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The Eros of God
February 1, 2025
I’m taking a class called The Eros of God. We are studying the Song of Solomon. Although that is the book’s title in most bibles, since it is questionable that Solomon actually wrote the Song, I prefer to refer to it by its other more poetic name, The Song of Songs.
The Song of Songs is a poem about the love, passion, and desire shared between a man and a woman. It’s incredibly erotic, and there is a lot of sex. A lot. And it’s beautiful. But mixing sex and religion has always been problematic for people. Few are able to image God as a sexual being. I have always believed God’s nature to have a sexual component because otherwise how could God have invented sex??? I was directly confronted with God’s sexuality last semester when we studied Queer Theology. It only underscored what I already suspected about the vastness and the fullness of God’s character and person.
Our reading included this from Renita J. Weems:
“Sex forces the audience to confront head-on their deepest convictions, their unspoken preconceptions, and their own complicated desires. When sex is combined with religion, boundaries are transgressed and lines are blurred, because sex is rarely about just sex. It is about needs, longings, fears, fantasies — in a word, human passion.”
