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From John MacArthur’s Shepherd’s Fellowship site today (hat tip: Tim Challies), the pastor/author is ready to address both the Song of Solomon and those evangelical leader who, he says with the only “explicit” term used in his introduction, “rape” its beauty.
Apparently the shortest route to relevance in church ministry right now is for the pastor to talk about sex in garishly explicit terms during the Sunday morning service. If he can shock parishioners with crude words and sophomoric humor, so much the better.
[. . .]
Sermons about sex have suddenly become a bigger fad in the evangelical world than the prayer of Jabez ever was.
[. . .]
I would be the last to suggest that preachers should totally avoid the topic of sex. Scripture has quite a lot to say about the subject [. . .]
But the language Scripture employs when dealing with the physical relationship between husband and wife is always careful—often plain, sometimes poetic, usually delicate, frequently muted by euphemisms, and never fully explicit.
[. . .]
That includes the Song of Solomon.
In fact, Solomon’s love-poem epitomizes the exact opposite approach. It is, of course, a lengthy poem about courtship and marital love. It is filled with euphemisms and word pictures. Its whole point is gently, subtly, and elegantly to express the emotional and physical intimacy of marital love—in language suitable for any audience.
But it has become popular in certain circles to employ extremely graphic descriptions of physical intimacy as a way of expounding on the euphemisms in Solomon’s poem. As this trend develops, each new speaker seems to find something more shocking in the metaphors than any of his predecessors ever imagined.
[. . .]
Such pronouncements are usually made amid raucous laughter, but evidently we are expected to take them seriously.
[. . .]
That approach is not exegesis; it is exploitation. It is contrary to the literary style of the book itself. It is spiritually tantamount to an act of rape. It tears the beautiful poetic dress off Song of Solomon, strips that portion of Scripture of its dignity, and holds it up to be laughed at and leered at in a carnal way.
I am grateful to Pastor MacArthur for addressing this issue and I look forward to reading more from him. And I am also grateful that he is not falling into the tempting trap of presenting Big Bad Examples of the sin so we can all see how bad it is, which kind of defeats the whole point.
In recent years, it seems this whole outdo-in-lewd-and-crude approach has been based on immaturity and a rather gleeful attitude of libertarian antinomianism as well. (I am not as familiar with Mark Driscoll, yet unlike some others at least for him the attitude is contrary to his professed strong Reformed stance.) Why can Christ-followers not adopt a more Puritan (not less!) attitude toward intimate relations in marriage — with a balance of guarding their sacredness yet also not being ashamed? Why must church leaders jolt from one extreme to the other?
Men such as MacArthur, John Piper and CJ Mahaney have done well addressing the subject of sex with the appropriate blend of restraint and yet clarity. Intimacy in marriage is a beautiful thing, but now too many churches are falling all over themselves to talk about it as if they’ve been muzzled for far too long and by golly now is the time to Show All the World That We Are Just as Crazy About Sex, too.
“Hee hee hee, look what Iiiii’m doinnnng, I’m talking about se-exxx! Oh, I am such a ‘bad boy,’ I am quite the naughty evangelical, aren’t I?”
Come on. Big deal. It won’t take long before the gimmick of this has worn off and all those “naughty evangelicals” will look around and see that it’s not so supposedly naughty anymore because everybody is doing it. Rumors of all these imaginary-enemy Puritan Legalists glaring in the general directions of married couples’ bedrooms have been greatly exaggerated. Furthermore, what is the deal with pretending like it’s all naughty in order to enjoy it? That’s just strange and twisted — and perhaps it demonstrates that they haven’t gotten rid of their hangups nearly as much as they say.
While mindful of Christ and propriety that honors Him and His institution of marriage, can we not be simply “too cool” to fall for all this dumb cackling about it? From what I have read so far, the Puritans did not frown upon pleasure, they safeguarded it from this kind of insipidity. So if you’re making a big pretense about rebelling against “Puritanical” attitudes, sorry, you’ve got the wrong straw man.
Such haw-haw nudge-nudge crude locker-room-speak about the subject is absolutely against the restrained-yet-passionate nature of Song of Solomon, and also transparently eye-rollingly absurd to those with a more Biblical balance. But worse, as Phil Johnson pointed out in his excellent March 6 sermon, it dishonors Christ, ignores the clear instructions of Titus 2 to forbid profane talk and crude joking, and fails to uphold the wonderful sacredness of intimacy in marriage.
Comments
Andrew
10:31 PM ET
,
Monday, Aug 10, 2009
Justin D. Barnard has an analysis over at Touchstone Magazine: Mere Comments that is neither too generous with Mark Driscoll's critics also (rather odd given how ones view of “Lordship Salvation” is manifested)....
And you know, he has a fair weight of history behind his point - for example:
The venerable Anglo-Saxon “Saint Bede” certainly scandalized a millenium later Victorian England commentators with his various unblushingly stated penance lists for various infractions such as hetero anal sex, hetero oral sex, hetero interfemoral sex etc. The Apostle Paul being both a Jew & a Roman and familiar with and being partly a product of their cultures in stating “Let there be no uncleanness named among you” (or any sort spoken of to be found among you) was well aware of the emphasis of oral hygiene and cleanliness of the mouth among the pagan Zeus worshipping upper middle class to Patrician elite free Roman citizens. Oral genital contact was something considered to be more debasing than even the debasement in Roman eyes of the receptive effeminate partner in anal intercourse and thus fellatio was considered something that no husband of the Citizen elite classes could dare request of his wife, a Matron of Rome. Evidenced by the extreme rarity of oral sex portrayed in pornographic Roman and Greek art of the time.
The socialist, atheist “homosexual” left in such online works as Debbie Nathan’s Sodomy for the Masses & George Painter’s The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers - The History of Sodomy Laws in the United States document that it was near universal Judeo-Christianity mores-“Natural Law” that dictated to society “what is appropriate” on this matter and not the other way around.
The world's major “religions” Christendom, Judaism, Hinduism, half of Islam, Buhddism (just ask the Dalai Lama) all believe that the behavior in question is outright sin or “bad kharma” inducing.
Some claiming that Paul coined the term arsenkoites in 1 Cor 6:9, and one cannot be certain what it means are beyond not seeing the forest for the trees. As the Greek and Latin vocabulary become absorbed in the native people group dialects resulting in the development of English (for one example), the core definitions of original Greek words conveyed without too much variance their original meaning. So you have the use of the direct Greek coitus (koites) universally used by the medical/scientific professions to describe sexual intercourse (the conveying of seed into the vagina - without the modifier) and Greek arse carried through the development of the English language as a somewhat slang expression used in contemporary British pornography to describe male on female sodomy/buggery. At the risk of offending with a Jack Chick “Tractism”/ Peter Ruckmann “plainspokeness”; @%$# her up her arse as they would vulgarly say... - definitely showing throughout history that arsenkoites was not limited to male homoseuality or pederasty by any means. With long running historical Hebrew & Phoenician “Tarshish” merchant and mining commerce operations in Spain & the British Isles one could well read arsenkoites reverse “Hebrew style” as coitus-(i)n-arse.
Andrew
10:32 PM ET
,
Monday, Aug 10, 2009
Mark Driscoll being near “Generation X” himself (38 years of age) along with his twentysomething adherents, were raised on this post judeo-christian post 60’s/70s sexual revolution culture. Said culture hedonistically pursuing what was before considered a universally illegal, deviant and uncommon behavior into a pornographic industry promoted pursuit popularized around the late 1980s & 1990’s.
Oh, I might add in connection to the previous that the “marriage bed undefiled” passage of Hebrews 13:4 uses similarly translated as “bed” the root Greek word koite - which means the conveyence of seed up the vagina when used without a modifying word before or following.
Some very recent “modern” commentators have personally read into Romans chapter 1 “lesbianism” or female homosexuality, although this is contrary to the near universal opinion of “Christendom” for 2000 years that it is specifically refering to heterosexual anal intercourse - as evidenced by Babylonian and ancient early Greek prostitution texts and widespread Hetaera courtesan Attica artwork and pottery. Lesbianism being a rare phenomena in contrast to male homosexuality in ancient times; even when mythicized by the ancient Greeks “Lesbianism” was put in a partially heterosexual phallic envy context. Contemporary Lesbianism is prominently fueled by political Feminism in hatred of men and “culturally hip” promiscuity, menage a trois and pornography and “bar scene” - “Lipstick Lesbianism” once they get bored of their whoredom with men. thereafter the rampant sodomy with women in the earlier Babylonian & early Greek empires would later manifest in the greater next step up in abomination of male homosexual anal sodomy practices by the later Greek, even more so the Romans and the almost completely given over to adult male sodomy the violent facistic Spartans.
The Hittites (Patriarch Abraham's friends) had harsh penal laws against “heterosexual” anal and “heterosexual” oral sex so called. One of the famous 1st century writings (the Epistle of Barnabas? or other) though uninspired, has a condemnation against “oral sex” refering to the legend of the copulation of the weasel, thus indicating a long standing tradition in Christendom. Martin Luther & John Calvin both wrote against masturbation/onanism one going so far as to call it sodomy, therefore it is a Reformed point of view.
Not to forget God’s displeasure at Baal Peor (which was the worship of “the opening”/defecation) by the priestesses and priests of Baal which was appeased by a zealous Israelite spearing and pinning a couple together shish-kabob style while they were likely engaged in “sacred anal sex”. Perhaps some of the plague which quickly struck down the Israelites who fornicated with those particular female worshippers of Baal may have been related to Ecoli food poisoning/flesh eating disease which the Isrealites had no immunity against since it (anal/feces sex) wasn’t normative Israelite practice.
… a couple of liberal rabbis opinions in the Talmud regarding a wife’s submission to “the overturned table” is contradicted by top rabbi Judah the Prince’s claim a century after Jesus’ ministry on earth that the angel “Gabriel” told him why some children are born deaf, or mute etc., echoing the Jewish cultural tradition of earlier when the disciples asked Jesus if this man’s parents sinned (in anal sodomy, or oral sex, or in this case pornographic voyeurism - believed in the later instance to cause blindness in children) that he was born blind.
Ask the Hassidic/Orthodox Jewish rabbis for historical confirmation of the above facts.
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