The Bible’s Marriage Metaphor Doesn’t Belong In the Bedroom

Very last 7 days, my college students and I ended up seeking at methods to interpret hard texts in Paul in class when a storm broke out on the internet all around the theology of the marriage metaphor.

In Twitter threads and Substack posts, Christian voices presented their discerning sights close to pastor Joshua Ryan Butler’s metaphorical examining of Ephesians 5 printed on The Gospel Coalition web-site. Butler’s piece, an excerpt from an impending e book on sex, generated adequate critical feed-back that the report was eradicated.

The the latest dialogue, although, underscores a perpetual question for us as Christians: How can we discern the Bible and Christian custom faithfully? What really should be our key?

As Christians, we level to the triune God as the fount of all adore, and 1 way that Scripture invites us to look at God and like is by means of the metaphorical language of relationship. In Ephesians 5, Paul describes marriage, a union equally social and actual physical, as a fantastic mystery (v. 32), and he attracts out useful lessons of self-sacrifice for wives (vv. 21–24, 33) and husbands (vv. 21, 25, 28–29, 33). Woven in the course of these teachings on relationship are lovely statements about Christ and the church.

Our interpretation of these statements have to be anchored in the biblical textual content itself. Just before describing him as a spouse, Paul takes advantage of imagery in Ephesians 5 to reveal the Lord’s sovereignty. Though he has just presented his incarnate title, Jesus, Paul refers to the Son of God as Christ and Lord. Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the 1 who reigns around God’s kingdom, and the Lord, the sovereign more than the universe. He is also the Savior of the system (v. 23).

Christ physical exercises his sovereign lordship by acts of self-offering provider and really like, as in John 13 and Philippians 2. Christ the Sovereign liked the church and gave himself for her, in get that he may sanctify the church. Christ dealt with the dilemma of sin by washing, which was the occupation of a servant (Eph. 5:26–27). All the associates of the human body, individually and collectively as the church (v. 30), wanted the salvation only Christ the Lord could provide.

Paul compares husbands to Christ in this passage, but this does not mean that husbands are like Christ in every single regard. It is releasing for gentlemen to know the strategies they must not (mainly because they are unable to) “be Lord” to their wives. They can neither conserve nor sanctify their wives, for they too are in need of a Savior and contaminated by sin.

Not like other males

Paul does offer the romance of wives to their husbands as an illustration of all Christians submitting to 1 a further and all the customers of the church submitting to Christ, but he hardly ever tells husbands to guide their wives, only to really like—a directive he repeats in Ephesians 5:25, twice in verse 28, and yet again in verse 33.

We see husbands are not Jesus, and Jesus is not in all techniques like a partner. Although Paul teaches husbands to enjoy self-sacrificially by following the instance of Jesus’ self-sacrificial loss of life for the church, he goes past the bounds of the relationship metaphor when he speaks of Christ’s appreciate for the church. Paul tends to make it obvious that Christ’s self-sacrificial like is not only a a person-time atoning event. Christ engages in extensive-phrase, ongoing treatment for the church.

In Ephesians 5:29, he nourishes the church, a term employed for father’s care of youngsters (Eph. 6:4) and relevant to the expression for mother’s nursing (Luke 23:29). Christ also cares for the church, a term utilized for keeping heat (Deut. 22:6) or nursing (1 Thess. 2:7). Paul is not limiting the metaphor to husband and spouse but is introducing into the marriage metaphor parental imagery for Christ—even parental imagery involved with feminine bodies.

The church is feminized in Paul’s metaphor, but the church is created up of male and female users who are all known as to adore Christ as a bride. Christ is largely forged as the spouse in this metaphor—and he is definitely embodied as male—but Christ is not like other males, not only since he is God, but also simply because his male system arrived from the flesh of a feminine overall body (Mary) and not also a male entire body (Joseph).

This truth is simply just the assertion of the doctrine of the virginal conception of Jesus. In brief, Paul’s depiction of Christ’s singular sovereignty and saving function, in addition to the combined parental and relationship metaphors, preserves the boundary upheld by all Christian instructing: the boundary involving Creator and development.

And this signifies that this text also preserves the boundary between Christ and males, freeing husbands from a normal they could under no circumstances accomplish. They only way they are termed to be like Jesus is to enjoy their wives self-sacrificially, the precise simply call Paul difficulties to all believers (Eph. 5:1–2). It is the biblical text alone that closes the door to privilege of proximity between adult males and Jesus/God, a idea that has been utilized to justify abuse of women of all ages by males, dressed up in spiritual garb.

A deeply inclusive mystery

As is evident from Ephesians 5, relationship is not the only metaphor for God’s relation to the church in Scripture. Another outstanding arena of biblical language is that of the family. God is occasionally the spouse, but more often, God is named as the Father. Even Ephesians 5, identified for the relationship metaphor, starts this way: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved young children” (ESV, emphasis added).

Just one of the hazards of overemphasizing the marriage metaphor is that it can add to an idolization of relationship and privilege the experience of those people who can righteously have interaction in sexual intercourse. On the other hand, the relatives metaphor is a lot more common. Regardless of whether or not the experience is a good a person, everybody understands what it is to be a son or daughter, but not absolutely everyone knows what it is to be married. The pervasiveness of familial language for God normally takes the marriage metaphor off any inappropriate pedestal.

Also, familial terminology does not lend alone to unsuitable comparisons among intercourse and romantic relationship with God as the relationship metaphor has. Granted, a gentleman does not develop into a biological father save by sex, but the same doesn’t utilize to God the Father. God is Creator. God is Spirit. God is eternally 3 people in dynamic loving connection as unbegotten, begotten, and proceeding.

When the triune God was exposed preeminently in the incarnation of the divine Son, that revelation took spot via a nonsexual act. God’s Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary but did not have intercourse with her (Luke 1:35).

When rightly recognized, both of those metaphors in Scripture—God as our husband and God as our Father—work towards a essential trouble that will have to be avoided: a crude male sexualization of God and its corollary, a divinization of male sexuality. This is the oversight that Butler built in his interpretation, which parallels how “Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word” with the sexual intimacy of a bride waiting around in the honeymoon suite.

In the Incarnation, the everlasting God selected to expose God’s possess self as the Father who is not an embodied male and an everlasting Son who turned one. And in God’s eternal wisdom, this revelation took area by way of and with the active agency and physique of a girl. There is a profound and deeply inclusive mystery in the entire body of our Lord, a male virginally conceived by the electricity of the Holy Spirt when Mary claimed indeed. His entire body evokes the picture of God (Col. 1:15 2 Cor. 4:4) as proclaimed in Genesis 1:26–27, the impression of God in male and female.

It is this revelation of God in Jesus Christ that should really command our interpretation of the relationship metaphor in Ephesians 5. Jesus is the critical to our discernment. If the Father of Jesus Christ is uncovered preeminently in the Incarnation, which does not occur by way of sexual intercourse and the Son who is male from the system of a feminine also never ever engaged in sexual intercourse and if that God is metaphorically the spouse of the church, then the creaturely classification of male sexual exercise can not be projected onto our God.

When recognized by means of the Incarnation, our metaphorical marriage with the triune God as partner offers one thing gorgeous and very good for all men and women, married and one, gentlemen and women, devoid of privilege for some but absence for others.

If nearly anything, this controversy displays that distinct faculties of interpretation want to be in interaction with a person another and not ensconced in self-contained silos. It is unity, even and specially, unity across big difference, that Jesus mentioned would converse God’s really like to a planet so desperately in require of it (John 13:35).

We are not all married to one an additional, but we are all a component of the exact loved ones.

Amy Peeler is affiliate professor of New Testomony at Wheaton Faculty and affiliate rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Geneva, Illinois. She is the author of a ebook on Mary titled Females and the Gender of God.