Book Review: Charlie Cleverly explores The Song of Songs.
By Andrew Symes, Anglican Mainstream
Charlie Cleverly has been Rector of St Aldates in central Oxford for 13 years. The church is large by Church of England standards, full of young people, connected to HTB, Alpha and the New Wine network. Pete Greig’s thoughtful foreword to this book (The Song of Songs – Exploring the Divine Romance, Hodder and Stoughton, 2015) summarises: it is about a journey to knowing and loving God more intimately – the “divine romance”, the source of all joy. The book is the fruit of many years’ reflection, but also contains material used in a teaching series about love, sex and marriage, run by St Aldates in 2014. As well as having minds fired and hearts warmed in love for God, can we learn something from the book about the general approach of charismatic evangelicals to the promotion of Christian sexual ethics?
Cleverly takes the reader through the eight short chapters of Song of Songs, following the text fairly closely, but using a wide breadth of literature from across the ages to illuminate the subject, as well as commentaries ancient and modern. A famous sonnet by John Donne sets up how Cleverly proposes to expound the Song:
“…we will be using sexual language to describe an intimate connection with God…Is such a voyage an appropriate thing?…The answer, I believe, is that precisely because of the obsession of society with sexual matters…this kind of language will be truly helpful for the church to express a holy – as opposed to unholy – longing” (p8).
From the start Cleverly introduces the reader to the history of interpretation of the Song in an easy-to-understand way. It is on the surface a poem about the love affair between a man and a woman, perhaps a peasant girl and a prince. But read in conjunction with a rich theme in Scripture which explicitly uses male-female marriage as a symbol of divine-human love, the song becomes an allegory for the relationship between God and his people. In this way the Song can be seen to celebrate romantic love, and the physical/emotional union of husband and wife, but also calls all, married and single, to the greater goal of holy, single-minded intimacy with God in a society obsessed with relationships and sex. Earlier commentators often neglected the obvious, surface meaning of the poem; latterly there has been a “hermeneutic of suspicion concerning anything approaching a spiritualization of these themes” (p21). We need both, Cleverly suggests, as a counter to false idols of sex, and also because the church needs maturity, depth and “passionate intimacy” with Christ to survive potential persecution.
This spiritual closeness with the Lord is best found through a combination of evangelical doctrine and “charismatic mysticism”, a warm relational supernatural spirituality which Cleverly traces in a tradition stretching back to 17th century Calvinistic Puritans, medieval mystics and then back further to early church fathers. The girl in the song yearns for the kiss of her beloved; he finds her beautiful: such is a healthy relationship between a courting couple or those married for many years – it also speaks of the individual believer and God; the church and Christ. The divine lover of our souls wants to hear our voice; we are to smell each other’s perfume; we see many delights in each other’s appearance and attributes – all of these sensory and sensual images are explored in detail for application in spiritual and marital contexts.
As the poem moves to an unabashed portrayal of intense sexual longing in chapter 2 of the Song, for Cleverly this is a clear echo of Adam’s desire for completion in union with Eve, from Genesis 2. The heights of human love, celebrated by poets in all cultures, then, “is a snapshot of the real thing: our longing for an end to alienation from God and full union with him from whom we originally came” p67. And yet there is also a peace, where the contentment of the lovers sitting under the trees in the sunshine reflects the believer resting in the Lord’s presence, under his “banner of love”.
But there is no suggestion in this commentary that the Christian life is always easy. The Song carries hints of shadow and sadness, with its references to winter, darkness and night, and the “foxes that ruin the vineyard”. Cleverly reflects movingly on this, using testimonies of tragedy in his own life and of those close to him, where heaven can seem silent, God seems absent and a time of painful waiting in faith is necessary before renewed relationship, fruitfulness and transformation. The Lord is always there of course, but as Spurgeon said, “the ardent lovers of Jesus must diligently seek him”, just as the woman of the poem runs through the streets looking for her lover (Song 3:1-3).
In reflecting on the powerful images of the Song, Cleverly helps the reader to dwell in an unhurried way on God’s word, using a breadth of Christian tradition including Roman Catholic (for example, spiritual exercises of St Ignatius and the Theology of the Body of Pope John Paul II) as well as the author’s evangelical roots and influences of contemporary Pentecostalism . Important themes in the Christian life emerge: spiritual warfare, the fullness of the Holy Spirit, the uniqueness of Christ, the nature, role and mission of the Church, the covenant of marriage, and the future return of the Messiah to claim his bride. The Song’s main subject is a relationship between a man and a woman, but there are other characters in what is a public drama – in the same way the Christian life is to be lived and communicated in the presence of others, as well as a relationship between lover and beloved.
This book deserves to become known as a contemporary devotional classic, in the way it encourages and guides us to deepen our love for Christ, and our practice of prayer and worship. As a commentary and meditation on the Song, bringing out applications for romance and marriage, and spiritual growth, it is excellent, as the many generous commendations testify. But having identified at the beginning the relevance of the Song to today’s culture, saturated with sex, I think Cleverly misses some opportunities to describe and explain the wrong philosophies and pagan spiritualities underlying the contemporary sexual revolution. For example, in using the phrase “unholy longing” (quoted above), he does not explain what this means or what its consequences might be.
We are in a time where cohabitation, marriage breakdown and pornography use are the norm, and confusion about sexuality and gender are widespread in our culture. The assumed “heteronormativity” and gender complementarity of the Song of Songs and the Bible as a whole is being seriously called into question, and even “male” and “female” is seen increasingly as fluid and a mental state rather than a created physical characteristic. These new ideas, contrary to the Bible, are being widely promoted in education, the media, foreign aid programmes, even by some senior church leaders, while to express the historic, orthodox biblical view is increasingly unsafe. There is surely a case for using an exposition of the Song of Songs not just to affirm the positive of intimacy with Christ, but also to “refute error”, to identify and warn against the dangers of false perceptions of self, unholy relationships, and idolatrous spiritualities, and to promote a deliberately counter-cultural sexual ethic? The book’s reluctance to do this while so expertly and warmly bringing Christ to life and affirming Christian marriage out of the Word reflects many strengths and a weakness in much charismatic Anglicanism today: evangelistic, pastoral, compassionate, prayerful, well-organised – but no longer prophetic, not warning and critiquing, not willing to take a strong public stand on the more controversial aspects of the discourse about sex, whether in the church or in wider society.
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