The Wedding Ring of Faith
Martin Luther on Christ, the church, and a marriage made in heaven.
There is a portrait of faith within Scripture that, to be honest, doesn’t get much traction nowadays, at least not that I see or read. To refer to the church as the Bride of Christ seems almost like a holdover from another era of church history. Whether this has to do with the radical assault on “gender norms” or “gender identity,” I can’t say; that is well beyond my ken. Whatever the case, it is to our shame that this intimate image of Christ as the bridegroom eagerly doting upon and caring for his bride has been largely left to the wayside, especially since it is a feature of some of the most affecting texts in both the Old and New Testaments. Apart from the conspicuously interpreted Song of Solomon, marital and/or wedding iconography is interwoven within several Messianic Scriptures, such as when the prophet Isaiah declares, “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isa. 62:5).
To conceive of Jesus’s salvation of sinners as a husband-to-be’s wedding day enthusiasm imbues the gospel with an effervescent thrill. The gospel’s wedding, however, is unlike our own, especially since, in this case, the Bride has little, if anything, to do with the events of her nuptials. Familiar, Westernized matrimonial components are foreign to this ceremony, in which the Bridegroom is responsible for taking care of every last detail and making every arrangement, including what the Bride is wearing. There is no need to embark on some aggravating quest to find the perfect dress, since, with Christ, all the wedding attire needed is graciously provided. An immaculate garment of spotless righteousness is given to cover the Bride’s unavoidable impurities. The unchaste wife is embraced and received, despite her egregious infidelity.
This, indeed, is the picture that best portrays the winding history of God’s people in the Old Testament. What the prophet Hosea makes explicit is the implicit and unfortunate reality of Israel’s inexorable sins. Despite the Bridegroom’s intrepid faithfulness, the Bride continues to turn away from him, embracing the passionate throes of other lovers. The scandal of the gospel, though, is that the scorned Groom is still there, ready to embrace his Bride and make her his. In so doing, he makes her righteous. Through the “wedding-ring of faith,” as Martin Luther once put it, Christ makes us his, and all that’s his becomes ours:
For Christ is God and man in one person, Who has neither sinned nor died, and is not condemned, and Who cannot sin, die, or be condemned; His righteousness, life, and salvation are unconquerable, eternal, omnipotent; and He by the wedding-ring of faith shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are His bride’s, nay, makes them His own, and acts as if they were His own, and as if He Himself had sinned; He suffered, died, and descended into hell that He might overcome them all. Now since it was such a one who did all things, and death and hell could not swallow Him up, they were of necessity swallowed up of Him in a mighty duel. For His righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, His life stronger than death, His salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its Bridegroom, from all sins, secure against death and against hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ, its Bridegroom. So He presents to Himself a glorious bride, without spot or wrinkle, cleansing her with the washing in the Word of life, that is, by faith in the Word of life, of righteousness, and of salvation. Thus He marries her to Himself in faith, in loving kindness, and in mercies, in righteousness, and in judgment, as Hosea 2[:19] says . . . Here this rich and godly Bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil and adorns her with all His good. It is now impossible that her sins should destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up in Him, and she has that righteousness in Christ her husband of which she may boast as of her own, and which she can confidently set against all her sins in the face of death and hell.1
Accordingly, to recover the gospel’s bridal imagery is to recover its essential wonder, glory, and grace. Far from an outmoded metaphor, discerning the church as Christ’s Bride endures as one of Scripture’s most affecting illustrations of unmerited and unlimited favor, reminding us that life in the household of faith isn’t a matter of morality or philosophy, but a redemptive and reconciliatory romance, in which the Groom sweeps his undeserving Bride off her feet with a love that will not let her go. This is good news, indeed.
Grace and peace to you, friends.
Martin Luther, “A Treatise on Christian Liberty with a Letter to Pope Leo X (1520),” Works: The Philadelphia Edition, Vols. 1–6 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1932), 2:321–22.