Susanna Krizo

Dave, that is precisely what I just asked as well. If Eph 5 speaks of marital love, then “one flesh” must mean the fleshly union of the husband and wife, AND the church and Christ. But what does the Bible actually say? “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved (agape) the church and gave himself for her.” “So husbands ought to love (agape) their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.” If this text speaks of eros, then the husband is said to love himself with eros-love for it is this kind of love that he is told to love his wife with. NN mentioned that authority is “nourishing” alluding to v. 29, but he missed something crucial: it talks about THE MAN’S BODY, not the woman’s. I.e. the man is said to nourish and cheris his own body and that is the kind of consideration he should show his wife, not that his authority should be “nourishing,” unless of course we want to argue that the text gives the man authority over himself, who then becomes subject to his own authority. Further the text says, “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones,” which is directly from Gen 2 in which the woman is created from the man and the man says she is of his flesh and bones. This describes unity of origin, i.e. the church finds its origin from Christ just as the woman finds her origin from the man. And it is here that we find the key to the whole question: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” The church was created of the flesh and bones of Christ when he left his father and came to be joined to his wife, as the woman was created of the flesh and bones of the first man and men leave their fathers and mothers to be joined to their wives. “One flesh” describes the coming together of two, not necessarily physically, for although a man and woman become one through sex, they spend most of their time as separate individuals outside of the bedroom and yet, they are always considered to belong to each other.