Adultery As Wound, River, Moonshot
Mapping Out Future Reflections on the 7th Commandment
Adultery as Depicting a Past, and Creating a Future. Part of a continuing commentary on the Decalogue.
Adultery and God’s Relation to the World
The commandment regarding adultery brings into view something Patrick Miller observed long ago regarding the Decalogue: it pulls the whole of the Old Testament into view, and is expanded into the cracks of the whole of the canon. Throughout the Old Testament, we see narratives, prophecy, histories—in all of it, we find qualified arguments about what drives murder, of how idolatry appears.
But of the commands pertaining to humans, none take on the cosmic dimensions, arguably, that adultery does. For adultery, more than any other act, characterizes infidelity to God in the Old Testament1. In the least PG passage in the entire Old Testament, Ezekiel compares Israel to two sex workers who longed after the well-endowed Assyrians. But more familiarly, Hosea is a book-length parable about the love of God for a people who are routinely—habitually, even—unfaithful to God. The language permeates Exodus, James, 1 John: if the relation to God by God’s people takes the shape of a binding covenant, then only an intimate relational image will do.
But let us ask whether this is more than just an intimate metaphor.
If the attributes and relations we use for God are not just language, but true images, then the language of adultery tells us something about how three aspects—our bodies, God’s own being as God, and our destiny as God’s creatures—are all tied together. What I mean is that the language of adultery does not work from our experience of sexuality up to God, but in reverse: our own sexual infidelity tells a story of a deep wound between God and the world, an ongoing river of that wound in the world, and finally, a vain attempt to escape that wound.
Paul, in his letters, tells this story in two different ways. We see this relation teased out most obviously when he chastises churches for visiting prostitutes, writing that they are joining the Holy Spirit’s temple to sexual immorality2. It seems obvious to Paul (in a way that it does not always seem to us) that sex has a metaphysical dimension, that the movements of the body depend on how they fit within the contours of God’s relation to the world. But we see this notion reflected in a different way, and in less conjugal terms, when writes to the Romans that they are “living sacrifices”. For there too, the sacrifice of our ongoing lives—not just in pleasure, but in discipline— images the way that God’s relation to the world works3.
Our bodies, in their intimate relations, reflect not only the way that the created order is meant to persist, but the way that God desires, the way that God invites creation into communion: an ecstatic elevation which transfigures the person. This is the mystery that Paul evokes, of Christ and the church, of marriage as a joining that is sundered only with great pain, of union that cannot be entirely dissolved but stays with us: in our deep histories, our commands to one another, our wisdom about relationships.
If we claim that the human is in the image of God, then it follows that the intimacies of human life are not things we hold apart from God, but mean something about that life with God. We saw in the previous commandment that natality—our entrance into creation—mirrors that relation: how we relate to parents says something about how we live well within the world below the cloud of the mountain of God.
In adultery, we enter deeper into this mystery which began with the commands of natality and murder: that our bodily life is not a matter of indifference, and is not just of concern to God. The claim is stronger than that: that God’s own status as God is of concern to how our bodies proceed into the world.
Moving Forward
In the next installments on this commandment, we’ll take our time, moving through three images of what adultery means if our bodies are of such paramount importance here: adultery as a wound, a river, a flight. Adultery, we are told by Jesus, encompasses more than the body, but desire, the mind, the stories we tell, and what we do to build out a world capable of sustaining that adultery. Such a command deserves our attention.
Book Club Updates
Our next book club time will be the next part of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. We had a fantastic group of eight animated readers last time, and I’m looking forward to what spending time with these rich chapters will yield.
Due to a schedule conflict, we will meet at 6:30-8 p.m. CST, on Monday, February 17th, in two weeks time. We’ll be reading chapters 8-13, and I’ll send out some initial thoughts to all supporting subscribers in advance of our meeting to get us ready. This section will help us to turn the corner from MacIntyre’s diagnosis of our moral fragmentation to a possible antidote, though not one without some questions worth posing to it.
If you’d like to join us, consider doing a month trial membership!
There is an important caveat that Thomas Aquinas reminds us of: that all human language regarding God works by analogy. See Summa Gentiles 1:33, among other places. Let’s take something like when Scripture says that God is jealous, for example. It works analogously: attributes of God work infinitely in ways that they don’t for humans, but because God is without need, jealous isn’t a foundational attribute, but works within the framework of those attributes which belong to God’s essence. Jealousy, an attribute which indicates that a person is pulled around by another, and so, it doesn’t work for God like humans, who has no need and thus can’t be pulled around. Jealousy is then how we talk about the purifying intensity of God’s love: that God is like none other, making God’s “jealousy” illuminating of our folly more than indicating something about God’s deficiency.
1 Corinthians 5-6
Romans 12:1
Such potent, challenging and directing thoughtsbefore I sleep.