Why Marriage as a Metaphor is a Failure

On Wednesday last week, I wrote that: “We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.”

I’ve already explained a bit of what I mean when I talk about the image of God as that of community rather than individual corporeality. To me, the individualistic tendency to say that “I,” as an individual, created being, are “made in the image of God” unnecessarily truncates and separates us from a necessary understanding of what it means be made in the image of God. The verse from which we get the saying “made in the image of God,” indeed, is a corporate reality – “male and female, he created them.”

It is important, when we discuss the image of God, to always place it within the corporate reality. Unfortunately, language is an insufficient reality to provide us with the metaphors that we need to understand this properly. Metaphors for the Trinity fall short and easily find their ways into heresies, so images of God tend to fall short as well.

I think the closest thing we get to a proper understanding of the image of God is Paul’s instructions about the Body of Christ (sidenote: it’s interesting to me that even in trying to move away from the image of God as a corporeal singularity, we use our corporeal reality as reference points).

Paul says:

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.  And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

I propose that these verses – moreso than the ‘your body is a temple’ or even the metaphors of marriages – are the lens through which we must look at both the role of the universal Church and of God’s actions within the world.* Many complementarians, as we’ve discussed, tend to use marriage as the primary metaphor for the relationship between the Church and Christ, asserting that the symbolism of a submissive wife and a leading husband are the key to understanding God.

That, to me, is an unnecessary limitation of metaphor and a truncation of the glorious diversity and beauty of the Body of Christ in which we participate. A wife, in of herself, cannot represent the Church. She is simply not enough as an individual (and the husband also is not nearly enough as an individual). We require all the various support systems and people playing their parts – as God has gifted them – to understand the fullness and richness that is the Body of Christ. By looking to marriage as a primary metaphor, we miss so much.

And yet, that is what we purposefully do when we talk, as John Piper does, about marriage as a primary metaphor for the relationship between God and his people. It makes the church homogenous – a singular person responding to another singular person. It misses all the diversity and grace and passion that the Church as a Body of diverse human beings is.

Look at it this way. CS Lewis talked about the diversity of persons that develop within friendships. Different friends bring different parts of ourselves out. When I hangout on G+ with friends on Sunday nights, I am a different person than I am with my coworkers on a Monday. This is not two-facedness or phoniness, as authenticity as a cultural value demands, but merely a function of how varying relationships work.

By using marriage as a metaphor, we necessarily flatten that diversity. We cannot talk of marriage as a primary metaphor because a wife is not just a wife. A wife (hopefully) has friends who support her in different ways than her husband does, and hopefully a husband likewise. Each of those people come together to make the wife who she is, and likewise for the husband.

I am, in many ways, an amalgamation of the influences my varying friendships and relationships through my life have had on me. I would not be myself without the community within which I exist, and I realize this most necessarily when I am trying to survive alone.

This is what the community of Christ and the image of God looks like – it is people bringing out the best in each other, in all our brokenness, working toward a common goal. It is people picking each other up, encouraging progress toward who we truly are. A faith lived alone is necessarily a faith lacking, just as a marriage attempted to live within a vacuum will be a necessarily lacking marriage. Rather than looking at the image of God as an individual persona – through looking to marriage as a primary metaphor – we must encourage each other to see the image of God in each and every relationship, replicating the relationships of love that exist within the Trinity.

This is what it means to be the Body of Christ – the push and pull and messiness of necessary, every day relationship, iron sharpening iron. The group of friends laughing at the table in the college cafeteria are, to me, a better metaphor for the image of God and the relationship of God to humanity than any marriage metaphor could possibly be.

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*Please excuse the inexact philosophical language – for the time being, I’m functioning from the assumption that God is both inside and outside our stream of time, which may or may not be a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. It’s too much of a rabbit hole to explicate here.

Carrying the Banner: In Which I Am Brutually Honest

The Church of the Spilled Blood - St. Petersburg

[Trigger warnings: depression, potentially triggering discussion of food, child abuse, corruption]

Working in social justice and feminism can be a bad place to be if you are prone to depression. I’ve learned the gospel of self-care over the past couple of years as an effort to keep myself from slipping into depressive funks that make it hard for me to think or write or do pretty much anything. I’ve written previously about my anxiety issues and their relationship to my need for birth control, but anxiety, unfortunately, is often coupled with depression.

My depression is not at a point where I need medication. This is not the case for everyone who suffers from depression, and I appreciate the good that medication has done for my friends.

I do have to steel myself some days and decide that I won’t be involved in certain discussions because simply dealing with the response takes everything out of me and takes all the wind out of my sails. Working in the social justice realm is hard, taxing, emotional work. Empathy can be incredibly draining and this work often has a high rate of burnout. This post is not a confession of that – I’m actually doing quite well – but rather an opportunity to talk about why this work becomes so taxing and emotionally draining. I also want to offer my solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the fight who are dealing with much worse hardships than I – in the face of the systemic and systematic institutional problems, this work often drains every emotional reserve we have and my fellow fighters have all my love and grace and I hope they remember and know that self-care is necessary.

Here’s why this sort of thing is so emotionally taxing.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to how the Reformed Christian blogging world works or how it connects back to churches. I take ideas as they come, challenge them, and respond as I can and am able. I am much more concerned with advocating for rape victims and empowering women on an individual, personal level than I am with grasping the entire narrative of the institution. Don’t get me wrong here – I am interested in the institutional and systemic injustices and involve myself in rebuking institutions insofar as I see the effects of institutionalized injustice. But studying the functions of the institution itself takes more energy and time than I can often muster.

Looking at the institutional corruption drains me of all activist energy I would have. So I concentrate on empowerment, on helping women find the words they need to understand themselves and to place themselves in context. I understand the institution insofar as it provides context, but part of the brilliance of the institutional injustice is that it is so large, so unwieldy, so incredible that looking at it, to me, is the emotional equivalent of looking at the sun. I can’t do it for too long or I am blinded.

This all shifted with Tim Challies’ post about SGM a couple weeks ago. I knew there was an institutional background that made his post even more hurtful than what it was on the surface, so I started digging. I’ve only scratched the surface, but the mass of money and financial investment SGM has in keeping these events quiet extends well beyond SGM. Tim Challies himself has a business relationship that stands to make money off of SGM continuing to have a good reputation. John Piper and Al Mohler have been either silent or actively throwing their support behind SGM’s efforts, likely because of business relationships. The Gospel Coalition has several SGM people on their board.

It feels like I’m a conspiracy theorist, like I should be writing for The Smoking Gun and appearing in an episode of X Files.

But it’s not. It’s all very real, and it’s all very disheartening.

Ignorance I can handle. Ignorance has the ability to change. Ignorance can be dispelled with the tools at my disposal  - words, a blog, the Internet, and social media. I am, after all, just a writer in Chicago, IL, sitting at my desk with a cat on my knee. Words are what I have.

But malevolent corruption? The voice that says “I know this is bad, but I don’t care because it benefits me”? The institutional protection that says vested financial interests are more important than the lives of children?

That terrifies me. That drags me into despair. That makes it hard for me to even think about cooking myself a meal.

Such is the enormity of the problem before us.

I have come to expect this large scale corruption from such entities as banks and large corporations. I have been primed for those narratives ever since Michael Douglas intoned that “greed is good” in the early 90s. The devil in the marketplace is less enormous. It is expected, and smaller.

The corruption that has caused men of God to ignore abuse, to ignore the cries of children, to claim secular authority and laws as their guides and protectors? The corruption that leads men to “protect their ministry,” even at the cost of children they are supposed to be protecting? The devil of the marketplace that tempts ministers of God to abandon their flock even while they claim they are fighting for their flock’s protection?

I’m floored by it. I cannot comprehend it. I cannot move past it. I cannot align myself with an institutional church because of it.*

But this is why I am a Christian feminist. Not simply because I was raised in the church, but because I believe in the holy justice of God. There are writers and advocates better equipped than I to discuss these institutional issues – men and women to take up the torch when I stumble, world-weary from the exhaustion and the enormity of the journey before me. Men and women taking on States, institutions, and devils in their own worlds. Men and women who bravely speak up when I – even I, who is never at a loss for words – lose my voice.

This is the church I know. The church that preaches justice for the marginalized. The church that does not let anyone fall behind. The church that pushes us to be better people but that understands the enormity of the takes before us. This is the image of God that carries me through the rough patches and the hard times – the Trinitarian God of love who is community in Themselves, the God in whose image we are made. We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.

Institutions, principalities, powers of darkness fall before us, even as we scrabble for a foothold. Even when these institutions are the church itself. Iconoclasts all, we proclaim justice, enact mercy, and fiercely defend those trampled by the institution. This, this, is the image of God. This, this, is the glory.

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*My day job is with a large Reformed denomination that is, to my knowledge, not associated with Piper’s denomination. To be clear – I do not work for the same organization. And I need to eat. [To reiterate: I do not speak for my company in any capacity].

Book 3: The Boy Who Lived

[This is part 3 in a weeklong series about Banned Books. Part 1 and Part 2. Join in on the Link Up here!] Let’s launch into the 21^st century with today’s pick, shall we? Or at least something contemporaneous: a boy who lived and a school for wizards.

Yes. Harry Potter.

In the early 2000s, I remember watching one of those 24 hour news networks and they were talking about the controversy surrounding Harry, the boy wizard, and the craze that was sweeping the nation. Parents were challenging the books in schools, stealing them from libraries, and even, in some places, burning copies. The reason? Magic!

I got hooked on Harry Potter right after graduating from high school. I had some gift cards to Barnes and Noble, and I figured, why the hell not, and bought The Sorcerer’s Stone. The next week found me persuading my dad to take me to go get book five (yes, I read all of them in a week, and there were only five out at the time).

When I moved into my dorm for my freshman year of college that fall, my roommate saw my Harry Potter books and told me that she had never been allowed to read them in her house. It was less than two weeks before I walked in to see her holding my copy, completely absorbed in the wizarding world.

There is a magic in Harry Potter, but it’s a magic that exists in the relationship between the world on the page and the reader reading. Harry Potter provided role models, vocabulary, and a part of an identity to many young children and has become a part of the cultural zeitgeist. You’ll find people identifying with certain Houses – I’m a Ravenclaw, for the record – and you can tell different (generalized) personality traits based on which characters people identify with the most. There is a magic in books that can capture that, in books that have multiple heroes and complex realistic characters.

And indeed, as I argued in my thesis for my Master’s degree, a Christian reader in particular can understand the depth and reach of a Church-esque community through paying attention to the ways in which Harry must depend on others and cannot “go it alone.” The Holy Trinity of Harry, Ron and Hermione is reminiscent of the Holy Trinity of the Christian tradition, in that it reflects equal contributions and inter-dependence necessary for a functioning community. In short: it takes a village to save the world, not an individual.

But, many children, like my freshman year roommate, have been denied access to this tale and this message because of a fear of a device – magic. Magic, in the wizarding world, is not the end all be all – it is a device used in creating the world, but it is not the world itself. It is value-neutral, and hierarchal, with love being the most mysterious and most powerful force of all.

The arguments many had can get more nuanced than that – arguing that because the magic is value-neutral, the books elide the distinction between good and evil, whereas Narnia, for example, always had a solid distinction between good magic and bad magic (which is laughable because, hello, Magician’s Nephew?). This is hogwash – the true message of Harry Potter is that the decisions we choose to make within our flawed, sinful world are what has the greatest impact, and we are most empowered to make good decisions when we understand our place within a loving community that bouys and challenges us in the right ways – a community that knows us as human beings and loves that we are.

And that, truly, is the Deepest Magic of All.