Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage. Matthew Levering

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 understand God’s scriptural word, we may continue boldly seeking the marital “depths of communion with God for which the human soul yearns” and which the God of Israel offers to us and triumphantly inaugurates in Christ Jesus, in merciful solidarity with sinners but also in his perfect justice.198

      86. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 109. Describing the coming Messiah, Soloveitchik states that “everything good and fine and noble in man must be passed on to the Messiah. He will have the capacity for gevurah and hesed. He will be a hero with unlimited power and strength who will defend justice. He will also be a man of unlimited loving-kindness, humble and simple. All these capabilities, capacities, and talents will merge in beautiful harmony in the King Messiah. The Messiah will represent creation at its best” (Abraham’s Journey, 177).

      87. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 22. The same insistence is at the root of de Lubac’s Catholicism. See my discussion of de Lubac and Gaudium et Spes in chapter 4 of my An Introduction to Vatican II.

      88. Soloveitchik holds that after their sin, “Adam and Eve heard the footsteps of the Holy One walking out of the universe. God broke the intimate relationship that was supposed to be realized by Adam. The purpose of the covenant concluded with Abraham was to restore the intimacy that God wanted to prevail between Him and man. At Sinai, the covenant embraced not only one individual but the whole community. The ideal is to extend the covenant even further, to the rest of the world” (Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 164–65). For background to the marriage metaphor in Judaism, see Satlow, “Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism.” Satlow summarizes: “In the Hebrew Bible, the metaphor of God as the husband or lover of Israel or Zion occurs not infrequently. . . . [Yet] Jews in antiquity by and large ignored, or even subverted, the biblical metaphor that compares the relationship of God to Israel as a husband to wife” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 14). Satlow explains this shift in part by pointing out that the metaphor seemingly “gives God the right to take other nations as ‘co-wives’” and also that the metaphor “implies a degree of intimacy between God and Israel that is not always compatible with an asexual and transcendent understanding of God” (“The Metaphor of Marriage in Early Judaism,” 17; cf. the cruder position of Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus). He adds that the shift may also be a response to Christianity’s emphasis on the marriage metaphor.

      89. Küng, On Being a Christian, 442.

      90. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.

      91. Levenson, The Love of God, 91.

      92. Levenson, The Love of God, 99. In particular, Levenson draws attention to Gerlinde Baumann’s work, which I also discuss at length. Levenson emphasizes that the men hearing Hosea’s prophecies would have identified not with God but with the wife, symbolic of the whole Israelite nation. He quotes Phyllis Bird, who writes, “It is easy for patriarchal society to see the guilt of the ‘fallen woman’: Hosea says, ‘You (male Israel) are that woman!’” (Bird, “‘To Play the Harlot,’” 89, quoted in The Love of God, 100). Levenson also quotes Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s remark, “Through this imagery, the people of Israel are enabled to feel God’s agony. . . . As a result, the image of God as betrayed husband strikes deep into the psyche of the people of Israel and enables them to feel the faithless nature of their actions” (Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 147, quoted in The Love of God, 101). In accord with my own emphasis in this book, Levenson adds: “The grand finale of Hosea 2 is God’s promise to re-betroth his wife whom he divorced, or seemed to divorce, and the prediction of the redeemed cosmos that marriage to her is to inaugurate. The passage thus adds a strong note of expectation, the expectation of nothing less than a transformed world when the Lord and Israel have resumed their intimacy” (The Love of God, 104). For the fundamental problem, however, see Collins, What Are Biblical Values?, 96: “Neither prophet [neither Hosea nor Ezekiel] is inciting violence against actual women. But the force of the metaphor depends on the credibility of the literal meaning. Readers are expected to agree that this is an appropriate way to deal with an adulterous woman, at least in principle. . . . These metaphorical passages are not representative of the view of women in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, and they were never meant to СКАЧАТЬ