Balancing Marriage

The Hierarchicalist View

FOLLOWING ON FROM OUR STUDY of kephalē in 1 Corinthians 11:3, we will continue on the theme of how we might understand Paul’s theology of the husband as the head of the wife, as he describes in Ephesians 5 and 1 Corinthians 11:3, as well as looking at the New Testament perspective on marriage. In the course of the discussion, we will examine the household codes (where husbands and wives are given instruction), but because the idea of “the husband as the head” is such a controlling metaphor within evangelical perspectives on marriage, we will focus particularly on this. The wider teaching on marriage in the New Testament will aid us in our understanding of what Paul might have been referring to in 1 Corinthians 11:3 as well as shedding some light on how Paul’s understanding of Christ as the head of the church might shape his view of the role of the husband. I will conclude with some thoughts on how this might be applied today.

Evangelicals claim that the Bible is their key text for ethical decisions and patterns of living. However, if we were honest, we would all admit that we pay attention to some parts of the Bible and ignore others. No one is immune to cherry picking, confirmation bias, and being deaf to the commandments that we simply find too hard to follow. It is a challenge, therefore, to listen to what the Bible says to us rather than filtering everything we hear, but it is a task we should apply ourselves to. In some evangelical circles there is a dominant narrative of authority and submission in marriage that purportedly comes from the Bible, but there are also scholars and churchmen and women who see nothing of the kind. If we want to follow a pattern of biblical marriage, what would we refer to and how should we understand what we find there?

HOUSEHOLD CODES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

Passages on how husbands and wives should behave in marriage, or how they should understand their roles in relation to one another, belong to what are called the household codes. The New Testament teaching on marriage comes in the context of how whole households should view their new positions vis-à-vis one another now that some or all of them are Christians. There are multiple examples of this in the New Testament and in early Christian writings. Scot McKnight identifies the following:

Ephesians 5:21–6:9, 1 Timothy 2:8-15 (males-females) and 6:1-2 (slaves-masters), Titus 2:1-10 (older men, older women, young men, slaves), 1 Peter 2:18–3:7 (slaves, wives, husbands); and they are developed in other directions in later Christian writings, including Didache 4:9-11 (fathers, children, masters, slaves), Barnabas 19:5-7 (fathers, children, slaves, masters), 1 Clement 1:3 (leaders, youth, women) and 21:6-9 (leaders, elderly/elders, youth, wives, children), Ignatius, To Polycarp 4:1–6:2, and Polycarp, To the Philippians 4:2–6:1 (wives, widows, deacons, young men, virgins, elders). Rudimentary teachings for such obvious social classes also appear in nonbiblical and non-Christian texts, perhaps most notably in Aristotle’s Politics and then in Arius Didymus, as well as in street philosophers (Ps.-Charondas, Ps.-Zeleukos).1

As McKnight goes on to note, however, these household codes speak differently to different readers. To some, they unequivocally endorse patriarchal structures; they confirm the hierarchicalist view that the father and husband is the head of the household, by which they specifically mean he stands in authority over all in his charge. To others, however, they tell a different story. McKnight notes, “While some might detect in these passages the establishment of patriarchalism others, including this writer, might see that very structure being de-throned or at least given a chance of being de-throned.”2 It appears, then, as is so often the case with the Bible, that these codes tell us something of the ancient perspectives of the writers and something about ourselves as we read them! McKnight goes on, “We should all agree that the interpretation of the household regulations brings with it our own social agendas.”3 Having said that, the purpose of the codes is not in question. “What is probably not up for disagreement is that the household regulations were shaped to promote socially respectable behaviors as a platform for social security, apologetics and evangelism (seen especially in 1 Peter 2:13–3:7, esp. 2:12, 14; 3:2).”4

So the hierarchicalists and the mutualists agree on some things and disagree on others. Where we are (again) in sharp disagreement is whether the household codes speak of the authority of the husband and the corresponding submission of the wife, or whether the picture painted is one of mutual love, honor, and submission between husbands and wives; a radical message for first-century Roman, Greek, and Jewish men and women. Once again we are at a place where we have to admit that we see things differently because the same texts tell us different stories. What speaks to a hierarchicalist of authority and submission speaks to a mutualist of marriage relations in which husbands and wives are both called to treat one another in conformity to a Christlike pattern of love, honor, respect, and dignity, and where the idea of male authority and female subordination becomes not only meaningless but anathema in the Christian context.

A HIERARCHICALIST VIEW OF MARRIAGE

For my summary of the hierarchicalist position I have chosen the work of Timothy and Kathy Keller as explained in their book The Meaning of Marriage: Facing Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God.5 I have chosen this particular account first because it is contemporary; second, because it is in a popular evangelical book on marriage; and, third, because I wanted to give the best version of this perspective I could find in order to avoid caricature or extremes. The Kellers are highly respected as godly, learned, and wise Christians, and I personally find much of Tim Keller’s writings insightful and helpful. I often learn much from him, and so he is someone I am inclined to listen to. In the end, though, as will become clear, I disagree with the Kellers and hope to offer some sound reasons as to why.

A HIERARCHICAL MARRIAGE

The first thing that strikes the reader of the Kellers’ book on marriage is that they have made the choice that Kathy will write the chapter on submission, where at no other point is it simply her voice. (I am choosing to call her Kathy not out of presumption but simply to avoid confusion with her coauthor.) I guess this choice is understandable because the whole thrust of her argument is partially autobiographical, telling the story of how she came to choose voluntary submission to her husband. So I presume the chapter in her own voice is the evidence for this. Thus, this chapter takes the form of a mixture of testimony and an appeal to biblical texts with the aim of persuading the reader of the divinely assigned gender roles in marriage, which require the husband to take a position of authority as servant leadership and the wife to take up a position of Christlike submission. Kathy describes this in terms we are now familiar with: authority, submission, headship, and helpmate. She goes on to explain how her reading of the Bible texts gives her the basis of her understanding of male headship.6

Although man and woman are both called equally to participate in God’s mandate to build civilization and culture, the creation story speaks to the Kellers of headship.7 The reason for this is first that Adam is the physical source of Eve and second that he names her, both indications, in their view, that the man is in an authoritative position. Woman is a strong helper—strong but a helper nonetheless.8 Note that we have already seen alternative ways of interpreting all these references as well as the fact that head is not mentioned in Genesis. Citing the next passage that we are familiar with as a contested text, she goes on describing the creation story as the foundation of headship, with an explanation of Genesis 3:16. At the fall, the shift in relationship occurs. “The woman remains dependent and desirous of her husband, but it turns into an idolatrous desire, and his protection and love become selfish lust and exploitation.”9 As we now know, the assumption behind this reading is that the original plan was for the wife to be dependent on and desirous of her husband with good intentions, and for the husband to exercise his authority in love and protection. This is portrayed as a healthy and God-given pattern. In Kathy’s statement above, we see a clear example of the idea that at the fall this initially asymmetrical relationship goes more unequally awry. In a mutualist reading, the imbalance in their relationship is both a new and a gross dysfunction.

Kathy then moves to explain her voluntary submission as reflecting the “Jesus role” in the marriage; “my submission in marriage was a gift I offered in line with Jesus’ voluntarily submitting to the Father.”10 Despite admitting to having found the concept of headship initially “morally traumatic,” Kathy explains the process of how she moved to accept the authority of her husband and her own submissive role. In her own words, some gifted teachers steered her through the Philippians 2 passage, demonstrating that “If it was not an assault on the dignity and divinity (but rather led to the greater glory) of the Second Person of the Godhead to submit himself, and assume the role of a servant, then how could it possibly injure me to be asked to play out the ‘Jesus role’ in my marriage?”11 The idea of teaching Philippians 2 to Christians in order to encourage them to learn to submit to one another seems to me to be appropriate and admirable. Submission is a deeply Christian concept that comes out strongly in the teachings of Jesus as a mark of discipleship, and Philippians 2 is where we read Paul extolling these virtues in Christ in relation to how Christians should behave.

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:1-8)

The idea of using Philippians 2 to teach a wife that her wifely role is to be submissive, without also teaching that this should apply to husbands appears to me to be disingenuous. However, there is quite a complicated thought process behind this, predicated on a specific interpretive maneuver, which goes as follows. First, Philippians 2, with its reference to the God-Christ relation where Christ “does not consider equality with God something to be exploited” is used to interpret and give shape to the kephalē reference 1 Corinthians 11:3 with its reference to God-Christ. So the answer to how we understand Paul’s use of kephalē is to reference Philippians 2.

I do see the logic of this because of the God-Christ reference in both texts. The problem, however, is that first there is no obvious cross-reference between these verses: that is, Paul does not specifically explain himself in 1 Corinthians in these terms (hence the endless debate about what kephalē really means). Second, there are other crucial references in the New Testament to the God-Christ and Father-Son relation, and they do not by any means all refer to Christ’s humble state. Some speak of oneness and others of Christ’s exaltation. For example, in John 10:30 we read of Jesus himself claiming that he and the Father are one; they act as one, speak as one, will as one. Reading on, Philippians 2:9-11 says:

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

So if we were going to prioritize one mode of relating in particular to explain what it means to have a kephalē, why choose submission and obedience? Why not oneness? Why not exaltation? Why not all three? The decision to prioritize authority/submission as the primary pattern tells us more about the people who have made that decision than it does about the New Testament picture of God and Christ. It stems from an already deeply held conviction that this is what should characterize the husband and wife relation. Evidence is then sought and found to endorse this.

Faced with the difficulty of interpreting kephalē in the God-Christ relation as referenced once in 1 Corinthians, hierarchicalists turn first to authority and submission, where others have refused to go for reasons articulated in chapter four. They then seek corroborating evidence for this choice from other Scriptures and then impose the result on the Christ-husband (or man) relation and the husband-wife or man-woman relation in turn. So here you have the explanation from the Kellers’ chapter on marriage: “In 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul says directly what is implied in Philippians 2—namely, that the relationship of the Father and the Son is a pattern for the relationship of husband to wife.”12 That is not very well expressed since there is no reference to husbands and wives in Philippians 2. I don’t think that Paul is implying anything about husbands and wives there, but I think we see the connection that is being made between the two passages, albeit a tenuous one. Drawing from Philippians 2:5-7, Kathy goes on to flesh out the nature of the relationship of Father and Son as follows: “The Son submits to the Father’s headship with free, voluntary, and joyful eagerness, not out of coercion or inferiority. The Father’s headship is acknowledged in reciprocal delight, respect, and love. There is no inequality of ability or dignity.”13 The fact that this is given as a description of Father-Son relations from Philippians 2 (conspicuously ignoring the exaltation of verses 8-11) but then also offered as a pattern of the husband-wife relationship as if this is the only paradigm for marriage gives rise to a number of problems.

The first is that the picture of humility rooted in Christ’s life is offered by Paul as a pattern for the Christian life for all Christians regardless of age, sex, or class. All Christians relate to the Father as children of God in the Son. They are called to submit to God and submit to one another. To apply the Philippians 2 passage only to one group of people (wives) is strange and muddled. What follows, however, takes the reader into a different exegetical realm altogether. With no real explanation offered, husband-wife and even male-female relations are then explained and given shape in terms of the inner life of God as Trinity, but with a very specific description of the nature of this inner life. “We are differently gendered to reflect this life within the Trinity. Male and female are invited to mirror and reflect the ‘dance’ of the Trinity, loving, self-sacrificing authority and loving, courageous submission.”14 The only possible textual basis from the Bible for a claim like this could be 1 Corinthians 11:3 because there is no other place where one might find any warrant for comparing gendered human relations with relations within the Godhead. I do hope by now that I have demonstrated why the three pairings in this verse cannot be used as a basis for this kind of claim, but I would like to delve a bit deeper into the assumption that we can draw analogies between trinitarian and human relations and the problems associated with such a move.

THE TRINITY AND US

There are two real problems coming out of the claims that (1) the Father and the Son relate to one another in an authority-submission pattern, and (2) men and women or husbands and wives correspond to the persons of the Trinity and should follow that pattern. One is a theological problem and the other a methodological problem. In recent years there has been an increase in interest in the debate about mapping male-female relations onto Father-Son relations, mainly because a number of prominent (male) theologians have taken the trouble to point out the flaws in the process! As early as 2006, Kevin Giles spelled this out in his book Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (the title speaks for itself).15 However, it wasn’t until about 2015 that other evangelical Bible scholars and theologians decided to take the time to rebut the idea that the Bible teaches male authority and female submission because men represent the authoritative Father and women represent the subordinate Son.16

In terms of the theological issues, the argument is essentially over whether or not there is any eternal hierarchy within the relation of the Father and the Son. It is summarized in the expression “eternal functional subordination” or EFS for short, denoting the permanent state of the Son as one of subordination to the Father. All the orthodox scholars involved in the debate point out that hierarchy within the eternal Trinity was excluded hundreds of years ago when the participants at the Council of Nicaea ruled that the Son was of the same substance as the Father. Thus hierarchicalists have put themselves on the wrong side of orthodoxy in their claims that the subordination of the Son is an eternal state. If the Son is of the same substance as the Father, then they are coequal and coeternal. They share one essence and one will. In what is called the principle of inseparable operations, orthodox Christians hold to the idea that God acts in the world as one in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Steve Holmes sums it up nicely: “The argument is nuanced, but can be reduced without too much loss to a fairly simple point . . . : orthodox trinitarianism, East and West, depended on the assertion of inseparable divine operations and of a single divine will; it is not possible to speak of ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ meaningfully if one genuinely holds to these points.”17

Of course, once you have ruled out subordination as a function or state within the eternal Godhead, then it can no longer be argued that human relations should follow that pattern because “God himself is like that.” But this latter point highlights the second problem with the whole argument, which is that male-female relations should be structured around authority and submission. This pertains to the methodology of the argument, which is also flawed and worth touching on here.

There is a way of thinking about the Trinity that focuses on analogies between how God relates as Father, Son, and Spirit, and how human relations should function. In other words, according to this way of thinking, the pattern for human relations is not drawn simply from the person of Jesus and his teachings but from the way it is imagined the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. This perspective is mostly associated with social trinitarianism, a view of the Trinity that puts the emphasis on the Trinity as a society of relations rather than the emphasis of the Godhead as one essence. The thinking is that once we conceptualize God as primarily three persons in relation, it becomes possible to argue that the relations within the Godhead are a pattern for our own. God is relational. We are relational. We should relate as God relates.

A simple example of this would be God is a society of mutual love, so should we be. That sounds innocuous enough, but note the problems it gives rise to. The society of love picture can easily be adopted by hierarchicalists and mutualists alike to make opposing claims, and in fact this is precisely what has happened. As we have seen earlier, hierarchicalists claim that God is a society of loving relations characterized by loving, self-sacrificing authority and loving, courageous submission. Mutualists such as Leonardo Boff, Jürgen Moltmann, and Miroslav Volf claim God is a society of love characterized by coequality, coeternity, and mutual glorification, and this should be our pattern—no hint of hierarchy. These kind of patterns, both hierarchical and mutual are then often extended to church structures, society, and politics. The question for us is who is right and why? How would we choose? Neither perspective is right because the pattern for human relations is given to us in the person of Christ, not in our imaginings of how God the Trinity relates to Godself as three persons.

We are on stronger ground arguing that all Christian lives are to be modeled on the teachings and life of Christ; he is our pattern. The relation of the Son to the Father is offered as the ideal loving relationship into which all humanity is called to participate. Human beings, men and women, participate in the life of the Son and his relationship to the Father by the Spirit and in that capacity become children of God. This is the basis of all Christian living, ethics, relations, virtues, and values—that we love God with all our strength and that we love one another as Christ has loved us. We begin and end with God in Christ communicated to us by the Spirit.

A FINAL CONFUSION

I hope it has become clear that the idea that the male represents the Father in his authority and the female represents the Son in his submission as a way of trying to lock in male-female relationships (whether in marriage or not) is not tenable either from a theological or methodological perspective. A final confusion in the hierarchicalist perspective is that it is unclear whether the wifely role is analogous to the submissive Christ in a Father-Son relation (1 Corinthians 11:3; Philippians 2), or whether her role is analogous to the church’s role in the Christ-church relation (Ephesians 5).

Having claimed a straightforward analogy between Father-Son and husband-wife (based on 1 Corinthians 11:3), with the wife in the submissive Jesus role (based on Philippians 2), Kathy then goes on to explain that the husband is in fact also in the “Jesus role,” only in a different Jesus role—that of the authoritative servant leader. I found this confusing, as I was expecting to read that the husband’s role is analogous to the Father, but the husband is seen to be like the Father and the Son when they are authoritative and sending and the wife is only like the Son in his submissive, sent role. “Men have a gift of independence and ‘sending’ and women have a gift of interdependence and receiving.”18 It is wholly unclear what the “gift of independence” is and why it should be a positive attribute for a Christian, especially a married Christian. It is also unclear how the idea of independence maps on to any of the persons of the Godhead, who all three are both persons in relation and of one essence. I imagine it is some reference to the Son’s obedience to the Father while on his earthly mission, but whichever way one reads this claim, there is no real sense to be made of it. It further demonstrates some of the problems with mapping human characteristics and relations onto relations within the Godhead and trying to validate human behavior by claiming that it is somehow mirrored in the structures of the tripersonal God.

In sum, the first difficulty we encounter is that Paul makes no reference to Philippians 2 in 1 Corinthians 11:3, and in fact he does not speak of submission voluntary or otherwise. It is true that Paul claims in 1 Corinthians 15 that at the end of time, God will be “all in all,” and speaks of Christ being made subject to God (1 Corinthians 15:28). However, this is also in the context of the idea that all authority in heaven and earth has been handed over to the Son in order to subdue every last enemy during his kingly reign. Christ emerges triumphant at the end of time, having put everything under his feet. This powerful picture of Jesus Christ is not quite the loving, courageous submission that is referred to in a few verses of Philippians 2 in relation to the incarnation. These two pictures of Christ are sometimes referred to as the state of humiliation and the state of exaltation. Hierarchicalists are really saying that married women are to take the role of Christ only in his state of humiliation because they believe this state to be characterized by voluntary submission and sacrifice, while husbands are to take both the role of Christ in his state of exaltation or the role of the Father because these roles are characterized by authority, commanding, and sending.

Having outlined some of the knotty problems and confusions associated with a hierarchicalist reading of marriage, we will now look at the wider context of Christian ethical living and household codes in general. This will give us a framework for Paul and Peter’s teaching on marriage and enable me to explain how and why certain scholars see the New Testament as expressing radical views of marriage rather than as a text that commands wives to submit and husbands to take up their God-given authority.