Provan on Song of Songs

I have the dubious privilege of writing a paper on the Song of Songs for my Poetry and Wisdom class. Iain Provan's NIV Application Commenatary, however, is proving to be immensely practical and thought-provoking ... and the assignment is turning into one that I really enjoy!

This quote kind of jumps into the middle of a great section, and since I don't really know how to preface it, I'll just let you mentally catch up:

Bound up with all this dysfunctionality of relationship in the church, as in society at large, is sexual activity. A truly countercultural church would atthis point confront with balanced biblical teaching on sexual expression both the mdoern society that idolizes it and the Christian tradition that essentially demonizes it and would seek to proclaim and to live the truth that God made the world as a good place and redeemed this same world in Christ. The reality is all too different. The ancient belief (or even just the feeling) that sex is perhaps unclean and certainly not entirely spiritual is still to be found among Christian men and women at the dawn of a new millennium, leading to a view of the Christian life that is instinctually ascetic.

Now here's where it gets REALLY good:

Such people simply do not believe, deep in their hearts, that Christ took on our humanity so as to redeem it in every aspect and to enable us as we are justified and sanctified in Christ to live it out as God intends. They cannot see that the gospel is about expression of our humanity. They have come instead to think of it as being about repression of significant aspects of our humanity. The collateral damage that the attempt to use Christian faith to repress important aspects of our humanity causes, however, is huge, for if faith and humanness are set in conflict with each other, sooner or later a human being will find the attempt to manage the conflict intolerable and will choose humanness.

Skipping a little bit...

In the midst of all the distortions of our lives respecting our relationships with each other, male and female, God speaks his Word to us in the Song of Songs, inviting us to reason with him and to change our thinking and our living so that it reflects what is true and good...

NIV Application Commentary: Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs, Iain Provan, pp. 250-1.