The Lydia Center Digests No. 2

The Lydia Center Digests No. 2

Title: McVay, John K. “Ecclesial Metaphor in the Epistle to the Ephesians from the Perspective of a Modern Theory of Metaphor.” PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 1994.

Keywords: Ephesians; Metaphor; Ecclesial body; Head; Ministers; Temple; Marriage; Husbands; Household Code; Christ

John McVay laments the lack of attention given to the subject of metaphor and the consequential “outmoded assumptions concerning metaphors'' in “many treatments of Pauline metaphors,” and agrees with Steve Kraftchick who “believes that the discipline of New Testament studies would benefit greatly if consideration of metaphor would move to the centre of exegesis” (1). In this work, McVay approaches ecclesial metaphor in Ephesians from the perspective of a modern view of metaphor, a methodology he developed by examining “modern perspectives on metaphor” and exploring and “appreciating their application to ecclesial metaphor in the Epistle to the Ephesians'' (2). He adopts Janet Soskice’s working definition of metaphor as “that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another” (21, Soskice). His method for evaluating metaphor “consists of three distinct tasks: 1) To determine major tenets of ‘a modern view of metaphor’; 2) To set out language and concepts for use in the evaluation of ancient metaphor; and 3) To survey treatments of metaphor (with special attention to ecclesial metaphor) in the Pauline corpus” (73). McVay identifies the “three principal ecclesial images of the Epistle to the Ephesians” as body, building/temple, and bride, and he aims to provide a “fresh study” of these “three principal ecclesial images'' using the above framework “from the perspective of a modern view of metaphor” (73). 

In McVay’s literary and exegetical treatment of “the body” found in Ephesians 4:1-16 as the first of three key ecclesial images in Ephesians, he looks to the chiastic structure of the argument and contextual indications to contend that, with the goal of a unified ecclesial body growing from Christ and up into Christ, the ascended Christ gifts the church with ministers and equips these ministers for the work of the ministry of the word, a responsibility that is not “the saints’ . . . but which is the responsibility of the gifted ones mentioned in v.11” (79). McVay suggests that “Eph. 4:11-16, then, may be seen to exhibit an ecclesial body metaphor with three sub-metaphors: 1) The ‘head,’ Christ; 2) The ‘joints’ or ‘ligaments,’ ‘ministers’ of the word; 3) The ‘parts” (μέρη), church members” (81). He reviews several arguments for the meaning of Christ as “head” as well as assesses contextual clues in Ephesians to determine that κεφαλή “includes the meaning ‘authority over,’ and is clearly associated with the significance ‘source’ or ‘origin’ (86). With this double-entendre for κεφαλή in mind, he explores in what sense Christ is head. Does κεφαλή “signify a body part . . . or is κεφαλή applied to Christ only in the sense of a title?” (86). In agreement with others as well as with the support of the framework of Eph. 4:1-16 itself, McVay reasons that designating Christ as head “as a submetaphor of the central body . . . in a way that is guarded by both the immediate and wider contexts of the epistle'' places Christ as head over all things rather than as head of an “acephalous” body, and protects against the portrayal of “the church as only a ‘torso’ or a ‘rump’” (86, appealing to the work of Heinrich Schlier). “In other words, Christ as κεφαλή is both ‘part and more than part’ of the body” (89). Άφη, McVay insists, with a look at syntax and semantics, “refers to a mediating role on the part of the gifted individuals of v. 11,” and should be employed as a physiological term” meaning “joint” or “ligament” which “may be seen to be a submetaphor of the body metaphor” (91). Listing several ways in which “ligament” functions as a submetaphor, such as support, nourishment, cohesion, or even supply, he contends that “the term . . . recall[s] the provision of ‘ministers’ by Christ (v.11)” (92). Μέρος, or “parts'' functions as the third submetaphor which refers to all the members of the church. 

McVay further supports his argument by comparing Ephesians 4:16 to Colossians 2:19; considering the body metaphor in ancient physiology; exploring the relationship between the body metaphor and other ecclesial metaphors in Ephesians (the cosmos, the temple, and the bride); surveying extra-biblical sources such as Gnostic Literature, the Qumran library, and Greek and Latin authors; and by examining the connections between the body metaphor in the Hauptbriefe, or earlier Pauline materials. McVay concludes that the “body metaphor functions in Ephesians in three distinct and yet related ways”' in which “‘unity’ finds expression--the unity of Christ and the church, the unity among church ‘members’ and the unity between church members and leaders'' (152). “The rhetorical function of the metaphor is to encourage the addressees to consider from the vantage point of a freshly-configured body metaphor, their relationship to gifted leaders provided by Christ” (153). 

The second key ecclesial image is found in Ephesians 2:19-22, the “body/temple metaphor” which, McVay says, is employed by Paul “to describe the nature of the church crafted by the work of Christ” (154). He identifies the tenor of the temple metaphor to be “the cohesion of Jews and Gentiles in the church with the vehicle being the temple imagery employed” and the “central metaphor” being the “divinely-crafted community as ‘a holy temple in the Lord’ . . . which in turn is ‘a dwelling place of God in the Spirit’” that is “surrounded by a cluster of submetaphors” (156-7). He identifies the following submetaphors and describes the tension between two views of how they should be read, “with an accent upon the past or with a view toward the future”: a) “God as Implied Builder and Occupant” of the temple; b) “The Building Materials” and the “idea that the addressees themselves form the ecclesial temple”; c) “The Foundation” who is “the apostles and prophets”; d) “The Cornerstone,” or, as he concludes, “copestone” who is Christ; e) “A Difficult Phrase: πάσα οίκοδομή” which McVay determines means “the whole structure” (158-63). 

McVay argues that this temple metaphor is not isolated “to the final verses of Ephesians 2,” and “a modern view ponders the interaction of the temple metaphor with its wider context” (165). To support his point, McVay considers the temple metaphor in the context of Ephesians 2:11-22 and in the wider context of the Epistle (167). Furthermore, he compares the ecclesial temple metaphor in Ephesians to other occurrences in the New Testament to sharpen our understanding of the temple metaphor in Ephesians and to show that “the use of imagery and concepts from the building/house/temple cluster is widespread in the NT and the literature of early Christianity” (168). Based on his comparison, he concludes that “the ‘development’ of the Pauline temple metaphor on the part of Ephesians should be judged primarily with regard to 1 Cor. 3:9b-17, a passage which...plays a significant role in shaping the building/temple metaphor of Eph. 2:19-22,” and that “the focus moves from the local congregation(s) of Corinth and their perceptions of Paul to the church as a whole and the perceptions of gentile addressees with regard to their inclusion, with Jews, in that church” (198). McVay then reviews occurances of temple metaphor in the Qumran Literature and compares and contrasts them with the imagery in Ephesians to demonstrate that “the idea of community as temple is to be found within Palestinian Judaism” and that “temple imagery does not appear to be evoked on simply an ad hoc basis but has a historical setting as data thrown up by a radical protest movement” (209, 214). Overall, McVay argues that “the temple metaphor, which could function in an exclusive way elsewhere, functions in a wholly positive and idealistic manner in Eph. 2:19-22 as a vivid metaphor of inclusion” in which Gentiles and Jews “become part of a new, living edifice which, in view of the language of demolition, functions as a radical image of replacement” (233, 232-33). 

Finally, in his examination of the third ecclesial metaphor, the nuptial metaphor found in Eph 5:21-33, he finds that the bride image continues in the overall theme of unity, “the divine plan to ‘unite all things to Christ...a theme which, in 5:21-33, is applied to ‘the smallest unit into which the church may be divided’”: marriage and family (235, including the work of J. Paul Sampley). Given that Paul begins with an invitation for Christian wives to “reflect on the church's relationship to Christ as the paradigm for their behavior” in their marriage and toward their husband, McVay contends that Paul is using a “pair of conceptual metaphors. . .: Christ is the husband; the church is the wife” (238).

This model is then “carried forward mutatis mutandis for the husbands'' to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” at which point “the author elaborates the work of Christ for the church” inasmuch as the “dues of the husband toward the wife seem, for the moment, lost to view” (238). Here, another pair of conceptual metaphors is evident: “Christ is the bridegroom; the church is the bride” (239). Paul then invites the husbands to “ponder. . . their ‘relationship’ to themselves. . . as an example of how they should treat their wives” ( 239). In Paul’s conclusion, his quotation of Genesis 2:24 fuses the “body and marital images” and draws “the equivalence, body = church = wife = flesh, with care” (240).

From the perspective of a modern view of metaphor, McVay argues that the “tenor” of the bridal metaphor is the human marriage and the “vehicle” is the relationship between Christ and the church; however, verses 25b-27 “possess something of an independent identity,” in which, rather than being a description of the husband’s role, “they constitute ‘a long statement about Christ and the church’” (249, pace Witherington’s work). The metaphor is ambiguous in that it’s difficult to determine which is the tenor and which is the vehicle as “each seems to become ‘the image of the other’ and the confusion is compounded...by individual terms doing double-duty” (250). However, “such ambiguity,” McVay posits, “may. . .provide a clue to the function of the metaphor in this context” (250). McVay also examines other occurrences of bridal imagery in the Old Testament, New Testament, and Gnostic Literature with the aim to further clarify “the nature and function of the bridal/marriage metaphor in Ephesians” (254). 

In considering the overall storyline of the bride metaphor in Ephesians, McVay asks a series of questions: “1) To what extent is nuptial imagery employed? 2) Against what wedding sequence should the passage be measured? 3) In what way is such a wedding sequence reflected and/or abrogated?” (283-84). McVay concludes that the answer to the first question lies in determining which phrase or terms specifically in verses 25-27 are referring “either to the bridal relationship between Christ and the church or to both the theological relationship between Christ and Christian and the bridal relationship between Christ and the church,” an evaluation he believes is “aided” by “considering what marriage patterns the author of Ephesians may have been reflecting in the development of the nuptial imagery,” at which point he reviews Jewish and Hellensitic nuptial patterns (288). In answering his third question, McVay discusses the tension of inaugurated eschatology in the passage by exploring the ways in which the bridal metaphor “emphasiz[es] the present intimacies of the Christ church relationship while retaining a future element” (303). His solution to this tension is Paul’s “two uses of marriage as metaphor”: “the divine marital relationship between Christ and the church” and the “(in some sense future) wedding between Christ and the church” (303). 

McVay ends his section on the bridal metaphor with a discussion of its contextual function. He argues that the bridal metaphor functions not primarily in instructing wives in their roles or as a way to “formulate an ethic which reflects the exalted Christ,” but as an admonition to Christian husbands (306). McVay proposes that the emphasis Paul places on the husband may be related to his “perception of the addressees and their situation” (307). With this understanding in view, Paul’s “concentration on one’s ‘own’ wife (or husbands),” and “earlier parenesis in the letter,” McVay suggests that sexual purity and adultery is a concern in connection with “spiritual adultery” (308, 310). “The author of Ephesians,” McVay argues, “makes the same assumption, that there is a link between the spiritual relationship between God (Christ) and the covenant people and the loyalty of those people to their spouses” (311). “The metaphor brings the covenant-loyalty of the divine bridegroom to bear upon the marital fidelity of Christian husbands” (311). In considering verses 25-27, McVay maintains that “husbands are not invited to emulate the specific actions of the divine bridegroom” but are to “recognize themselves. . .as the recipients of these attentions” which, in “the ambiguity of the language,” then allows husbands to not only identify themselves as the bride (the church), but also to identify “themselves with their wives” (312). 

McVay concludes his thesis by stating that “the author ‘mixes’ the metaphors and invites a synoptic understanding of the church as ‘body,’ ‘building/temple,’ and ‘bride’” through the major themes of Christ’s central role, unity, the church universal (not just local), “a nuanced eschatological expectation,” and “the consistent rejection. . . of negative associated commonplaces which attach to each metaphor in contemporary literature” (318).

AE