Erotic Bible

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Is there a connection between the Bible and eroticism or sexuality? Most believe that there is, but also that this connection is (almost) entirely negative in nature. Such a conclusion is not hard to understand - the Bible has, after all, long been used as a source of inspiration for grounds for repressing people's sexual and erotic impulses. Can it also be used as a source of inspiration for encouraging those impulses?

That's the position adopted by David McLain Carr in his recent book The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible. A professor of the Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary, Carr argues that the wedge which has been driven between religion or spirituality and human sexuality, often based upon biblical texts, has been a terrible mistake which has done a great deal of harm to people over the centuries.

In place of the profoundly anti-sexual and anti-body readings of the Bible which have generally dominated discussions of religion and sexuality in the West, Carr offers a different understanding of key biblical texts which he believes may help people better integrate their spiritual and sexual lives. Indeed, Carr believes that when viewed in the proper light, the Bible can be understood and calling people "to a life of erotic passion: passion for others, passion for God, and passion for the Earth."

This argument is improved, I think, because Carr spends some time on passages which are used to repress sexuality or which depict an image of relationships that are ultimately very harmful. For example:

In the mid-1980s Gracia Fay Ellwood showed how the image of divine-human marriage in Hosea and elsewhere depicts God as a violent husband caught in a cycle of spousal abuse of Israel, his wife: becoming jealous of his wife, violently abusing her, and then wooing her back. ... If the male God of the Bible has the right to brutally punish his unfaithful wife in the Bible, it is harder to argue that human husbands do not have the same right as well. The model depends on the legitimacy of gender power, in which husbands - whether human or divine - have specific rights and violent power over their wives.

This is a good news/bad news moment for Carr. On the one hand, he cannot deny that passages like those he describes are simply unacceptable models for how humans should treat one another, much less how humans should be treated by God. On the other hand, such passages also help him make his case for the idea that there has always been a connection between spiritual and sexual relationships - if there weren't and if such a connection weren't implicitly understood as normal, the prophets' depiction of the relationship between Israel and God as akin to that between a wife and husband wouldn't have made a great deal of sense to the original readers.

Fortunately for Carr, he isn't limited to such violent and abusive passages - there are other passages with more positive depictions which he can use to build his case. Of course, it would be impractical go through the entire collection of books in the Bible for this, so Carr focuses on three key sections: the Garden of Eden, Isaiah's vineyard garden, and the lover's garden of the Song of Songs. Here, he believes, a relationship between the spiritual and the sexual can best be illustrated.

Whether ultimately successful or not, Carr's arguments are important because they provide sound basis for disputing some of the anti-sexual politics of the traditional "family values" movement which has come to be so powerful in America:

Where the Bible has been cited as the authority for modern forms of family and marriage, we can point to the fact that few seriously affirm the range of Biblical commands about sex, whether in the Old or New Testaments. ... [T]he Bible offers a vision of sexuality that goes beyond the moralism and sexual exchange that characterizes much of our culture. The Bible does not just tell people to do whatever feels good, not to just avoid what is bad. Nor does the Bible offer any single norm for sexuality, however much modern readers might strive to create such a norm out of a mix of Victorian images of the family, Old Testament honor laws, and early Christian texts generally ambivalent about sexuality and family.

Central to Carr's general methodology is the principle of looking beyond the surface text and reading into the words ideas and attitudes which many other readers may not agree with. Not quite as much of this is involved when it comes to some passages, like those in the Song of Songs, but when it comes to others it becomes much more complex.

I suspect, for example, that fundamentalists and even generally conservative Christians are likely to disagree with his reading of the Garden of Eden section. Yes, it is true that it depicts humans as being made "in the image of" God and, yes, this can be reasonably understood as perhaps a validation of our physical natures - sexuality included. Such a reading may not, however, be absolutely necessary: one might argue for example that the "image" in question is actually our souls rather than our bodies.

Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that any one interpretation of any portion of the Bible must be definitive - that's exactly the error which fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals adopt. What Carr does offer instead is a plausible interpretation, one which offers the chance of taking our understanding of the Bible into a different direction, one that wouldn't be possible in the context of traditional, conservative readings of the Old Testament.