Plenary address (Part 2) presented at the 2024 Priscilla & Aquila Centre conference.
Speaker: Andrew Leslie.
In his second plenary address, Andrew takes us to the New Testament, where the same pattern of creation underlays its description of Christ’s relationship to his people and the life of the church itself.
1. Introduction
This second talk should really begin by tracing out the familiar contours of Adam’s fall in Genesis 3, with its comprehensively tragic effects on the capacity of the man and the woman to live up to their destiny as a microcosm of God’s glory.
But because time is short, I simply want to take this point as a given. Because of Adam’s fall, there is simply no way back to the garden, no secret passageway beyond the threshold of those flaming swords.
And so to return to the observation I made at the beginning of the last talk, if we are to locate that concentrated microcosmic expression of God’s character and glory that is writ large in creation as a whole, the sad fact is we will need to look somewhere other than ourselves.
Adam and Eve may give us the pattern, the type, but if we want to find the reality, the antitype, we will need to look elsewhere. For if the truth be told, we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, says Paul. Life, alas, has given way to death. That is the story of ourselves, summed up, figured, represented in the story of Adam.
And so however much Adam and Eve provide the pattern, the reality, of course, is only to be found in the second Adam, who is that microcosmic reality—the incarnate word of God, the glory of his Father (John 1), the perfect image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), the radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of his being (Heb 1:3)—but who is that microcosmic reality only in the context of his redemptive mission, recapitulating the pattern of Adam, while at the same time putting it into reverse, bringing, new life, holy, redeemed, and sanctified life out of the nothingness of death.
What I want to do in this talk, then, is to explore how the threads of the Adamic pattern are gathered up in the mission of Christ, before then drawing out some suggestions for the way this illuminates the wisdom of the New Testament instructions to husbands and wives and men and women within the life of the church.
2. The Christological reality
a. The bridegroom and his bride
The most basic and familiar of these typological patterns that are fulfilled in Christ is, of course, the figure of the Son and his betrothed, his bride.
I say most basic because just as Adam is—as the genealogy in Luke 3 describes him—son of God before he is anything else, so too is Christ, Son of God before he is anything else.
The thing that distinguishes the Adamic pattern from the reality, the antitype, is the sense in which Christ is the Son of God in a way that Adam, nor indeed anyone else, could ever be. He is, as John describes him, monogenes, the only begotten of the Father.
But in terms of the Son’s incarnate mission to reveal the Father, there is a critical, but perhaps slightly less obvious sense in which the only begotten Son is also most basically husband: not as he is eternally with the Father apart from creation but as he reveals that sonship in the context of his incarnate mission.
That is to say, when the eternal, only begotten Son takes on human flesh, he is designated Son of God, not in isolation, but in the terms of Hebrews 3, Son over a household, “God’s house” (Heb. 3:6).
Hebrews 3
As the writer of Hebrews makes clear, this of course is a reference to God’s people. “We are his house”, he says, “if we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory” (Heb 3:6).
Now you might wonder how we are to infer that the Son’s headship over God’s household also entails his husbandry, especially as Hebrews actually speaks of us not as his “brides” but as his “brothers”—those whom he is not ashamed to call his “brothers” (Heb 2:11).
Well, when the New Testament deploys the familial figure to speak of God’s household, not in the plural in reference to its individual members, but in the singular, the primary personal figure that is used is the figure of the bride. There is not one collective brother of Christ, there are only many individual brothers (and sisters). But collectively, they are designated in feminine terms as his bride, not his brides, but his bride.
Ephesians 5
It hardly needs to be said that the figure of the Son’s bride is most explicit in Ephesians 5 in Paul’s instructions to married couples, and in Revelation 19 and 21. But it is a figure already anticipated in the bride of the anointed Old Testament king, most famously in Psalm 45 (to which the writer of Hebrews in fact alludes in chapter 1:9), and in Song of Songs, where four times, Solomon will address his bride in intimate familial terms as “my sister” (4:9, 10; 5:1, 2). And, of course, the Old Testament has no difficulty going even as far as designating the living Lord himself to be the bridegroom of his people (Isa 54:5; Jer 3:14; 31:32. Cf., Isa 62:5; Hos 2:7, 16)
But ultimately, the antitype of Christ and his bride is simply a recapitulation of the original Adamic pattern.
No man is an island, John Donne once said. Well, Adam was not an island either. That much is implied in Luke’s genealogy. For Adam to be designated son of God implied an entire household—a household embraced within his wife, Eve, whom Genesis calls the mother of all the living (the closely related maternal figure to which we will return shortly).
And so, just as Adam’s sonship cannot be understood apart from his bride, we cannot think of the incarnate Son apart from his betrothed, the bride, the sister of Christ, the household of God.
This means that the complementary contours of the Adamic pattern we drew attention to earlier are now gathered up into the antitype.
So, Paul describes Christ as the head of the church in Ephesians 5, and if that entails his authority over the church, it is an authority that forms the church with all the irreducible gendered difference of the woman taken from Adam’s side, albeit a difference that is now magnified in the most radical terms possible: the formation of an indestructible life where there was once only death, the formation of something pure and righteous and holy and glorious from that which is defiled and destitute and offensively depraved, foreshadowed in the figure of prostitute Israel in Ezekiel 16, wallowing in a pool of blood but then lifted up and washed and clothed and dressed in the finest of apparel, rising as a queen whose beauty and splendour is revered among the nation…taken and formed from Christ’s side in the deep sleep of his own sacrificial death… For Christ formed the church, as it were, by loving her and giving herself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. Surely there can be no doubt that Ezekiel 16 was on Paul’s mind as he wrote those words.
Incidentally, far from being dismissed as a fanciful piece of allegorizing, Augustine’s belief that Adam’s sleep and the formation of Eve from his side was a prophecy of the church’s formation from the life-giving blood that flowed from Jesus’s side on the cross, was readily taken up by 16th century Protestant commentators like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi as a straightforward and necessary implication of the typological parallel given to us in Scripture between Adam and Eve and Christ and the church, Christ the glorifier, the very radiance of the divine glory, and his glorified bride, the church, called to reflect his image, from one degree of glory to another.
The complementarity that is exemplified in this union has nothing to do with natural compatibility, you see—you know, that saccharine good that’s prized above all in most modern romances. This is not chiefly a case of two being better than one or the sum being greater than the parts. There is no natural compatibility between Christ and his bride. They are irreducibly different in the starkest possible terms. No, it is a costly union of radical otherness forged together only through the atoning heat and purifying fire of the Son’s sacrificial self-offering.
Thomas Goodwin, the English Puritan, saw an echo of this costly complementarity in the way Jesus’s final moments with his disciples are described in John’s Gospel before he died.
John 13
“It was just before the Passover festival”, John tells us at the beginning of chapter 13, and “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.” Indeed, verse 3, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God”.
In other words, what does John say was on Jesus’ mind? Leaving this God-forsaken world and returning to his heavenly throne in the presence of his Father’s glory.
And yet, with that on his mind, what did he do?
“Having loved his own who were in the world,” John says, “he loved them to the end”, and “so”, verse 4, “he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist.”
In other words, as Goodwin reflects on this, what was on Christ’s heart most of all amidst these elevated meditations upon his return to the Father?
Not so much his own glory, although he did consider that—only he could not think about his own glory without his heart reaching out in love towards “his own”, his own children, his own members, his own wife, his own flesh, Goodwin says. And what shape does that love take? It takes up a towel, gets down and washes clean their filthy feet.
John 14
A chapter later, Jesus says to his disciples, “My Father’s house has many rooms, if that were not so, would I have not told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
On this Goodwin writes, “here Christ condescends to the very laws of bridegrooms….for it is the manner of bridegrooms, when they have made all ready in their father’s house, then to come themselves and fetch their brides, and not to send them by others, because it is a time of love.”
And where Christ says I will come again to take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am, Goodwin says it’s like Christ is saying, “The truth is, I cannot live without you, I shall never be quiet till I have you where I am, that so we may never part again; that is the reason of it. Heaven shall not hold me, nor my Father’s company, if I have not you with me, my heart is so set upon you; and if I have any glory you shall have part of it.”
John 17
So, a little later again in John 17, when Christ prays to his Father, “glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began”, what’s the context in which Christ expects that prayer to be answered?
He tells us… he says (v 24), “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am”.
In other words, I’m not coming back without first fetching my bride. For if Eve was the glory of Adam, the company of Christ’s disciples, the church, for which he was about to lay down his life, is the glory of Christ. “I have given them the glory that you gave me”, he says to his Father, “that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.”
Here is the true microcosm and tabernacle of the Father’s divine glory. Not Adam and Eve in the end, but the only begotten incarnate Son and his bride. Not the incarnate Son in isolation, but the Son only together with his bride.
But what, then, does it mean for the bride to be filled with Son’s glory? Or in Pauline terms, what is the true radiance of the bride?
2 Corinthians 3
It is, perhaps, to reflect his image: “we all, with unveiled face”, he says, “beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Cor 3:18). “Just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man” (1 Cor 15:49). For “we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” (Phil 3:14).
Ephesians 4
Paul also speaks of it organically, shifting from the personal familial figure of the bride to the body of Christ, which is to be built up until it reaches unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, becoming mature and attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ (Eph 4:12-13).
John 15
John likewise speaks of it in organic terms as bearing the fruit of him who is the vine. “I appointed you so that you may go and bear fruit—fruit that will last”, Jesus says (John 15:16).
If the bride’s glory is to bear the fruit of Christ, should the typological relationship between Adam and Eve and Christ and the church, lead us, then, to speak of this fruitfulness in maternal terms, in a way that parallels Eve’s designation as the mother of all the living?
Protestants have not unreasonably been wary of going too far in this direction for fear of wheeling in a proverbial Trojan Horse, opening the way for an assault of wildly speculative and frankly blasphemous Mariology.
But can we make some more chastened biblical reflections in this regard?
Quite apart from what we might say about Mary herself, the maternal figure is in fact used to allude to the church a few times in the New Testament.
Revelation 12
Perhaps the most explicit is in Revelation 12: the sign of a “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant”, we are told, “and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.”
Who is this woman? Well, in verse 5, it is clear that she is the mother of Christ: “she gave birth to a son, a male child, who ‘will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre.’”
Clearly some might and have seen there an obvious allusion to Mary. But matters are complicated by the way she is then described as fleeing to the wilderness and being pursued by the dragon who wages war with her “and the rest of her offspring”, verse 17, “those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.”
So, is this a reference to Mary herself as the mother, not just of Jesus, but of all Jesus’s followers—the church? Certainly, many in the Early Church took it that way, and that’s the direction in which Catholic reflection has moved.
Or is it a reference more directly to the church itself, figured in maternal terms, as the archetypal mother, who bears within her a new humanity under the headship of that male child, Jesus Christ?
When we look at the way the maternal figure is used elsewhere in the New Testament, I think the latter is most likely.
Galatians 4
So, in Galatians 4, Paul famously speaks of barren Sarah whose womb is opened by a word of divine promise as a figure of “the Jerusalem that is above”, and “she is our mother”, Paul says (verse 26). And then he goes on to quote Isaiah 54:1: “Be glad, barren woman, you who never bore a child; shout for joy and cry aloud, you who were never in labour; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.”
In other words, this barren woman is likened to that holy city of God, the tabernacle and focal point of divine glory, an archetypal mother, filled with offspring, born not from below, as it were, by means of mortal human flesh, but born from above, by water and the Spirit as Jesus puts it speaking to Nicodemus.
We can trace a similar association in John’s Gospel I think. Time is against us to explore these associations at length, but let me at least draw out a few observations from one passing remark of Christ on the night before he died.
John 16
In John 16, towards the end of the so-called Upper Room discourse where Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure, at one point, in verse 21, he compares the grief and suffering his disciples are to expect to the pain of a woman giving birth.
At one level, you could simply glide over this as a metaphor without giving it much thought, as I suspect the NIV’s somewhat inadequate translation does (and I might say, a fair number of modern commentators, although not older ones). But Jesus phrases the remark using language that is really quite suggestive in the context of the Gospel, and indeed the Scriptures as a whole.
In the ESV’s rendering, verse 20, he says, “Truly, Truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for the joy that a human being (not a baby, not a child, notice, but a man, a human being) has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
It’s obvious how this little parable works as a metaphor. For if the resurrection life and joy that the disciples will eventually come to experience can sometimes be characterised in agrarian terms as a harvest that breaks forth from a grain of wheat that falls to the earth and dies, it can be no less fittingly be likened to the travails of a woman in labour whose anguish eventually will eventually give way to the exhilarating joys of childbirth.
But the figure of a woman in labour is significant not least because in the Old Testament it is an image that was, once again, associated with the new Jerusalem that God would raise from the ashes of judgment and exile in the last days.
So, in Isaiah 49 and 50, the prophet alludes to Zion as a divorced, dejected, barren mother, laden down with the bereavement of divine judgment and exile, swallowed up by her enemies. And yet, miraculously, by the sovereign gracious determination of God, in the midst of her barrenness and bereavement she will yet bring forth offspring, so many, indeed, an entire nation, too large for her borders, before whom the nations will lick the dust of their feet.
And then, right at the end of Isaiah, in chapter 66, he speaks of Zion now risen from the ashes, whose time of suffering when compared with the joy of her restoration, is likened to an expecting mother whose labour has been so brief as to have been almost non-existent, certainly forgotten. “Before she was in labor, she gave birth; before her pain came upon her she delivered a son. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment? For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her children.”
Now as Jesus ministers to his disciples in their distress, it is highly likely that exactly this prophetic expectation was in mind. Indeed, in 16:22, he directly alludes to Isaiah 66:14: “you shall see,”—indeed, “I shall see you”—“and your hearts shall rejoice”.
In other words, that company of dejected, grief-stricken disciples is likened to Zion, that grief-stricken mother who—after a little while, as if to say, after a time of travail so brief as if to be almost non-existent, certainly forgotten—will yet rejoice as she miraculously bears forth new life.
The other thing about the prophetic expectation is the sense in which the labour and offspring Zion will bear is at once her own, and yet, at the same time not her own but entirely a gift of the sovereign and gracious God. Zion is, for all intents and purposes, barren. In the words of Isaiah 26:17-18, “like a pregnant woman approaching the time of birth…we writhed, but we have given birth to wind”. And yet, says the prophet by the miraculous providence of God, “your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.” (cf. Isa 54:1; 49:19-21).
Now in John 16:21, Jesus speaks of the woman’s travail as “her hour”. Indeed, it is her child, her labour.
And yet, by speaking of it as an “hour”, he draws her suffering back to his own, as if somehow to envelop it within his own.
In John’s Gospel, you’ll know that Jesus’s departure through his own suffering and crucifixion is described many times as his “hour”…an hour that “has not yet come”, “has not yet come”, “has not yet come”, and then, finally when some Greeks come to worship him in chapter 12, “The hour has now come for the Son of Man to be glorified”, for “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
And so, Jesus dies.
But then it is the woman’s hour, the disciples’ hour.
Make no mistake, the hour of Jesus, the suffering of Jesus, the exile and banishment of Jesus is unique and unrepeatable. But the hour of his disciples—yes, it is their hour in one sense—but in other sense it’s not really their hour but a kind of envelopment within the hour of Jesus himself. It is only because he suffered and died that they too will suffer, most immediately, of course, when they mourn over his death.
But, as Jesus warns them, the thlipsis, the travail, the labour pains, will not entirely cease with his resurrection. For in this world, verse 33, this world of rebellion and hostility towards the Lord and his Messiah, in this world you will have thlipsis. Once again, however, that trouble they will experience may well be their own, but in another sense it is simply an envelopment in his own. “All these things they will do to you on account of my name”, Jesus says, “because they do not know him who sent me.” (15:21)
Barren Zion, by a miracle of divine providence, is now in labour, bearing a child which is at once her own yet not her own, bearing a travail which is at once her own yet not her own…If I can borrow the memorable words of the apostle Paul, carrying within her body the death of Jesus, as it were—and soon rejoicing with a joy that again is at once her own yet not her own.
For if the death of Jesus is unique and unrepeatable, so too is his resurrection. And yet, such is the life-giving power of his resurrection that its abundance pours over and floods the barren womb of this woman with life.
And so, the disciples will rejoice, for a man (v. 21), not a child, but a man—this crucified and risen man—has been born into the world.
And if the woman’s travails are focussed immediately upon the disciples’ grief in the face of Jesus’s death but then extended in to embrace their entire journey through this passing world, so too the woman’s joy is focussed immediately upon the inaugurated resurrection joy of seeing their risen Lord but then extended in a way that encompasses their entire journey from this world into the next.
In other words, in this passing allusion, Jesus conveys the expectation that his own bodily life, his own travails and death, his own glorious resurrection from the grave will break into and envelop the lives of his disciples in this passing age, in a way that can be perfectly figured in terms of a woman groaning in labour, exactly as was anticipated of Zion by the prophets of old.
But what does all this actually mean?
b. The church and the maternal figure
Well if we zoom out from John’s Gospel it’s not hard to get a handle on it. For instance, the Apostle Paul’s writings are replete with the expectation that the church’s life in this age is essentially conformed to the pattern of Christ’s own death, juxtaposed alongside his resurrection life.
In the broadest terms it is summed up in what we might call the mortification of the old man, as Paul puts it, at once crucified with Christ but not yet finally crucified till this body of sin is finally laid in the grave; juxtaposed alongside the vivification of Christ’s resurrection life, inaugurated, yes, but not yet consummated until the age to come.
But if that captures it in the broadest terms, it is manifested in the variegated experience of the church in this age: in the sacrifices of self-denial and love, in personal struggles with sin and temptation, in the grief of departures and death, in the heartbreak of division, betrayal and apostasy, in the setbacks and discouragement of hostility and persecution – all tokens and manifestations of Christ’s own decisive battle with sin and death.
…experiences that are set alongside the present assurance of our future hope, the Spirit’s presence and comfort in distress, the blessing of daily provisions, the warmth of Christian fellowship, the thrill of people turning from darkness to light—all tokens and manifestations of Christ’s resurrection life being born into our midst.
That is the life of the church in this age: otherwise lifeless and barren, but now by the grace of God in labour pains, bearing the agony of Christ’s own death as her own as she gradually gives birth to his abundant and indestructibly glorious resurrection life, bringing forth a new humanity, as it were, from her otherwise lifeless, barren womb.
Enough said on all this for now, suffice to say that a sideways look like this inclines me to think that the woman of Revelation 12 is an allusion directly to the church, figured in archetypal maternal terms, who bears in her midst the new humanity of the resurrected Christ…so that if Eve was the mother of a humanity summed up in Adam, so we might speak of the church as the mother of that humanity now summed up in Christ.
What then of Mary? We’ll come back to Mary in a moment.
a. Understanding ourselves in light of the spiritual reality/antitype
Because in the final part of this talk, I want to suggest some ways in which this exploration of the typological relationship between Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church might shed some light on the wisdom of Paul’s instructions to husbands and wives, together with the patterns of church life in 1 Timothy.
To repeat the observation I’ve made a number of times now, the nature of this typological relationship impels us to see that the terminus of God’s glory in creation, the concentrated microcosmic expression of the Father’s glory, is not found in the type, not in the original pattern of our first parents, but in the antitype, the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church, the mother of a new humanity that is summed up in him.
And to be a Christian, then, is to be swept up into that antitypical reality in a way that radically transposes our identity into a key that rises above our gender or our marital status or whatever particular calling or station we might happen to possess in this passing age.
Before I am a woman or man, before I am single or married, before I am a mother or father, son or daughter, I belong first to Christ in the company of those who together are his glorious bride, offspring not of Eve but of that mother, the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven.
And it is radical, almost comical in a way that only God can be. Christian men, it is not the figure of Adam that defines you now so much as the figure of that harlot, that promiscuous Gomer, that half-caste Samaritan woman, forgiven, bathed and cleansed, dressed and now decked with the splendour of the sun; barren Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Manoah’s wife, Elizabeth and Mary, together with their offspring, born as it were not from below but from above.
And Christian woman, it is not the figure of fallen Eve that defines you now so much as the figure of that woman of Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars, no less than the Christian man a coheir with Christ, who will sit on the throne judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
Unsurprisingly it’s this radical subversion that is behind so much egalitarian thinking on gender, for there is a very real sense in which there is in this vision, no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, even male or female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.
b. A spiritual reality mapped onto the broken fragments of the old pattern
But, of course, to draw this implication from the antitype of Christ and his church is not to overturn or cast aside our own pre-existing, original location within the type, within the family of Adam as women and men, as husbands and wives, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. At least not yet. Certainly, Paul doesn’t think it does. For now, the spiritual reality is mapped onto the broken fragments of the old pattern, the Adamic family in which we each have our own calling.
So collectively our primary calling as Christian people, women and men, is to bear the glorious, spiritual fruit of Christ’s bride, but individually, we are called to witness to that reality in and through our particular station within the family of Adam.
c. Some suggestions with respect to Paul’s instructions for husbands and wives
And that I think is what Paul has in mind in the instructions for Christian marriages in Ephesians 5. It is not simply a rehash of the Garden pattern. No, with the fall, that pattern has to be transposed in light of the antitype, and that’s exactly what Paul does.
What does it mean for husband to exercise headship over his bride? It has nothing to do with the oppressive economy of old age outside the garden. It is to discern, cultivate and invest in the formation of Christ in his bride, radiant and without blemish. There is authority, yes. But as for Adam in the Garden, it is an authority that is to take the shape of service, a love that lays down for her to take up, a love that is devoted to the spiritual instruction, protection, flourishing and glorification of the other… a love that is now only possible in the strength of God’s grace, through the Christian’s husband participation in and reflection of Christ’s own sacrificial love.
What does it mean for the Christian wife to submit, to be subject to her husband? If the husband is called to help guard and cultivate the fruit of Christ in her life, in a sense, submission is simply to bear the fruit of Christ. It’s to be a disciple of Christ. Indeed, in a very real sense it’s as simple as that. Where Paul calls her to submit to her husband in all things, it’s a submission that’s subordinate to and in that sense defined and limited by her submission to Christ. And therefore, the headship and authority of the husband to which she is called to submit is as Christ defines it, not necessarily as the husband defines it (I think that applies to every human authority instituted by God). And so in a fallen world, and even in the best of Christian marriages, this kind of submission may not always entail doing and complying with everything the husband desires if it conflicts with the will of Christ. Sometimes, perhaps often, he will need her forgiveness.
Now, clearly, of course, this complementary calling is something that is built upon the specific order and boundaries of the original marital pattern in the Garden. And all the order and boundaries that were designed to preserve the sanctity and integrity of that relationship continue to apply. Yes, there is to be faithfulness. Yes, there is to be fathering and mothering, children to be instructed and nurtured, if not literally, certainly figurally: Paul clearly expects as much in his instructions to young women and widows, for instance (Tit 2:4-5; 1 Tim 5:14). But all this is redeemed from the wreckage of marital life outside the Garden by being transposed into a context where that order serves a higher end, namely our Christian discipleship.
Now of course we want to know what this means in practice. But as with the pattern in the Garden, we are not given details for how this is to take shape in each and every Christian marriage—who has the final say on the finances, where we will life, which way the family votes, what jobs each one is or isn’t to have inside and outside the home, what home devotional life should look like, which church we will attend, how many children we’re going to have, or what we will do if we can’t have children, and so on. Paul simply gives us the general pattern as it is transposed in light of the antitype. And the pattern liberates us to discover what this might look like in the pluriform diversity of each and every Christian marriage. It’s a pattern which is in one sense beautiful in its simplicity, but of course, something that entails all the sacrifices and self-denial of discipleship as the acute challenges of married life are navigated by the pair.
See, in the end, even a place like Proverbs 31 is not laying out a prescription for what a Christian marriage must look like. The wife of noble character in Proverbs 31 always reminds me of the way the matriarch Ma Joad is described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, with her clean calm beauty—and no doubt it’s a beautiful picture of what Christian womanhood could look like.
But ultimately, Proverbs 31 is about Christ and the way his own wisdom is glorified in his bride. And so as co-disciples of Christ, then, the Christian husband and wife, are together gathered up into the figure of that wife of noble character in Proverbs 31.
But in the context of their earthly marriage, the Christian husband is called to model his discipleship in a way that echoes Christ’s devotion to his bride, whilst the wife, in a sense, specifically encouraged by her husband’s Christ-like devotion, is called to model her discipleship by flourishing as an exemplar of that discipleship.
d. Some suggestions with respect to Paul’s pastoral instructions
A similar transposition of the original earthly pattern of the Adamic family in light of the antitype also helps grasp the wisdom of the well-known instructions in Paul’s pastoral epistles, I think.
Indeed, to the extent that the life of Christ’s bride can’t be prised apart from our particular station and calling within the old family of Adam, it’s no surprise that the life of the local congregation is mapped onto that pattern in Paul’s eyes.
From a spiritual perspective, we are all adopted children of God, co-heirs with Christ, disciples and members of his bride. And yet, in the local church, some of us are women, some of us are men. Some of us are married, others of us are not. Some of us are older and some of us are younger. And all these distinctives from earthly point of view reflect our life in Adam.
And in this age, Paul expects that our discipleship will be modelled in a way that is distinctive and appropriate to our earthly, bodily life in Adam. If I am married, there is, of course my spouse, and I am called to reflect my discipleship in that context in the distinctive way that we have seen—likewise if I’m a parent with respect to my children, and children with respect to my parents. But with other women or men there is not the peculiar dynamic of headship and submission that is appropriate only to the marriage (with one exception which I’ll come to in a moment)—naturally speaking the local church is largely a random collection of odd bods! But since we are all now members of a new household, the household of God (1 Tim 3:15), spiritually sisters and brothers in Christ, there is a sense in which I am called to relate to my Christian neighbour as if they were kin.
Now as in the marriage, that dynamic makes no sense apart from its transposition in light of the antitype. To call Jane Tooher my sister is not at all to claim any of the peculiar obligations and privileges and perhaps trials of natural kinship, unless of course she were legally my sister, which I’m sure she is glad she is not. But to call her my sister in Christ means that I am obligated to model my discipleship towards her in a way that echoes the natural pattern and order of kinship. So, what, is appropriate and indeed expected of me in my love for my wife is strictly out of bounds here: for I am to treat her with absolute purity. And yet, there is a call to devote myself to her in brotherly love. The same principle applies to women who are older: encourage her as if she were your mother, Paul says. Encourage the older man as you would your father, and so on (1 Tim 5:1).
And then, there are specific responsibilities within the life of the congregation, the deacon, the overseer, the person tasked with the public instruction and authority. And Paul assigns both office and function to men—not any old men, of course, but those who are reckoned to be qualified in life and doctrine—but men, nonetheless.
But once again, I think the same principle we have already seen in these other relationships applies here too. It is not a generic expectation that women and men are always to relate as if they were married like Adam and Eve: no in general terms they are brothers and sisters. Nonetheless, in a certain context in the life of the congregation, in the context of a specific office and function within the congregation, there are ways in which this context does echoes the specific order of the marriage, and indeed, that original, paradigmatic type of marriage back in the Garden. Paul makes that clear, grounding the well-known instructions of 1 Timothy 2 in that original relationship.
Now, why is that? I think the wisdom of the instruction comes into focus in the antitype of Christ’s own relationship to his bride.
Christ’s headship over his bride is of a kind that Adam’s should have been but was not. It is a headship which instructs and cultivates, guards, shepherds, protects and preserves his bride in submission to the will of God. If Adam’s failure to be all that resulted in Eve’s vulnerability to the deception of the evil one, Christ’s faithfulness undoes all that in his bride.
And so, the ministry of the word of God within the local church needs to be understood ultimately in terms of the husbandry of Christ towards his bride. It is this specific office and function that creates a context in which a qualified man is fittingly called to exercise his discipleship as a servant of that husband in the ministry of the word, whilst women within the church are, in a sense, fittingly called to exercise their discipleship by modelling what the church as a whole must and will be—the new Eve, instructed, guarded and preserved in submission to the will of God, “in faith, love and holiness”, as Paul puts it (1 Tim 2:15). Indeed, I think he likely zeroes in on the maternal figure of childbearing for precisely this reason (2:15). The bride of Christ is not saved by her fruitfulness, but she is certainly saved through ultimately bringing forth and bearing the fruit of Christ, a reality which is, as we have seen, captured in the maternal figure.
In other words, this specific context and office within the life of the church provides the woman, as in the Christian marriage, an opportunity to be an exemplar of faithful discipleship—adorned not with the outward glory of braided hair and gold and pearls and costly attire, as Paul puts it, but with good deeds.
I think we need to banish, then, any perverse suggestion that this instruction represents a relic of ancient patriarchy justified as some draconian punishment for Eve’s deception.
I think Paul is envisaging a profoundly positive vocation for the Christian woman in the life of the church. The fall of Eve now affords Christian women the opportunity, dare we say, to lead the way in discipleship, the life of conformity to Christ, within the life of the local congregation. Indeed, for whatever particular, public honour we may attach to the teaching office, at least in the eyes of God, there is special dignity for the woman’s vocation that aligns with the real terminus of Christ’s glory and the glorification of his word in his bride. By all means make your church less alienating to men, but be careful or else you may be at risk of robbing your church of its true glory.
Now, as I say, I think this relationship only arises in this specific context as a fitting echo of Christ’s own headship and oversight of his bride through the authority of his word. It’s not to say that men aren’t also called to be exemplars of discipleship and fruit-bearing, or indeed, at times, motherly nurture (Paul describes his own ministry in maternal terms on more than one occasion). Likewise, it’s not to exclude women from the ministry of the word in ways that are fitting to the pattern of the household in other contexts. But it does help us appreciate the wisdom of the headship entailed in the office of overseer and teacher, and also prevents it from being illegitimately extrapolated into other contexts where the antitypical relationship has no bearing.
Of course, we’re desperate to know what all this means in practice, but in answering those questions, word studies into the semantic range of words like didasko, teaching, or prophecy, propheteuo, will only get us so far. Indeed, if we fail to see the wisdom of these instruction in light of the antitype we are at risk of losing the wood for the trees.
e. What then of Mary?
I said I would return then to Mary, and that’s where I’ll finish. What then of Mary? No, I don’t think she herself is the new Eve or the mother of the church. But perhaps we can see now why it is that the Protestant Reformers would uphold her as a model, perhaps even the model par excellence, of Christian discipleship. Through her simple, unvarnished, humble acceptance of the divine word—“let it be to me according to thy word”—she leads the way for Christ’s bride, the new Eve…a posture which is vindicated by God in the extraordinary dignity she is given to bear the Son of God in her midst, a figure of what the church as a whole is called to do.
