Fifty Shades of Grey and One Very Good Song

Not that I think the internet has been waiting with bated breath, wondering what Pastor Dale thinks about the upcoming release of the (so-called) erotic film, Fifty Shades of Grey, but musings, concern and alarm about this “cultural event,” such as it is, keep turning up on my Facebook feed and the blogs I read, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to spend some time thinking theologically about this one.

And let me start here.

In one of the more mysterious and difficult passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, Song of Songs 8:6 is talking about the power of sexual love, and it says, “love burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame.”  At least, that’s how the KJV and the NIV translate it; the NASB, which tends to go for a more a literal rendering of the original, reads, “[Love’s] flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”

The original Hebrew uses a very obscure phrase there, šalhebetyâ’, which is the combination of a rare word for fire, šalhebeth, and the suffix yâ’. And here’s where the mystery and the difficulty come in.  “Yah,” you have to understand, is a shortened form of the Hebrew name for God; love, as far as the Song of Song is concerned, is “the flame of Yah.”  This could be read in a generic superlative sense, as in: love is the “greatest” or “mightiest” flame (so the NIV, KJV, etc.); but it can also be read just as the NASB has rendered it: “Love burns with flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”

In his commentary on Song of Songs, OT Scholar Richard Davidson says this about verse 8:6, “If the blaze of love, ardent love, such as between a man and a woman is indeed the flame of Yahweh, then this human love is explicitly described as originating in God, a spark off the Holy Flame.  It is, therefore, a holy love.  Such a conclusion has profound implications for the whole reading of the Song of Songs—and for the quality and motivation of human sexual love.  ... The love between man and woman is not just animal passion, or evolved natural attraction, but a holy love ignited by Yahweh himself!” (Davidson, The Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament, 630).

I tend to favor this second reading.  Partly because I’m a die-hard romantic, and partly because it just resonates with me theologically.  There is, I think, a spiritual dimension to our sexuality that we have lost or forgotten or ignored, but the ancients knew well.  It’s not for nothing that the New Testament so often uses wedding imagery, when it wants to describe the coming together of God and humanity in Jesus Christ.  And it’s not for nothing, either, that the earliest Christians tended to read the Song of Songs as an allegory for the Church’s union with Christ.  But, as Eugene Peterson says, this was not because they had such a low view of sex that they were embarrassed to face its erotic imagery frankly.  It was because they had such a high view of sex that they saw in that imagery a spark of the Divine Flame.

If sexual love is indeed the “flame of Yahweh,” then suddenly this ancient song has a powerful word to speak to our modern world, as it prepares itself for the film adaptation of an erotic novel that set the UK record for the fastest-selling paperback of all time (according to Wikipedia).  Fire, of course, has the potential both to warm and heal, or to burn and consume, and whether its effects are destructive or life- giving depends on where and when and how it is ignited.  This is why the Song continually insists that it ought not be aroused until it desires (2:7, 3:5, 8:4).

It’s also why the Song of Song offers us such a wholistic view of sexual love.  In his Nooma video Flame, Rob Bell points out that the Song of Song uses three different but interlocking words for loving intimacy that together we would translate with that simple word “love.”  The word rayah, for instance, describes a mutual affection between close companions.  We might translate it “friendship” as easily as “love,” and it’s used of both the Lover and the Beloved at different times (1:9, 2:10, 5:2, 5:16, etc.). The word dôd describes physical intimacy specifically, and it’s the word used in verses like 1:1, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love (dôd) is better than wine.”  The word ‘ahăbâh describes the deep spiritual union between human beings that we sometimes talk about in terms of “becoming someone’s soul-mate.” And it’s ‘ahăbâh specifically that verse 8:6 is talking about, when it says that love burns with the very flame of the Lord.

Here’s the point:  ‘ahăbâh can’t burn without the light of rayah (friendship) and the heat of dôd (physical intimacy), but it’s not mere companionship, or physical pleasure alone that burns with divine fire. Rayah and dôd may burn hot—destructively hot, even—but only ‘ahăbâh, fueled and fed by the other two, burns divine.

Which brings me, at last, to Fifty Shades of Grey.  Because whatever else it’s about, Fifty Shades reflects our culture’s increasing tendency to disconnect mere physical gratification from the other aspects of sexual intimacy—emotional, spiritual, relational, and so on—that together make sexual love the Flame of Yah.  If Christians are concerned about the release of a mainstream film that glorifies “kinky sex,” it’s not, or shouldn’t be, because the film makes too much out of sex; it’s because it’s making too little of it, reducing it to a mere parody of dôd.

In this sense, it is bitterly ironic that Fifty Shades’ release is slated to coincide with St. Valentine’s Day.  Traditionally, of course, St. Valentine was martyred because of his commitment to Christian marriage—to ‘ahăbâh, we might say—but if a quick perusal of the Valentine’s Day bookshelf at Chapters can be trusted as empirical evidence, ‘ahăbâh doesn’t sell nearly as well as a stripped down version of dôd (no pun intended).

This is not just the prudish hand wringing of a Christian fuddy-duddy.  Many commentators have pointed out that the problem with Fifty Shades is its sexualisation of violence and abuse.  This is very bad, to be sure, but the problem runs even deeper than that.  In his book Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges offers a disturbing but unflinching analysis of the American pornography industry, and points out a “normalization dynamic” that drives it. As things that were once taboo—the purvey of the outer edges, so to speak—become more and more mainstream, the porn industry must push the outer edges further out to remain taboo. As a result, Hedges argues, pornography has become increasingly and alarmingly misogynistic, sadistic, violent and dehumanizing. And Hedges wrote this in 2009, six years before E. L. James brought terms like BDSM into the mainstream.  One shudders to wonder where the “outer edges” will need to be re-drawn now.

If the author of Song of Songs were here (and he is) I think that whatever else he said, he’d say this: doing violence to dôd like this is quite literally playing with fire; things will get burned.

But I also think he’d say this: there is a different path, a sacred path, one that leads to healing and wholeness and shalom, where physical intimacy finds its rightful place among heart-to-heart companionship and spiritual mutuality and honoring and nurturing and covenant that taken together, and only together make sexual love sweeter than wine and stronger than death, the very flame of Yah.