I was a bit late getting round to it but I’ve finally sat down to read Aimee Byrd’s “The Sexual Reformation all the way through. The premise of the book is that we’ve got our understanding of sex, gender and sexuality all messed up and certain elements of conservative evangelicalism -specifically the Campaign for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood haven’t helped.
Aimee’s solution is that we need to learn to sing a better song again. We will find the answers to today’s problems in the Song of Songs. There are two primary takes on this book of the Bible, on the one hand, and really the more traditional view is that the book is primarily about God’s relationship to his people. YHWH is the husband of his chosen people and so, in Ephesians 5, we discover that Christ is the husband and the church is the bride. There has ben a strong counter argument against this view, with a significant body of scholarship arguing that it demonstrates a church that is squeamish about sex and sexuality, therefore the book needs to be taken at its word as an erotic love poem and therefore helpful, practical relation ship advice.
Aimee goes with the traditional view as do I. This is not to ignore the original setting of the book as a love poem but we need to read it as first pointing to Christ and the church which enables us to do two things. First, as I’ve argued frequently, it enables us to discover intimate language and use it to describe our deep affection for Christ, to learn to sing of our love in worship. Secondly, as Aimee leans hard into, if the church is the bride, then we should rediscover feminine language and this should counter arguments that the church needs to be more masculine. It also helps us to recognise the value of the feminine and female so that women are welcomed in the church and can discover their place and voice.
So, the book should have a lot going for it. I certainly agree with its thesis and welcome its core message. However, it didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t find it an easy or enjoyable read. By that, I don’t mean that it was difficult, uncomfortable reading. Rather, it didn’t excite or grip me. My heart was neither pierced nor warmed by it.
Here is why I think that was the case. We sometimes contrast two approaches to engaging with the detail of the Biblical text. On the one hand, exegesis is about reading the text and drawing meaning out of it whereas eisegesis happens when we read meaning into it, so we make the Bible say what we want it to say. Well, Byrd is not guilty of eisegesis, her handling of the text is valid. However, I think she does something else. The end product of exegesis should be an exposition of the text, so that we preach or teach drawing meaning from the text and applying it to our context. We might refer to the opposite of that as eis-position. Correct exposition may have happened but then we end up reading an application onto the text and making it conform to our particular purposes.
I think that Aimee Byrd does that here. Now, she isn’t alone in this and indeed, a lot of the recent debate on church, marriage, gender and leadership on both sides may well fall into that trap. Indeed, that’s a trap we can all fall into. But what seems to have happened is that Byrd has decided that the church faces a very specific problem, the brand of complementarianism presented by CBMW and so has really set out to write another book critiquing that movement. The result is that instead of allowing her readers to join with her in enjoying the beauty of the Song, she employs it for her polemic and in my view, that takes away something of its beauty. For all of her wordiness, Aimee Byrd cannot recreate that beauty.
It also means that she starts with a skewed diagnosis. To be sure, I share many of her concerns and reservations about CBMW but the set up of the book gives the impression that the primary problem faced by today’s culture and church is CBMW/complementarianism whereas I would argue that this gets the cart before the horse, the problem is a culture around is that has departed from God’s Word and so gets its understanding of sexuality and gender in a mess. Christians should be able to offer a better vision but we have gone askew with our various reactions including purity culture and yes CBMW.
Like I said, I don’t think Byrd is alone in this. I think the mistake is made frequently in a lot of contemporary Christian writing. Personally I would love to see more books that start with a particular Scriptural exposition or doctrinal teaching, allow us to enjoy it and then draw out appropriate application and teaching.
Faithroots 