For the first post in this series, click here.

I’ve decided that it’s best to examine marriage as spiritual and metaphysical metaphor by breaking it down into several different “sub-metaphors.” In this article, I’ll talk about the image of the marriage–particularly the faithful husband and unfaithful wife–as a metaphor for the idea of resistible grace, with apologies to my female readers that I cannot write the above simply as “faithful spouse and unfaithful spouse.” The writers of the Bible were entirely (as far as I know) men, and the men of the Biblical era apparently had a lot of angst about what their wives were doing when they weren’t around. Maybe if they’d treated their wives as equals they wouldn’t have had to have been so worried, but I digress.

Resistible and irresistible grace. The Arminian view and the Calvinist view. In a nutshell, the question is whether man has the ability to resist God’s salvific grace. Under the Arminian view, grace is a gift freely offered by God, but it must be accepted by man, who has the option to refuse it if he will. Under the Calvinist view, God’s grace cannot be resisted; those whom God wills to save are saved and those who God decides not to save are damned, regardless of human action.

Arminianism runs the risk of becoming Pelagianism, a heresy in which salvation is worked out by the sinner himself rather than being received as a gift from God; but Calvinism envisions an arbitrary God whose sovereignty is not matched by God’s love, who is sometimes indifferent to God’s creation, who has left little of meaning in the lives and choices of man.

I think that the Calvinist view sets up an incorrect view of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will, assuming that they are a zero-sum game. A God who is sovereign over all things may choose to forbear God’s sovereignty to allow free will to man–even in the matter of accepting grace.

There is a greater justice in this than in predestined salvation–the consequences for a particular person are based on the choice that person has made. This seems in line with what I’ll describe elsewhere as “natural justice.” More important, for a God whose desire is to be in relationship with the beings God has created, those creatures must be fully independent of God–without this, there can be no meaningful relationship. We’ll discuss that more fully in Part 3 of this series.

To take things a step further, I’ll admit that I believe that God never revokes the opportunity to accept grace from any person–before or after death. Once, I would have called myself a soteriological universalist (believing that all people will ultimately be saved). Without denying that possibility (and actively hoping for it), my time reading Barth has lead me to become an inclusivist–I believe that God’s love for us means that grace is offered to all, but that no one is forced to accept it, and perhaps some never will. I do not pretend to understand the details or mechanics of this–that is well beyond the scope of human knowledge. But I believe this firmly based upon my understanding of the nature and person of God through Jesus Christ. Let those who disagree say what they will–I’ve heard it all before.

Now, with all of this lead-in, let’s look at the ways the Scriptures appear to point to the existence of resistible grace in the relationship with God. In the Old Testament, we’ll look to the Book of Hosea; in the New, we’ll look to the marriage-feast parables of Jesus Christ.

It is potentially unfair to call the connection between human marriage and the relationship of man to God a metaphor in the Book of Hosea; it’s more of an analogy, really, given that the comparison is set up so intentionally and explicitly.

Here, God explicitly commands Hosea to marry the promiscuous and unfaithful woman Gomer as a symbol of the faithlessness of Israel to God. This may seem a surprising command, but in the context of the Old Testament prophets, we commonly specific action intentionally taken as a symbol of either what is currently happening or what is to come. Jeremiah is ordered to purchase a new linen garment, bury it under a rock and then go back and uncover it to show that it has been ruined as a symbol of impending ruin upon Judah and Israel. Jeremiah 13. Jeremiah also wears an ox-yoke as a similar symbol. Ezekiel eats a scroll and lays on his side for three-hundred, ninety days as a symbol for the years Israel has defied God. Isaiah walks barefoot and naked as a symbol of impending Assyrian captivity.

But Hosea’s prophetic action in some ways seems especially harsh–particularly if we look to the names he gives his poor children by Gomer: Jezreel (after the breaking of the Kingdom of Israel in the Jezreel Valley), Lo-Ruhamah (“unloved” to show that God will not show love to Israel) and Lo-Ammi (“not my people,” to signify a rejection of Israel by God). Nevertheless, God promises restoration and blessing on the Israelites in Hosea 1:10-11 and commands Hosea to go after Gomer and to accept her back into his home in spite of her faithlessness.

If we are to follow Barth (and more recently, Bejamin Corey, who advocates the same interpretive hermaneutic in his book Unafraid), and use Jesus as the lens through which we interpret the action in Hosea, I think the result is that we see the condemnation of Israel by God as the human side of working through the story–an attempt at theodicy to explain why bad things (like the Assyrian destruction of the nation of Isreal and the Babylonian captivity from Judah) have happened to God’s favored people (this in Hosea 2>9-13). Allowing them to portray these events as punishment for their faithlessness allows them to call these events righteous and just retribution from God without demeaning God’s character (at least, so the argument goes).

But when we read God’s words about restoring Israel (as God has commanded Hosea to restore Gomer), we see part of the text that conforms closely with the understanding of Christ advocated through the Gospels. In Hosea 2:14-20, God says,

“‘Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. In that day,’ declares the LORD, ‘you will call me “my husband”; you will no longer call me “my master.” I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will there names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with beasts of the field, the birds in teh sky and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.'”

Such density of meaning and metaphor in this passage! First, some linguistics: the word for “master” in this passage is “baali” or “ba’ally.” As we noted in the first post in this series, the word Baal (strictly defined as “lord”) is sometimes translated as “husband” in the Old Testament. The more common word for husband is used in the above passage for the word that is translated as “husband.” This linguistic playfulness accentuates the metaphor in Hosea–God by using “baali” refers simultaneously to the unfaithfulness of the Israelites in turning away from God toward pagan deities (or, perhaps more importantly, misunderstanding the nature of God and the nature of the relationship God wants with creation) and also addressing the divine marriage relationship in contract to the traditional social concept of marriage of the Israelites–God’s statement seems to indicate love and mutuality rather than patriarchy and mere obedience.

Second, some geography (and more linguisitcs): “Achor” means trouble. The Valley of Achor is where the Israelites (led by Joshua) stone Achan son of Zerah for violating the command of God and keeping spoils from the conquering of the Canaanites. Joshua 7. So there, too, we see the reconciliation of God’s people to God despite their past transgressions. Not to put too fine a point on it, but God then commands (in Hosea 3) Hosea to go back to Gomer and “Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”

Which leads us to the argument that this image provides support for resistible grace. Note how God says that God will woo back Isreal–not with force, not with fear, not with majestic display. With tenderness and kindness. With gifts freely offered. By showing Israel the splendor of right relationship with God, but not forcing it upon them. We Christians often talk of God continuing to pursue us when we flee from God into selfishness, and we have good cause to do so. We would also do well to remember here that God is calling us back to a relationship that uplifts us, not one that denigrates us into mindless obedience. (To be clear, an obedience to what is true and good is somethign God wants from us, and, I think the natural consequence of falling in love with and seekign relationship with God, but this kind of loving obedience is different from the obligatory and feudal obedience preached by many Christians).

Now, let’s turn to some of the words of Jesus (and a few about Jesus). John the Baptist describes himself as the friend of the bridegroom who makes the way for the bridegroom, who is of course Jesus. John 3:39. In this statement, we see the marriage metaphor clearly conveyed from the Old Testament to the New. Jesus Himself does this when He tells the disciples: “‘How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.'” Matthew 9:15, c.f. Luke 5:34-5.

Jesus’s words above use the continuing adaptation of the marriage metaphor employed by the Savior throughout the Gospels: we are here described as the guests to the wedding rather than the bride.

I’ll treat two of Jesus’s parables here. The first is the Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 24:36-51). This parable appropriately follows the statement that none but the Father knows the day or hour of Judgment. The virgins are a greeting party for the coming bridegroom (but none seems to be the bride, mind you). We are told that five virgins are wise and five are foolish. The wise take extra oil with their lamps as they wait for the bridegroom, but the foolish do not. All fall asleep while waiting. Upon waiting the foolish find that they have run out of lamp oil and must go to get more–during which time (of course) the bridegroom arrives and they miss it, ultimately finding themselves locked out of the wedding banquet! The wise, the parable reminds us, keep seeking for the coming bridegroom and make sure that they are not distracted in the search.

The common thread between this parable and the next is the concern over who makes it into the wedding feast and who does not. Here, those who have–not out of malicious intent but out of lack of discipline and preparation–fail to be ready at the appointed time are left outside the festivities (which seems a ready metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven). If this seems a harsh warning, I agree. But it is perhaps softened both by the fact that it is related to the preceeding passage (where the warning is to always prepare oneself for the end rather than planning on an expected timing) and by the message in the next parable.

That parable is the Parable of the Wedding Banquet, which appears in Matthew 22:1-14 (in the same [artificial] Chapter as Jesus’s saying that we looked at in Part 1 of this series). The same parable appears in Luke 14:16-24.

In Matthew’s version, Jesus begins by saying explicitly that, “‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son.” Then we are told that those the king invites to the banquet refuse to come, in Luke’s version giving excuses about their worldly concerns that prevent them from attending.  In Matthew, those invited even go so far as to kill the king’s servants (for which their city is burnt and the murderers destroyed!).

Then the king (or owner of the house in Luke) sends servants to collect any they can to come. In Luke, the house owner tells the servants to “compel” those in the streets and alleys (and then further afield) to attend, whereas in Matthew they are merely invited. Matthew further tells us that the servants “gathered all…they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

Matthew contains the additional (and odd) part of the story where a man not wearing wedding clothes is thrown out of the banquet and “into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” and ends with the phrase statement, “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”

There is some difficulty in interpreting this parable because the two accounts of it vary in some important respects. Luke presents an overall “softer” version of the parable–there is no punishment for those who refuse to come (and neither do they do violence to the servants), there is no guest who is cast out, and we are told at the conclusion not that few are chosen, but that those who were invited (I think it’s safe to read this as “originally invited”) will get a taste of the banquet. Which version are we to believe is the more accurate to Jesus’s words?

At first blush, especially considering Jesus’s closing in Matthew, this parable appears to support election, not resistible grace. Not so with Luke’s version, which seems to favor an Armenian interpretation. I would argue that both, ultimately, require a belief that humans have choice in responding to or refusing God’s gifts (including the salvific gift).

Putting the passage in Luke in context, we find that it follows Jesus’s dining with a Pharisee and thus should probably be read as a condemnation of those who believe that they are holy and righteous but who do not actually respond to God when invited.

The passage in Matthew comes between the Parable of the Tenants and the question about paying the tax to Caesar. The former is likewise a condemnation of the Pharisees and the latter an (intellectual) attack on Jesus by the Pharisees.

And here, we see the common core of the passages–a dire warning to those of us who believe that we are righteous through our upholding of God’s ordinances but who refuse to follow the spirit and intent of God’s commands–loving one another. Put another way, taking this metaphor to its logical conclusion, those who do not love have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. This, I think, requires an understanding of free choice in responding to Grace for there to be any justice in condemning such people.

Thus, we see resistible grace as a foundational aspect of the marriage metaphor in both the Old and New Testaments. We’ll carry this understanding into Part 3 as we look to the metaphysical meanings found in the marriage metaphor for the relationship between believer and God.

For the next post in this series, click here.