In his new book Wounded I Sing: The Song of Songs and the Incarnation of the Son of God, Dr. Timothy Kelly, a professor of theology at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria, argues that Christians are uniquely positioned to unlock the mysteries of this book, which opens its secrets more and more as we read it in and through the Heart of Christ.
When the Word became flesh, the transcendent God of love reached down into our mortal, passible nature to join it as a man joins his betrothed, and upon the Cross He accomplished a bodily-spiritual nuptial covenant with the Church and every baptized soul that He renews, day after day, in fleshly-and-spiritual Eucharistic communion.
When the Word became flesh, the transcendent God of love reached down into our mortal, passible nature to join it as a man joins his betrothed, and upon the Cross He accomplished a bodily-spiritual nuptial covenant with the Church and every baptized soul that He renews, day after day, in fleshly-and-spiritual Eucharistic communion.
What the Hebrews longed for as yet-to-be-attained in the Messianic age, the Christian receives as now accomplished in the sacrifice and sacrament of the Lord's Passion—yet this, in turn, is the foretaste and pledge of something far greater: the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. The dynamism of eros that characterizes the Song reveals both the fiery love of the Divine Lover and the yearning of His beloved to be inseparably one, but in a manner that is incarnate, ecstatic, total, irrevocable, blissful beyond what mind can conceive or imagine.
This is the essence of the Christian life and no book in the entire Bible conveys it better. No wonder the Fathers and Doctors wrote more commentaries on the Song of Songs than on any other book. No wonder it entices and baffles us: it speaks to our deepest desire, and yet does so with all the enigmas of salvation history and of our pilgrimage under the invisible hand of Providence.
And we can be thankful to Dr. Kelly for synthesizing all of this—drawing especially on St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Matthas Scheeben—into a readable guide that opens one magnificent vista after another. An exemplary work of Thomistic synthesis, with the clarity of Garrigou-Lagrange and the eloquence of Pieper.
Of particular interest to tradition-loving Catholics will be Kelly's extensive discussion of the Passion narratives (pp. 63-96), which play so pivotal a part in the ancient Roman Rite's celebration of Holy Week (with all four being read between Palm Sunday and Good Friday); how Christ's spousal office is necessarily priestly, sacrificial, and nutritive of His bride, the Church and the Christian soul; and how baptism and the Holy Eucharist, in particular, are nuptial sacraments with analogous aspects of unity and fecundity (pp. 97-149).
Without necessarily intending to be an apologetics work for the Catholic Faith, in fact Kelly's argument shows that both the Old Testament as a whole and the Passion of Christ make no salvific sense if there is not an immediate physical-spiritual communion possible with the Son of God, and in that sense proves that the Protestant account of personal salvation (through faith, by Scripture, by grace alone, etc.) is in tension with the entire trend of salvation history and of the life of Christ.
The early readers of this manuscript—including some of the greatest living Catholic biblical scholars—loved it.
Scott Hahn, editor of the Ignatius Bible’s commentary on the Song of Songs, wrote: “Rarely will you see a book that brings biblical, dogmatic, and mystical theology together so artfully and lucidly as this remarkable and readable synthesis does. Timothy Kelly refreshingly resets the entire question of the Song’s literal and spiritual meanings.”
John S. Bergsma, who co-authored A Catholic Introduction to the Bible with Brant Pitre, and wrote a book called The Bible and Marriage, had this to say: “An exquisite contemporary reading of the book, which I hope will contribute to returning the Song to its rightful and central place within Catholic biblical theology.”
Stephen K. Ray, author of commentaries on Genesis and the Gospel of John, summed it up as “an illuminating guide to a sublime and mysterious book.”
Fr. John Saward, author of some of the finest theological works of recent decades, declared: “Writing with a poet’s sensitivity to language, Dr. Kelly shows us how the Nuptial Mystery of Christ and His Church, of which the Song of Songs speaks with the authority of divine and prophetic inspiration, stands at the very centre of the Catholic faith.”
To find out more or “look inside,” visit the publisher’s site or any Amazon site.
Here’s a short video introduction, including a reading of part of the text:
