The CBE Scroll

Blog voices from Christians for Biblical Equality

Panim El-Panim

Filed under: Biblical Interpretation, Marriage — DP at 5:39 pm on Wednesday, March 29, 2006

I finally got around to reading Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews, which had been on my get-to list for a while now. It is a very creative interpretation of Hebrew history and how, in the words of the subtitle, “changed the way everyone thinks and feels.” One of Cahill’s observations has to do with the nature of interpersonal relationships in the pagan, pre-Abrahamic world and how the growing Hebrew understanding of God changed everything.

Before Abraham—and even during the patriarchal period—people were generally treated like pawns. We see this in Genesis when, for example, Abraham passed his wife off as his sister to save his own neck—not once but twice—and enrich himself in the process. We see it when Lot offered his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom, and when Abraham stood ready to offer his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.

In this age, wives, slaves, and others were not valued so much for their intrinsic worth as persons or as partners in a relationship, but for how you could use them to get ahead.

Cahill makes the astute observation that, before Abraham, this was also precisely why the gods were valued. There was no thought in ancient Sumeria of anyone desiring a “personal relationship” with Enlil or Ninhursag. You just performed the proper rituals in hopes of getting what you wanted out of your gods.

All of this began to change—slowly—with the Hebrew patriarchs. For example, when Sarah died, Abraham was willing to pay an exorbitant price for clear title to a place to bury her. He would have paid any price, Cahill writes, “and thus does he show belatedly, pathetically, his reverence for the matriarch” (pp. 87-88).

As the vision of a relationship with God emerges, so it seems does a vision for relationships with other humans. As the Hebrews grew from impersonal manipulation of the gods to a face-to-face relationship, a similar transformation occurred in the interpersonal sphere. Not only did they learn that they could not manipulate God, they learned that they were not to manipulate each other.

Later in Genesis, we read a story that bears this out. Jacob, anxious about being reunited with his estranged brother Esau, wrestles with God (Gen 32:24-32). In the morning, he names the place Peniel, “for I have seen God —panim el-panim — face to face.” One chapter later, the momentous reunion takes place and Jacob, transformed by his divine encounter, says to Esau, “for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God” (Gen 33:10). Here is how Cahill describes what has happened:

“Because Yaakov has seen the face of God—has been allowed, however partially, to know God as he really is, to see into the face of ultimate truth—he can also see an individual human being for who he is; and somehow this experience is like the experience of God. What this will mean for the future is yet to be spelled out, but the human being as pawn (Sara, Lot’s daughters, Lot’s wife, Yitzhak) is quietly and subtly giving way to a more exalted vision of what a human being is.” (p. 95)

We need not go into the finer details of how all of this gets played out in Jewish history with the Mosaic regulations to extend basic human rights even to slaves and foreigners or the prophets’ constant demands for justice. It was, to be sure, a rocky road and one from which Israel frequently diverted, but it ended, among other places, with…the Song of Solomon! Whatever the Song of Solomon is, it is an ode to romantic love between a man and a woman that has all the hallmarks of a mutual (and mutually satisfying) relationship of deep passion:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is better than wine,
your anointing oils are fragrant,
your name is perfume poured out;
therefore the maidens love you.
Draw me after you, let us make haste. (1:2-4a)

….

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone. (2:10-11)

….

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it,
If one offered for love
all the wealth of his house,
it would be utterly scorned (8:6-7)

Cahill again:

One wonders what Avraham would have made of this poem. And Sara, would she not have found it unthinkable that “love is as fierce as death” and that “great seas cannot extinguish love” and that a woman could be so free—and even have most of the best lines? Could any woman in history before these verses were written have asserted with credibility: “My beloved is mine and I am his”? Throughout the Bible there have been innumerable marriages and sexual relationships, but here for the first time is a reciprocal relationship—a relationship “face to face,” with much of the mystery, drama, power, and pleasure of Israel’s face-to-face relationship with God. If the Song of Songs were only an allegory, the relationship of the lovers would serve as a mere mirror for the relationship of the soul (or Israel) with God. But the Song of Songs, appearing in the Bible after the long recounting of Israel’s labyrinthine relationship with God, suggests rather that this God-human relationship has at last made possible a genuine human-human relationship. (pp. 233-34).

In short, how we relate to God is likely to be an indicator of how we relate to each other—whether by manipulation, ritual, and legalism, or by mutuality, respect, and love. In my own experience, I have found that correlation many times over—the churches that have done the best job of cultivating a genuine relationship with God have also been the ones where people treated each other lovingly. The opposite is also true.

That is why the relational aspect is a primary consideration for my family when choosing a church home.

And that is why I am a Christian egalitarian.

A Discussion 30 Years Ago

Filed under: Biblical Evidence, Biblical Interpretation, Complementarianism, Gender Equality, Personal Story — ronsmith at 5:30 pm on Wednesday, March 29, 2006

I sat in a discussion thirty years ago at Gordon-Conwell Seminary listening to Dr. Andrew Lincoln and Dr. Gordon Fee discuss the place of women in ministry. The discussion between egalitarianism and complementarianism had only really begun back then. The two terms were really not even used because “complementarianism” was not even a word commonly used in the English language. Even today, 99 percent of Christians in the church around the world probably know neither the term “complementarian” nor “egalitarian.” The real question has been “Is it legitimate for a woman to lead in the church of God?” At the time, Lincoln was less egalitarian than he has become. Fee, then as now, was egalitarian to the core. I find Lincoln’s drift both commendable and instructive. That drift for certain contemporary complementarians would probably be impossible since some of them have labelled women leading in the church of God as “morally rebellious.” That is a very difficult position to back down from, once one has publicly stated his case in such strong language. Lincoln drifted because he continued to stay in the text of the New Testament and allow his opinions to be tested and changed. When one has labelled another as “morally rebellious,” dialog comes to an end and change becomes impossible because no one wants to be “morally rebellious.”