Here’s John Stackhouse, professor of theology at Regent College, on the recently rather popular ‘love song to Jesus’ genre: http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/jesus-im-not-in-love-with-you/.
One thing I found interesting in reading the comments responding to his post was the number of people who seemed tempted by the idea that you can infer that a part of a whole has a feature from the fact that the whole has that feature. This is relevant to Stackhouse’s discussion because he does think that it’s right to talk of the Church as a corporate body as the bride of Christ; he just doesn’t think that it’s right to talk of individual people being the bride of Christ. But a number of commenters seem to think that if the Church is a bride, then each member of the Church is also a bride. But I don’t know why people are tempted by that inference, since it’s obviously invalid in most cases. Erin was my bride, but her left big toe was not despite being a part of her. Or, to use a more trivial example, I am two-legged but my heart is not, despite being a part of me. Or, final example, the United States is a wealthy country but not all members of the United States are wealthy. So I’m a bit puzzled as to why people are so tempted to think that you can infer from features of wholes to feature of parts.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
Sydney,
I was one of the one’s who responded not so much in favor of Stackhouse’s blog.
First, let me say that while I’m in agreement for the most part with the sappy love songs he speaks of, I don’t see how he resolves the problem of the “homoerotic creeps” not so much by the fact that the corporate body of Christ is more than individuals which in large part is made up of males (it seems to me to be a false dichotomy. You can say that about your body parts, I’m not so sure you can say that about the body of Christ), but that agape has been given center stage in Christian theology. John certainly doesn’t address the issue of how eros–a desire so intense and passionate for communion with the other has implications for the Christian life. Why must THIS type of love be reserved only for the corporate life (if it is to be reserved at all and John doesn’t do this as this goes against the whole grain of his post) and not for individuals? If love is simply looked upon agapic without the other elements of storge, philia and eros, it is as James Nelson said, both impoverished and impoverishing just as those other aspects of love would be without agape. John just seems to have read too many negative connotations in erotic love.
Brandon
Wow. There’s all kinds of interesting sociological implications in here! To address just one, I think the tendency to transfer “bride” status from corporate to individual is not so much that your average Christian believes that the two are interchangeable or synonymous in a theoretical sense(sadly, I don’t think they think that hard). I think it has more to do with the individualized spirituality that seems to be growing in American religion–i.e.If it’s all about me and God, then it only makes sense that anything in the Bible applies to that relationship. Maybe I’m too cynical about this, but I think there’s some truth in it.
Just as there is the danger of “rampant individualism” in the Church there is also the equal danger of the “corporate swallowing up the individual.” There is an “individual side” to Christianity. But still, none of this deals with the question that “erotic love” for the Savior, whether individual or corporately, cannot be sought after. Cannot I, as (not solely) an individual, grow in grace and love and passion for my Savior such as to become one with Him?
The real question here, that I think is getting missed, is what does Sidney have against Erin’s toe?
Yeah, I was thinking a more elegant metaphor would have been called for.
Erin
Your dissection of the whole bugs me because the whole “body” of Christ thing is a METAPHOR!!!!!!! Jesus is not decapitated and only his head sits upon the throne. We’re not a literal body, in the sense that you are an eye and I’m a vein and your wife is a kidney. It’s a METAPHOR! So is Bride of Christ. It’s a symbol for something, and what it represents for all of us, it represents for me alone. If I were the only Christian past or present, I’d still be called the BODY and BRIDE of Christ.
Lisa, I think you’re on to something. When I think about the kind of language that gets used in these contexts, I also get the sense that bridezilla-style bride is what the speakers and singers have in mind: she gets to run everything, while he does her will and brings her chocolate. Or, if it’s lover talk, the focus is on the pleasure that such a relationship will bring the crooner. Either way, things seem to be pitched such that Jesus-as-bridegroom/lover-will-serve-me-as-bride/lover. I think I would go so far as to say that for many it’s not even me-and-God, but God-for-me. Though the thought is appalling, the implications of the metaphors that are used, the genre conventions that are followed, all point to such a relationship.
Erin
I think what I was up to in this post has been misunderstood, so let me try to make myself clearer. I did say that I agreed with Stackhouse’s post. But the stuff that I said about parts and wholes in no way is meant to be a defense of the claim that there is something wrong with the ‘love song to Jesus’ genre. If that were what I was trying to do, I would have obviously failed. Rather, I was objecting to a principle that I took to be an implicit premise in the arguments made by a number of Stackhouse’s critics. But clearly the critics might still be right in their conclusions even if it turns out that they relied on an illicit principle in their arguments. Most of us make bad arguments for good conclusions with some frequency.
Anyway, here’s the argument that I thought was made by some of Stackhouse’s critics:
(1) The Church is the bride of Christ.
(2) I’m a member of the Church.
(3) Therefore, I’m a bride of Christ.
Now, as it stands, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. But that’s okay — we often make arguments with implicit premises, especially if we take the premises to be obvious. In philosophy, we call such arguments enthymematic. But if an argument turns out to be controversial, it’s good to make all premises explicit so that people can pinpoint the source of disagreement.
So what might the missing premise be in this case? Well, my reading of the relevant comments suggested that it might be a principle that says that if a whole has some feature, then members of that whole also have that feature. So the argument would go as follows:
(1) The Church is the bride of Christ.
(2) I’m a member of the Church.
[(3) Members of wholes share the features of the whole.]
(4) Therefore, I’m a bride of Christ.
This argument is valid. That is, the only way to rationally challenge the conclusion is to deny one of the premises. As it happens, it’s not to hard to find a premise to deny, since (3) is obviously false (as the examples I gave in my original post should have made clear). Note that I’m not claiming that it’s never true that members have the same feature as the whole of which they are a member. In fact, quite often they do. All I’m saying is that this universal principle is false. So if you want to argue that a member shares a feature with the whole of which it is a member (e.g., that both individual Christians and the Church are brides of Christ), you’ll have to find some other premise(s).
Of course, it’s tricky to attribute implicit premises to other people. After all, they’re implicit because they were unstated! So perhaps I was wrong to attribute (3) to some of Stackhouse’s critics (and note that I was only attributing it to some of his critics). Though I can’t for the life of me figure out what other premise might have been intended to complete the argument.
So, my question for Brandon and mlm: are you intending to defend the particular argument that I lay out above or are you just taking umbrage at my agreement with Stackhouse’s position (a position that I did not attempt to defend)? If the former, are you aiming to defend the implicit premise that I attributed to some critics? Or do you have a different candidate premise to complete that argument?
Sydney
Perhaps I can make some more specific comments in response to some of the things that have come up.
(1) Brandon, I’m not sure why you think that Stackhouse and I have a problem with eros. I won’t speak for Stackhouse — though I might note that he didn’t use the term ‘eros’ at all in his post — but I know that I didn’t intend to suggest anything negative about eros. For one thing, I would want to know a bit more about how we are using the term before I say anything much about it, since different authors have made different uses of the term. At any rate, in my mind having eros towards someone need not be the same thing as being in love with someone. It’s the latter with which I took Stackhouse and myself to be concerned.
(2) Lisa, perhaps I share your cynicism!
(3) Brandon, you say that ‘just as there is the danger of “rampant individualism” in the Church there is also the equal danger of the “corporate swallowing up the individual.”’ I’m not completely sure what you mean by ‘equal danger’. If you mean that extremes on either side are equally bad, then I think I might agree with you. But if you mean that people are just as tempted by one as the other, then I definitely do not agree. Most of us are more or less selfish by nature and hence are more likely to focus to much on our own individual selves than to focus too much on corporate wholes. I know a great many people who care too much about fulfilling their own desires; I know very few, if any, that focus too much on fulfilling the desires of corporate wholes such as religious bodies.
(4) mlm, if I said something to suggest that I thought that the Church as Christ’s body is a physical body and that Christ is a decapitated head sitting on a throne, mea culpa. That sounds just as ridiculous to me as I take it that it sounds to you.
Sydney
So… if:
1) Jesus is Jewish
2) The Church is the Bride of Christ
3) The Church is Christian
4) then we have a rampant case of intermarriage going on
:-p
-L
Sydney,
I think you’re overly rationalizing this here and I think mlm is right on course with this. I suppose if you want to work with certain presuppositions as to what it means to be the Church that logic will work for ya, but as you draw out the implications it’s just as creepy as John’s homoerotic aversions.
Here’s the way I’m thinking about this. Here are my thought processes, OK?
Think about it like this Sydney. John Stackhouse says that biblical imagery (Bride of Christ) is to be reserved EXCLUSIVELY for the CORPORATE BODY. He then says that it gives him “homoerotic creeps” for individuals to use such language i.e. individuals are not the body of Christ, therefore they are not the bride of Christ, therefore it is wrong for individuals to sing, talk, etc, “I am in love with you Jesus.”
But imagine for a moment that you have a church (if you can call it that) that is exclusively men–I mean we could use Promise Keepers as an example if you like. What would it mean for THEM CORPORATELY to sing, “We are in love with you Jesus?” OK. Maybe this is an extreme example. Let’s use something more realistic. Let’s say you have a church that is 50% women and 50% men. What would it mean for the men in the congregation to be singing, “I am in love with you Jesus?”
As a matter of fact, one of John’s responders linked to his “Church for Men Florida,” http://churchformenflorida.blogspot.com/
Even if you don’t want to officially call this a church but rather a “Men’s Meeting” or “Men’s Gathering” (which they don’t seem to want to imply, they want to call it a CHURCH) what would you call it for them, CORPORATELY to sing, “I’m in love with Jesus”–a “gang bang” (forgive the crudeness, but then again, it is no more crude than John’s talk of homoerotic creeps with regard to Jesus). Is this not as creepy as what John is saying of individuals? All John seems to have done is move the “homoerotic creeps” from individuals to the corporate–but creepy nonetheless.
And that’s the thing. Unless you are prepared to say that prepared to say what it means to be the Church (at all levels) John and yourself will continue to work with certain presuppositions as to what it means to be the Church and then read negative connotations into the language and the God talk that the Church uses with regard to it’s relationship to Christ.
Think of it like this as well. When I think of “the bride of Christ,” generally, I think “corporate body” and not atomistically–the individual. However, when we as a local body of believers sing a song that says, “**We** are in love with you Jesus” by saying, “We” I am also including myself in this. Thus, I am saying, “I am in love with you Jesus.” Thus it is seems to me to be a false dichotomy (as Scot McKnight pointed out) to divide between the individual and the corporate body. Ultimately speaking, Stackhouse, in order to be consistent could NEVER sing “**We** are in love with you Jesus,” yet that seems to be OK by him as it is always OK for the corporate church to refer to itself/herself/themselves (plural) as “in love with Jesus.”
As for the use of “eros”, based on my thinking above it wouldn’t totally be out of the question for both the corporate body or the individual to refer to Christ in an “erotic” way–not in a homoerotic way, which then leads into the question of rampant individualism vs. the individual being swallowed up into the corporate idea.
By equal I mean not of the same weight but rather of the same possibility–the danger is there. This very question we are asking above is a prime example of this. As much as Paul speaks to the church corporately say, about such things as the fruit of the Spirit or to “die in Christ in gain” its not hard to imagine that this can’t be applicable to the interior life of the individual. That is, I as individual, will have a “heart posture” if you will, to seek after God passionately i.e. loving God through displaying of the fruit of the Spirit in my own ad intra life.
Brandon,
I’ll confess to being confused by your comments. For example, I’m not sure what the charge of ‘overly rationalizing’ is supposed to mean. I thought rationalizing is when one, say, defends a bad action by giving superficially plausible reasons for why it is a good action but where those reasons are actually irrelevant to what really matters. But I don’t see how I was doing that. For one thing, I wasn’t even defending an action at all, good or bad. But perhaps we can extend rationalization to cases where one gives superficially plausible reasons for beliefs. Is that what you mean? If so, which of the reasons I give are only superficially plausible?
You also talk about ‘creepy’ implications that I draw out from my presuppositions about what it means to be the Church. But I didn’t know that I either talked about my presuppositions about what it means to be the church or that I drew out any implications from such presuppositions. So what exactly did I say that is creepy?
I also asked several questions in my previous responses, but, as far as I can tell, you don’t address any of them in your post. Am I just failing to see where you answered them or did you decide that answering them was not a fruitful line of conversation? The latter might be a reasonable response to me, but it would make me worry again that we are just not talking about the same subject. As I said, I am talking about a general principle that has no special relevance to discussions about the Church, worship, etc., though it can be applied there as well.
Anyway, I had a hard time seeing how your last set of comments was relevant to what I was talking about, i.e., I had a hard time seeing what it was that I said that there were suppose to be directed against (perhaps this is because of the difficulties already mentioned). For example, I don’t see what the point is of your example of an all-male church. I don’t care what the gender make-up of churches is as far as the song lyrics used in worship are concerned. ‘I’m in love with Jesus’ sounds bad to me whether the congregants are male, female, or mixed. It also doesn’t make a difference to me whether it is one person singing that or a corporate body of hundreds. I also don’t care whether the lyrics say ‘I’m in love with Jesus’ or ‘we’re in love with Jesus’ (so I’m not bothered by your claim that in order to be consistent I need to be bothered by the latter lyrics as well — I in fact am). The point isn’t a distinction between one and many; rather, the point is that the many can give rise to an entirely different sort of entity. For example, if all members of my church are wealthy and I am a member of the church, then it follows that I am wealthy. But it doesn’t follow from my church being wealthy that I am wealthy. Why? Because the church is a different sort of thing than its members. It has a life of its own above and beyond its members. It has features not shared by its members (for example, most Christians think that the church universal will not die, but it doesn’t follow from that that members of the church won’t die — of course they will).
Of course, that doesn’t say that there are no features that the church and its members share. Perhaps you think that both the church and individual members of the church are brides of Christ. I don’t. It seems to me that there are certain sorts of exclusive, romantic relationships that are appropriate between certain people, but that are not good models for relationships of individual believers and Christ. For example, as it happens, I would be upset if I found out that Erin was in love with another man (and I think it would be right for me to be thus upset). I would not, however, be upset if I found out that Jesus loves another person besides me (in fact, I think it would be wrong if I were thus upset). I think that already suggests that there is something different about these two loves. There is a certain sort of demand of exclusivity in one that is not in the other (this is not to say that there are no sorts of exclusivity in the other — just not the same sort). So there are specific reasons like this for why I think the ‘love song to Jesus’ genre is problematic. More generally, I think the genre is trivializing.
Sydney