Is the Church ‘The Bride of Christ’?
There are a couple of places in the New Testament where the relationship of Christ to the Church (aka, to Christians) is likened to that of husband and wife. The passages are in Ephesians chapter 5 and Revelation 19, 21, and 22. We’ve probably heard sermons of one hue or another which feature this idea. But through what framework for ‘what it’s saying’ are we to understand it?
One of the golden rules associated with a metaphor is that it only works to a point. It provides a helpful ‘picture’ in relation to some aspect(s) but not all aspects. The metaphor of Jesus as the Lamb of God sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven should not be leading us to research sheep-like qualities to apply to the ascended Jesus in this Sunday’s sermon (I hope I’m not giving anyone ideas at this point). When any metaphor is pressed too hard it becomes false.
When it comes to the metaphor of our relationship to Jesus having (some) correspondence to husband and wife, we can see that the answer has to be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Let me explain: I am not dissing biblical truth here, I am saying we need to have our mind in gear when we think it through and remember the basic starting point for all biblical interpretation. Which is what it meant, then—what it was ‘saying’ then—in the minds of its original author and audience.
This is not always a straightforward question, but it’s often a lot easier than one might think. What we must not do is simply ‘copy and paste’ a verse into our world, today, as if what it’s saying must automatically be a timeless truth for now and forever more. It may be—but it may not be. It may simply have been a timebound truth for then. We must remember that before anything is a truth for us, today, it was firstly a truth for an original audience. We are eavesdroppers on their conversation. How that truth does or doesn’t transport from ‘then’ to ‘now’ is a separate question.
Perhaps the easiest way of recognising that is to think about what (to most of us) would be timebound truths from the Old Testament era, such as, “you shall not put on a garment made of two different materials” (Leviticus 19:19). Most of us would say that’s timebound (otherwise it’s curtains for our polyester and cotton shirts—although, there was no prohibition that I’m aware of for making curtains from two different materials). However, the immediately preceding verse in Leviticus is “love your neighbour as yourself” which we would all take to be a timeless truth. Both are in the part of Leviticus that scholars speak of as ‘the Holiness Code’ (holiness, by the way, is a much-misunderstood word in contemporary evangelicalism—see https://www.steveburnhope.com/blog/what-is-holiness). Quite what Leviticus 19:19 has to do with holiness is anyone’s guess, but no doubt it made sense to them, then. Maybe it was metaphorical in its day as well. Or maybe there was no reason for it as such, in terms of morality or well-being, it was just something God asked them to do without knowing why (without having to ‘personally agree with it’ in the modern sense). I’ve elsewhere suggested that the prohibition of eating the fruit from the tree in the middle of the Garden was in the same category.
Anyway, back to the metaphor of husband and wife in relation to Christ and the Church. It works well, I would suggest, insofar as it speaks of a relational intimacy with which we can readily identify. It also works well in that marriage is a form of covenant, and covenant is the most prominent defining feature of God’s relationship with humanity from cover-to-cover in Scripture (see chapter 3 of Part I of my latest book, Reading The Bible With Its Writers). We have very few accessible examples of covenant in our world today, so awareness of what such a relationship was all about has been rather lost. Marriage is not the example that it once was, but it can still work to a point. However, once we move beyond these two features—a desire for relational intimacy and an unbreakable covenantal commitment from Jesus—it ceases to work so well.
The self-evident problem that we encounter when we look at how Ephesians 5 characterises things is that it reflects an Ancient World understanding of the marriage relationship, rather than a contemporary understanding. When we see that in Scripture, we have two choices. Either we baptise it as timeless truth (a ‘biblical model’ for how all marriages should always be in all times and places)—which some uber-conservative fundamentalists would do, under the assumption that’s faithfulness to the Word of God—or, we say, “That was then, but this is now.” We ask ourselves how that timebound truth—that reflection of the cultural context in which those ‘self-evident at the time’ truths were originally written—relates to today. Is it the same, something analogous, or … nothing at all? We’re not just picking and choosing which truths in Scripture we agree with; we’re asking the Holy Spirit which ones were intended to have timelessness breathed-into them (2 Timothy 3:16).
To illustrate what I mean, here’s the passage, Ephesians 5:25–33. Read, and consider!
Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Saviour. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.
Be prepared to see timebound-ness in Scripture as well as timelessness. To hear the voice of humanity alongside the voice of divinity. To need to discern those voices as we read. Everything in the Bible was written into a context with which its original hearers were familiar: a context of things that were ‘obvious’ to them, that they took for granted as ‘the way things are’. And remember that all metaphors work only to a point.
The danger of anachronism in biblical interpretation is ever-present. One such danger is reading today’s understandings of marriage into the occurrences of the word in the Bible. Even a cursory study of how ‘marriage’ was understood and practiced in the Ancient World (including the biblical world, in its various eras and iterations) will reveal how flawed that is. And yet, we regularly encounter such ‘reading-in’ (eisegesis) in popular evangelical sermons and writings.
When we read this passage, it’s likely that we will easily see both timebound elements (‘that was how they saw things then, in their context’) and timeless elements (‘that’s how we see things today, as well’). This is entirely unsurprising. And since it’s a metaphor, that’s OK! If the biblical writer understood something as a metaphor—aka, if the Holy Spirit understands it as a metaphor—then we’re not required to implement its timebound features into Christian life today. The genre of the writing must be respected and not overridden by a modern lens.