A Thousand Beauteous Dyes: Toward a Reformed Theology of Color

FROM THE BOOK

He “became ruddy for our sakes”: some Puritan reflections

While Protestant hermeneutical perspectives tended to be hostile to such allegorical interpretation as a rule, the exegesis of the Song of Songs was a notable exception. In a posthumous work on the communion between Christ and his people, the Puritan author Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) unabashedly described Song of Songs 5:10 as a “misticall portion of Scripture,” and followed, knowingly or unknowingly, Nyssen’s interpretative line. Sibbes noted that white and red together make the “carnation color,” a chromatic designation that dated from the mid-fifteenth century and which would later be termed “pink.” This most beautiful of colors, in Sibbes’ judgment, was “the purest and the best” of the color range and the most appropriate way to set forth “that excellent and sweet mixture” of divine and human that “makes such a gracefulness in Christ.”  

In 1642 Sibbes’ student John Cotton (1584–1652) also published a series of sermons on Solomon’s Song. Like Sibbes he was convinced of a Christological reading of Song of Songs 5:10, but, following the interpretative path laid down by Origen, he differed from his mentor in seeing a contrast between the two colors. The whiteness of Christ spoke of his “innocency of true holinesse,” while the red foreshadowed “the ruddy scarlet dye of his death.”

Nearly ten years later, Cotton’s fellow Congregationalist John Owen (1616–1683) agreed with Sibbes that “white and ruddy” are “a due mixture of… colors” which constitute “the most beautifull complexion.” In the same context, Owen maintained that the particular beauty of Christ owed much to the union of natures in his one person. One would expect Owen then to link the “carnation color” to the incarnate Christ, and follow the “Gregorian” interpretation of Song of Songs 5:10. Instead, in the “Origenist” vein of interpretation, Owen focused on the two colors and saw them as representative of three distinct contrasts. First, Christ is “white in the glory of his deity,” but red “in the preciousness of his humanity.” Then, the Messiah is “white in the beauty of his innocency, and holinesse,” but ruddy “by being drenched all over in his own blood” and having our sins, “whose color is red and crimson”—a reference to Isaiah 1:18—imputed to him. He “who was white, became ruddy for our sakes,” Owen declared with Puritan pithiness. Yet a third contrast was that the Lord Jesus is “white in love and mercy” to his people, but “red with justice and revenge towards his enemies.”

“The most beautiful person”: the perspective of Anne Dutton

Possibly the most detailed reflection on the Song of Songs 5:10 is that by the Baptist authoress Anne Dutton (1692–1765) in her treatise Hints of the Glory of Christ (1748), one of a number of literary works that made her fairly well known throughout the world of trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism in the long eighteenth century. Among her friends were a number of key figures in that era’s Evangelical Revival: the remarkable preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770), the Welsh preacher Howel Harris (1714–1773), and the redoubtable Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791). While Harris was convinced that the Lord had entrusted Dutton “with a talent of writing for him,” Whitefield, who helped promote and publish Dutton’s writings, once said after meeting with her: “her conversation is as weighty as her letters.” By 1740 she had written seven books. Another fourteen followed between 1741 and 1743, and fourteen more by 1750. And there were yet more, for she continued to write up until her death in 1765. Dutton was undoubtedly the most prolific female Baptist author of the eighteenth century, and her writings reveal eighteenth-century Calvinistic Baptist piety at its best—solidly Christ-centered and robustly crucicentric. 

In Hints of the Glory of Christ, a detailed study of Song of Songs 5:10–16, Dutton devoted forty-four pages to specifically noting five contrasts between Christ’s whiteness and redness. The emphasis on these contrasts appears to place Dutton in the “Origenist” interpretative stream:

From the first of these contrasts, it is patent that Dutton has read and reflected upon Owen’s comments on the text from the Song of Songs. For as she put it, Christ is 

Sibbes had discussed the incarnation through the imagery of mixing together the white and the red of Song of Songs 5:10—hence his “carnation color.” Her comments beg the question, did Dutton know of this discussion? She never uses the term carnation, but she was aware that the incarnation is a truth that can be easily misunderstood and taken to imply that an essential change occurred in one or both of the two natures in Christ. After all, when white and red are blended together to produce pink, the latter is neither white nor red, but a different color entirely. She thus stressed that in the “mixture” of the incarnation, there is neither change nor confusion of natures, an understanding wholly in sync with Chalcedonian Christology. 

Sibbes’ opinion that “carnation” is the most lovely of all colors, in light of his reading of Song of Songs 5:10, implied that he viewed Christ as the most beautiful of persons. Dutton was in obvious agreement. She would thus have deeply appreciated a hymn by the remarkable Welsh hymn-writer Ann Griffiths (1776–1805) that elucidates this very point, drawing on the language of Song of Songs 5:10a: