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
5 Comments
5 Comments:
I'm gonna have to differ with you on this one. The word we see as submit in our bibles means under-arrange. We mostly know what this means, but we need a practical application to what this means. But notice that Paul provides this.
How a wife should under-arrange (5:22-24)
How a husband should under-arrange (5:25-30)
How a child should under-arrange (6:1-3)
How a parent should under-arrange (6:4)
How a slave should under-arrange (6:5-8)
How a master should under-arrange (6:9)
So we see that how under-arranging takes place is very much role dependant. So on the outside it appears that a hierarchy emerges in these role-relationships, but in reality it is not so simple.
Hierarchy is dependent on authority, but in the text, the husband is not given any authority that the wife doesn't have. The parent is given authority that the child doesn't have. The master does have authority over the slave but this authority is not from God. So the only hierarchy is the parent/child relationship. Verse 21 strips away all God established authorities other than the parent/child relationship.
Can you find for me where the husband is given authority over the wife in these verses? I can't find it.
Lyle, I appreciate your voicing your objections. I'll do my best to reply as briefly as possible.
I wasn't able to find a working definition in your comments for “under-arrange” as you are using it, but it seems that you have in mind a voluntary cooperation between believers without regard to authority, i.e., in the absence of any scriptural command for one person, by virtue of role, to yield to another. I'm trying to think of scriptural examples of this sort of relationship. Perhaps one elder on a church council yielding to the collective wisdom of the group? Or a husband yielding to his wife's strong preference? Or, thirdly, one woman yielding to the counsel of her peer, a friend in the church? The first two possibilities really don't work, however, if we are talking not about inconsequential matters (what color the new sanctuary carpet, or drapes for the home), but solemn matters of faith and godliness. In such cases, the lone, dissenting elder, or the husband, has the prior scriptural duty to stand for what is right, come what may, as the Lord gives him strength. In the third possibility, authority still plays a role: both women, if married, are to be subject (as I am arguing) to their husbands; and if one is older than the other, there is the mandate of Titus 3:3-5. So in the abstract, I am having difficulty thinking of examples where (what I believe to be) your notion of “under-arrangement” maps onto Scripture. By all means, reply with your own.
This issue notwithstanding, the best test of what a biblical word means is how the Bible uses it. Amen? By my count, hupotasso appears five times in the NT outside its use in Ephesians 5. Running through them briefly:
Rom. 10:(1-)3 Paul's indictment of and sorrow for those Jews who refused to submit to God's righteousness in the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
1 Cor. 16:16 Imperative: the Corinthians are to be subject to Stephanus' household and to those who have devoted themselves to the service of the saints.
Col. 3:18-19 Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.
James 4:7 Imperative: submit yourselves therefore to God.
I Pet. 2:13 Imperative: be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors sent to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.
Do these usages really support the idea of non-hierarchical, mutual submission? With regard to both Romans and James, I find it virtually impossible to bring to mind any human interaction with God where God's authority is not relevant! The context of the Colossians passage is similar Pauline instruction to households as Ephesians – in neither text are the commands to husbands and wives reciprocal. (You say that in Ephesians, “the husband is not given any authority that the wife doesn't have,” but if this is case, why isn't the husband told to submit in turn to his wife, and why is the husband's headship over the wife not analogous to Christ's over the church?) The First Corinthians text doesn't seem to support your view either: whatever kind of yielding is in view, it is in one direction. Now, First Peter: I would have trouble identifying a more hierarchical relationship than that between a Roman emperor and his, er, subjects.
It seems from this that subjection to authority is well within the semantic range of hupotasso for Paul, James, and Peter.
As for your other comments, are you really willing to stand behind your contention that parents are given no authority that their children don't have? How would you support that biblically? How in your view are relationships between parents and children intended to function? Next (and this is a comparatively minor point) I would beg to differ with your notion that masters' actual authority over their slaves is not from God. Would such not be a “human institution” as per Peter above? And incidentally, how would you read the relevant aspects of the 4th and 10th Commandments?
I look forward to hearing again from you on this, my brother.
Hierarchy is created by placing someone in "over-arrangement". With only "under-arrangement" (i.e. to place oneself under someone else) no hierarchy is required. The concept of hierarchy is simply not in view in any of these hupotasso verses. Submission is a different topic than authority.
I figured that you would bring up the husband is head like Christ is head, but the Greek mind set of what 'head' means is not the same as what we think it means. It means 'head' as in headwaters. The headwaters are the source of water to the various streams. Also when they would perform addition they would place the sum at the top of the numbers they were adding, and call it the 'head'. This was their mindset of what 'head' meant. Nowhere do you see the idea of authority, but rather that the head is the source (containing the essence of) what is seen below. So as Christ is the source or sum of what constitutes the ekkelsia, so is the husband the source or sum of what constitutes the role of wife. No establishment of authority is being discussed in these verses.
This does not mean that no authority exists, just that these verses aren't talking about it.
head = "person in charge" is an English idiom but is not a Greek idiom.
And I kinda figured I would hear from you that kephale = "source," but not authority. It's a well-worn egalitarian argument. And so far as I can tell it is without merit.
If you believe otherwise, please cite some biblical usage, or contemporary extrabiblical usage, to support your claim that "head" means source but not also authority.
For my part, I will point you back to the unambiguous words of Paul in Eph 5:23. If the husband is only a "headwater," then Christ is also only a headwater vis-a-vis His body, the church - its source of (new) life but in no sense its Lord. Would any professed Christian really wish to defend this?
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