or, Who Is the Seed of the Woman?
The third century North African church father Cyprian, who served as bishop of Carthage (in modern day Tunisia), made major theological contributions to topics like church unity, the doctrine of apostolic succession, and the sin of schism. One of his most famous quotes is the line “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.” While I believe that that this sentiment has been well preserved in some traditions, for example the Roman Catholic tradition, I think on the other hand that it sounds completely foreign if not heretical to American evangelical sensibilities. Perhaps this would be for no reason other than that most of us couldn’t think of a place in the Bible that explicitly says this. Can this proposition be sustained biblically? I argue, yes, it indeed can be.
Now Cyprian produced his own biblical arguments which you can read in his “On the Unity of the Church.” This is embedded into his broader arguments about the necessity of believers remaining united to the church, sparked by controversies in his own time. I have my own narrower biblical theological argument to develop the single proposition that the believer can rightly call the church mother in a sense, and that this is true for all believers (compare to Cyprian’s paragraph 6). So the first question to answer would be where in the Bible the metaphor of the church as a mother might be found. Three places to consider are Genesis 3:15, Romans 15:20, and Revelation 12.
In Genesis 3:15, YHWH speaking to the serpent in the garden says:
And enmity I will set between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed,
Genesis 3:15
He will cruise you on the head, but you will bruise him on the heel.
Many of us probably grew up reading this primarily as a prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ to conquer the devil once and for all on the cross. And this is true, but it is insufficient; it fails to observe the generational nature of the promise. The enmity is not just between the woman and the serpent, it is about the generations (the seed) that issues from both. But the references to seed are not simple either; like the English offspring, seed is grammatically singular in form but could refer either to a singular individual or to a collective (referred to in singular form). There is a certain hermeneutical stream would insist that Scripture must always have a ‘single meaning’ and therefore seed must refer either to a singular individual or to a plural collective but not both. But this is not how the Bible uses language; this hermeneutic arose out of Enlightenment metaphysical assumptions. Just as such a hermeneutic was foreign to interpretation prior to the 18th century, it will inevitably become foreign again to interpretation after the 20th. Through the vast majority of interpretive history, it is well understood that the Bible uses language sometimes with multiple intentional meanings, and seed in Genesis 3:15 is such an example. Rather than providing a singular prophecy of a singular event, Genesis 3:15 provides a typological framework for understanding redemptive history.
This typological framework views history as an ongoing struggle between the children of the serpent and the children of the woman. For example, such a framework explains Jesus’ description of the those who followed the Jewish religious leaders as sons of the devil (John 8:44). In context, he contrasts this both with their physical descent from Abraham and claim of God as spiritual father (8:31, 33, 39, 41). But Abraham was given the promise of seed (Gen 12:1–3), pointing to his role in fulfilling the promise of the seed of the woman. Hence the contrast between sonship of Abraham and sonship of the devil is the same typology as the contrast of the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Similar contrasts throughout the Bible reflect this typology.
A natural question to then ask is how the promise of the seed of the woman could relate to the idea of church as mother. One connection is that Paul explicitly describes the members of the Roman church as the seed of the woman.
Now the God of peace will trample Satan under your feet in a little while. May the grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.
Romans 16:20
The reference to trampling Satan underfoot is a strong allusion to Genesis 3:15. However, Paul does not view that prophecy as completed in Christ’s work on the cross (though perhaps arguably as guaranteed by Christ’s work on the cross), but as something that God would accomplish soon through the Roman believers. This views the members of the church as the seed of the woman, and thus the members of the church as participating in the fulfillment of crushing the serpent and the serpent’s seed. This is another example of the typological understanding of history rooted in Genesis 3:15.
What remains is to identify the woman as the church; then the seed of the woman referring to the members of the church (as in Romans 16:20) would follow naturally. Revelation 12 accomplishes this.
Revelation 12 describes John’s vision of the woman and the dragon, which he describes as a great sign visible in the heavens. The woman is described as clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet (vv. 1–2), pointing in some way to a sort of universality. That she is crowned in 12 stars points either to the twelve tribes of Israel or to the twelve apostles, or quite likely both. That she was pregnant already raises the possibility of connecting her to the promise of the seed of the woman. Her adversary is introduced as a great fiery dragon, with apocalyptic references to seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns suggesting connections to Daniel (beyond our scope today). The woman gives birth to a child who will shepherd the nations with a rod of iron (v. 5), which would be Jesus as a fulfillment of the Davidic covenant (cf. 2 Sam 7; Psalm 2), confirmed in his being taken up to God on his throne. The woman flees into the wilderness to survive a time to tribulation (v. 6); this helps to distinguish the woman from any individual woman like Mary. Later verses expound on this time of tribulation (vv. 13–18), but perhaps what is most important to note is that the woman’s children are described as those who keep God’s commandments and have the testimony of Jesus (v. 17). Indeed, this is consistent in that the woman and her children persist after Christ’s ascension.
Already the description of the woman exhibits strong ties to the promise of the seed of the woman. This is confirmed in the identification of the dragon as the serpent of old, the devil himself (v. 9). The description of the dragon taking down with him a third of the stars of heaven (v. 4) and fighting with Michael and the angels until he is cast out of heaven (vv. 7ff.) provide the biblical basis for Christian ideas of the demons as a fallen third of the angels, the mythology behind Milton’s description of the demons in hell in Paradise Lost and similar cultural depictions. In so doing the typological idea of the seed of the serpent is used to refer to all evil beings in the biblical universe, showing both sides of the promise of Genesis 3:15 fulfilled in the events described in Revelation 12.
Revelation 12 then depicts biblical history–at least from about the birth of Christ on–in an overall snapshot. This woman, drawing on the theology of Genesis 3:15, is the mother of all the godly, and in this sense she can be called the church, the collective people of God of all time. Modern distinctions between Israel and the church notwithstanding, the Bible’s own language and imagery points toward this unified view of the church as a collective singular existing in a singular storyline from the promise of Genesis 3:15 to ultimate culmination in Revelation. While such a distinction between Israel and the church can help make sense of certain shifts in redemptive history between Old and New Testaments, read together the Bible does not draw a strong distinction within the people of God (indeed, the same word ἐκκλησία used in the New Testament to describe the church simply means congregation or assembly and is frequently used to describe Israel in the Septuagint). What we mean by church as mother is the abstraction of this assembly of all the redeemed from Adam to Jesus to the end of this age. This points to the church (perhaps in a slightly different sense than you are used to saying) being the mother of all those who belong to God throughout history.
Practically it should be clear that this does not mean a particular organizational structure is the only group that is truly Christian. Rather, it means that there is a universal, catholic community to whom all Christians belong. Christians are a family and have a true spiritual unity with each other. That so much of Revelation 12 is portrayed under tribulation suggests a reason that perhaps this unity may not always be visible, but how true Christians could even under tribulation refuse to identify with the church is foreign to biblical description. A practical ramification of the idea of church as mother is that Christians should not view themselves primarily in individualistic ways, or even their Christianity and conversion as primarily individual concerns. The corporate, covenant nature of the church as seen as a single family demands a certain attitude toward the community that shuns schism, unnecessary division, unnecessary privileging of individual preferences, a lack of connection to the past and church history, and biblicist methods of theology and interpretation that privilege an individual’s interpretive work over the church’s accrued theological and interpretive traditions.
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