In hopes of broadening the discourse at MBCC, we are inviting community members to blog. As such, anything posted is the opinion of the writer only, but is held as a part of the respectful dialogue that goes on within our community.
[image: diverkeith]
This week we hear from Jeff Miner on the subject of biblical marriage.
This afternoon I asked my wife if we could have a biblical marriage.
I thought she might be excited, but instead, she got a decidedly skeptical look on her face. Fair enough, I guess. Our apartment is barely big enough for the two of us, so where would we keep all my
other wives? On top of that, what about the concubines? Plus, she’s a little too far to the left politically to be excited about the possibility of having slaves to keep house, even if you choose to over look the fact that I’d be obligated to sleep with them if she ever became infertile (and likely even if she didn’t).
All in all, it’s difficult to ask someone to be excited about the possibility of Leah-and-Rachel-style fertility contests. And when I started to think about the possibility that I might be required to impregnate any of my sons’ wives in the event of their death, well, frankly even I started to get a little uncomfortable.
Even if we look at the gospels or the letters for our models of biblical marriage, the phrase itself, “biblical marriage,” has a lot of gender-political connotations in which an independent-minded woman like my wife is unlikely to be interested. ‘Wives submit to your husbands as to the lord’ is only one example - there are a number of places in the letters where Paul appeals to then-contemporary understandings of marriage to understand God. At least at face-value, these passages can only be reconciled with independent-mindedness after serious thought and a mildly uncomfortable amount of mental gymnastics.
other wives? On top of that, what about the concubines? Plus, she’s a little too far to the left politically to be excited about the possibility of having slaves to keep house, even if you choose to over look the fact that I’d be obligated to sleep with them if she ever became infertile (and likely even if she didn’t).
All in all, it’s difficult to ask someone to be excited about the possibility of Leah-and-Rachel-style fertility contests. And when I started to think about the possibility that I might be required to impregnate any of my sons’ wives in the event of their death, well, frankly even I started to get a little uncomfortable.
Even if we look at the gospels or the letters for our models of biblical marriage, the phrase itself, “biblical marriage,” has a lot of gender-political connotations in which an independent-minded woman like my wife is unlikely to be interested. ‘Wives submit to your husbands as to the lord’ is only one example - there are a number of places in the letters where Paul appeals to then-contemporary understandings of marriage to understand God. At least at face-value, these passages can only be reconciled with independent-mindedness after serious thought and a mildly uncomfortable amount of mental gymnastics.
Now, if she has her doubts about Paul, so do I. In 1 Corinthians, Paul suggests that the unmarried man is “anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord” but the married man “is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife.” I’m not sure how many unmarried men Paul knew, but at least in my experience it’s the single men who are most consumed with making sure their ‘worldly affairs’ are
taken care of, if you catch my drift.
Still, marriage between God and his people is an important theme in a number of places in the Bible, so if we want to talk about biblical marriage, it becomes necessary to return to the text.
Among the many metaphors used by the prophets for the Israelites, the unfaithful spouse (Hosea) is one of the more dramatic. Even if the meaning of the image seems obvious, there remains a hidden undercurrent to these prophetic appeals, one I’ve never seen in print or heard preached. As long as we’re talking about the ancient Israelites, we’re talking about a culture where polygynous marriage was the ideal, at least as far as men were concerned. Not only that, we’re talking about a context in which the most powerful men (David, for example) might have a large number of concubines as a reserve set of sexual partners.
So, if God’s relationship with the Israelites was like a husband to a wife, who were his other wives? Did he have a thing on the side with the Philistines? What about his concubines? If he thought Israel didn’t keep a clean enough house, would he go shack up with the Jebusites or the Edomites?
Still, marriage between God and his people is an important theme in a number of places in the Bible, so if we want to talk about biblical marriage, it becomes necessary to return to the text.
Among the many metaphors used by the prophets for the Israelites, the unfaithful spouse (Hosea) is one of the more dramatic. Even if the meaning of the image seems obvious, there remains a hidden undercurrent to these prophetic appeals, one I’ve never seen in print or heard preached. As long as we’re talking about the ancient Israelites, we’re talking about a culture where polygynous marriage was the ideal, at least as far as men were concerned. Not only that, we’re talking about a context in which the most powerful men (David, for example) might have a large number of concubines as a reserve set of sexual partners.
So, if God’s relationship with the Israelites was like a husband to a wife, who were his other wives? Did he have a thing on the side with the Philistines? What about his concubines? If he thought Israel didn’t keep a clean enough house, would he go shack up with the Jebusites or the Edomites?
Don’t think you can avoid these difficulties simply by turning to tha tired New Testament / Old Testament argument. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that this line of thought cannot be applied equally to the imagery of the gospels. If the church is the bride of Christ, and God is made up of three persons, isn’t the church itself involved in a polygamous marriage? Even worse, what about that Holy Spirit? If it really descended from heaven as a dove, we might even be talking about a polygamous marriage with intermittent bestiality!
What’s the point of all of this blasphemy? Mostly to say that I think the best way to have a biblical marriage is not to have too biblical a marriage. To be fair to the authors above, it’s not like Paul and the prophetic authors got it wrong, exactly. The only vocabulary available to them for describing divinity was analogy. The author of Hosea opted to use (among other things) the concept of marriage in his attempts to dramatize and understand the divine. Paul did the same, but made a double move, using his then-contemporary understanding of marriage to characterize God, and then using that characterization to make prescriptions about the then-contemporary institution of marriage.
As far as the available vocabulary for describing the indescribable, our situation hasn’t improved substantially in the last 2,000 to 4,000 years. Then (as now) using analogies carried (and carries) risks (as I tried to show above).
If you want to figure out how to relate to God, you could pick worse books than the Bible and worse analogies than a marriage. If you want to figure out broadly how to relate to other people (including a spouse), the Bible provides a compelling set of principles to work with there as well.
On the other hand, if you go looking for specific pointers and/or rush your reading, you are (in one man’s humble opinion) likely to miss the forest for the trees. If (to pick only one hypothetical example) you are participating in the democratic process and considering how to set social policy, you’re better off with a census in your hand than one of the minor prophets. I wouldn’t read Thessalonians if I were trying to unstop my toilet, after all.
If you want to figure out how to relate to your actual partner, you might get better returns from listening to them than from paging through the good book. Speaking of which, I’m hearing her say that it’s time to get to bed.
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