1If only you were to me like a brother,
who was nursed at my mother’s breasts!
Then, if I found you outside,
I would kiss you,
and no one would despise me.
2I would lead you
and bring you to my mother’s house—
she who has taught me.
I would give you spiced wine to drink,
the nectar of my pomegranates.
3His left arm is under my head
and his right arm embraces me.
4Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires.
5Who is this coming up from the desert
leaning on her lover?
Under the apple tree I roused you;
there your mother conceived you,
there she who was in labor gave you birth.
6Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm,
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.
7Many waters cannot quench love;
rivers cannot wash it away.
If one were to give
all the wealth of his house for love,
it would be utterly scorned.
8We have a young sister,
and her breasts are not yet grown.
What shall we do for our sister
for the day she is spoken for?
we will build towers of silver on her.
If she is a door,
we will enclose her with panels of cedar.
10I am a wall,
and my breasts are like towers.
Thus I have become in his eyes
like one bringing contentment.
11Solomon had a vineyard in Baal Hamon;
he let out his vineyard to tenants.
Each was to bring for its fruit
a thousand shekels of silver.
12But my own vineyard is mine to give;
the thousand shekels are for you, O Solomon,
and two hundred are for those who tend its fruit.
13You who dwell in the gardens
with friends in attendance,
let me hear your voice!
14Come away, my lover,
and be like a gazelle
or like a young stag
on the spice-laden mountains.
Original Meaning
THE OPENING SCENES of the Song of Songs concern a woman whose brothers have previously been angry with her and have made her “take care” (nṭr) of the vineyards (1:6). The only possible reason for the anger that could be found in 1:6 lies in her claim that she has not taken care of her own “vineyard.” She is in love with a man, who is associated (like the vineyards) with the countryside. She now finds herself at the royal court and at the beck and call of the king—another male figure who interposes himself between the woman and her lover (as in 3:6–11). There are thus significant obstacles to be overcome if the lovers are to continue their relationship—something hinted at in the two dream sequences of 3:1–4 and 5:2–7, in the midst of dialogues of the deepest intimacy and mutuality throughout 1:2–2:17; 4:1–5:1; 6:4–7:13.
Chapter 8 draws many of these threads together as the Song of Songs comes to its conclusion. The obstacles to the coveted relationship are implied already in verses 1–5 in the references to those who would “despise” the woman for her kisses (v. 1) and in the allusion to the king’s bed (v. 5a). The woman’s brothers themselves apparently speak in verses 8–9, drawing a sharp retort from the woman in verses 10–12, which establishes her independence from both the brothers and Solomon. This response returns to the language of vineyards and “keepers” (noṭerim; NIV “tenants” in v. 11; “those who tend” in v. 12) already introduced in chapter 1. The passion of the lover’s relationship, finally, is powerfully communicated in verses 5b–7, and the song ends with their words to each other as they transcend all obstacles and reaffirm their love (vv. 13–14).
The man has previously and on several occasions referred to his beloved as “sister” (4:9, 10, 12; 5:1–2), which speaks of intimacy and closeness of relationship. She has never before referred to him as “brother,” however. When the word is eventually used in 8:1, it expresses a desire that cannot be realized. Only in her dreams is she able to go outside (3:2; 8:1), find (mṣʾ, 3:4; 8:1) her lover, and bring him to her “mother’s house” (bet ʾimmi, 3:4; 8:2). Even in her dreams she has encountered opposition (5:7). It is only in the private world of her relationship with her lover that words like “sister” and “bride,” and indeed “brother,” have any substance to them and that her deep desire for intimacy with him, first announced in 1:2, can be satisfied.
As the woman looks back on that request in 1:2 for kisses and lovemaking that are better than wine, and as she indeed now lies in her lover’s arms (8:3), having just spoken with him about the wine that flows from her mouth to his (7:8–9),1 she recognizes the gulf that separates the real and public world from the world of dream and private moment. The world in which she must for much of her time live her life does not know her lover as “brother”; it is in fact inhabited by real brothers, who stand in the way of her love. She is not able to kiss him in public, therefore, without risking public contempt,2 nor is she able to bring him to the family home to taste her “wine” or “nectar of . . . pomegranates”—to join her in sexual union (cf. 4:13; 6:11; 7:12, for the erotic overtones of “pomegranate”).3 She must rest content with what they have.
In the context, which includes the woman’s own description of her “rousing” (ʿwr) the man and of the nature of their love (8:5b–7), the charge of verse 4 not to “arouse or awaken” (ʿwr) love until the right time is particularly clearly heard not only as warning about the dangerous power of love but also as a warning about the complications it brings to life (cf. 2:7; 3:5). Both aspects are developed in 8:5–12.
The speakers who refer in verse 5 to the woman and her lover are not explicitly identified, but they are most naturally taken to be the “daughters of Jerusalem” who have just been addressed in verse 4. This was also the case in 3:6, where the same question is asked: “Who is this coming up from the desert?” The interpretation offered in the comments on 3:6 earlier identified the “this” as the female lover. This same woman is certainly referred to here in 8:5. In our comments on 3:6 we also understood the “desert” as the royal bed. It is interesting, then, to notice the different way in which 3:6 and 8:5 end and are then developed. Song of Songs 3:6 has the woman arising from the royal bed in the way that smoke rises up into the sky when sacrifices are burnt; 3:7–11 then focus on the bed itself rather than the woman who is in it, emphasizing the impersonal nature of what happens between the king and his women. Song of Songs 8:5, by contrast, has the woman arising from the bed, leaning for support on her beloved man;4 a highly personal and intimate address follows, in which the woman describes their relationship.5
There is a stark contrast, then, between these two passages, which implies that this second “ascending from the desert” is a leave-taking of the royal palace to match the arrival of the woman there in chapter 1. As the two lovers walk away together, she reminds her lover of a previous amorous encounter that took place, not in a “desert,” but in an orchard (8:5b; see comments on “apple tree” in 2:3)—a place linked to his own conception and birth, just as the house of the woman’s mother was linked with her conception (and presumably birth, 3:4). The associations are once again those of intimate family relations. It was in this sacred, fruitful place that she aroused and awakened his love.
Having thus aroused and awakened it, she looks now for reciprocation (8:6). She wants her man to place her “like a seal” over both his heart and his arm. The seal was a valuable possession in the ancient world, both in terms of its manufacture (made of precious and semiprecious metals and stones) and of its use (to mark and protect other possessions). It was commonly kept in close proximity to its owner, whether on a cord around the neck (Gen. 38:18) or as a ring on the hand (Gen. 41:42; Jer. 22:24; Hag. 2:23). The woman desires her lover to clasp her close to him in the same way,6 in response to her loving movement toward him in Song of Songs 8:5b.
There follows a reflection on the nature of the love they share, which makes clear its powerful and enduring nature.7 It is “as strong as death” itself—the most powerful of enemies in the Bible and a force that cannot be overcome by mere mortals. Death comes to all. Yet love, we are told, is its equal, and the passion8 that the lovers share is as stubborn and unrelenting as the underworld (šeʾol; NIV “grave”), which pursues all living things to swallow them up. In this respect it is also like “blazing fire,” looking for things to consume. It is indeed like “the flame of the LORD,”9 who is himself a consuming fire (Ex. 24:17; Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29), particularly in the respect that “many [better, ‘mighty’] waters cannot quench love [and] rivers cannot wash it away” (Song 8:7).
The background echoes here are of the mighty waters (mayim rabbim) or rivers (neharot) that are the powers of chaos, which only the Lord God can overcome.10 His flame is by no means extinguished by these waters, nor is the flame of human love. Love is so utterly precious to those who experience it, indeed, that it is regarded as beyond price. No amount of wealth would be exchanged for it if the offer were ever made, and the person offering it would in fact be regarded contemptuously by the lovers: “He would be utterly scorned”11 (8:7).
True love is thus valued far more highly by those who know it intimately and who “scorn” (bwz) those who wish to buy it (8:7) than by people who view it from the outside and are apt to “despise” (bwz) those who give expression to it (8:1). Lovers utterly scorn those who think they can buy love, indeed (the emphatic Heb. boz yabuzu, v. 7), whereas women who kiss lovers in public are only routinely (and less emphatically) despised by society (yabuzu, v. 1).
The contrast that is thus set up between those who know love and those who regard it as a commodity to be bought and sold is especially intriguing in view of what follows in 8:8–12, for here we meet various people who seem to view love in precisely the commercial way just alluded to. The speakers in verses 8–9 are not explicitly identified, but the mention of “little sister,” the role of brothers elsewhere in the Old Testament in overseeing the arrangements for the marriages of sisters (e.g., Gen. 24:29–60; Judg. 21:22), and the earlier reference to “brothers” in Song of Songs 1:6 lead us most naturally to think of the woman’s brothers as the contributors here. These brothers regard her as their possession (“we have a young sister”) as well as their responsibility (“what shall we do to/for our sister until the day she is spoken for?”—i.e., on the day when her hand is requested in marriage, 1 Sam. 25:39).
Their answer to their own question is given in verse 9. They recognize that the sister is both a “wall” and a “door.” The wall speaks of fortification and impregnability, indeed virginity; their task is to ornament as well as to strengthen this “wall” with “towers” (lit., “a tower”) of silver, increasing both its impregnability and its beauty and thus its value to a potential suitor.
The “door” (delet) is a more ambiguous thing, both preventing people from passing through the opening in a city wall and allowing them, under certain circumstances, to do so. We have already read of the woman’s “opening” (petaḥ) in 7:13. To the woman as “door” these men apparently respond in a different way: They literally “besiege” (NIV “enclose”) her with a “plank” of cedar (a wood famed for strength and durability, 8:9), laying emphasis now on defense rather than on beautification.12 They see their task, in other words, both as ensuring that men stay away from their sister until the proper time and as making sure that she is a prize catch when that time comes. They themselves are, evidently, the arbiters of what the proper time might be.
Possession is also the focus of verses 11 and 12b. Here it is Solomon himself who owns something—a “vineyard” in Baal Hamon, which is entrusted to others so that they may “tend” its fruit. The NIV refers to these people as “tenants” (v. 11), but this is misleading. The Hebrew is noṭerim, which is exactly the same word as “tend” in verse 12; the same verbal root also appears twice in 1:6, where the woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem that her brothers made her “take care” of the vineyards, although she did not “take care” of her own. Elsewhere in the Old Testament this verb is used of maintaining anger over a long period of time (Lev. 19:18; Ps. 103:9; Jer. 3:5, 12; Nah. 1:2). It refers in the Song of Songs simply to the maintenance of the vineyard, and the relevant line in 8:11 is best translated: “He entrusted the vineyard to overseers.”
This particular Solomonic vineyard is extraordinarily valuable: “A man would bring for its fruit one thousand silver pieces” (v. 11).13 It is above all the fantastic price that alerts us to the fact that we are not dealing here with a literal vineyard. The “vineyard” is once again, as characteristically in this song, simply a metaphor for a woman—one of the most valuable of Solomon’s possessions in “Baal Hamon.” The place name is interesting, for it not only means “husband of a multitude” (alluding to Solomon’s harem, as the figure of one thousand possibly also does, cf. 1 Kings 11:3) but also evokes through its use of “Baal” (the Canaanite deity so often mentioned in 1-2 Kings and elsewhere in the Old Testament) the story in 1 Kings 11, where Solomon’s many wives lead him astray into idolatry. Here is one prized possession among the many possessions of the idolater king (cf. Song 6:8). The truly mutual love of one man and one woman as described in 8:5–7 (cf. 6:9), by contrast, invokes a form of the name of Israel’s God, “Yahweh.”
Speaking out of the midst of all these men with their prized female possessions we find, in 8:10 and 12a, the woman who has already spoken in 8:5b–7. She, it seems, is both the “young sister” whom the brothers in verses 8–9 regard as living under their domination and protection and the “vineyard” that Solomon regards as his most treasured possession in verse 11. Her words represent a firm statement of independence in respect of both. It seems as if she is looking both to the past and to the present and future as she speaks for herself, rather than being “spoken for.” She remembers her brothers’ claims and rejoices in having escaped their control.
It may once have been the case that her breasts were not fully developed and that she was simply the object of her brothers’ construction plans, with their “towers of silvers” and “planks of cedar.” She is now a “wall,” however, that has assuredly been breached, as a matter of her own free choice. She has no need any longer of their ornamental “silver towers,” for she has towers of her own—her mature breasts; these “towers” are by no means defensive fortifications but themselves draw her lover into her “city.” In these towers he finds “contentment” (šalom in 8:10, a sense of well-being and peaceful satisfaction).14
The mention of contentment or peace, however, reminds us of that other reality of the woman’s present and her future. She knows not only a lover who finds in her breasts “peace” (šalom) but also a king whose name is “Solomon” (šelomoh). In response to Solomon’s claim to ownership of her as “vineyard,” she responds most forcibly: “My own vineyard is mine to give” (v. 12). The Hebrew is stronger still than this NIV translation suggests; literally it reads: “My vineyard which is mine is my own to dispose of” (cf. 1:6 [lit.]: “my vineyard which is mine I have not maintained”). This is not a vineyard that can be entered simply by the payment of a fee, even if the fee-paying visitor who brings with him his “thousand pieces of silver” is the mighty Solomon himself, who owns the vineyard.15
That the silver and the vineyard can have nothing to do with each other is made clear in the structuring of verse 12: “My vineyard which is mine [Heb. li] is my own to dispose of; the thousand pieces of silver are yours [Heb. leka], O Solomon; and two hundred belong to those who take care of the fruit [Heb. lenoṭerim].” In other words: “Keep your money, O king—with the exception of what you owe your employees.” The “silver” (kesep) that symbolizes throughout verses 8–12 the possession of the female by the male (vv. 9, 11, 12b) is thus evidently despised by the woman. Money has nothing to do with true love—a point already made in a different way in verse 7. The woman thus emphatically rejects all these male attempts to “look after” her “fruit,” whether the males are the brothers or the noṭerim of verses 11–12 (presumably those who oversee the royal harem).16 She will not be possessed by any man other than the one she has chosen (v. 6).
This stark reminder of the common realities of life for women in ancient Israel—owned by men and traded as possessions from one to the other in marriage—sets in sharp relief the love poetry of the whole song and the relationship to which we return as chapter 8 closes. The beloved man comes to the boundaries of the “gardens,” where the woman and those companions17 whose voices have often been heard throughout this song are to be found. He longs to hear her voice. Her voice, when it responds, invites his intimacy.
This is not the defiant response to brothers and the king of a woman who is viewed as possession. It is the openhearted and willing response to a lover of a woman who is viewed only as beloved. She invites him to run like a gazelle or a stag over the spice-laden mountains, her breasts—those very places in which he has taken such pleasure throughout the preceding episodes. It is perhaps testimony to the seriousness of the contrast between the relationships of 8:8–12 and that of 8:13–14, however, that whereas a similar request from the man in 2:14 that he should hear her voice was followed by the teasing of 2:15, no such teasing is found in 8:14. Here the request for speech is met straightforwardly by a response similar to that in 2:17—an immediate invitation to sexual consummation. She moves, on this occasion, directly to the point; it is with this point that the Song of Songs, fittingly, ends.
Bridging Contexts
THROUGHOUT THE SONG of Songs, the lovers’ relationship has been played out against the background of the often harsh realities of life in the ancient world. Chapter 8 is no exception. This was a world in which it was not generally the case that “if one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned” (8:7). Quite the contrary; it was a world in which women were routinely regarded as possessions to be traded from one male (or group of males) to another, and “profit” was central to the exercise—whether the gain was in terms of money, status, or power. Marriage was entirely bound up with economics and politics, and there was only limited room for individual choice or indeed romantic love (unless one was fortunate enough to find such love in marriage after the fact). It was a world in which lovers might occasionally propose, but in which dominant males like the brothers or the king regularly disposed.
The harshest reality of all, however, we do not touch upon in this song before we arrive at this final chapter. It is the reality that threatens every life, whether invested with temporal power or not—the reality of death.
Death, as the book of Ecclesiastes so powerfully reminds us, overshadows all of life. It is a mighty power, as the peoples of the ancient Near East already understood when they characterized Death as a hungry deity, dragging all life down into the deep pit from which there could be no escape—the world of the dead, from which no return was possible. The god in question was known in the Canaanite pantheon—evoked by the allusion to the deity “Baal” in 8:11—as “Mot.” Death was thus one aspect of the dark and disorderly side of existence that stood in ongoing tension with creative life and order and was routinely associated with images like the sea and sea monsters. The Old Testament itself reflects this worldview in various passages, as when it speaks, for example, of the world of the dead as a place that even righteous Job will experience as darkness and chaos and from which even he will not return (Job 7:9–10; 10:20–22). It is a place in which a person is separated from God (Ps. 6:5; 30:9; 115:17). It is a ravenous beast that waits to devour its victims (Isa. 5:14; Hab. 2:5). Song of Songs 8:6–7 itself reflects this general perspective in alluding to death in terms of unrelenting power and watery chaos.
In what sense is love as strong as this great power of death (8:6)? It seems a ridiculous statement—a piece of human bravado in the face of crushing, overwhelming reality.18 It is very much the kind of statement that Qohelet in the book of Ecclesiastes would savagely attack. Death clearly comes to all—whether to those who seek to make some “profit” out of life and love or to those whose love has been pure and undefiled. Love can certainly be enjoyed while we live, but it must be enjoyed while we live precisely because it cannot be enjoyed when we die (Eccl. 9:7–10). Death, Qohelet would say, is much stronger than love, and nowhere is love as unyielding as the grave. Even if love for the departed continues for a short time after death in the hearts of the survivors, death soon obliterates that as well. The flame is extinguished, despite Song of Songs 8:6. It is, in the end, no match for the rivers of death that deluge it, despite 8:7. Thus would Qohelet speak; and common sense must lead us, as astute observers of the world, to agree. Death is much stronger than love—despite the ludicrous De Beers TV ad inviting men, as 1999 closed, to show their women (by purchasing a diamond) that they would love them for another thousand years.19
We require a context beyond observable reality, therefore, if we are to regard 8:6–7 as anything other than desperate hyperbole. We require, in fact, the canonical context in which the Song of Songs is set. We need to recognize, first, a crucial difference between the Old Testament view of the nature of death and the view typically found in the literature of the surrounding cultures. Simply put, reality in Old Testament thinking is not in the end dualistic. Good and evil are not two equally matched powers locked in an endless struggle that has an uncertain outcome. There is one God; there are not two, and there certainly are not many. Death in Old Testament thought is, therefore, although a formidable enemy, not a god. It is a power that is, like other powers and principalities in the cosmos, subject to the sovereignty and power of God.
God can, indeed, deliver mortal beings from this power (e.g., Ps. 18:4–19). Perhaps the best narrative example of this reality in the Old Testament, because of the way in which the story consciously addresses the question of whether gods like Baal and Mot are stronger than the living Lord, is found in 1 Kings 17.20 Here Elijah first challenges, in God’s name, the assumption that Baal is the god of fertility. He is not the god of fertility, it turns out, even in the very heartland of Baal worship in Sidon and its environs. It is the living God who brings drought and sustains both Elijah and the widow with her son in the midst of the drought. It is the living God who, faced by “Mot’s” claims over the boy, is able even to storm the world of the dead and bring him back to life. There is only one true God, and no other power is able to withstand him.
God can redeem mortal beings from death’s power, and beyond that, God will one day destroy the power of death altogether, as Isaiah testifies in Isaiah 25:7–9:
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.
In that day they will say,
“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”
It is this vision that is picked up in the New Testament, of course, and interpreted in terms of Jesus’ own death and resurrection and their consequences for all humanity. God’s self-giving love brings Jesus to the cross and to the tomb and to the apparent defeat of love that has been rejected and trampled upon. Jesus’ descent into the world of the dead is only a temporary one, however. He rises again, love victorious over the grave, and the ultimate consequence of this will be the destruction of death itself (1 Cor. 15:12–28, 50–55; Rev. 21:4). It is important to note that the announcement of death’s demise in Revelation 21:1–4 is accompanied both by the observation that there is no longer any sea (v. 1—all chaos has been dispelled, all sea monsters destroyed, as in Isa. 27:1) and by the proclamation of the ongoing wedding between God and his faithful people. Love has proved as strong as death indeed. It has, in fact, proved stronger.
It is only the whole biblical story, then, as it moves from the creation of the world (where the loving God first imposes order on chaos and brings forth a good world, Gen. 1:2), through the account of human rebellion against God and the first appearance of death (Gen. 3; cf. 2:17), and on toward redemption and renewal, that makes sense of the apparently hopelessly optimistic statement in Song of Songs 8:6 that “love is as strong as death.” It even helps us to see that this statement is not quite optimistic enough. The power of God’s love is vastly greater than the power of death, outlasting it by the distance of eternity.
In the light of this great truth we ourselves can be assured that our own love for others, although only a pale reflection of the divine love, will also pass through the valley of the shadow of death and endure. There will be no marriage in life beyond death, it is true (Matt. 22:30), but we may be sure that all that is best about our marriages as we give ourselves to our wives and husbands in love and intimacy will be found there:
Heaven will be all marriage. Indeed, in earthly marriage we may detect the sign and promise that in eternity everyone is to be married to everyone else in some transcendent and unimaginable union, and everyone will love everyone else with an intensity akin to that which now is called “being in love,” and which impels individual couples to spend their whole lives together. In this way Christian marital love is (or should be) as close as we are likely to experience to being “a piece of Heaven on earth,” for it is a true leftover from Paradise.21
Even if in the end profit is indeed futile, love most certainly is not. Love lasts. Its fire is eternal (Song 8:6). The whole Bible story allows us to say so and not sound foolish. It allows us to speak to our lovers thus, without reservation:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.22
Contemporary Significance
Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.23
The Princess Bride is a wonderful movie. The committed love of two young lovers, Wesley and Buttercup, survives separation and all the threats introduced by a wicked king who pursues the woman for purposes of his own. It eventually survives even death. Wesley is discovered only to be “mostly dead” and, revived by a miracle worker, he is able to rescue his beloved just in time from the clutches of the horrible monarch. Justice is thoroughly done, and all the good characters (including Wesley and Buttercup) ride off into the sunset.
This is not how life truly is, of course. Good does not always triumph over evil in the world of our experience, and justice often falls victim to injustice. Powers intervene in our lives to restrict and deny our choices, and they overwhelm us rather than in the end being overwhelmed. The course of true love does not usually run smooth, and if we find love, it is all too quickly snatched away, as committed to the other as we may be. Chaos all too often marks our lives, and death follows in its train, ensuring that we are entirely rather than “mostly” dead and that happy endings are beyond us. We ride, not into the sunset, but into the darkness. That is how life truly is, as far as it can be observed.
Yet the myth that “death cannot stop true love” is a powerful one, which continues to captivate our souls. We have an insatiable desire to have it told to us again and again. Hollywood regularly obliges, knowing that the myth will always sell. Against all sense, it seems, many human beings are incurable romantics and optimists. They will not accept that fairy stories are only fairy stories. They have a deep need to believe them to be true, even as they have ceased to believe in any God who might reveal to them what Truth is.
Perhaps it is just as well, for those who look observable reality straight in the eyes are often unbalanced by the experience; in recognizing death as the ultimate power in the universe—because they do not recognize God—they come to promote (whether consciously or unconsciously) a culture of death as a fitting response to it. Where God himself is dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche so famously proclaimed him to be in his book The Gay Science (1882), death must evidently be victorious in the end, and it even begins to consume life in the present. For the death of God means there is no longer any truth that can claim absoluteness, universality, and eternity. There is no Truth, only many truths; there is no Right, only self-created moralities.
Nietzsche himself challenged, for example, the idea that such things as exploitation, domination, and injury to the weak are universally objectionable behaviors. Who is to say? God cannot, and when it dawns on people that God cannot because he is dead, what follows is first widespread nihilism (a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness) and then widespread idolatry (as people embrace alternative absolutes to God as a way of investing life with meaning). Idolatry leads in turn (as always) to inhumanity to others, as the false gods require their sacrifices.
This is Nietzsche’s world, and we currently live in it. It is a culture of death, and romantic escapism is in truth a fairly innocuous response to it when compared with those other responses evoked from human beings as the twentieth century has passed. It has been a century marked at one and the same time both by unparalleled progress in technology and by unparalleled despair and brutality as the value of human beings, set loose from the valuation of God, has plummeted in the world markets.
The cultural passion for romance and fairy story can be seen as an emotional and moral refusal to accept that God is dead even while there has been a widespread intellectual capitulation to the idea. It is a sign of transcendence—an indication that we are indeed created in the image of God and cannot escape that reality even if part of us wishes to. The larger story that makes sense of these fairy stories—the biblical story—has long since been abandoned, yet the culture cannot give up on its hope that somehow it is true that “death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
In other words, our culture refuses to accept that what it intuitively knows to be good—self-sacrificing love, commitment, intimacy—has no lasting place in the universe. It insists, against all the evidence, that good, in the end, defeats evil. It does so because the truth of God has not yet been fully suppressed in human hearts or in society and because nihilism has not yet, therefore, become a contagion. We will be in a pitiable state if it ever becomes the normal way of looking at the world, and it may yet, if the youth culture of the present moment is any guide.
Romance is thus seen to be the great leap of faith that modern secular people (and too many unthinking Christians) make in order to escape the realm of death, dimly perceiving that love is indeed stronger than death but lacking any reason to think so. The sexual promiscuity of our culture can itself be understood in a similar way, as a doomed attempt to push away the chaotic darkness of the cosmos through the pursuit of serial intimate encounters with other lost souls. Since it is at least a faith of some kind, romanticism is in the end much closer to the truth than nihilism, for it recognizes, however imperfectly, that Love lies at the heart of things. Only the gospel supplies the larger framework, however, in which its lacks can be made up and its errors corrected. For it tells us of a wooing God whose love makes sense of ours:
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.
“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here.”
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling, did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”24
It is the same gospel that proclaims God’s love that tells us that we do not need to leap blindly from death to love in the vague hope that love will prevail. It shows us how Love has already prevailed by conquering death. It thus enables us to look forward with confidence and with our eyes open to the future, while enjoying such good things as come our way in the life in the present. It is wonderful Good News, which makes sense even of our fairy stories. It should enable those of us who believe it to live our lives fully in response to our Creator, who made us as physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual beings to enjoy our lives and thus witness to his glory; and to our Redeemer, who will take us beyond death to share in that glory.
Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Cor. 15:54–55)
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38–39)