True---but in the New Covenant we are "...neither male nor female..." (Gal. 3:28) and we are "chosen" to be "a royal priesthood" (1Pet 2:9) so just as the "bride" is a metaphor for men and women alike, wouldn't the "priesthood" be a metaphor which includes both men and women too? Am I missing something?
BTW: Of course I could be wrong, but I have thought that "bride" can represent the whole body of Christ. What verses indicate it is speaking of an individual? I think it can represent individuals too, but I can't think of any scriptures to support that thought.
Yeah, we all agree that in the New Covenant the priesthood metaphor applies to both men and women. We are just stating that it is a POSSIBLY confusing metaphor since some people will think of the fact that in the Old Covenant only men were priests.
And the same goes for the bride metaphor. We agree that the bride image represents ALL believers, but we were simply saying that it might be a difficult metaphor for some people to grasp since a bride is technically 1 individual person.
Same thing for 'body.' We know the 'body of Christ' metaphor represents all Christians, but it's sorta hard to picture how a bunch of individuals can collectively be 1 body, let alone the body of another person (Christ).
In other words, all these metaphors are used of the same group (the collective church), but so many different metaphors are used b/c they all have limitations.
PS.. thanks all for continued feedback. I'm presenting these for discussion again on Sunday evening (the first round of discussion was fruitful)
