Non-allegorical sermon series on S of S?

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Eoghan

Puritan Board Senior
I apologise to those who prefer the allegorical interpretation as the primary meaning but I hold the contrary view. My question is does anyone know of a good sermon series from the non-allegorical point of view. R.C. Sproule and John Piper seem to take this position but I have been unable to find any sermon series by either?
 
I apologise to those who prefer the allegorical interpretation as the primary meaning but I hold the contrary view. My question is does anyone know of a good sermon series from the non-allegorical point of view. R.C. Sproule and John Piper seem to take this position but I have been unable to find any sermon series by either?

If you don't believe the Song of Solomon is allegorical, then what do you believe it is?
 
I apologise to those who prefer the allegorical interpretation as the primary meaning but I hold the contrary view. My question is does anyone know of a good sermon series from the non-allegorical point of view. R.C. Sproule and John Piper seem to take this position but I have been unable to find any sermon series by either?

I'll let others decide whether they are good or not, but my sermon series on the Song is available at christgrovecity.org. You'll have to scroll through the sermons to find them. My approach is Christ-centered but not allegorical; a fuller explanation will soon be available in my Tyndale OT commentary on the Song, which will be published in the UK in January and in the States in March. The sermons will eventually also form part of the REC series.
 
Should I be apologetic? It seems that most (?) reformed thinking is catching on to the nuances of Hebrew poetic imagery and has the literal interpretation as the primary meaning. Having gained a clearer vision of the relationship and fellowship between man and woman in the covenant relationship of marriage, it restores marriage to what it should be (it has been massively discounted and degraded by contemporary culture). With that clear vision of a biblical marriage Paul's use of marriage to illustrate the relationship of Christ and the church becomes all the more meaningful. That God intends marriage as in some way indicative of our need for Him becomes clear when we acknowledge the dissolution of marriage at the resurrection.
 
Let me say that we've had Dr. Duguid lecture at Mid-America on this and we deeply appreciated his approach to and treatment of these materials and thus would recommend his sermons.

My good friend G.I. Williamson also preached through the Canticles some time ago, treating it as addressing, in the first place, God's intention for marriage. You may find these on Sermonaudio.com.

Peace,
Alan
 
Can something have dual purpose? Can the Psalm of Solomon be about romantic love in a sense and about Christ and the church in other sense?
Solomon was never a shepherd but this bridegroom is a shepherd. He also comes from the dessert as if with a pillar of cloud

A book like Job can be about Job and his suffering and also portray God's suffering servant who offers sacrifice for sinners in the depth of his suffering and then is raised both in Job's life and in another sense in Christ. A dual use.

Clearly Psalm 45 is about a marriage of the King marrying a gentile bride but quoted by the New Testament about Christ
 
Can something have dual purpose? Can the Psalm of Solomon be about romantic love in a sense and about Christ and the church in other sense?

This would turn it into a type. A type requires historical events, people, and/or things, which bear a divinely ordained resemblance to an antitype. Nothing like this can be seen in the Song. One must create "resemblances" in order to treat it as a type, and this just opens the door for fanciful allegory.

The allegorical view is the safest as it requires a literal interpretation of the allegory. Proverbs is interpreted in the same way in connection with Wisdom. There is a concrete object which supplies stable meaning so that the allegory is tied to the words and concepts expressed in the text. Man-made types, in contrast, have no boundaries, which leaves the interpreter free to follow whatever takes his fancy.
 
I apologise to those who prefer the allegorical interpretation as the primary meaning but I hold the contrary view. My question is does anyone know of a good sermon series from the non-allegorical point of view. R.C. Sproule and John Piper seem to take this position but I have been unable to find any sermon series by either?

I'll let others decide whether they are good or not, but my sermon series on the Song is available at christgrovecity.org. You'll have to scroll through the sermons to find them. My approach is Christ-centered but not allegorical; a fuller explanation will soon be available in my Tyndale OT commentary on the Song, which will be published in the UK in January and in the States in March. The sermons will eventually also form part of the REC series.

Thanks. I've enjoyed what you've written so far in the REC series, so I'm looking forward to listening to this.
 
Can something have dual purpose? Can the Psalm of Solomon be about romantic love in a sense and about Christ and the church in other sense?

This would turn it into a type. A type requires historical events, people, and/or things, which bear a divinely ordained resemblance to an antitype. Nothing like this can be seen in the Song. One must create "resemblances" in order to treat it as a type, and this just opens the door for fanciful allegory.

The allegorical view is the safest as it requires a literal interpretation of the allegory. Proverbs is interpreted in the same way in connection with Wisdom. There is a concrete object which supplies stable meaning so that the allegory is tied to the words and concepts expressed in the text. Man-made types, in contrast, have no boundaries, which leaves the interpreter free to follow whatever takes his fancy.

I'm not sure that I'm understanding your point here, Matthew, which seems to turn on its head the normal use of these categories. It is common in these discussions to regard allegory as the category under which we place unboundaried interpretations, in which the interpreter follows his fancy. Thus Cyril of Alexandria's understanding that the sachet of myrrh between the woman's two breasts represents Christ between the two testaments is normally described as allegorical, while a more restrained understanding that sees a link between human marriage and the relationship of Christ and the church is often described as typological. Nor have I heard allegory argued for as the proper method of interpreting Proverbs. So I suspect that you mean something else by them from the common usage of the terms. Perhaps you intend to distinguish between something that was written as an allegory (such as Pilgrim's Progress) and allegorical interpretation of things written as something else. But regarding a piece as an allegory seems inevitably to me to imply allegorical interpretation, which can easily lead to precisely the kind of fanciful speculations that we find in the Church Fathers. Since in an allegory everything has meaning, we are encouraged to multiply speculations.

In fact, I'm not convinced that these categories are really that helpful anyway for the Song since you don't have to take a "spiritual/allegorical" understanding of the Song to end up with the interpreter freely following his fancy. Much of what Tommy Nelson writes following a "natural" approach in The Book of Romance is as ungrounded in the Biblical text of the Song as anything the church fathers ever dreamed up.

I view the key interpretive question in the Song as the choice between a primary focus on human relationships (the "natural" approach) or on the relationship of Christ and the believer/the church (the "spiritual" approach). Both can be pursued in a sober more Biblical-theological mode, or in a wild, free-association mode. Nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive. When Proverbs says "Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life" is that talking about "natural" hopes (the desire for a job, for health, for a spouse, etc) or "spiritual" hopes (for God, heaven, etc.)? Do I have to choose as a preacher? Or can I address our everyday hopes and our deepest desires as well? So too when I preach on "Husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church" do I only talk about Christ's love for the church? Or do I speak to husbands about their duties and responsibilities as well? In fact, I would argue that even if you think that the Song is primarily about Christ and the church, since Christ is the perfect husband anything that shows us more of Christ in that role ought to convict us as human husbands! For that reason, my expositions of the Song are intended to be both convicting and challenging concerning our human relationships and pointing us forward to Christ and the gospel, not through wild allegory but through sound Biblical theology.
 
There has to be elevation of marriage even if the Psalm is also taken spiritually

As far as types. Types may be abused, but there are types. In this case, the groom being a shepherd is a tip off more may be going on than merely a song about Solomon. You might say similar about Psalm 45 which references some historical marriage, but is quoted in Hebrews about Christ

The account Joseph in Egypt is a type of Christ as well as a historical account
Are the Psalms mostly about the historical case in point or mostly about Christ? or both? Psalm 88/89 may have been written provoked by the Babylonian exile or some such catastrophe but are types of the death and resurrection for example.
 
I'm not sure that I'm understanding your point here, Matthew, which seems to turn on its head the normal use of these categories. It is common in these discussions to regard allegory as the category under which we place unboundaried interpretations, in which the interpreter follows his fancy.

Iain, You must be thinking of the allegorical method of interpretation. The allegorical view of the Song does not employ an allegorical method. It identifies the Song as an allegory, but it interprets that allegory with the same literal method that is required for all of Scripture, just as is done with parables and visions.

There is no focus on human relationships in the Song. So right there the allegorical method has begun to show itself. A new meaning has been created for the Song. Then, in order to give some legitimacy to this new meaning, "marriage" is read into the text. Then, to try to give this meaning some "religious" significance, marriage is made a type of Christ and the church. By this means the typological approach to the Song engages in fanciful allegorical interpretation. The book is made to speak to something that is foreign to its basic nature and contents.
 
I'm not sure that I'm understanding your point here, Matthew, which seems to turn on its head the normal use of these categories. It is common in these discussions to regard allegory as the category under which we place unboundaried interpretations, in which the interpreter follows his fancy.

Iain, You must be thinking of the allegorical method of interpretation. The allegorical view of the Song does not employ an allegorical method. It identifies the Song as an allegory, but it interprets that allegory with the same literal method that is required for all of Scripture, just as is done with parables and visions.

There is no focus on human relationships in the Song. So right there the allegorical method has begun to show itself. A new meaning has been created for the Song. Then, in order to give some legitimacy to this new meaning, "marriage" is read into the text. Then, to try to give this meaning some "religious" significance, marriage is made a type of Christ and the church. By this means the typological approach to the Song engages in fanciful allegorical interpretation. The book is made to speak to something that is foreign to its basic nature and contents.

Matthew,
I suspect that we'll have to agree to disagree on the nature of the Song, since I believe (as I will argue in my forthcoming commentary) that the challenges involved in human relationships and marriage are actually front and center in the Song, just as they are in Proverbs 5. But there is surely nothing fanciful about seeing marriage as a type of Christ and the church, in view of Ephesians 5.
 
I suspect that we'll have to agree to disagree on the nature of the Song, since I believe (as I will argue in my forthcoming commentary) that the challenges involved in human relationships and marriage are actually front and center in the Song, just as they are in Proverbs 5. But there is surely nothing fanciful about seeing marriage as a type of Christ and the church, in view of Ephesians 5.

Iain, I will agree to disagree with you as firmly as I disagree with you. :)

The apostle, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, brings out a "specific" correspondence between marriage and the relationship between Christ and the church. By turning the Song into an "extended" type, that correspondence is likewise "extended" beyond the "specific" point mentioned by the apostle. This facilitates the introduction of all kinds of fanciful ideas under the patronage of "typology."
 
I suspect that we'll have to agree to disagree on the nature of the Song, since I believe (as I will argue in my forthcoming commentary) that the challenges involved in human relationships and marriage are actually front and center in the Song, just as they are in Proverbs 5. But there is surely nothing fanciful about seeing marriage as a type of Christ and the church, in view of Ephesians 5.

Iain, I will agree to disagree with you as firmly as I disagree with you. :)

The apostle, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, brings out a "specific" correspondence between marriage and the relationship between Christ and the church. By turning the Song into an "extended" type, that correspondence is likewise "extended" beyond the "specific" point mentioned by the apostle. This facilitates the introduction of all kinds of fanciful ideas under the patronage of "typology."

Yet the image of marriage for the relationship of God and his people is surely pervasive throughout the Scriptures, Old and New. It forms the basis for related images such as divorce, adultery, jealousy and so on. I would understand Paul as simply making a specific application of that broader picture, although he himself seems to suggest a broader parallel in 5:31-32, where he appeals to the creation order in Genesis 2 as pertaining to the image.
 
Yet the image of marriage for the relationship of God and his people is surely pervasive throughout the Scriptures, Old and New. It forms the basis for related images such as divorce, adultery, jealousy and so on. I would understand Paul as simply making a specific application of that broader picture, although he himself seems to suggest a broader parallel in 5:31-32, where he appeals to the creation order in Genesis 2 as pertaining to the image.

If anything, you have just made the case for the allegorical view. The relationship between God and His people, Christ and the church, is the point of reference.

Paul's point of correspondence is union. He is arguing in the opposite direction to the way a type functions, as he is drawing on the relation between Christ and the church as a moral pattern to be imitated in the relation of husbands and wives.
 
Reading Carr's Tyndale Commentary I came across a very good discussion of the allegorical method on pages 21-24. He traces the origin of allegory back to Philo and Origen but demonstrates it has it's roots in the pagan Greek rehabilitation of the stories of the gods. Since the gods of Homer and Hesiod's writings were immoral, unjust, vindictive etc... they chose to deny the historicity of the stories and allegorize them (p22). "The assumption that the Song is purely allegorical has been widespread amongst English-speaking evangelicals for many generations."

I think it is this allegorizing away that chaffs against so many reformed hermeneutical principles. The Roman Catholic Church allegorizes 4:7 to defend the worship of Mary! Within their tradition that is probably but it does rather show the problem that when the whole is taken as allegory the emphasis shifts from the authority of the text (and God) to the interpreter and his opinion.

Whilst the relationship of Christ and the Church is an application of S of S it is not the primary meaning. Were it the primary meaning I think we would expect Paul, Peter, James and the other apostles as well as Jesus Himself to quote from it. The fact is they don't!
 
Reading Carr's Tyndale Commentary I came across a very good discussion of the allegorical method on pages 21-24. He traces the origin of allegory back to Philo and Origen but demonstrates it has it's roots in the pagan Greek rehabilitation of the stories of the gods. Since the gods of Homer and Hesiod's writings were immoral, unjust, vindictive etc... they chose to deny the historicity of the stories and allegorize them (p22). "The assumption that the Song is purely allegorical has been widespread amongst English-speaking evangelicals for many generations."

I think it is this allegorizing away that chaffs against so many reformed hermeneutical principles. The Roman Catholic Church allegorizes 4:7 to defend the worship of Mary! Within their tradition that is probably but it does rather show the problem that when the whole is taken as allegory the emphasis shifts from the authority of the text (and God) to the interpreter and his opinion.

Whilst the relationship of Christ and the Church is an application of S of S it is not the primary meaning. Were it the primary meaning I think we would expect Paul, Peter, James and the other apostles as well as Jesus Himself to quote from it. The fact is they don't!

Eoghan,
Matthew can defend his own view more than adequately, but one of the distinctions I was trying to draw out in our discussion is the difference between allegorical interpretation as a general method and interpreting the Song as an allegory. So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is rightly interpreted as an allegory and it would be a mistake to criticize such interpretation as a denial of the historicity of the storyline. Matthew is, I think, arguing for the latter (the Song as an allegory) and not the former (allegorical interpretation). And in his defence, one of the observations I have made in my research is that the "allegorical method" - in the sense of a loose association between a Biblical image and some other reality - is as prevalent on the natural side of the interpretive divide as it is on the spiritual.

Nonetheless, for some interpreters, it is an attraction of interpreting the Song spiritually that it then doesn't have to do with such earthy matters as human love sex. Iain Campbell, for example, writes:

If the Song’s meaning is exhausted as a celebration of human love, it is difficult to attach any theological significance to it, particularly given the absence of God's name from the composition. To have a book devoted to the joys of physical love in a collection of spiritually oriented and theologically significant writings would appear to make the Song superfluous.

Yet in the Book of Proverbs, God seems to find our human relationships (including sexual relationships - see Prov 5) a significant topic of theological teaching.

On the other hand, other interpreters have wrongly argued for a natural reading on the grounds of the erotic language and imagery of the Song (which itself has, in my view, been vastly overstated by modern interpreters). This too is clearly wrong, for one of the clearest allegories in Scripture comes in Ezekiel 16, where the imagery of Israel as a wayward bride is certainly extremely erotic, even in our rather toned down English translations, to the point where Spurgeon though it impossible for a minister to read that chapter in public.

So the question of the proper interpretation of the Song rests on the rather complex issue of genre interpretation: is the Song more like Proverbs 5, with its affirmation of the appropriate joys of human marital love, or does it, like Psalm 45, have more centrally to do with God's love for us? The answer to that question requires an evaluation of many things, not least the identity of the man (is he actually Solomon, or an idealized lover, or God, or Christ?) and the woman (is she one of Solomon's thousand wives and concubines, an idealized woman, Israel, the church or an individual believer?). That requires considerable thought and examination of a wide variety of factors, as I explore in my forthcoming commentary.

Moreover, do we have to choose entirely between the two applications of the Song in an either/or way? The story of the Good Samaritan is not an allegory but an extended metaphor. Like the Song, it has sometimes been painfully allegorized (read the early church Fathers on the significance of the two coins, or the donkey), yet we wouldn't want to insist on the historicity of the events in the story. But is this metaphor primarily about the relationship of God and his people or about human relationships? Do we have to only talk about its significance for one and not the other? Doesn't it (primarily?) address our human relationships (who is my neighbor?) and yet at the same time show us something profound about the costly nature of God's love for his rebellious people in Christ, which goes so much further than even the Samaritan's concern for his enemy?

By the way, although it is rarely recognized, I think Revelation 3:20 (Behold I stand at the door and knock) is a clear reference in the NT to the Song - and, yes, one where Christ takes on the role of the spurned bridegroom!

I hope that aids you in your reflections on this fascinating, complex, and often misunderstood book.
 
I had hoped that with only eight chapters this would be an eight week study. Those hopes have risen as I have realised that the chapters do not follow the Song's natural units. Then again I have come to realise that the preliminary study could easily last two months as I look at how Paul refers to marriage as reflecting Christ's relationship with the church. There is also a limited sense in which man (plural) is man and woman, dimly reflecting something of the fellowship in the Trinity. I wonder if this is in part why there is no marriage in heaven.

I think part of the problem from the modern perspective is evolution (I was an evolutionist before a creationist). Our culture sees us as highly developed animals not fallen spiritual beings. In this regard I see the S of S as an antidote. As reformed Christians we revel in propositional truth, so it comes as something of a shock to the system to be confronted with poetry, not in english but in Hebrew conforming to Hebraic poetry conventions (or is it Aramaic?).
 
Iain has clearly articulated the difference between the allegorical view and allegorical interpretation. The quotation from Iain Campbell is well worth pondering.

I might just add, that Proverbs 5 itself is allegorical within the context of chapters 1-9, and specifically identifies "wisdom" as the point of reference. So any appeal to this chapter to elucidate the Song will be further confirmation of the allegorical view.
 
Iain, You must be thinking of the allegorical method of interpretation. The allegorical view of the Song does not employ an allegorical method. It identifies the Song as an allegory, but it interprets that allegory with the same literal method that is required for all of Scripture, just as is done with parables and visions.

There is no focus on human relationships in the Song. So right there the allegorical method has begun to show itself. A new meaning has been created for the Song. Then, in order to give some legitimacy to this new meaning, "marriage" is read into the text. Then, to try to give this meaning some "religious" significance, marriage is made a type of Christ and the church. By this means the typological approach to the Song engages in fanciful allegorical interpretation. The book is made to speak to something that is foreign to its basic nature and contents.

What is the allegorical method of interpretation?
 
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