6. See also Scot McKnight, “Why Did it Take So Long?,” Jesus Creed, Aug 17, 2017 (http://patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2017/08/17/why-did-ittake-so-long/).

DENISE COOPER-CLARKE holds a PhD in medical ethics. She is a tutor in medical ethics at the University of Melbourne (Australia), an adjunct lecturer in ethics at Ridley Melbourne, and a researcher with Ethos (the Evangelical Alliance’s Centre for Christianity and Society). Dr. CooperClarke is a fellow of the Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology and is active with the Melbourne chapter of Christians for Biblical Equality.

The huge importance for complementarians to endorse without any criticism the whole complementarian package became very clear to me when a one-time friend and fellow graduate of Moore theological College in Sydney said to me very angrily, “Kevin, we [complementarians] will never give way to you on the Trinity because to do so would weaken our case for male headship, and nothing is more important for us.” (60-61) In other words, holding to the “whole complementarian package” had become an identity marker for some evangelicals, making it especially difficult for them to change their minds even if presented with good reasons to do so. If some of the world’s finest theologians could accept a heterodox view of the Trinity for so long, which of us can claim to be immune to error? Can we honestly admit the possibility that we might be wrong?

Notes 1. Denny Burk, “Why the Trinity Must Inform Our Views on Gender Roles,” A Commentary on Theology, Politics, and Culture, Aug 13, 2013 (http://dennyburk.com/why-the-trinity-must-inform-our-views-ongender-roles-ctmagazine/).

30 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

cbeinternational.org

CBE International CBE International (CBE) is a nonprofit organization of Christian men and women who believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the fundamental equality of men and women of all ethnic groups, all economic classes, and all age groups, based on the teachings of Scriptures such as Galatians 3:28.

Mission Statement CBE exists to promote biblical justice and community by educating Christians that the Bible calls women and men to share authority equally in service and leadership in the home, church, and world.

Statement of Faith • We believe in one God, creator and sustainer of the universe, eternally existing as three persons equal in power and glory.

• We believe in the full deity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ.

• We believe that eternal salvation and restored relationships are only possible through faith in Jesus Christ who died for us, rose from the dead, and is coming again. This salvation is offered to all people.

• We believe the Holy Spirit equips us for service and sanctifies us from sin.

• We believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, is reliable, and is the final authority for faith and practice.

• We believe that women and men are equally created in God’s image and given equal authority and stewardship of God’s creation.

• We believe that men and women are equally responsible for and distorted by sin, resulting in shattered relationships with God, self, and others.

calling women and men to share authority equally in service and leadership.

• God’s design for relationships includes faithful marriage between a man and a woman, celibate singleness and mutual submission in Christian community.

• The unrestricted use of women’s gifts is integral to the work of the Holy Spirit and essential for the advancement of the gospel in the world.

• Followers of Christ are to oppose injustice and patriarchal teachings and practices that marginalize and abuse females and males.

Envisioned Future CBE envisions a future where all believers are freed to exercise their gifts for God’s glory and purposes, with the full support of their Christian communities.

CBE Membership To celebrate 30 years of ministry, CBE is pleased to make available, for free, every Priscilla Papers article ever published. In addition, find the full archive of CBE’s magazine, Mutuality, and hundreds of book reviews and recordings of lectures given by world-renowned scholars like N.T. Wright, Gordon Fee, and more!

Find it all at www.cbeinternational.org.

Core Values

CBE Board of Reference

• Scripture is our authoritative guide for faith, life, and practice.

• Patriarchy (male dominance) is not a biblical ideal but a result of sin.

• Patriarchy is an abuse of power, taking from females what God has given them: their dignity, and freedom, their leadership, and often their very lives.

• While the Bible reflects patriarchal culture, the Bible does not teach patriarchy in human relationships.

• Christ’s redemptive work frees all people from patriarchy,

Miriam Adeney, Myron S. Augsburger, Raymond J. Bakke, Michael Bird, Esme Bowers, Anthony Campolo, Paul Chilcote, Havilah Dharamraj, Gordon D. Fee, J. Lee Grady, David Joel Hamilton, Fatuma Hashi, Roberta Hestenes, Richard Howell, Craig S. Keener, Tara B. Leach, Gricel Medina, Joy Moore, LaDonna Osborn, Jane Overstreet, Philip B. Payne, John E. Phelan Jr., Ron Pierce, Kay F. Rader, Paul A. Rader, Ronald J. Sider, Aída Besançon Spencer, William David Spencer, John Stackhouse, Todd Still, Ruth A. Tucker, Cynthia Long Westfall, Cecilia Yau.

cbeinternational.org

Priscilla Papers | Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018 • 31

32 • Priscilla Papers

| Vol. 32, No. 1 | Winter 2018

cbeinternational.org