Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering
and covenant.”180 As she says, it is understandable and, indeed, powerfully resonant that “woman’s body” in biblical texts serves “as a sign for the social body,” as the prophets and other biblical authors employ “gynomorphic figurations of corporate identity indigenous to [their] world.”181 Keefe reminds us that when we are disturbed by the “metaphor of female sexual transgression” as an “image for the negation of Israel’s identity,” we need to realize that “[t]he adultery metaphor works in this way because it is also a maternal metaphor, and as such, it participates in and effects a reversal of another important dimension of the symbolism that is constitutive of Israelite identity—Israel as generative mother, symbol of the ongoing life of the people.”182 This perspective helps us to appreciate why such metaphorical imagery was employed in the first place, as well as its original positive intent.
This background gives some explanation to the use of such imagery in Scripture, so long as we do not thereby suppose that we are not meant to be disturbed by the imagery. Baumann remains unpersuaded that the imagery can be excused. If God can be said to behave in this way, how can men be told that they cannot behave in this way?183 This is obviously a problem that applies to genocidal violence as well.
I agree with Baumann that a God who engages in the ancient Near Eastern practice of physically humiliating and attacking rebellious wives is not an acceptable “God.” For scholars such as Exum, this means “doing away with . . . biblical authority” and with the notion that the biblical God is the “‘real’ god.”184 By contrast, I stand with Jerome and with the other witnesses to the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church’s spiritual—allegorical, typological, tropological—reading of parts of the Old Testament’s language. A cultural practice of physically abusing wives is being metaphorically attributed by the prophetic authors to God, but this cultural practice is not of God.185
This is similar to how many Christians have long interpreted God’s biblical commandments regarding the killing of all the persons living in a specific city. It is also similar to how many Christians interpret biblical portraits of God noisily “walking in the garden” or of God inflamed with jealousy and rage, desiring to slaughter his entire people until Moses talks him out of it (Gen 3:8; Deut 32).186 Such texts are read theologically in light of the overall biblical witness to the God who makes covenant with Abraham in order to bless Abraham’s descendents and ultimately the whole world.
What this kind of exegesis (“allegorical” or “theological”) does is allow the abusive metaphorical imagery to be read and understood in its fullest and most proper contexts, while valuing the value of the historical-critical clarifications brought by Keefe and others. Jerome knows that the God who reveals his love in the prophetic books and in Christ Jesus may (and does) justly punish his people—indeed the punishment (exile) is intrinsic to their idolatrous turning away from God—but this God would never abuse a woman, and indeed would never commit any evil action whatsoever. After all, “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and “God cannot be tempted with evil” (Jas 1:13). Quite rightly, Jerome uses his knowledge of the entire Bible to guard against misreadings of the abusive imagery that would turn the just God of mercy and love into the very kind of oppressive and sexually abusive god (prevalent among the nations) that he repeatedly reveals himself not to be.
Recall what happened when the young Augustine, inspired by Cicero’s Hortensius to seek wisdom about divine realities, applied himself to reading Christian Scripture. For Augustine as a young man, one of the problems with Scripture—especially the Old Testament—was that “[i]t seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero.”187 Cicero never thought of God as filled with the passions of jealousy and anger or as plotting actions of violence against women and infants. Later, Bishop Ambrose of Milan advised Augustine to read the Book of Isaiah; but Augustine “did not understand the first passage of the book” and put it down.188 Augustine’s response to the first chapters of Isaiah is easy to sympathize with, given Isaiah’s attention to the contemporary politics of his day and the dense culturally embedded style of his writing. But Ambrose’s influence won out. Augustine reports, “I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill (2 Cor. 3:6).”189
We may also recall Pope Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini, where he reflects upon the “‘dark’ passages” of the Bible, namely “passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”190 In addressing the problem, Benedict XVI proposes that “it must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages, and despite human resistance.”191 Thus, we should read the prophets’ application to God of the metaphor of a husband violently angry with his adulterous wife as the culturally conditioned mode of discourse that it is; it displays an unacceptable view of violence as permissible in such situations. God revealed himself through real human authors writing in particular cultural contexts. But by reading in context (i.e. historical context, the internal context of the prophetic book, and the context of the whole canon and the realities of what God has done in Christ), Christians can perceive that the import of the prophetic texts is not that God is an angry or violent being, but rather that God wishes to be united fully to his unfaithful bride (his people Israel) and that God will not abandon his unfaithful bride whose actions have imperiled the future of the covenant. Instead, with infinite mercy, compassion, and solidarity with sinners, God will ultimately reunite his bride to himself in perfect mutual love.192
III. Conclusion
In Christ, a human marriage becomes “a mystical participation in the spousal and sacrificial relationship between Christ and the Church,” so that we experience more profoundly the reality of the marriage of God and his people.193 But not all Christian marriages are good ones. Many women, and men too, have experienced physical violence within a bad marriage. In numerous cultures over the centuries, husbands have been explicitly allowed to abuse their wives physically.
Jerome’s approach recognizes the presence in Scripture’s plain sense of a wrongheaded depiction of God, since a central point of divine revelation is that God, while just, is not an oppressive and sexually abusive “god” like the ones found in Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman myth. As we saw, Jerome and other Church Fathers make clear that rape and violation are never justifiable and are infinitely far from the holiness of God. Such evil acts or even the threat of such acts may never be literally attributed to God.
Without referring to this patristic approach, Weems in her book Battered Love contends that the diversity of biblical portraits of God means that the image of God as husband can be relativized sufficiently to enable readers to perceive the difference between the “marriage metaphor” and the real “object to which it points (God).”194 Weems is also poignantly cognizant of the truth that, even despite the many hurtful and failed marriages that we see around us, “the marriage metaphor permits us to believe in the most unbelievable of all possible responses to our woundedness, namely, grace. . . . That we risk loving again those who have wounded us, and that others trust us to try again despite the fact that we have broken their hearts—this is grace. It is a breathtaking possibility.”195 The divine grace is rooted in God’s undiminished will to marry his fallen but still beloved people.
Given all this, we are free to read the prophetic texts as they were intended. Despite the images of “violence to the woman [Israel],” it is a truly glorious marriage of God and his people that prophetic texts such as Isaiah 54, Hosea 1–3, and Jeremiah 2–3 have at their core.196 The people of Israel look forward with yearning to the restoration and intimacy with God that will be brought about by this divine-human marriage. As Richtsje Abma states, “The promise that Yhwh will remarry Zion ([Is] 54:5) contributes to the comfort of Zion and is part of the reversal of her fortunes,” just as at the conclusion of Hosea 2 we see that “Yhwh is devoted to Israel” and in Jeremiah we find that “Israel is called to a new intimacy with Yhwh and to new conjugal responsiveness, a perspective that is endowed with promises and blessings.”197 Our sins cannot destroy God’s plan for the eschatological marriage of God and his people. Learning how to