Cross Examine the Sentence

Room 212 smells like dry erase marker at eight forty on a Saturday morning, which is when the debate team meets, because it is the only hour in the week nobody else wants the room.

Roz has coached here nineteen years. She has a method the kids call the box: write the claim in the middle, then come at it from four sides. Definition. Evidence. Warrant. Impact. You keep going until either the claim is standing or it is not. Kids who learn the box win rounds. Kids who learn the box also lose the ability to hear a sentence without testing it, which is a thing parents occasionally call her about.

There are six of them in the room this morning. Two on the floor. One eating dry cereal out of a plastic container with his fingers. They are supposed to be running a case about municipal water rights and they have been running it badly for twenty minutes.

Priya is fifteen and is the best natural cross examiner Roz has had in a decade, which is to say she is relentless and has not yet worked out that this is a gift rather than a personality flaw.

"Can I ask something that is not the topic," Priya says.

"Go ahead."

"At my grandmother's funeral the pastor said the church is the bride of Christ." She says it flat, the way she says everything, and then she waits the exact half second she has been trained to wait. "Is that true, or is it just something people say."

Roz goes to the board out of nineteen years of habit. She writes the sentence in the middle of the box. And then she stands there with the marker in her hand.

Definition. Bride of whom, which church, in what sense.

Evidence. She knows there are verses. She could not name one under time pressure and both of them know it.

Warrant. This is the one she cannot even begin. Why that image. What is it for.

Impact. If it is true, so what.

The cereal has stopped. Six sophomores are watching their coach not write anything, which has not happened in room 212 before.

"You don't know either," Priya says, and for once she says it gently.

Nobody has ever asked you to prove it. That is the only reason you have never had to notice that you could not. The sentence goes past at funerals and at weddings and in the third verse of a song, and you let it go past, because it feels like the sort of thing everybody else settled a long time ago and it seems late to raise a hand now.

You are standing on ground that holds, and the question you have been too embarrassed to ask has a written answer. Scripture was put in writing by people who expected it to be examined, and the Holy Spirit has never once been offended by an honest question. Nothing in the word is asking you to look away from it.

Definition: who that sentence was written to

Start where Roz would start, because it is the right place to start and because the answer is better than the question.

The sentence comes from a letter. Not from a hymn and not from a greeting card. A man named Paul is writing to a mixed congregation in a port city, and in the middle of a passage about how people in a household are to treat each other, he reaches for a comparison. He tells husbands to love their wives. And then he tells them what to measure that love against.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.Ephesians 5:25

You are inside the company that sentence is about, and it is the company Christ gave Himself up for. That is what the word says in Ephesians 5:25, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a membership process and not a temperament, who set you in that body. The love in that sentence has a whole people in view.

Now look at what the sentence is actually doing, because this is the part that gets missed. Christ and the church is not the thing being explained here. Christ and the church is the thing being explained with. It is the fixed point. Paul reaches for it the way a builder reaches for a level, and he uses it to correct something else in the room.

Which means the definition question answers itself in the grammar. The word behind church there is a crowd word. It meant a town's citizens called out into the square, and it kept meaning that: a company of people, in a city, eating together and arguing and taking care of each other badly and then better. Every time you meet it in these letters it is a plural thing. It is never one person alone.

You are one of the people that love has in view, counted in the plural along with everybody else in the room. Scripture keeps the word plural on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who joined you to the plural rather than leaving you to qualify for it on your own.

Evidence and warrant: why a covenant, and not a romance

Here is the part Roz could not start, and it is the part worth having.

Ask why that image and not another one. Paul had other pictures available and he uses them elsewhere: a building, a field, a body, a household, a flock. He reaches for this one when he wants to say something specific, and the specific thing is not feeling. It is binding.

In the world that letter was written into, a marriage covenant was the most publicly binding thing an ordinary person could enter. Witnessed. Announced. Not privately felt and not quietly revisable. Somebody stood up in front of the town and committed themselves, out loud, in advance, to a future they could not see. That is the freight the image is carrying. Christ has bound Himself, publicly and in advance, to a company of people, and He did it before that company had done anything to earn it or to spoil it.

You are held by something that was witnessed and announced, not by something that has to be felt to be in force. The word calls it a covenant and says Christ gave Himself for the church, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on it rather than the mood of it.

So let me rule out the other reading plainly, once, and then leave it alone.

It is not a romance, and it was never about you personally as somebody's beloved. Scripture never puts an individual in a private romantic relationship with Christ. If that framing has ever made you uneasy, your instinct was sound, and you can keep it. The bride language here belongs in the same family as a whole nation being called God's own people. It is about that size, and it is about that kind of commitment.

You have a place inside a promise that does not depend on being anybody's first choice. A romance is something a person has to be appealing enough for; a covenant made with a people is not, and the word says Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, corporately, before any of us were in a position to be attractive to anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who put you inside that body, and no one in it got in on their own appeal.