Wives, Husbands, and Ephesians 5:21ff
"...submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord ... Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ... Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right ... Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling ... Masters ... stop your threatening..."
Every once in a while we students of God's Word get those "Aha!" moments when something that was hiding in plain sight just jumps up and grabs our attention. Today, I had one, when reading this post. You can go there, where the author will do a better job with the text than I'm about to do, or you can stay here and muddle through it with me ... Still here? OK, then.
My little epiphany was nothing more than being shown how the "mutual submission" interpretation of this passage by Christian egalitarians (as with these folks; tread carefully) simply falls apart logically. "Mutual Submission" is the idea that there is no hierarchy in marriage, no sense in which husbands have authority over their wives. I once believed it, and taught it. Coming around (praise God) to where I finally saw the violence I was doing to Scripture, I turned away from egalitarianism beginning several years ago.
In light of (much!) other biblical teaching, I came to understand that Ephesians 5:21-6:9 could not be advocating anti-hierarchy, but I did not have a concise reply to the argument that 5:21 is the guiding principle for the entire passage, and therefore that any seemingly hierarchical teaching such as that in 5:23 must be read against verse 21, and negated.
Consider this: egalitarians eagerly use verse 21 to combat the hierarchy of verses 22-33, but would not think of also applying it to relationships between parents and children, and masters and slaves. Is there any textual reason why verse 21 is the guiding principle for marriages, but not these other relationships? Not at all. Why, then, do they apply it in the one case but not the others? No reason at all, unless special pleading is a reason, that is. Because they want wives not to be in subjection to their husbands, even though they stay on the side of sanity in recognizing that parents shouldn't be in subjection to their toddlers.
"Mutual submission" is of course unworkable in reality, as some of my wiser congregants tried to tell me when I began advocating it from the pulpit some years ago. Everybody submitting to everybody is really just another way of saying that nobody has to submit to anybody, because each erstwhile "authority" must submit to all others. (If you don't believe me, think through a few examples and send me a comment)
I knew this, of course. I knew that the passage says yes, everyone is to practice submission, and here's how: wives to their husbands, children to their parents, etc. Husbands don't get off the hook, of course; as addressed elsewhere, there's still the matter of submitting to pastors, elders, government officials and employers. Nothing new here for me. But what struck me today was how simply the Verse-21-Trumps-All interpretation can be answered: if it undoes the seemingly hierarchical language about wives and their husbands, it also undoes every other authoritative relationship in the passage. All or nuttin'. Even egalitarians don't believe that families are to be democracies.
posted by Aaron @ 6:32 PM
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