Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
about because we know that we are sinners, unworthy of intimate communion with God. Recall the response of the prophet Isaiah to seeing a vision of God (YHWH) enthroned in glory. Far from rejoicing, Isaiah responds in agony: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5). It may also be that, as Jon D. Levenson says, we have lost a proper understanding of love: “where love is understood as primarily a sentiment, the dimension of deeds and of the service that the deeds bespeak is lost or radically transformed.”90 Levenson justifiably fears that the sentimental notion of love has resulted in “the perception that all talk of God’s love or of loving God is, at base, a treacly thing that appeals only to the emotionally weak,” making of religion a mere “crutch.”91
All this is troubling. Even more troublingly, however, it may appear from Scripture that God has acted like an abusive husband toward his covenantal bride whom he professes to love. Levenson observes, “The severity of the punishments that Hosea’s symbolic wife is to endure has understandably attracted the attention of feminist scholars.”92 It may seem that “the dominant position of men is reinforced by God’s role as husband,” even if the male citizens of Israel were “expected to identify . . . also with Israel as God’s wife.”93 In the prophecy of Jeremiah, God complains bitterly against the spiritual adultery of his people Israel.94 Indeed, God threatens to punish Israel in ways that are drawn from the cultural language of powerful husbands threatening unfaithful and powerless wives.95 At the same time, promising restoration, God assures his people, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel!” (Jer 31:3–4). God will do this even though the people of Israel broke their covenant with him—a covenant so intimate that, as God says, “I was their husband” (Jer 31:32). Not only was God their husband, but God in his “everlasting love” and “faithfulness” still is their husband. God will act to place this relationship on an everlasting foundation.
In Hosea’s prophecy, similarly, God warns of a coming tribulation, a dire punishment of his people’s spiritual adultery. The prophet describes God threatening his unfaithful “wife” by stripping her naked and having no pity upon her children.96 Yet, God also promises Israel that “I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:19–20).97
The Letter to the Hebrews says bluntly, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31). In our fallen condition, few people cross the boundary of death lightly, and perhaps even fewer lightly give over their lives to the will of God. Yet, Thomas Joseph White is correct to affirm that nonetheless “the human person is marked by longings for the infinite. Each human being has a hidden natural desire to see God”; we can be satisfied by nothing less than God.98 These longings have to do with the kind of creatures that we are, with the graced call to an intimate dwelling with God that we received from the beginning and to which the whole of Scripture testifies.99 In his Confessions, Augustine perceives that “you [God] have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”100
Yet, what if the God who reveals himself through the prophets is not worthy of our love, because he is terrifyingly abusive? Can we still desire the eschatological marriage of God and his people? In response, this chapter proceeds in two steps. First, I survey the New Testament scholar Brant Pitre’s popular book on Jesus as the Bridegroom Messiah who fulfills the marriage covenant promised by God to Israel through the prophets. In this section, I also draw upon Scott Hahn’s work on covenant and kinship, since it influences Pitre’s perspective. Second, I set forth the concerns of the Old Testament scholar Gerlinde Baumann in order to give full force to the fact that the prophets at times portray God in the role of a dominant male who threatens or implements violence against an unfaithful wife or woman. In the face of this abusive imagery, I suggest a twofold solution.
First, I retrieve the allegorical exegesis of such passages advocated by the Church Fathers (notably, in the present chapter, Jerome). Second, I take note of historical-critical research that shows that in its original historical context this imagery primarily indicated the importance of women for the survival of the people. The people of Israel—including the men—were represented by a woman in the prophetic imagery in part because the very survival of the people depended upon women bearing and raising children. Sadly, the people were represented by the image of an adulterous woman (among other images) because in their covenantal relationship to God, the people “are neither a devoted bride nor an obedient son. They are, rather, a people acting like a wife who flagrantly and chronically cheats on her husband, manically pursuing sexual gratification at the expense of covenantal fidelity, or like a son who ungratefully and obstinately refuses to serve his loving, giving father.”101 The Scriptures of Israel portray not a mutually loving marriage between God and his people, but rather an unfaithful people and a faithful God. Levenson comments, “The love, then, between the divine husband and the nation that is his wife is real but only in the past and in the future. . . . The marriage is an ideal recollected from the idyllic past and a possibility promised for the restored future. It is not the current reality, but reality it surely is and shall be again.”102
These points are not likely to change Baumann’s mind, since the presence of abusive imagery is enough to convince her that Scripture is not inspired by the living God. But I suggest that this approach should suffice to redirect attention to the main point of the prophetic texts, which is—as Pitre says—the everlastingly glorious, entirely unmerited, and supremely fulfilling marriage of God with his people. This marriage is inaugurated, though not yet consummated, by Jesus Christ.
I. Brant Pitre’s Jesus the Bridegroom
Brant Pitre emphasizes that far from being impersonal or aloof, as we sometimes fear the invisible and immaterial God must be, the God of Israel wishes to draw his people into a relationship so intimate with him as to be comparable only to the most intimate human relationship, marriage.103 In a brief opening chapter, Pitre argues that “from an ancient Jewish perspective, the God who created the universe is a Bridegroom, and all of human history is a kind of divine love story.”104 What does this have to do with the Torah, which recounts that God gave Moses a law at Mount Sinai? Upon marrying a bride, no bridegroom would simply hand her a set of rules.
Nahum Sarna has pointed out that covenants, in the ancient Near East, carried legal weight and served to confirm the behavior owed by the two parties (typically unequals) to each other.105 Pitre, indebted to Scott Hahn’s Kinship by Covenant, adds that “[f]rom a biblical perspective, a ‘covenant’ was a sacred family bond between persons, establishing between them a permanent and sacred relationship.”106 For his part, Hahn focuses attention on the ways in which the covenants involve God, as Father, welcoming his people into a relationship of sonship with him. With good reason, Hahn focuses on the biblical “drama of the development of the covenant relationship between father and son, that is, between God and his people.”107 He points out, among other things, that in Exodus 4:22, God calls Israel his “first-born son,” and in Exodus 19:5 God exhorts Israel that if it keeps the covenant (whose stipulations God reveals at Sinai), Israel “shall be my own possession among all peoples.” When Israel seals its covenant with God through Moses in Exodus 24, God calls the elders of the people up the mountain to behold him and eat and drink in his presence as his family.108
Hahn develops these points for the purposes of a broader account of priesthood in ancient Israel, but what I find important is the “familial shape” that he identifies in each of the covenants found in Scripture.109 To show the way in which “kinship bonds were extended by covenant to outsiders,” Hahn draws upon the work of Old Testament scholars such as Frank Moore Cross and Dennis McCarthy.110 As Hahn notes, “In a kinship covenant, kinship bonds are extended to bind two parties in a mutual relationship based upon a joint commitment under divine sanctions.”111 Not all covenants are kinship covenants, but Hahn makes a persuasive case that it is the “familial or relational dimension that integrates and binds together the other dimensions of the covenant that scholars over the past century have identified (i.e.,