Wife Beating and the Idea of Revelation

Revelation presupposes three things — a revealer, a recipient, and a message with an accompanying hermeneutic. There is one who speaks, there are the ones spoken to, and there is the message along with the medium that carries that message. That medium would include all the created world, with its atmosphere and sound waves, papyrus, paper, computer screens, ink, toner, ones and zeros, and . . . a hermeneutic. How many times did Jesus tell us that the one with ears should hear?

It is important to get the hermeneutic right. To illustrate how important this hermeneutic is (illustrated by two different versions of it, two distinct theologies of revelation) let us compare two very angular texts with regard to women. The first is from the Koran and the second from Exodus.

[Husbands] “are the protectors and maintainers of their [wives] because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient and guard in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. As to the women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them first, refuse to share their beds, spank them, if they return to obedience, seek not against them means of [annoyance]: for Allah is Most High, Great” (Surah 4:34).

“And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her” (Ex. 21:7–8).

The passage from the Koran instructs a husband on the process required in pious wife-beating. Begin with admonition, and then move on to a refusal to have sex with her. If that doesn’t work, then corporal punishment may be applied. And the modern world says eeeek, recoiling, and rightly so.

But the modern world also recoils from Exodus, thinking it just a different monstrosity from the ancient world, but another monstrosity nonetheless. But this is where our confusions about the hermeneutic comes in.

The passage from Exodus concerns concubinage. If a Hebrew man indentured himself, he was to “go out” after a period of six years. The only way his slavery could become permanent after that point was if he himself desired it because he loved his master. His ear was then pierced with an awl and his status was fixed (Ex. 21:5-6). But if a daughter was sold into concubinage (that is, if she became a slave wife), the fact that she was a wife made it permanent. Her husband was restricted in what he could do if he became displeased with her. The text presupposes that it is the man dealing treacherously, and so if he does not want to keep her as his concubine, he is prohibited from selling her off to the Gentiles, and he is required to allow her to be redeemed out of her concubinage.

So how do the theological assumptions that under gird the hermeneutic matter? According to Islam, the Koran exists only in Arabic, and was given as an example of timeless perfection. If you have an English version of the Koran, it will likely say something like “The Meaning of the Glorious Koran” on the front because you are only being given the gist in English. It really is thought of as the Book that Was Lowered from the Sky. It admits of no development, and consequently fundamentalist applications of it will necessarily be attempts to roll back history. This means that faithfulness to the Koran requires that you duplicate whatever it is talking about. The Koran is full blown perfection — it is not thought of as seed with a future before it.

Christians have had, from the very beginning, a very different approach to the whole topic, as seen in two things. But before noting those differences, we should note the similarity. The Bible is perfect, the very breath of God. The Bible is like silver, refined seven times. The Bible is perfect . . . a perfect seed. But what do seeds do? What are seeds? They are agents of transformation, and an essential part of the design is for the end result to look very different from what went into the ground.

“Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Pet. 1:23).

Notice that the Word of God is described in two ways. One is that it is incorruptible seed, and seed is that which grows up into something else. “And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain” (1 Cor. 15:37). But at the same time, Peter tells us that the Word of God lives and abides forever.

The Old Testament is not a ladder we use to climb up onto the roof of the new covenant, at which point we kick the ladder away. No, the Old Testament comes with us, the way an acorn comes with the oak.

There are at least two important aspects of this. The first is an understanding of progressive revelation, and the second is our glad embrace of a veritable riot of translation activity.

Before getting to that, it is important to stop at this point and note the unfortunate existence of two Christian heresies, which threaten this kind of mature understanding of Scripture. One is the pretense of uber-maturity, the idea that we can outgrow our seed, which is ridiculous. The other is that we must preserve the seed at all costs, which means refusing to let it grow. The first would be theological liberalism and the latter would Islamic-style fundamentalism, only with a Christian veneer. The liberal takes the “progress” of the modern world for granted, detaching it from scriptural inerrancy and authority altogether. Like the Episcopal ghost in The Great Divorce, he wants progress to be untethered from the absolute Word.

In sharp contrast, the re-enactor fundamentalist says that if Exodus allows for concubinage, then let’s get us some concubines! Both these responses will be disastrous, and reveal a deep problem in the realm of interpretation and application.

The Koran was given in the course of one man’s lifetime, and the nature of that revelation given requires those who submit to it to freeze the meaning of that moment in time. There are of course Muslims who do not do this, but we call them moderate because they have been Westernized. In this instance, this is nothing but a sly code for Christianized.

The Bible is actually a library of books, spanning two thirds of all human history. In fact, just the first book of the Bible, Genesis, spans a significant portion of all human history. The life of Joseph at the end of the book is as close to the life of Charlemagne as it is to the life of Adam, created at the beginning of that book.

Moreover, that revelation is given to mankind in two different kinds of deficiency. The first is that man was created to grow up into dominion, but did not begin as a mature race. The second is that man rebelled against God, and so the revelation that God gave us after that point was revelation that was given into the chaos caused by our disobedience. The Christian view is that God accommodated us in our immaturity and, depending on the issue, accommodated us in certain imperfect and/or sinful institutions — think polygamy, divorce, concubinage. Jesus expressly says that the laws given concerning divorce were given in order to restrain man’s sinfulness, not ratify that sinfulness (Matt. 19:8). God placed restrictions on the (pre-existing) blood avengers in order to grow us up out of that system. He did this by requiring the civil magistrate to exact strict justice (eye for eye) in order to unplug the power cord of the blood avengers who, if they were not watched, would not mind taking a life for an eye.

Given all this, and given the promises of a coming Messiah who would transform everything, it is not surprising that Christians have been comfortable with that resultant transformation. We have often been more comfortable with it practically than we have been theoretically, but it is undeniable that we are very comfortable in how our customs differ markedly from David’s. I don’t know anybody who paid a dowry of foreskins, and I’ll bet his music would sound to me like snake charmer music. Christians go out into the world expecting the future to look very different than it was in “Bible times.” This is a reflex with us, and it is a most proper reflex.

This is seen in many ways, but one of the most striking is the passion that Christians have for translation. There are about 7,000 extant languages in the world, and a major part of Christian missionary work consists of getting the entire Bible into the languages of the group being evangelized. There is more that I will have to say about this subsequently, but the more passionate a Christian is about the Word of God, the more he wants to see it take another shape, in another language, among another people. The tree grows, and each new translation is a leaf out at the periphery. We reject the idea that faithfulness requires cutting the tree down so that we may sit quietly on the stump, counting how many of the tree rings were in Aramaic.

But like I said, more on translation later.