The Bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:22-33): a problematic wedding.

Abstract

The passage in Ephesians that compares the union of husband and wife to that of Christ and the church is a favorite ecclesial image, yet it has always been problematic. It is not clear what is the intended function of the household codes, and this passage in particular is open to a variety of misinterpretations. The effects of the way in which simile and metaphor function in the passage extend beyond ecclesiology in ways that suit certain interests. A feminist analysis indicates some interpretive mistakes and suggests some criteria for approaching this beautiful but dangerous text.

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This is not the first time I have spoken or written on this text. In one talk a few years ago, I brought in my critique of the negative effect that the passage has had on church life, which led one reporter to entitle an article: "Biblical scholar raps Bride of Christ"!

We are confronted with a formidable text, formidable not only because of the layers of associations and feelings it evokes, but also because of its complexity and the importance it has had in the church's understanding of itself (not: herself, which is one of the less felicitous effects). If we employ a hermeneutic of suspicion, there is plenty to be suspicious about, as witnessed by the blank stares of women when I tell them I am working on this text.

I want to consider this very influential passage in Ephesians first from the perspective of its historical and social context, then in light of its literary genre, and finally from the perspective of ecclesiology, in every case withm a feminist framework of interpretation. There is by now no such thing as a uniform or even standard feminist hermeneutic. In every area of biblical interpretation--whether historical-critical or literary--feminist scholars, by no means all female, are creating a network of feminist scholarship marked by a variety of approaches. What I think most of them have in common, and what is the basis of my own investigation here, is analysis and critique of how engendered power works, with a view ultimately toward the restructuring of society--including church--into a more just and equal distribution of power. Needless to say, I do not consider power itself something evil or to be avoided, but rather a necessary component of any human interaction, one that will enter into the dynamic of human exchange, whether with conscious intention or not.

In the current Roman lectionary our reading occurs on one Sunday (twenty-first of the year) and one weekday (Tuesday of the thirtieth week), and it is an optional Second Testament reading for marriages. In the readings for marriages, we are given a long form and a short form. The short form omits Ephesians 5:22-23, 33, those verses that contain submission of wife to husband. Both long and short readings introduce the passage with Ephesians 5:2a: "Follow the way of love, even as Christ loved you. He gave himself up for us" (omitting the sacrificial aspect of Ephesians 5:2b: "as an offering to God, a gift of pleasing fragrance"). From there the lectionary reading jumps to 5:21: "Defer to one another out of reverence for Christ." My parish priest friends tell me that almost no couples choose either the long or the short version of that reading, though a prospective groom will occasionally joke about it (e.g., "I'd like to choose it, but I value my life"). But the reading has already had its effect, and of course, in some conservative Christian traditions today, the structure of relationships within it is taken quite seriously.

A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: The Household Code

I begin with what I know best, and what has continued to fascinate me for some time. I will not enter into arguments pro and con Pauline authorship of the letter. In my opinion, that conversation was finished some time ago. Most scholars today would say that the Letter to the Ephesians was written by a disciple or imitator of Paul using Pauline ideas and images, but taking them beyond Paul's own thinking. Nor will I enter into a discussion of whether or not the historical Paul, or the author of Ephesians, was a chauvinist. In such discussions we inevitably judge ancient persons by modern standards, which is not fair. What I do want to argue, though, is that the author of Ephesians has read Paul well, and has combined several Pauline themes into a new configuration under the guiding theme of the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. But more on that later.

The household code (translation of the original German name Haustafel or "household table") is a description of mutual relationships within a household. The usual dyads, as here, are wife-husband, children-fathers, and slaves-masters. Thus six roles in three relationships are discussed, though of course, only four actual groups of people are involved, since husband, father, and slave owner are presumed to be the same, notwithstanding the social realities of the day: mothers, though not legally owed obedience, were just as influential in the upbringing of their children as they are today, and many women owned slaves. Because of the Greek use of masculine for generic language, modern translations are justified to translate "parents" instead of "fathers," but in the original self-consciously patriarchal context, it is very doubtful that the authority of mothers was envisioned here.

The same pattern of six roles also occurs in Colossians 3:18-4:1, and parts of it in 1 Peter 2:18-3:7, where for the author's own purposes, slaves are placed first and masters, children, and fathers omitted. First Peter's concerns are the resemblance of slaves to the suffering Christ, and the plight of wives married to pagan husbands. There may be some structural connection with the triad of subordinate relationships in 1 Corinthians 11:3: man to Christ, woman to man, and Christ to God. Adaptations of the same form occur in 1 Timothy 2:1-3:13; 5:4-17; 6:1-2, 17-19, where the same idea of mutual relationship and responsibility is extended to relationships within the church community. The form exactly as we have it in Ephesians and Colossians is not found in previous literature, but the categories are definitely there. My co-author David Balch has shown that the form has its origins in Aristotelian and later discussions of household management, peri oikonomias, that are common in Hellenistic literature (Balch 1988, 1992)

The modern reader assumes that only the first dyad, wife-husband, is problematic, since talk about slavery is anachronistic and children's obedience to parents still holds. Not so: relevant press coverage continues to highlight the existence of slavery throughout the world, and the biblical household codes refer to the legal obligation of obedience owed by adult children to their living fathers, no matter what age the child. So it is not only the first dyad that is problematic. It is, however, the one that generates the most heat in our culture, and because of limited time and patience, it is the only one to which we will give attention here.

When most of these discussions of household management are compared to those of the Second Testament, several distinctive differences arise. One is that the Hellenistic discussions usually include something on household finances. It may be very telling that the biblical writers chose to omit that issue, perhaps because the focus is now no longer on management but on something else. In keeping with that "something else," the more significant difference is that nearly all the Hellenistic discussions of household management, beginning with Aristotle, address only one person, the male authority figure (paterfamilias) who must relate differently but always in a superior manner to wife, children, and slaves. We are of course talking here about the patriarchally "ideal" family, one headed by a strong male leader. We know from other evidence that there were many households headed by women. How authority functioned in households headed by women is something about which we know very little, precisely because it was considered outside the norm, and therefore largely ignored in the literature (but see Osiek & Balch: 58, 243-44 n. 46). Here we have something very different. The Second Testament codes address all categories of persons concerned: wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, and masters. The pattern of submission in the case of wife to husband and of obedience in the case of children to fathers and slaves to masters remains, but no longer is the husband-father-master the only socially visible and significant person. Now wives, children, and slaves are given social visibility and therefore personal dignity by being addressed as well. What is more, in each dyad they are addressed first: wives then husbands, children then fathers, slaves then masters. It is as if the authors of these texts, while keeping the subordinate order, want to reverse the usual custom of granting central attention to the male authority figure.

This brings us to the possible reason why the comments on household finance are omitted from the Christian texts. The Graeco-Roman discussions of household management are concerned with just that: the skills of supervision and management that the ideal paterfamilias should have, and his successful, enlightened but disciplined dealing with those under his authority--which is everyone else in the household. This does not seem to be the goal of the Christian discussions. Rather, I believe the strategy of the Second Testament household codes has more to do with formation of proper relationships within the household as microcosm of the church, just as it was earlier seen as microcosm of the state. The dominance-submission pattern is still there, but it has been radically changed, from treatise on male dominance to exhortation to mutual relationships in Christ.

These observations, however, do not completely exonerate the author. It is sometimes argued that the household codes appear in these letters in order to assure outsiders that Christians are not out to upset the social order. As Sarah Tanzer has observed, that argument makes little sense in this case because one of the purposes of the author is to create in recipients of the letter a consciousness of their unique status as specially chosen and therefore distractive (Tanzer: 330). From what we know, the reality of the social lives of most Roman women was not that of the patriarchal submissive ideal put forth in the discussions of household management. Generalizations are hazardous, but from the indirect evidence, that is, not the legal codes but the letters, inscriptions, and other social evidence, we can say that by the end of the first century CE, rights of divorce, property ownership, and even property management were in the hands of many if not most of those women living under direct Roman influence. What happened in the countryside, in small villages, and among the urban poor is largely unknown. A general anthropological pattern is that women of poorer families and lower social classes, while deprived of the education that their upper class sisters may get, in fact have more social freedom and independence, but also have to work much harder, because their full participation in the earning of family livelihood is needed by the family, and women are not the precious commodities for enhancing family status through marriage strategies that they are in the upper classes.

At this point let us step back and take a look at the whole picture, the Letter to the Ephesians, in order to see the place of our text within it. The central theme of the whole letter is reconciliation of the alienated within the unity of the church. It has been said by one scholar that the structure alternates between something specific to the readers and their concerns, and what Christ and God have done for them (Sampley: 11-12). The first chapter celebrates the mystery of God's purpose accomplished by raising Christ from the dead. Chapter two recalls the distance we have come from our sinful past because of what Christ has done for us. 2:11-22 contains some of the best lines in the Second Testament: you who were once separated and alienated have been brought together into one by the blood of the cross. "He is our peace, who makes the two sides into one by destroying the wall of separation" (Eph 2:14) "so that he might make one new person out of the two, and reconcile both of us into one body through the cross" (2:15-16). Therefore, we are no longer strangers, but "citizens and members of the household of God" built into a holy temple (2:19). Chapter 3 continues the meditation on this mystery from the perspective of Paul's ministry of reconciliation and revelation. Chapter 4 begins the paraenetic or exhortatory section, and here the author beseeches the hearers to lead lives of unity and peace. This theme is carried through into chapter 5, which begins with the exhortation to imitate God and Christ, who gave himself up for us with love. Between that verse and our text falls a warning against foolishness and letting down our guard against evil. Rather, we should constantly give thanks with song in our hearts because of what God has done for us in Christ. That brings us to our text, which takes up again the theme of loving submission begun with the example of Christ in 5:2. The text we are examining begins with 5:21: Be submissive to one another out of reverence for Christ. In 1 Peter 2:18-25, slaves are the type of the innocent sufferer, Christ. Here wives will be the type of that mutual submission in Christ which all are to have.

The lectionary editors may have acted with wisdom by beginning the reading with 5:2, the self-sacrifice of Christ, because it does set the tone that is important to retain in the whole passage. The exhortation to mutual submission (5:21) begins the passage, but first connects directly with the self-sacrifice of Christ in 5:2. That is why Christians should submit to one another: out of reverence for Christ, who submitted to God. The wording in 5:2 is clearly sacrificial; it is therefore somewhat surprising that the sacrificial theme plays so little part in our passage, occurring only in 5:25, where Christ gives himself up for the church, with the corresponding implication that the love of husbands for their wives should go to that extent. Rather surprisingly, neither wife nor church is expected to be sacrificial except in the general sense of submission. Sacrifice seems to be "a guy thing."

In spite of the exhortation to mutual submission in 5:21, however, here submission is a "woman thing." Wives are not to obey, as are children and slaves; the terminology is different. One could, however, make the case that the words are practically interchangeable on the basis of 1 Peter, where slaves are to submit as are wives (2:18; 3:1; also Titus 2:9), while Sarah gives example to wives by obeying Abraham and calling him lord (3:6).

To submit or be subordinate (hypotassein) is a common concept in a hierarchical society. Good social order is impossible without it. Elsewhere in the Second Testament, all Christians are to submit to the law of God (Rom 8:7) and to civil authority (Rom 13:1; 1 Pet 2:13), and younger men to older men (1 Pet 5:5). The precocious child Jesus, who in Luke's infancy narrative has already worried his parents to death by deliberately getting lost for three days, returns with them and submits to them (Luke 2:51). Demons submit to the disciples in Luke (10:17, 20), and the spirits of the prophets to the prophets so that their ecstasy is not out of their control (1 Cor 14:32). All creation will ultimately submit to Christ (1 Cor 15:25-28, a quotation from Psalm 8:7; Phil 3:21). Beyond the Second Testament, one further author uses the idea indirectly of wives to husbands (1 Clem. 1.3), but then the motif changes. Submission from then on is to church authority (Osiek & Balch: 148, 268 n. 195). The term used for submission carries connotations of respectful rather than servile yielding, but very definitely of inferior subject to authoritative superior.

The ideologically expected submission of wife to husband, a simple exhortation in the parallel passage in Col 3:18, is here immediately turned into a comparison with the church and Christ. This is not the only one of the relationships that is "theologized," so to speak. The admonition to children and fathers (6:1-4) is fairly straightforward, but that to slaves and masters (6: 5-9) includes the same analogy, that slaves should obey their earthly masters as if they were Christ, and masters are reminded that they too have a master in heaven. But this author obviously felt that he had something important to say about the first analogy: the ten words addressed to husbands in Colossians 3:19 become 143 words in Ephesians (Karlsen Seim: 178)!

It is not possible to give anything like a full exegesis of the passage, and others have done that very thoroughly (especially Sampley). It will suffice to discuss some points important to our investigation. I think the author has taken motifs from several previous Pauline texts and brought them together into a new configuration as follows. The headship motif comes from two sources: 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Colossians 1:18. The former text contains the rather mystifying headship triad: Christ over man, man over woman (or husband over wife, less likely since this is not a marriage context), and God over Christ--in that order. Colossians 1:18 portrays Christ as head of his body, the church, which presupposes 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 and Romans 12:3-8 where the church is simply the body of Christ, with no differentiated head. It is also worth noting that the submission of wives to husbands in Colossians 3:18 is not linked to the head motif. Now with the combination of 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Colossians 1:18, man as head of woman and Christ as head of the church, the stage is set for the combination that occurs in Ephesians: husband is head of wife as Christ is head of the church.

The text very quickly moves away from marriage into ecclesiology. Ephesians 5:26-27 speaks of ritual washing and purity. It has been debated whether baptismal imagery is intended here. I do not think any early Christian audience could have heard these lines without thinking of baptism. The analogy with marriage has disappeared into the background, but resurfaces in 5:28, and again in 5:31 and 33. There are two important background motifs here. The first is the recurring biblical theme of the relationship of Israel to God likened to a sexual liaison or marriage, in which Israel is the unfaithful lover or wife, God the longsuffering husband. The second is the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of god and goddess, or king and goddess, or god with representative human female, sometimes perhaps ritually enacted in temple cults. The sacred marriage was a recurring theme in Ancient Near Eastern literature, and probably a major influence on the marital imagery of God and Israel, on the Song of Songs, and on such Second Testament texts as Ephesians and Revelation 19:7-9, where the bride prepares herself for marriage with the Lamb by clothing herself in bright, pure linen: cf. Hosea 2:19; Isaiah 54:5-6 (Klein, Yarbro Collins: 223-24, 239-40 n. 62-65). In the very ancient sacred marriage, especially in the case of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, the goddess sometimes takes a ritual bath before the marriage--but the bath is not given by the future husband, as here. For that connection we must turn to Ezekiel 16:1-22, where God has picked up Israel as an abandoned baby girl, raised her, bathed (v 9), clothed, and married her, though she later was unfaithful (Sampley: 38-51). The sacred marriage is a legitimizing ritual. It legitimates the divine right of the king, or the priestess of the god, or a couple who represent the divine pair as representatives of the city. In the same way, the sacred marriage of Christ and the church in our text legitimizes human marriage as reflection of the sacred union.

Most of these sacred marriage myths are ancient and archetypal, from millennia before the era of Ephesians. Is there any evidence that they would still have been operative or attractive to readers of the late first century? Myths, of course, defy time. There can be no limit placed on the "shelf life" of a myth. But would the imagery still be credible to first-century people? An interesting story in Josephus ANT. 18.66-80, reported straightforwardly as an incident that happened during the reign of Tiberius, suggests an affirmative answer. He relates that a certain man of the equestrian class, Decius Mundus, was enamored of a married woman of the senatorial class named Paulina. When he had offered her all sorts of bribes and enticements, to no avail, his freedwoman mistress Ida, in order to please him, bribed the priests of the temple of Isis, a goddess to whom Paulina was known to be devoted, to say that the god Anubis, closely associated with Isis, was in love with Paulina and invited her to the temple overnight. Her husband gave his consent, both of them thinking that she was indeed privileged to have such an invitation, her husband, Josephus adds, being confident of her chastity.

What either the gullible lady or her husband expected is not clear, but the infatuated Decius Mundus, disguised as Anubis, had sex during the night with her in the temple, and she did not object to his advances, thinking him to be a god. But his indiscretion was his undoing. Seeing her later in the street, he boasted that he had had her after all, in the temple--whereupon her husband reported the whole matter to the emperor. Punishment was swift and brutal. In keeping with the class and androcentric distinctions of the day, the temple priests and the freedwoman Ida were crucified, while Decius Mundus, the cause of the whole trouble, was merely exiled, since he too was an aristocrat and had done what he did "under the influence of passion." Josephus, writing towards the end of the first century, tells this as an apparently credible story. It is an interesting illustration that the idea of the hieros gamos seems still to have been not only operative but credible at the time--however gullible the victims were. The story in its present form may be based on an earlier story claiming the Egyptian paternity of Alexander the Great, his mother having been seduced by pharaoh Nectanebo disguised as Zeus Ammon (Feldman: 9.51). The sacred marriage of Zeus and Leto was also commemorated in an inscription at Didyma, by what ritual is unknown (Rehm: 116).

There is a strong emphasis on female purity in the Ephesians text, which should not be surprising. Anthropologists of Mediterranean culture have long pointed out the symbolic value of female chastity and the enormous weight it bears in the society. Male honor depends heavily on the chastity of the females of the family, wife, daughters, and sisters. Family honor is extraordinarily vulnerable to attack through women. A man who wishes to insult another male can do it in no better way than by violating the women whom it is his duty to protect, thus showing him to be unable to defend them, and therefore pitiably weak. A woman who transgresses the sexual norms dishonors not only herself but also her male relatives and her whole family, and brings upon her brothers the onus of cleansing the family of this dishonor, often by killing her. Thus the fixation on virginity at marriage, and the difficulty of raped women to be accepted anywhere. There is of course a double standard at work here; men are expected to be sexually experienced before marriage, and the concepts of purity or exclusivity simply do not apply to them (Peristiany 1966, 1976; Gilmore).

Female sexual purity was and is not only a private affair, however. It is projected onto the big screen of civil symbolism. The purity of women represents and safeguards the purity of the state; thus the consecrated virginity of the Vestal Virgins upheld the integrity of ancient Rome. Besides the Vestal Virgins, the institution of marriage at its most ideal was the form of human society that reflected in miniature what the state should be. As goes the family, so goes the state. If the integrity of marriage depended on male authority and female chastity, so did the state. As Peter Brown puts it, our passage in Ephesians "presented the relations of husband and wife as reflection of the primal solidarity brought back by Christ to the universe and to the church.... In the church, as in the city, the concord of a married couple was made to bear the heavy weight of expressing the ideal harmony of a whole society" (57).

The archetype of the pure bride is evoked here in Ephesians 5:26-27, and lurking just below the surface is the alternative: the impure, soiled woman described by Ezechiel 16. Ephesians 5:27 expresses the wish that the bride be without spot and unblemished. The two terms for "spot" and "blemish" (spilos and momos) occur elsewhere in the Second Testament, but together only in 2 Peter 2:13, where they are applied to false teachers, thus giving us an idea of the echoes of meaning here. The female unchastity of Israel was a metaphor for idolatry. The chastity of the bride church here is a metaphor for orthodoxy, and any impurity in her would be heresy (also Sampley: 67-69). As Margaret MacDonald succinctly puts it: "As in Paul's letters ... there is the idea in Ephesians 5.21-33 that union with a pure female body has symbolic importance in expressing the nature of the separation from a past way of life. As a reflection of the holy and unblemished church, the pure bride stands in contrast to the evil world outside" (230-31).

Once again, female chastity bears the burden of the projection of male fantasies of pollution.

Bride Is Not Body: Of Similes and Metaphors

Here I move into unfamiliar territory, to the land of literary critics, where the customs and ethos of the natives are different than in my own country of biblical studies and social history, and others are far more expert than I. But this aspect of the analysis is crucial. We begin with the simple category of analogy, which compares two things that are partly alike and partly different in order to highlight what is alike, and thus enhance and enrich symbolic meaning. Since Aristotle, the basic types of such analogies have been simile and metaphor. Simile is an explicit comparison using "like," "as," or something similar, for example: "Your hair is like a flock of goats moving down the slopes of Gilead" (Cant 6:5b).

Metaphor is a more implicit comparison made by direct statement that one thing is another. As Aristotle puts it, when A is to B as C is to D, it is a metaphor to say A is C, or vice versa (POETICS 21.11-12). In other words, we transfer to one word the sense of another; one thing is likened to another as if it were that other. To take another example from the Canticle, "My dove, my perfect one, is the only one" (6:9). It would be a serious mistake to assume from that line that the author is fixated on a bird. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their delightful book METAPHORS WE LIVE BY, show that it is not only poetry that uses such figures of speech, but that language without them is simply impossible, and that even straightforward business English is replete with such metaphors. The underlying metaphor "Argument is war" produces such figures of speech as "Your claims are indefensible." The root metaphor, "Time is money" yields expressions like "How do you spend your time?" The spatial metaphor that consciousness is up and unconsciousness is down produces such expressions as "Get up" or "Wake up," while we "fall asleep" or "sink into a coma" or "descend into the unconscious" (4, 8, 15)

Discussion of the nature, use, and limits of simile and metaphor is endless in the contemporary scholarship (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, Ortony, Paxson, Sapir & Crocker, Ricoeur 1975). Some schools of thought would say that there is little difference between them, and that they are simply two different linguistic constructs with which to make analogies. Others would say that there is considerable difference: that a simile is "a self-limited comparison" while a metaphor "boldly and warmly declares that one thing is the other," and that metaphor carries language beyond lexical meaning to give a fuller understanding of the subject (Bullinger: 735, quoted in Frye: 51-52). Newer understandings of metaphor move in the same direction by stressing that it is not the comparison of two words per se that creates the figure of speech, but the entire sentence, and that the metaphor is created by the tension, even the shock value, within the whole statement. Thus it is not substitution of one term for another but the metaphoric process, the interaction between two meanings that creates semantic innovations and therefore new pictures of reality (Ricoeur 1975; Blomberg: 136-37). Thus the interactive tension is highly contextual. Words do not operate in a vacuum, but echo and in turn shape our understanding of reality. Figures of speech can work only within a given social context that is receptive to it. What is it in the social context of Christianity that has continued to be receptive of the bridal metaphor contained in the Ephesians text?

Also in this passage is a certain type of metaphor, personification, which is the attribution of (in this case) human characteristics to something that is not a human person. By far the majority of personifications are feminine, products of either an idealization or demonization of woman. Christ, as continuous with the historical Jesus though subsequently glorified, can be said to be based on an actual historical person. The church, however, is not. It is a "social body." A group of people united by the common bond of "one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father" (Eph 4:4-5) is united into "one body." In 5:21-33, there is continuing interplay or tension between two metaphors for the figure who plays opposite Christ, one personified (bride) and one a collective identity (body). The tensive play between the two metaphors "bride" and "body" works only because it was not outrageous for a nubile woman to be depersonified as a body. The church is depicted alternately as bride and body. "Body" is also played on from two directions: the social body or gathering of the faithful, and the sexual body on which the analogy of marriage is founded.

This playing down of the force of simile and playing up of the force of metaphor is not by any means accepted by all. Some, however, would argue that it is important to biblical interpretation. In a 1989 article entitled Language for God and Feminine Language, Roland M. Frye, Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, responding to feminist attempts to develop the feminine aspects of God, argues that ascription of feminine characteristics to God in the Hebrew Scriptures is mostly limited to Second Isaiah (e.g., "I will cry out like a woman in labor," 42:14; also 45:10; 49:15), and always structured as a simile or simple comparison, whereas masculine images for God are found all over the Bible and appear often in metaphorical structure, one term substituted for another. Metaphors like "shepherd" ("The Lord is my shepherd," Ps 23:1), "husband" of Israel, or in the Second Testament, "Lamb of God" are good examples. His conclusion is that God is only--and rarely--compared to a woman, whereas masculine ascriptions to God as metaphors are constitutive of a growing structure of meaning about God in the Bible.

Let us now turn back to our passage. The whole passage is one great simile: the relationship between husband and wife is like that between Christ and the church. This fundamental comparison is never turned into a metaphor: it is never said or implied that the wife is the church or the husband is Christ. Moreover, it is not persons but relationships, and therefore interactions that are compared. Wives should relate to husbands as if (Eph 5:22) to the Lord. In keeping with the theory of metaphor articulated above, I would suggest, however, that in ongoing religious imagination, the whole analogy has acquired the force of metaphor, that is, it has contributed to shaping new insights into reality, for better or for worse.

The overall simile or comparison, though, both presumes a background metaphor and carries on a foreground metaphor. The background metaphor that is assumed is the use of the word head. The head is a principal piece of anatomy. It is not at all self-evident without reinforcement in a social context that the word can be used to connote leadership or authority. Yet long before the writing of Ephesians, this root metaphor of a leader as head of a group of people had become commonplace in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and many other languages, and it works as well in English and many modern languages. Similarly, the metaphor of the body as group of people with some kind of social unity was also commonplace. Readers of Ephesians are prepared for the metaphor of the church as body of Christ from 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 and Romans 12:4-5. Similar meaning seems to occur in Ephesians 1:23; 2:16; 4:4, 12, where the church is the body of Christ.

But these texts do not fully prepare us for the leap taken in Colossians 1:18 and Ephesians 4:15-16, where the church/body analogy is substantially altered by the introduction of headship. Where earlier in Paul the church was the body of Christ, an ecclesiological metaphor borrowed from familiar social illustrations, now in Colossians and in Ephesians a new element has been introduced: Christ is now head of the body, distinguished from it as a distinctive part. Now a hierarchical relationship is established, which leaves an opening for the analogy of hierarchical human relationship that comes in chapter 5.

The "head" analogy for a leader of an army, a city, or some other social grouping was already established and quite common. What is less obvious in the sources is how "head" came to mean authority of one person over one other person as it does here, and how "body" could support the meaning of a subordinate yet free individual person. (Slaves were sometimes depersonalized by being referred to legally in Greek as somata, bodies, but a reference to a specific individual slave by this term is unlikely.) These are precisely the points of greatest tension in the simile of this passage. The dissonance of the headship of one person over another occurs previously in 1 Corinthians 11:3, where Christ is the head (kephale) of man, man of woman, and God of Christ. But it was not a well-established metaphor in its day. How is Christ head of the man in 1 Corinthians 11:3, and of the church here? Not as military or political leader, but in a new way here, as savior (5:23). Bracket for a moment the accumulation of theological, eschatological, and individualist meaning attributed to the title "savior." In the first century a savior was one who healed of disease and restored to community; one who protected the weak from the oppression of the strong; a military hero and ruler who was responsible to keep his people from harm. In this last sense a savior could also be head, and in a collective sense, head of the social body. But for an individual man to be head of an individual woman is a very new application of the metaphor of headship.

The comparison of wife to body is more shocking. There is nothing immediately obvious even about the similarity of wife to church, except that wives make up some of the members of the church. But so do husbands. Only by extrapolating from biological to ecclesiological functions can we begin to see some figurative similarities: wives become mothers who produce children, etc., and the church can be figuratively personified with a somewhat similar role. But there are other more subconscious similarities that produce this metaphor: the ideal shy, pure, therefore inexperienced, virgin bride who submits her body to the waiting bridegroom and is reserved for his pleasure alone, for him to initiate her into the joy of sex in whatever way he would like. I do not mean to titillate, but I think all of these undertones are there, especially in the highly unusual suggestion that the bridegroom is the agent of the bride's prenuptial bath and purity inspection. The metaphor comes close to asserting that female biology is destiny. However, it is typical of the kind of projections of the feminine that are based solely on women's sexual status in the male world: virgin, mother, or whore.

We have seen that the background metaphor to the simile of wife:husband::church:Christ is that of head as leader. The foreground metaphor is the application of the sacred marriage. It is quite an irony that the historical Jesus, of whose celibacy so much has been made in Christian history, has been transformed into the glorified Christ who is bridegroom ready for the bridal chamber, preparing to be a faithful and self-sacrificing husband! Yet that seems not to have stopped the continuing power of the metaphor. "It's only symbolic," we say. Yet there are other elements of the metaphor that are taken with complete seriousness, like the need to conform gender symbolism in eucharistic presidency to reflect the sacred marriage of Christ and the church.

Neither the biblical writer nor most theologians would say that actual physical sexual union is an intended component of the metaphor (though I have read on the Internet churchmen using such sexually explicit language about so-called ecclesiology that I do not care to repeat, and this is not at Internet addresses that cater to "prurient interests"). The social reality of marriage evokes primordial feelings because the immediate suggestion of sexual union with--in the days before premarital sex--the mysterious unknown evokes primordial energy. When symbolized and spiritualized, it still evokes the same energy.

It is perhaps surprising that the metaphor of Christ as bridegroom and the church as bride is not depicted in early Christian art. Apparently the metaphor did not immediately catch on. The author of 2 Clement 14.2 may include an allusion to it when he recalls that "the church is the body of Christ," then quotes Genesis 1:27, "God made humanity male and female," and exegetes that "the male is Christ, the female is the church." The same ambiguity of identification of the female partner, body or woman, is there as is present in our text. Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna in the early second century both give evidence that they knew Ephesians, yet they make nothing of the bridal metaphor (Ignatius Polycarp 5.1; Polycarp Phil. 10.2). Later in the second century, Tertullian and Irenaeus begin to show signs of awareness of its ecclesiological load. Tertullian (DE PUD. 18.11) uses Ephesians 5:26, 27 with regard to keeping the church pure of fornicators; ADV. MARC. 5.18.8 has successive quotes from the passage to demonstrate that Marcion is a neglectful husband who does not love the church. Irenaeus (ADV. HAER. 4.20.12) argues that the marital symbolism of the prophets is fulfilled in Christ in Ephesians 5. In ADV. HAER. 5.18.2 he also references Ephesians 5.23 in passing.

Clement of Alexandria, noted defender of marriage, in a rare turn of originality, retorts to those who say that marriage is fornication that they have completely misunderstood why the Lord did not marry. The real reasons are: first, he already had a bride, the Church; second, he didn't need a physical partner like everyone else; third, since he was the eternal Son of God, he had no obligation to produce children (STROM. 3.49.3 chap. 6).

After the Honeymoon: The Bride of Christ in the Life of the Church

There are two major sources in Christian theology of the sacred marriage of Christ and the church, the Canticle of Canticles and Ephesians 5. I do not believe, however, that each is of equal impact. Rather, I think that without Ephesians 5, this ecclesial interpretation of the Canticle would never have come about. The sacred marriage motif has had an enormous impact through the centuries, not only in ecclesiology, but also in Mariology and the theology and spirituality of vowed religious life.

It is a common assumption that interpretation of the Canticle of Canticles as the relationship between Christ and the church was an adaptation of a Jewish allegorizing tradition that portrayed as a love affair the relationship between God and Israel. In fact, such a pre-Christian Jewish tradition is very difficult to document, and may not have existed as a recognized tradition. The earliest possible evidence of Jewish allusions to the Canticle as allegorization of mystical marriage between God and Israel is attributed in Talmudic sources to Rabbi Akiba in the early second century, and the full-blown allegorization of the targum on the Canticle dates no earlier than the early Islamic period, by which time this interpretation was well established in Jewish biblical scholarship (Murphy: 11-41; Pope: 89-112).

Yet already in the early third century Hippolytus, the first known Christian interpreter of the Canticle, seems to presuppose such a tradition. He works with the "replacement" theme: the church becomes the successor of Israel as object of God's love. What was foreseen by Solomon is fulfilled by Christ. (Only the commentary on 1:1-3:8 survives, mostly in Georgian, with only a few Greek fragments extant [PG 10.627-30]. A Latin translation of the Georgian text is in CSCO 264). Hippolytus was followed about a century later by Origen, who was already familiar with this interpretation of the Canticle as the relationship of Christ and the church. In the brief part of his commentaries on the Canticle that are preserved (only 1:1-2:15), he uses the same metaphor. Since most of what we have of Origen's work on the Canticle is preserved only in the Latin translation of Rufinus, who is known to have "orthodoxised" his hero Origen whenever he suspected the potential for accusation of heresy, we cannot be sure that we are always getting "the real Origen." But the two extant volumes of Origen's ten-volume commentary set the pace for all later interpretations until the modern era. While Origen is credited with being the first to interpret the metaphor as applying to the union between God and the human soul, still his primary framework is the union between Christ and the church. I do not believe that this ecclesiological interpretation would have been possible without the text in Ephesians to suggest the motif of sacred marriage.

The spousal metaphor has been a primary one throughout the development of ecclesiology. I need not and cannot document this development. Like any metaphor, it is sometimes carried too far. I cite only one example. One theologian argues on the basis of a social meaning of the Hebrew word basar (flesh, body) that the reference is not only to one's personal body, but also ancestors, descendants, and particularly, one's spouse. Thus the husband is considered to have two bodies, his own and that of his wife. Likewise, the wife has two heads, her own and that of her husband. This is supposed to reveal the distinction and the union of Christ and his church (Page 2.30-32).

Since Mary is portrayed as mother of Jesus in the Second Testament and in subsequent theology and devotion, she is also portrayed as mother of the church, or perhaps more accurately, she should have been seen as its mother-in-law. But Mary has also been frequently seen as symbol or representative, a sort of first citizen, of the church. This blurs the distinctions. Thus there has been considerable symbolic slippage between her role as mother and her representation of the church in a spousal relationship to Christ. Use of texts from the Canticle for Marian feasts, for instance, was prevalent in the former lectionary. Much of this has been eliminated in the revisions of Vatican II, but we still find the following in the breviary. May 31, Feast of the Visitation has as its reading at morning prayer the simile from Isaiah 61:10 in which God has wrapped the recipient in a robe of justice "like a bride bedecked with her jewels." The responsorial is: "The Lord has chosen her, his loved one from the beginning.... He has taken her to live with him." The Office of Readings for the same feast gives a lengthy and romantic passage from the Canticle, 2:8-14; 8:6-7. Evening Prayer II for August 15 features this antiphon: "The Virgin Mary was taken up to the heavenly bridal chamber where the King of kings is seated on a starry throne."

Examples could also be drawn from the history of art. For example, the apse mosaic in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, made about 1140, depicts co-enthroned Christ and Mary, he with his arm around her shoulder in a gesture not exactly reminiscent of welcoming mother. She holds a scroll, he a codex, on both of which the writing is clearly legible. Hers says, "Leva ejus sub capite meo, et dextera illius amplexabitur me," (His left hand is under my head and his right hand will embrace me--Cant. 2:6; 8:3 Vulgate; also the second antiphon at second vespers of the common of the Blessed Virgin); has: "Veni, electa mea, et ponam in te thronum meum," (Come, my chosen one, and I will place my throne in you.) This is not from the Canticle, nor anywhere else in Scripture that I am able to identify, though at its origin the text might have been inspired by Wis 9:4: "Da mihi sedi. um tuarum adsistricem sapientiam" (Give me wisdom, the handmaid at your seat.) Instead, this was a liturgical text, the fourth antiphon at second vespers of the common of virgins and of holy women. The fact that both were used as liturgical texts suggests that liturgical practice, not the Canticle, is the direct influence. A century and a half later, the apse mosaic of Santa Maria Maggiore across the city, influenced by the Trastevere mosaic, again depicted the two enthroned together. Christ holds the same quotation in his left hand, while with his right hand he places a crown on Mary's head. This time her hands are empty.

The same ecclesiological writer who attributes two bodies to Christ and two heads to the church notes that at the foot of the cross is begun in Mary the "mysterious sponsality" of the church, so that she is both herself and the church. This is a delicate point, he notes, for Mary is first of all mother of Christ, but inasmuch as she initiates the church at Calvary, she is also in a spousal relationship to him, as are all the baptized in a mystical way (Page: 3.582-83; cf. n. 38).

The rites for celebration of female celibacy have been replete with bridal imagery. Still, the present Rite for the Consecration of Virgins has the presider address the candidates with, among other things: "In the chaste womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word was made flesh, in a marriage covenant uniting two natures, human and divine." This of course refers to the union of two natures in Christ under the metaphor of marriage, a slightly different focus with a close connection. Later, candidates for consecration as virgins are told, "You are a sign of the great mystery of salvation, proclaimed at the beginning of human history and fulfilled in the marriage covenant between Christ and his Church." At the time of profession, the presider asks them: "Are you resolved to accept solemn consecration as a bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" The transfer could hardly be more explicit. What woman who entered Catholic religious life before Vatican II could forget the bridal imagery of rituals of clothing with the habit and the taking of vows? Nowadays these associations are played down, but we still read, for example, in the Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata of 1996 on religious life that "consecrated women are called in a very special way ... to be special witnesses of the mystery of the church, virgin, bride and mother." Why are not male religious, as members of the church, called to the same witness? The answer to be given, of course, is appropriate symbolism. But is an unmarried celibate woman an appropriate symbol of a bride or a mother? Is a celibate male an appropriate symbol of Christ the bridegroom? A comparison of the rites for the consecration of an abbot or abbess reveals the emphasis in the former on leadership and strength; in the latter on the need of the abbess for divine support. The rite for religious profession of men proclaims, "How good it is for brethren to dwell together in unity" while the women to be professed are "panting and fainting in the courts of the Lord"!

Male interests predominate in our reading strategies. The implied reader is usually male or represents male interests. This is clear in the case of the history of interpretation of our text from Ephesians. I do not know of any instances in which male readers have deduced from it that as members of the church, which is submissive to Christ, her bridegroom, they should be submissive to their marriage partners. Nor do men generally, on the basis of this metaphor, image themselves as feminine in relation to God, which is the logical conclusion of the marital metaphor. Some older spirituality in English spoke of the soul as "she," more under the influence of feminine words for soul in Latin and French than anything else, but also perhaps influenced by the marriage metaphor. Likewise, Caroline Bynum calls our attention in her essays on Jesus as Mother to the influence of the submission theme in medieval monasticism: becoming symbolically female meant both the humbling of the self and the assumption of a compassionate attitude toward others (Bynum: 110-69). Here the stereotype of the stern father and the compassionate mother strikes again, to the detriment of fatherhood as well as motherhood, and the stereotype of the dominant male taking on female characteristics by becoming humble belittles the dignity of women.

Both men and women do, however, make the connection that the ecclesial marriage metaphor means that women as members of the church should be submissive, however troublesome that realization may be, and whether they accept or reject it. Men certainly do identify not with the church in this metaphor, as members of it, but with Christ, because such identifications suit male interests. Herein lies the great danger posed by this ecclesiological metaphor: it encourages men to identify with Christ, women with the church. As everyone knows who teaches or ministers, for most people the line between Christ and God is very thin. As long as the marriage metaphor is in play, gender symbolism is fixed. Men will, even unconsciously, identify with Christ and women with the church, and feminine imagery for God or Christ then has no place. Then God is the ultimate male.

Conclusion

Literary theorists are not unanimous on the nature of simile and metaphor and the difference, if any, of their function in human communication. But let us assume that it is correct to say that metaphor expands and creates meaning in a very different way than does a simile. Then let us return to Frye's argument: that feminine similes for God in the Scriptures do not bear the same weight as masculine metaphors. If we accept this argument, we can't have it both ways. The connection in Ephesians 5 between the Christ-church marriage and human marriage is not a metaphor, but a simile. If a metaphor really does present a new insight that must be taken more seriously, then the assimilation of human marriage to the ecclesiological marriage metaphor cannot bear the weight assigned to it, and it is therefore illegitimate to support the claim for unequal relationship between husband and wife with ecclesiological justification in the Christ-church marriage.

But is there no end to the influence of metaphor? Does it have no limits? If metaphor creates new insights about reality, then it creates new motivations on which people act. Metaphor brings together two mostly dissimilar objects or actions in order to highlight those characteristics that are similar. To try to unite under the metaphor those aspects of the two objects or actions that are not similar is a misuse of metaphor. When metaphor ceases to be poetic analogy and becomes instead an obstacle to new insights, it has gone too far.

We are back to the consideration of gendered power. Elizabeth Johnson reminds us that

   any representation of the divine used in such a way that its symbolic and
   evocative character is lost from view partakes of the nature of an idol.
   Whenever one image or concept of God expands to the horizon thus shutting
   out others, and whenever this exclusive symbol becomes literalized so that
   the distance between it and divine reality is collapsed, there an idol
   comes into being.... Simultaneously, the religious impulse is imprisoned,
   leading to inhibition of the growth of human beings by the prevention of
   further seeking and finding [39].

When the metaphor replaces or restricts reality, a distortion of reality takes place. Clement of Alexandria was shrewd enough to know he was distorting reality to use the spousal relationship of Christ and the church in Ephesians 5 as explanation for the celibacy of the historical Jesus; it was bad theology, but good rhetoric. There is no range of metaphor more susceptible to abuse than that of gender, because it comes so close to the roots of personal and institutional power.

Like all life, metaphors need to grow and expand in order to be viable and survive. If the church is still the bride of Christ, the wedding customs have changed. The metaphor cannot be allowed to limit theological or spiritual development. If the metaphor is judged to be harmful in this respect--and I am making that judgment--then it must be downplayed or abandoned. I would argue that casting the church as feminine, and above all as bride of Christ, far from enhancing the dignity of women, has in fact done harm to perception of the capacity of women to image the divine, and thus of women's fundamental human and Christian dignity. It does no good to affirm the full dignity and equality of women with men if our language, our imagery, and our metaphors continue to perpetuate inequality.

There are other biblical metaphors that have never attained the status or power that this one carries. It conveys the power it does, not only because it taps into the primal human energy of sexuality, but also because it serves certain interests that are closely related to the confusing ambiguity we experience between the desire for connection and the desire to control. In the Second Testament, 1 Peter 2:18-25 does something very similar to Ephesians 5:21-33 in that it holds up the unjust suffering of slaves as a mirror of the suffering of Christ, and enjoins slaves therefore to submit even to cruel masters. We have long ago rejected that comparison as illegitimate. It is time to acknowledge the same dangers in the wedding of the bride of Christ.

Works Cited

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Carolyn Osiek, Th.D. (Harvard University), is professor of New Testament at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, IL 60615 (e-mail: [e-mail]), New Testament Book Review Editor of the CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY, and author of THE FAMILY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT WORLD: HOUSEHOLDS AND HOUSE CHURCHES (Louisville, KY: Wesminster John Knox, 1997).