I can’t think of many things more personal than digging into people’s relationship with their husband or wife. Seriously, people have very strong views on how marriage should work, and there is a truckload of emotion due to past experiences both good and bad. Everybody asking this question ultimately has to say who they think is the boss and calls the shots. We can make it sound more deep and thought provoking, but that is the bottom line. Even people who say, “no one is the boss”, are still saying that there are two co-bosses (that sounded much better in my head before I wrote it down). From Promise Keepers to stay at home dads, from women’s lib’ers to the Amish, you have to admit that the church has been all over the board on this one.
In the next few posts, we will attempt to look at the key Scriptures involved in this discussion, and see that it is intertwined into the discussion about female pastors and women in authority that we left unanswered from the 1 Timothy 2 passage. I am going to begin with the New Testament and work backwards on this one, and Ephesians 5:22-33 has to be one of the most debated New Testament passages on marriage. Paul begins by addressing the wives first in 22-24, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
In this passage, Paul compares the relationship of husband and wife to the relationship between Jesus and the church. In doing so, he creates a new term to describe this called “headship”. In the Greek, the word for head is the same one (kephale) that is used for people’s literal heads, but here it is clearly taking on a figurative meaning. The million dollar question is, “What is the figurative meaning of headship?” There are two main views in the church on the figurative meaning: 1) authority: in the same way we can say that a leader is the “head” of a group, this view maintains that the husband has been given the role of authority in the marriage; 2)source: in the same way that we can say a lake or underground water supply is the “source” of a river, this view sees headship as the responsibility of the husband to provide encouragement, nourishing, and care for the wife, and has nothing to do with authority.
Paul gives this same advice to married couples in his letter to the Colossian church in Colossians 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.” Before even dealing with the concept of headship, we need to observe that in both passages Paul starts with the command for “wives, submit to your husbands”. He never gives this command for husbands to submit to wives, so the term “submit” must be defined. You can do a fancy Greek word study and come up with the astounding conclusion that “submit” means to “submit” Mind blowing, I know. To submit is to voluntarily place yourself under the authority of another, and was originally used in Greek as a military term of placement under a leader. Often, this word is translated as “be subject” and has connotations of “yield, subordinate, and arrange under” (the Greek word is actually in 5:21 of Ephesians for submit).
No matter what we say about “headship” in our next post, there is still going to be this command about submission. I have heard the following thoughts on this: 1) Paul commands them in 5:21 to “submit to one another”, and he does this to establish that all relationships should be mutual submission; 2) Paul is merely addressing what each one struggles with (women with submitting and men with love) but both are applicable for husband and wife (both need to love and submit). 3) this was a temporal command (not timeless) based on the culture of their day and was intended to be phased out as they understood their identity in Christ (just like Paul never says “Don’t have slaves” in the New Testament); and finally 4) Paul is establishing roles within marriage with the wife “submitting” to her husband’s authority.
I have to be honest here and say that the fourth option seems the most straight forward and requires the least amount of “explanation”, but that doesn’t mean that it is the correct option. Once we cover headship next, we must bring these two concepts together, and see how they fit together contextually. Ultimately we are all submitted to God and under His “headship”, but we shouldn’t use that as a cheesy way to get out of addressing the practical question of roles within marriage. Until I start having babies, God has clearly made man and woman different and has different roles for each. Whether that involves authority or not remains to be firmly established as we continue. Would it be really tasteless of me now to insert a husband/wife joke here? On second thought…
The Bible Nerd 