This is an issue I’ve heard Mike Frost get quite excited about, and I’m very keen to hear some reaction:
Today our congregation was asked to sing, “Jesus, I’m in love with you”–a line that shows up, in one permutation or another, in several songs that occur frequently in our worship leaders’ rotation.
Well, I didn’t sing it. It’s wrong, and I try not to sing wrong lyrics.
First, I’m not in love with Jesus. The locution “in love with” is one I reserve for one person only: my wife. I love my sons, I love my siblings and parents, I love my friends, I love my country, I love my brothers and sisters in Christ, and I love God. But I’m not “in love” with any of them. And I daresay most of the rest of us use this phrase in exactly the same, highly-restrictive way.Second, it gives me the homoerotic creeps to declare that I am “in love with” another man. And I don’t apologize for saying so. A gender lens is interesting here, for a lot of men feel as I do (many have told me so), while many (not all) women seem to love telling Jesus that they are in love with him. I saw them, swaying with closed eyes and waving hands in the air this morning, singing exactly that. Maybe, indeed, they are in love with Jesus. But they shouldn’t be.
For the third point to make is a theological one. Jesus is not your boyfriend, not your fiancé, and not your eventual husband.
From Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog, Via Dan Wilt
I find it a difficult argument to disagree with: and I think it offers some pretty big challenges for the songwriters and worship leaders and it represents a really big deal for the theology that comes with it. So - tell me, singers, songwriters, general advocates for the “I’m in love with Jesus” worldview - why is Professor Stackhouse wrong?
(P.S - Have a read of Professor Stackhouse’s whole post before commenting, to save on duplication. Thanks)
6 Comments
I didn’t feel homoerotic when I sang it …
I really dislike the whole ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ approach, but sometimes I think we do get worked up over semantics - myself as much as anyone.
Generically speaking, I’m sure when I sing (be it in my head, or out loud when no one is watching) along to songs, I don’t always take their full intended meaning. Not just talking about church songs here. It sometimes takes me months to work out where the song writer is coming from and it often presents a vastly different perspective, to that of which meaning I’ve given it. Might you put the same approach to church songs? Or are they in some elitist class, how important is it to be clear?
(My mind is fairly fried right now hopefully this all makes sense). I do think songs that put forward our understanding of theology are important - we remember songs, perhaps a little bit of our understanding of God is built around them. We have to be careful I think, but not anal.
Another thought, what about the whole bride of Christ metaphors and fitting those in there somewhere, however odd that seems?
And I think that the post (or maybe it’s in the comments to the post) makes a good call on the “Bride of Christ” thing: that’s only (in the bible) ever a metaphor for the whole body, not for individuals. So “we are in love with you” might be fair, but “I am in love with you” - perhaps not so much.
Yeah, I also feel a bit weird singing it, but mostly because it’s a bit twee.
I think it’s splitting hairs (and heirs, in a sense) to say that as a member of the cap C Church I’m not a bride of Christ anyway; one could definitely argue against that.
My main issue with the language is that it promotes Love as being a state. But love is a verb! A doing word!
I wonder if there would be an issue with “Jesus, I’m loving you..”?
Maybe it gets drawn out of that “bride of christ” analogy… the church ukno.
“I always said I would marry my best friend. He’s not so keen.”
I’ve really been reflecting on what it actually means to approach Christ like a little child does. What exactly did he mean by that? (story of the children the deciples turned away)
I don’t think it means spending our lives swaying in trancelike adulation… or dissosciating our upper cognitive ability, lest we in some way doubt.
But it doesn’t mean the opposite of those things either. I’m pretty sure God mostly looks at our intentions… and that’s gotta be a good thing.
Some worship songs will work for some people, others for others. Sometimes worshiping in a church service is an act of patience and tolerance. These things are also worship.
I’m just appaled at the moment about how much time we spend as western christians convulsing in perverse fantasy over our nonsensical adulation towards an entity we reintepret to reinforce our upper middle class way of life. Not that we need to reinforce it anyway, its fairly self perpetuating.
There’s a kind of intellectual poverty that sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t correlate with the financial and survival types of poverty.
Some poor people simply lack the local primary resources to produce wealth. Other’s are in a poverty loop because of their lack of capacity, learned or aquired, to change their circunstances. Mostly we blame these people for their situation… in australia we call them bogans and rednecks, crack addicts and skanks… and we’re pretty sure we’re not helping them because they don’t want our help, because they chose to be there, or generally because they suck.
Now the crying shame is that you probably think I’m completely off topic… but the real point is this: it doesn’t matter if we prance around having homoerotic fantasys about jesus, or sing “I think I kinda really like you jesus in a matey blokeish kinda way”… the best way to worship, to express love to christ, is when we show it to “the least of these”.
I’ll care about the debate over whether jesus can be my boyfriend, sometime after the debate about whether we should prance and sing… or maybe possible just maybe act, is closed.
But I will say as a final reflection that in classic art, Jesus is certainly represented in some homoerotic ways… and you don’t have to be the director from queer as folk to notice that ‘white-jesus’ is always a bit limp.
I heard Mike talk about this at blackstump over the weekend.
Now i really wished that I had taken notes…
I really struggle to sing the songs as mentioned above, largely due to the fact that I don’t at all (well, hardly) ‘connect’ with them. I would prefer not to lie when I am singing to God. I know that He is not “the only one I could live for,” and I already feel bad enough about that without having to sing (or not in my case) about it.
Give me a song like U2’s ‘Wake up dead man’ anyday.
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