Violence in the Prophets

I'm currently taking an online class at Luther Seminary on the Old Testament prophets, and an ongoing theme has been the "offensive" nature of much of the prophetic texts. This week, in particular, was concerned with violence in the prophets; in particular, some of the most graphic judgment texts in the prophets uses the imagery of sexual violence (i.e., Jeremiah 13:22-27; Ezekiel 16:36-44; Hosea 2:1-23). So what does your average 21st-century evangelical feminist kid  do with these passages? Volumes could be (and have been) written on how to appropriately exegete these texts; I simply want to offer some notes on how one might proceed.

Flannery O'Connor once remarked, on the subject of teaching literature to eighth-graders, "And if the student finds that this [reading the best literature of the past] is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed." I believe that a Christian stands in a similar position with regard to Scripture - although it is not only our "taste" for God being formed by Scripture; we are also being saved by the One by whom it is inspired and to whom it testifies. We stand under these texts, because they alone tell us the truth about our situation. My horror at what their imagery evokes may remain, but I can't simply dismiss the revelatory status of these texts because they offend my sensibilities.

That said, the fact of the matter is that the Bible is an ancient text and its authors are coming from a very different place than we are. (It does not, however, follow from this that the text is ultimately inaccessible, or that we can privilege our own historical moment and dismiss Scriptural texts we dislike because they are no longer "culturally applicable.") And yes, the Bible was written in a patriarchal context: that is, it arose from the ancient Near East, in a patriarchal social order. That order (like any social order) was structured by written and unwritten codes of conduct and language that helped make human life intelligible. While we may not have reached anything like full sexual equality in our culture, we are also a long way from patriarchy, strictly speaking. Quite a bit of the Biblical language carries a force that would be intensely and acutely felt in a patriarchal culture - such as language about "loose" women - and that is felt rather differently in a post-patriarchal liberal-democratic culture like ours.

Now, I'm not a cultural relativist. I think liberal democracy is morally superior to patriarchy for a lot of reasons, not least for the dignity it affords women. But if Christians are going to be able to talk about this ancient Near Eastern text as Scripture (that is, the authoritative testimony to the revealed Word of God), we have to be willing to acknowledge that 1) patriarchal Near Eastern culture is the one that God chose for the revelation of his incarnate Word and the written testimony to Him, and therefore 2) our liberal-democratic culture, while arguably more humane, does not occupy a privileged place within history. In other words, the Christian faith is an incarnate faith, and what we have to learn about God and God's relation to the world is inseparable from the historical time and place in which God chose to reveal it. All of our conclusions about social order and intimate human relationships need to follow from the whole picture of Scripture, and that means that when we read passages that are completely alien in their apparent misogyny, we need to be willing to patiently get inside of them and poke around - while unfailingly proclaiming the whole truth of God's Word, which leaves no room for abuse, violence, or domination of anyone.