Sometimes when you talk with a friend who is super excited about something, try as you might you just can’t quite get it or can’t quite get as excited as they are. You weren’t at the concert but you like the band; you thought the film was good but not great. Sometimes the one who is excited has seen something they think no-one else quite sees, sometimes their own circumstances are such that the moment is always going to mean more to them than to anyone else. In some ways what they feel can’t ever be truly shared. I suspect all of those reasons are in play here as Aimee Byrd seeks to get us excited about the Song of Songs but that not everyone will be as excited about it as she is. But let’s say it up front you should still read The Sexual Reformation because this rewarding study has much to offer.

Aimee Byrd has, it seems made a habit of ruffling feathers (pun intended). Although I think that if her context was different (ie not America) then there would have been almost no fuss at all. She has also been treated very badly by other Christians (see this and this for example) and all of that is a background to this book. Personally, I don’t get the reaction she has had from some complementarians (I wrote this when I first heard about it) because so far I haven’t seen or read anything that should trouble us unduly but instead encourage us considerably. Certainly I think that should be the case if what we believe really isn’t about misogyny but really is about the beauty of God’s good ways in the world and in the church.

Andrea Turpin wrote in a preface to a review of Aimee’s book that,

I believe one reason complementarian teaching remains popular [despite its problems] is that many people consider being male or female a central part of their identity. They want it to mean something. And Christians who hold a theology of a purposeful creation rightly ask what God intended by two sexes.” I went on to note that I had not yet encountered a robust egalitarian theology of the meaning of sexual difference, and asked my readers to point me to one. No one knew of a published work that fit the bill. In other words, there was no alternative on offer.

And a robust theology of sexual difference is what Aimee Byrd has had a good shot at articulating. Interestingly, Aimee Byrd is not, at least not at the time she wrote this book, an egalitarian though I get her desire to be free of the labels, especially complementarian. One of the things that makes me think she might be on to something is because if Turpin (an egalitarian) and people like myself (a complementarian) agree on similar points that Byrd is making then perhaps there is scope for a project that seeks to make some headway past the entrenched lines of the debate that we’ve recycled endlessly over the last few decades about who can do what & in what manner.

Turpin in outlining Byrd’s thesis says,

Byrd breaks genuinely new ground by offering a theology of gender based in the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon), in keeping with the long history of Christian interpretation that sees this book as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and the church. In the theology she articulates, men and women’s embodied existence point all of us to truths about who God is and who we are. It means something to be male or to be female, in ways we can lean into.

The connections between the Song & Isaiah were really powerful and well worth thinking about, and there are allusions to Scripture there that we can miss, so Byrd has done us a service by reading with close attention to the phrases and their echo or recurrence throughout Scripture. There are few places here and there that seem a little uneven or remind me of my overly-excited friend where the analogies back to the Song seem a stretch too far but for the most part I think they work. Above all they do give us something to sing about. The aim is to find the why of our differences as men and women as something beautiful and glorious and praiseworthy because it is.

One of the main reforms, with regards to the old debates is Byrd’s contention that the wife of Ephesians 5, and in some way all women, is that she points towards not the church now in her submission, but the church of Revelation, the bride of Christ. She has now a glorious future and that is her telos – the thing she points us too. Again Turpin says,

All of a sudden, it’s no longer true that a man symbolizes someone greater than himself and a woman does not. Now both men and women symbolize someone greater than themselves, both symbolize someone free from sin, and both have something different to learn from the other. They are genuinely complementary.

Complementary but not the same. Byrd argues, and I think because Scripture teaches, that there is still headship in play here but it is reformed (certainly against an American telling of it). As Turpin describes it:

Byrd argues that, patterned after Christ, the man in marriage, created first, is “authorized to be the first to love, the first to sacrifice, the first to serve, the first to give power to other persons, not to exercise power over them. We see this distortion of the gift as the effects of the fall, described in Genesis 3:16” (119–120). This is a headship of sorts, but it is a headship of responsibility to serve, not final decision-making power. It is not “servant leadership” as commonly understood today, where the emphasis is on leadership and “servant” just modifies it. Rather, it is the leadership of service, full stop.

As I’ve reflected on this I struggle to see how it can be taught any other way, but also that the idea of submitting to that kind of service and that kind of love is not a burden but a joy. After all it is a joy to submit to Christ because of precisely that kind of love. That kind of loving service releases and empowers, it creates freedom and security not restriction and frustration. It also encourages a reciprocal response that works a bit like a dance. We need more dancing in the church (although maybe not the tango. Or line dancing. Or Morris Dancing. Ok forget the dance comment – it was allegorical anyway).

I suspect that the background of the feverish debates & often vicious reactions of US Christianity has shaped both the writing and reception of this book. Yet I find little here to object to but instead much to celebrate in terms of how a complementarity view of church can advance in a world increasingly hostile to it.

Despite her overuse of the word ‘fructifying’ and its various cognates this is a lively & engaging study that is worth reading. One doesn’t have to agree with all her claims or all the connections she sees between the song & the rest of Scripture to still appreciate that there is more here about us than we realised.

---

• Links to the book are affiliate links which means I receive a small commission if you click the link and then buy something. Thanks.