when scripture has stretch marks
a Mother's Day reflection on the "altogether grotesque" maternal metaphors of the bible
Being a mother makes me a better scholar.
This week, I have been writing a dissertation chapter on Romans 6-7. I am exploring Paul’s ideal masculinity through his portrait of the baptised believer living in the reality of Christ’s resurrection. In order to do so, I am analysing the Wretch of Romans 7 as a foil for that masculine ideal. It’s been a productive week of writing, and one of my favourite chapters so far. To the point that I am now well over my word count and way past the deadline to turn this in to my supervisor. Over the past couple of months, I have fallen head-over-heels in love with Romans 6-7.
I am fascinated by Paul’s shocking, visceral, and paradoxical language in this passage. He writes about a slavery that leads to freedom, weapons that commit life, and offering your limbs for justice.
The metaphors are so scandalous in this passage, that many scholars point to verse 19 as Paul’s apology for such vulgar language: “I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh.”
If you read Romans 6-7 and pay attention to the gutsy, fleshly, and sensual language in this section—often obscured and tamed in English translations— you may imagine Phoebe reading to a room full of flushed cheeks and furrowed brows.
The work of my thesis is to uncover the scandal of Paul’s language and explore its gendered implications.
This is exemplified in a text that I sent to my dad this week:
“Romans is so much sexier than everyone wants it to be!”
At this point, you might be asking: what does this have to do with motherhood?
Well, this week, I was researching a particularly indecent metaphor in Romans 7:4-5:
4 In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our limbs to bear fruit for death.
The immediate context of this passage spices things up. The analogy that Paul uses before these verses references a married man and woman. The illustration goes like this: a woman is bound to the law when she is married to a man, so she is considered adulterous if she has sex with someone else. On the other hand, if her husband dies, she is freed from the law that bound her to him, and she can remarry. The word for “marriage” in this passage is literally “under a man” (ὕπανδρος). In fact, the whole passage is rife with patriarchal language of ownership, belonging, and rulership.
Remember, you can take Paul out of the 1st century. But you can’t take the 1st century out of Paul.
But here’s where Paul takes a lurid turn: Christ becomes the husband in this analogy, and we become the submissive woman “under” him. And not just metaphorically. The death of Christ has given the believer freedom from Sin’s ownership, so that the believer and Christ’s resurrected body may “belong to another” (in the husband-and-wife-kinda-way) so that they “may bear fruit for God.” Here, we’re under Christ to give God life-babies. On the other hand, our sexual immorality when we were under Sin, gave birth to death-babies.
Quite the picture, Paul.
Now, like a good little scholar, here’s a caveat: this isn’t the majority reading of this metaphor. Although I do have some big names on my side (ever heard of Robert Jewett?),1 it is the consensus that this metaphor is not as sexy as it seems. Here are the SparkNotes of a counterargument (see Gaventa for a more thorough treatment):2
Paul shifts from the second-person plural to the first-person plural in this verse.
Paul elsewhere uses karpos to mean “produce” (6:21-22). (It is worth mentioning that I thoroughly disagree. I argue that karpos in 6:21-22 absolutely has an embodied metaphor in mind, especially with the immediate context of sexual immorality!)
Paul never uses karpos to refer to “children of the faith.”
Now, I don’t think these counters are good enough reason to ignore the clear analogy that Paul is drawing here. For the sake of time and space, I am going to spare you all the nitty-gritty details of my exegetical argument. But, as always, feel free to come to your own conclusions based on the textual evidence.
As I was researching different interpretations of 7:4, I came across a conclusion that had me reflecting on my motherhood and scholarship. When I opened C.E.B. Cranfield’s commentary on Romans, I found that he strongly disagreed with the reading of this verse as a birthing metaphor. His primary reason for rejecting that interpretation is that this reading is—and I directly quote— “altogether grotesque.”3
Altogether grotesque.
Grotesque??
That phrase has haunted me over the past couple of days.
When I started seminary, my daughter was five months old. I remember weeping as I tried to study for my master’s classes in a postpartum, sleep deprived haze. I remember my nipples cracking and bleeding in the middle of class. I remember feeling alone as the only mother in my program, while none of my professors or classmates could relate to my embodied reality. All I could do was ask for another extension, more sympathy, and some understanding when I didn’t do as well on that test as I wanted. Gratefully, I was given these graces at every turn (shout out to Denver Seminary).
One of my first classes in seminary was a class on the Pauline epistles. At this point in my career, I was convinced I would go into Gospels or early Christianity—like many of my female peers in New Testament studies. Never Paul! Never ever.
Ha.
But, one day, we started to read 1 Thessalonians 2 aloud in class. We came across this passage:
“But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us” (vv.7b-8)
I started weeping in front of everyone.
Okay, so this wasn’t incredibly rare. In fact, I’m pretty sure I became known on campus as the weepy liberal. But that’s beyond the point.
As a nursing mother, I was absolutely struck by this metaphor.
I would go on to write a paper about this passage, arguing for an echo to Isaiah 49:15: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Most scholars (on the shoulders of Abraham Malherbe) attribute this metaphor to a commonly used analogy among contemporary philosophers.4 However, the examples that Malherbe gives are always analogies or illustrations, and they tend to have a negative perspective of the nursing role. Beverly Gaventa, in her brilliant book Our Mother Saint Paul, diverges from Malherbe’s argument and offers, instead, Numbers 11:12 as a background to Paul’s metaphor.5 In this passage, Moses is complaining about the Israelites (as he is wont to do):
“Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors?”
These explanations didn’t do it for me. I couldn’t see how Paul would be influenced by some cynical philosophers or bemoaning prophets. Based on my own embodied experience of nursing a child, these connections didn’t cut it. Instead, I saw the metaphor as a joyous, self-sacrificial, and theologically rich image. One that, I argue, Paul took right from Mother God herself.
This paper launched my career in Biblical studies. I was invited to present it at the Society for Biblical Literature conference as a masters student. This was rare. So rare, in fact, that I had a fellow panellist tell me that I “wasn’t allowed to be there.” I shrugged in response— “well, they invited me.”
(You guessed it! That fellow panellist was a man.)
I don’t think this paper was exceptional. In fact, it was rejected for publication (did I only submit it to one journal? Yes. Do I need to revise and submit it again? Also, yes. Eventually.) But I do think that I had the audacity to allow my experience of motherhood to influence my reading of the text. And this helped me to make a connection that hasn’t been made before. A connection that, if Cranfield were to read it, may be seen as “altogether grotesque.”
A God with leaky breasts and bleeding nipples?
Grotesque.
A believer giving birth to a resurrected life?
Grotesque.
A pregnant mother interpreting scripture through her embodied experience?
Grotesque.
It is Mother’s Day today. To celebrate, I will be skipping church and going to the office to get some writing done. Every writer-mother’s dream.
My Mother’s Day wish is for more mothers to read the Bible from their experience of motherhood.
I want breastmilk and afterbirth to seep through the pages of scripture.
I want a saviour with stretch marks and cellulite.
I want an “altogether grotesque” gospel.
Jewett, Romans, 434.
Gaventa, Romans. See her section on Romans 7:4.
Cranfield, Romans, 1:337.
Abraham J. Malherbe, “‘Gentle as a Nurse’: The Cynic Background to I Thess II,” Novum Testamentum 12, no. 2 (1970): 203–17.
Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018).