Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976’s The Selfish Gene to describe an idea that spreads by means of imitation from person to person, often carrying symbolic meaning representing a phenomenon or theme. He nicked the word from the Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated thing”.
Most of us know what’s happened to the “meme” concept since.
Speaking Another Language
To say the meme has “gone viral” is a gross understatement. It has become its own internet language, with meme creators using common popular culture-derived visual templates and a ubiquitous font often referred to as “meme text” to upload short messages to their favorite social media sites that they hope will catch on and circulate. Even President Trump occasionally takes up memery now and then, or at least he circulates the memes of others. The best memes are rhetorical, humorous and most often sarcastic. Naturally, as with any form of communication that reduces an argument to one or two lines of text, they also have severe limitations.
I came across this one on social media the other day:
“Ha ha!” you say. Yeah, me too. The visual template comes from the old sitcom Friends, and thousands of meme creators, serious and totally frivolous, have used it before. This version has a Reformed theological flavor, and its argument goes something like this: If the Bible calls Israel a bride (and it does), and if the Bible calls the Church a bride (and it does), then the Bible’s writers have made God a polygamist unless we concede Israel and the Church are actually the same entity.
Uh, no. Not so much.
Fools and Folly
Pause for thought here: Our long-time regular readers at ComingUntrue span age ranges from their early twenties to mid-eighties. I know because I’ve met a bunch of them, a few quite recently. Thanks to the Lord for that, and for the encouragement that comes from it. But I suspect both ends of the age spectrum might be inclined to caution me at this point. The eighty-somethings will say, “Tom, brother, ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.’ ” The twenty-somethings will say, “It’s way gamma to respond to rhetoric with a dialectical argument. Chill, bra. Don’t do the wall of text!”
To which I will respond, “But guys, he put ‘God’ and ‘polygamist’ in the same sentence!” You know I have the winning argument there. No red-blooded contender for the faith can leave that one alone, even the grizzled variety you find around these parts.
So let me try to do the dialectical response with whimsy, flair, pointed truth and gentle mockery, while steering clear of both folly and the evil wall of text. We are not so much answering a fool foolishly as providing a shot of common sense to the young folks standing by who may be taken in by a foolish argument cleverly framed. [Insert prayer as required.]
Okay, let’s stop and think about the way the Bible uses figurative language, which is what its writers are doing when they employ an image like a bride.
The Bible’s Figures of Speech
Figurative language, as discussed here, is one of scripture’s most common methods of conveying lofty spiritual truths to limited thinkers like you and me. When we say that the writers of scripture are speaking figuratively, we simply mean that they are identifying a similarity between something in the physical world around us and some aspect of the invisible, supernatural reality behind it. That literal thing is useful as a picture, metaphor, allegory, parable, figure of speech, simile, symbol or type that points to eternal truth. The spiritual world is thus understood by analogy to physical and literal things we can examine more easily.
Now … here comes the caution: Don’t exhaust the symbol by ripping it to shreds and micro-analyzing each aspect of it, and don’t literalize it. Just don’t. The Bible’s writers didn’t mean you to do that. All they meant by employing a familiar metaphor was that we should learn a lesson from a single aspect of that image, and ignore its other obvious, more irrelevant features.
All We Like Sheep … or Not
To illustrate the point with one of the most potent possible Bible examples, there is something sheep-like about sinners. There is also something sheep-like about believers. Believe it or not, there is even something sheep-like about the Lord Jesus Christ. But they are not all the same thing, and the writers who use the sheep image are not interested in the same sheepish quality in every instance. The sinner is like a sheep in that he has gone astray and turned to his own way. The believer is like a sheep because he hears the shepherd’s voice. The Lord Jesus was like a sheep because he was led as a lamb to slaughter.
Not the same thing. Not the same thing at all. If we were to argue that the Lord Jesus is sheep-like in the same way sinners are sheep-like, we would be in heretical territory. He never missed the mark. Not once. The Bible’s image-makers and the Holy Spirit who informed them are not confusing the issue by using the sheep metaphor in two, three or four different places to suggest different things. But we have to read the metaphor, symbol or figure of speech aware of the limitations the individual writers intended to place on it and conscious of the context in which the image was used. We need to ask ourselves which aspect of the picture we are supposed to be looking at. What specific aspect of sheep-hood does the writer have in view that ought to inform our view of sinners, believers or the Lord Jesus?
God as ‘Father’
To take another example, scripture calls God “the Father”. So let’s talk about fatherhood. Human fathers bring children into the world, care and provide for them, training them to adulthood. They become their example, disciplinarian, teacher and source of encouragement. Adult children become like their fathers, or at least they ought to. In this respect, human fathers become a good analogy for the Holy Spirit to use when he describes the relationship of God to his human children, or even his celestial children.
But if we try to beat the father image to death, we could come up with horrible theology. With respect to God’s human or angelic children, who is the mother? Not to be gross, but was sex involved? It is when we discuss human fatherhood. With respect to the Son, does it mean that he had a beginning because he has a Father?
Of course not! The absurdity of the whole thing should cause us to take a reverent step backward and reassess how we look at the Bible’s figures of speech. It is exceedingly important to recognize their limitations. They describe one, very context-limited aspect of a spiritual reality. You cannot pick them to pieces, or compare them to the way other writers of scripture use them to describe entirely different spiritual realities. Doing so is a waste of time and leads to silliness like the subject of today’s discussion.
Brides and Polygamy
What does that mean with regard to the bride imagery of scripture? Just this. Isaiah calls Israel “like a wife deserted”. Again, concerning Israel he says, “your Maker is your husband; the Lord of hosts is his name.” So then, Israel is LIKE a bride in her relationship to God. When we come to the New Testament, Paul uses the relationship between believing husband and wife as a picture of Christ and his church. So then, the church is LIKE a bride in relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ. The New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb, will be home to both devout Jews and the Church for eternity. Its citizens are LIKE a bride in that they are the object of Christ’s love and a great bride-price was paid for them. That does not mean Israel was or will be the Church, or that the Church is Israel.
These pictures only deal with a single aspect of the relationship between God and believers of different eras, and they ought not to be literalized. Israel, for example, is not just the bride of YHWH, it is also compared to a firstborn son, a servant and a bunch of plants. That’s just for starters. The church is not just a bride to the Lord Jesus, but also a body and a building.
So then, let figurative language be figurative language. Learn from it what you can. But please, don’t make deep conclusions about your favorite theological system from a very limited picture God gave you for your encouragement. Don’t jam “Israel the bride” together with “the Church the bride” and get polygamy out of it.
The end result of that dubious exercise is absurdity, not theological clarity.
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