SIX

EMBRACING THE OTHER

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Ephesians 5:22–23, 25

Although Tim and I (Kathy) have collaborated throughout
this book, we thought it made more sense for me to write this chapter in my own, singular voice, as I have had more direct experience in talking about and struggling with the difference in gender roles between men and women. No surprise there—under the influence of the curse in Genesis, every human culture has found a way to interpret male headship in a way that has marginalized and oppressed women, and it’s usually the women who notice, and object, to this treatment first.

Whether you identify yourself as an egalitarian, a feminist, a traditionalist, a complementarian, or any other variety on the interpretive spectrum, the differences between men and women will become an unavoidable issue in every marriage. Failure to come to terms with it is like tiptoeing around the proverbial elephant in the living room. Everyone comes into marriage with an idea of roles—of how a husband should behave to his wife, a wife to her husband, and children to their parents. This may be the sum of impressions gathered from one’s family of origin, current cultural norms, observations of friends’ marriages, and even the flotsam and jetsam of one’s fictional reading or television and movie habits.

There’s no denying that the subject of gender roles in marriage is a contentious and controversial one. I have personally lived at the heart of the controversy myself for more than forty years. I have seen Bible verses used as weapons of both oppression and rebellion. I have also seen the healing and flourishing that can happen in a marriage when hot-button words like “headship” and “submission” are understood correctly, with Jesus as the model for both.

Tim and I did not come into our marriage with any well-articulated thoughts about how the roles of men and women played out in a real-life relationship. In fact, despite many major conversations on the theoretical level in our seminary classes, I was unprepared for the first morning in our new church when Tim packed up his briefcase, kissed me good-bye, and “went off to work.” I remember standing in the kitchen saying, “Now what am I supposed to do all day?” Up until then, we had pretty much lived in a unisex world, as students taking the same classes, competing for grades on a level playing field, rarely forced into any consideration of what God’s intention may have been in making us male and female. Suddenly I had to think both practically and Biblically about my role as a woman and a wife.

Though Tim and I have been both clumsy and clueless at times, we have found that in submitting to our own divinely assigned gender roles that we discovered one of God’s great gifts for getting in touch with our deepest selves, as well as entering into the Great Dance of the universe. And no, this did not involve me developing a taste for frilly clothing, nor Tim taking up car maintenance. No wise person rejects a gift from someone who loves them without at least giving it a look. So we hope that even if you are not comfortable with the idea of distinct, divinely ordained gender roles within marriage, that you will suspend judgment just for the space of this chapter and consider how God may have intended them for our good.¹

In the Beginning

A discussion of how gender roles work in marriage must begin with a look at the good that God originally intended, how men and women have corrupted that good, and what Jesus has done to redeem gender roles; only then can we move on to the hazardous concepts of authority, submission, and headship and the idea of the helpmate.

The first mention of gender in the Bible occurs with the very first mention of humanity itself.² “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26). This means that our maleness or our femaleness is not incidental to our humanness but constitutes its very essence. God does not make us into a generic humanity that is later differentiated; rather from the start we are male or female. Every cell in our body is stamped as XX or XY. This means I cannot understand myself if I try to ignore the way God has designed me or if I despise the gifts he may have given to help me fulfill my calling. If the postmodern view that gender is wholly a “social construct” were true, then we could follow whatever path seemed good to us. If our gender is at the heart of our nature, however, we risk losing a key part of ourselves if we abandon our distinctive male and female roles.

At the same time, Genesis shows us that men and women were created with absolute equality. Both are equally made in the image of God, equally blessed, and equally given “dominion” over the earth. This means that men and women together, in full participation, must carry out God’s mandate to build civilization and culture. Both men and women are called to do science and art, to build families and human communities.³

Immediately after making us male and female, God tells us to be “fruitful” and “fill the earth.” Here God gives the human race the mandate to procreate, which is a reflection of his own boundless life-giving creativity. But, obviously, this wonderful gift of creating new human life is something we can only carry out together. Neither sex has all the characteristics necessary—only in complementary union can we do it. These verses suggest strongly that the sexes, while equal in dignity and worth, are complementary.

When God sees Adam alone, a male without a female, God says it is “not good.”⁴ It is the first thing in the universe that God finds imperfect. Adam is the physical source of Eve, and he is given the responsibility of naming her. Both of these elements in the narrative lay the basis for later New Testament statements about a husband’s “headship.”⁵ However, despite giving authority to the man, the woman is not described in the expected way—as an inferior. She is called “a helper suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18, NIV).

The English word “helper” is not the best translation for the Hebrew word ’ezer. “Helper” connotes merely assisting someone who could do the task almost as well without help. But ’ezer is almost always used in the Bible to describe God himself. Other times it is used to describe military help, such as reinforcements, without which a battle would be lost. To “help” someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in him with your strength.⁶ Woman was made to be a “strong helper.”

The word “suitable” is just as unhelpful a translation. This translates a compound phrase that is literally “like opposite him.”⁷ The entire narrative of Genesis 2, in which a piece of the man is removed to create the woman, strongly implies that each is incomplete without the other.⁸

Male and female are “like opposite” to one another. They are like two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are not exactly alike nor randomly different, but they are differentiated such that together they can create a complete whole. Each sex is gifted for different steps in the same Great Dance.

Genesis 3 recounts the Fall, in which both man and woman sin against God and are expelled from the garden of Eden. We immediately see the catastrophic change in the unity between man and woman. The air is filled with blameshifting, finger pointing, and accusation.⁹ Rather than their Otherness becoming a source of completion, it becomes an occasion for oppression and exploitation. The woman remains dependent and desirous of her husband, but it turns into an idolatrous desire, and his protection and love become a selfish lust and exploitation.

The Dance of the Trinity

In Jesus Christ’s person and work we begin to see a restoration of the original unity and love between the sexes. Jesus both elevates and underlines the equality of women as co-bearers of the image of God and the creation mandate,¹⁰ and he also redeems the roles given to man and woman at the beginning by inhabiting them, both as servant-head and ’ezer-subordinate.

In Philippians 2:5–11,¹¹ we have one of the earliest hymns to Jesus sung by the church, which celebrates that although Jesus was equal with God, he emptied himself of his glory and took on the role of a servant. Jesus shed his divine privileges without becoming any less divine, and he took on the most submissive role—that of a servant who dies in his master’s service. In this passage we see taught both the essential equality of the First and Second Persons of the Godhead, and yet the voluntary submission of the Son to the Father to secure our salvation. Let me emphasize that Jesus’s willing acceptance of this role was wholly voluntary, a gift to his Father. I discovered here that my submission in marriage was a gift I offered, not a duty coerced from me.

As I personally struggled with understanding gender equality within gender roles, it was this passage that entirely took the sting out of the subordinate role assigned to the female sex. If a child of the fifties can be said to have been raised “gender neutral,” my siblings and I were. My mother was one of the only college-educated women among her acquaintances. I had grown up not even considering whether I was the equal of any boy—it just never occurred to me to divide the world into boys and girls, except when it came to restrooms. So, in some ways, the whole feminist movement was a terrible shock to me. You mean, I thought, there are women who have been mistreated, abused, exploited, marginalized, made to feel inferior? The proposed cure revealed to me that I had been oblivious to the disease.

Nevertheless, when I first heard Christians talk about male and female as “different but equal,” it sounded a little too much like the “separate, but equal” motto of segregation. So my first encounter with the ideas of headship and submission was both intellectually and morally traumatic. But fortunately I had some gifted teachers who steered me to the Philippians 2 passage. And then I saw it. 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?

This passage is one of the primary places that the “dance of the Trinity” becomes visible. The Son defers to his Father, taking the subordinate role. The Father accepts the gift, but then exalts the Son to the highest place. Each wishes to please the other; each wishes to exalt the other. Love and honor are given, accepted, and given again. 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 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. 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. The Son takes a subordinate role, and in that movement he shows not his weakness but his greatness. This is one of the reasons why Paul can say that the marriage “mystery” gives us insight into the very heart of God in the work of our salvation (Ephesians 5:32). C. S. Lewis writes, “In the imagery describing Christ and the church, we’re dealing with male and female, not merely as facts of nature, but as the live and awe-full shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our knowledge.”¹³

But What about Headship?

Understanding that submission to my role was neither demeaning nor dangerous was a big step for me. I was a woman living in the heady days of early feminism, albeit one who had never personally felt the need for its advocacy and protection. To choose willingly to “submit,” or to “be submissive,” didn’t sound like me in the slightest, nor was it a choice that was either understood or encouraged by anyone around me.¹⁴

But an even bigger leap was required to understand that it took an equal degree of submission for men to submit to their gender roles. They are called to be “servant-leaders.”

In our world, we are accustomed to seeing the perks and the privileges accrue to those who have higher status—Platinum mileage flyers receive free upgrades to first class and, along with that, free food and drink and free baggage checking. Those with bigger bank accounts than the rest of us are ushered into the (shorter and faster) premium banking line at the bank.

But in the dance of the Trinity, the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the Other. Jesus redefined—or, more truly, defined properly—headship and authority, thus taking the toxicity of it away, at least for those who live by his definition rather than by the world’s understanding.

In John 13:1–17, Jesus, on the night before his death, famously washed his disciples’ feet, both showing and teaching them how he was redefining authority and headship. He said:

 

Do you understand what I have done for you? . . . You call me “Teacher” and “Lord” and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master.

(12–16)

The master has just made himself into a servant who has washed his disciples’ feet, thus demonstrating in the most dramatic way that authority and leadership mean that you become the servant, you die to self in order to love and serve the Other. Jesus redefined all authority as servant-authority. Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself. Jesus is the one who did not come to be served, as the world’s authority figures expect to be, but to serve, to the point of giving his life.

His disciples, writing in the gospels, candidly reveal how thoroughly they did not get this, arguing practically on the eve of his crucifixion about who would get the honor of sitting at his right and left hand, positions of power in his soon-to-be inaugurated rule. Jesus clearly states his position on the meaning of authority and headship: In the world, rulers and high officials exercise their authority by “lording it” over others. Not so with you. Those tasked with leadership must be the slaves of all, following their master, who “did not come to be served but to serve. . . .”¹⁵

Following the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s words seemed to have finally sunk in. By the time Paul wrote to the Ephesians, the relationship of Jesus to the church had been made the model for that of a husband and wife. We, the church, submit to Christ in everything, and the parallel of a wife submitting “everything” to her husband is no longer daunting, since we know what kind of behavior the husband has been called on to imitate. To what role must he submit? To that of savior, a servant-leader, who uses his authority and power to express a love that doesn’t even stop at dying for the beloved.

In Jesus we see all the authoritarianism of authority laid to rest, and all the humility of submission glorified. Rather than demeaning Christ, his submission leads to his ultimate glorification, where God “exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.” By analogy, does that mean that a husband is grooming his wife, in her submission to him, to be lifted in glory above himself? I don’t know, but I do know that if a wife’s role in relation to her husband is analogous to the church’s submission to Christ, then we have nothing to fear.

Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage—Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission. By accepting our gender roles, and operating within them, we are able to demonstrate to the world concepts that are so counterintuitive as to be completely unintelligible unless they are lived out by men and women in Christian marriages.

Embracing the Other

Since God called woman specifically to be a “helper” suited for her husband, it would be strange if he did not endow both men and women with distinguishable abilities to better fulfill their distinguishable calls. The most obvious are physical characteristics that enable women to bear and nurture children, but more subtle emotional and psychological endowments would be natural accompaniments to those physical differences, albeit on a spectrum.

This is where, surprisingly, some feminist theory echoes Biblical teaching about gender difference. Men and women are not interchangeable, unisex beings, but they have different strengths that result in men and women solving problems, building consensus, and performing leadership functions in distinct ways. In one interesting case study in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, “When Women Make Music,” a female conductor and music director outlined how gender differences in each of these three areas meant that she directed her orchestra differently than a man would.¹⁶ She said at one point that women’s style of management is “perhaps better” than men’s, and at another she insisted that musicians who are treated the way a woman conductor treats them “perform better over the long run.” Not surprisingly, some believed the author was guilty of a kind of reverse sexism. However, the main point—that men and woman approach the same task in significantly distinct ways—has been verified by a great wave of empirical studies in the last twenty years that support the depth of gender differences in the way we think, feel, behave, work, and conduct relationships.

One of the first feminist studies that argued for such irreducible gender differences was Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice in 1982. Harvard University Press, the book’s publisher, describes it as “the little book that started a revolution.” Before then, social scientific theorizing emphasized the superficiality of gender differences, but Gilligan insisted that female psychological development, motivations, and even moral reasoning were different from those of males.¹⁷ Gilligan argued that while men seek maturity by detaching themselves, women see themselves maturing as they attach.¹⁸

Using all the qualifiers in the world, in general, as a whole and across the spectrum, men have a gift of independence, a “sending” gift. They look outward. They initiate. Under sin, these traits can become either an alpha male individualism, if this capacity is turned into an idol, or dependence, if the calling is utterly rejected and the opposite embraced in rebellion. The first sin is hypermasculinity, while the second sin is a rejection of masculinity.

Using all the qualifiers in the world, on the whole and across the spectrum, women have a gift of interdependence, a “receiving” gift. They are inwardly perceptive. They nurture. Under sin, these traits can become either a clinging dependence, if attachment is turned into an idol, or individualism, if the calling is utterly rejected and the opposite embraced in rebellion. The first sin is hyperfemininity, while the second sin is a rejection of femininity.

The dance of the Trinity would lead us to expect differences such as these, as well as others, if we are made in the image of the triune, dancing God.¹⁹

Sadly, those who most deny innate differences between men and women (fewer now than before medical and scientific research joined sociological and psychological studies) may end up devaluing women at the very point where they are trying to protect them. Dominant, swaggering (and sinful) male behavior is assumed to be the default mode if one wishes to get ahead or be taken seriously in the world. Women are asked to shed their feminine qualities and become faux men in order to be “one of the boys.” The strengths of gender-distinct leadership, creativity, and insight that women bring to the world, to name only a few, are lost to the business world, romantic relationships, and even ministry within the church.

Over the last thirty years, many philosophers and social theorists have reflected on the “problem of Otherness.”²⁰ It is natural to define one’s identity against others who are different. Many have argued that this process automatically leads people to strengthen their sense of worth and uniqueness by excluding and subordinating those who are Other, who are not like us. Christians can acknowledge that our sinful drive for self-justification often leads us to despise those who think, feel, and behave differently than we do. Personal, racial, and class pride naturally grow out of the human heart’s alienation from God and therefore our need to prove ourselves and win an identity based on our specialness, superiority, and performance.

One of the main places where “exclusion of the Other” happens is between the sexes. Loving someone of the other sex is hard. Misunderstandings, angry explosions, and tears abound. Men tend to look down on women as they gather around the water cooler and snicker about female foibles. Women return the favor, skewering male pretensions and weaknesses. Does anyone not know how to say “Men!” or “Women!” with that particular sneering tone? And indeed, the gap between the sexes often looks like a chasm. We cannot understand each other. And since the default mode of the human heart is self-justification, where we cannot understand the other sex we assume inferiority. Yet as men and women lose or deny their “peculiar honors,”²¹ knowledge of how to relate to and relish the Other is also lost.

However, this is where the Christian understanding of marriage comes in. Marriage, in the Biblical view, addresses the chasm between the sexes. Marriage is a full embrace of the other sex. We accept and yet struggle with the gendered “otherness” of our spouse, and in the process, we grow and flourish in ways otherwise impossible. Because, as Genesis says, male and female are “like-opposite” each other—both radically different and yet incomplete without each other. I have had homosexual friends, both men and women, tell me that one of the factors that made homosexual love attractive to them was how much easier it was than dealing with someone of a different sex. I have no doubt this is true. A person of one’s own sex is not as likely to have as much Otherness to embrace. But God’s plan for married couples involves embracing the otherness to make us unified, and that can only happen between a man and a woman.²² Even at the atomic level, all the universe is held together by the attraction of positive and negative forces. The embrace of the Other, as it turns out, really is what makes the world go around.

The Cross and the Other

Inside a real marriage there will be conflicts rooted in gender differences that are seismic. It is not simply that the other gender is different; it’s that his or her differences make no sense. And once we come up against this wall of incomprehensibility, the sin in our heart tends to respond by assigning moral significance to what is simply a deep temperamental difference. Men see women’s need for “interdependence” as sheer dependence, and women see men’s need for independence as pure ego. Husbands and wives grow distant from one another because they allow themselves to engage in a constant, daily drumbeat of thoughts of inner disdain for the gendered difference of their spouse.

But Jesus gives both a pattern and a power to change all of this.

Miroslav Volf, writing in Exclusion and Embrace, shows that the God of the Bible embraces the Other, and it is us. Quoting another theologian, Volf writes:

 

On the cross of Christ, [the love of God] is there for the others, for sinners—the recalcitrant—enemies. The reciprocal self-surrender to one another within the Trinity is manifested in Christ’s self-surrender in a world which is in contradiction to God; and this self-giving draws all those who believe in him into the eternal life of divine love.²³

Christ embraced the ultimate “Other”—sinful humanity. He didn’t exclude us by simply consigning us to judgment. He embraced us by dying on the cross for our sins. To love the Other, especially an Other that is hostile, entails sacrifice. It means sometimes experiencing betrayal, rejection, and attacks.²⁴ The easiest thing is to leave. But Jesus did not do that. He embraced and loved us, the Other, and brought us into a new unity with himself.

Knowing this kind of gracious, sin-covering love gives believers in the gospel of Christ the basis for an identity that does not need superiority and exclusion to form itself. In Christ we have a profound security. We know who we are in him, and that frees us from the natural human impulse to despise anyone who is significantly different from us. This enables us to embrace rather than exclude those who differ from us, and that especially goes for our spouse, with all his or her mysterious and often infuriating differences.

This is one part of the glory of marriage, in the Biblical conception. Two people of different sexes make the commitment and sacrifice that is involved in embracing the Other. It is often painful and always complicated, but it helps us grow and mature in ways no other experience can produce, and it brings about deep unity because of the profound complementarity between the sexes. This has nothing to do with who brings home the biggest salary or makes the most sacrifices to care for the children. The family model in which the man went out to work and the woman stayed home with the children is really a rather recent development. For centuries, husband and wife (and often children) worked together on the farm or in the shop. The external details of a family’s division of labor may be worked out differently across marriages and societies. But the tender, serving authority of a husband’s headship and the strong, gracious gift of a wife’s submission restore us to who we were meant to be at creation.

Embracing the Other at Home

This all may sound inspiring on paper, but how does this idea work itself out in the actual life of a marriage?

First, you have to find a very safe place to practice headship and submission. I say this because I am not unaware of God’s warning that sin will lead men to try to dominate women (Genesis 3:16).²⁵ Therefore it is crucial that women who want to accept gender-differentiated roles within marriage find a husband who will truly be a servant-leader to match her as a strong helper.

We are all familiar with watching stunts or action sequences on television or in movies that come with the “Do not try this at home” disclaimer attached.²⁶ Gender roles are the exact opposite: “Only try this at home or within the community of believers, the church.”²⁷ It is only safe for us sinners to attempt to resume our royal heritage and our creation gifts of gender roles where resources such as repentance and forgiveness can be (and very often will need to be) accessed.

I will never be one to dismiss or make light of the horrible record of abuse suffered by women at the hands of men who wielded twisted and unbiblical definitions of “headship” and “submission” as their primary weapon. The church should not overlook or minimize one iota of that suffering, but I would beg that we not throw the baby out along with the dirty bathwater. Bail bathwater, by all means available, but save the baby, which in this case is the rightful acceptance of gender roles as Jesus has both defined and embodied them.

The home, then, can become a window into a restored and redeemed human society in which our different gender roles lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and a deeper melding with the Other.²⁸ Within that context of marriage-as-ministry, wives are told to “submit” to husbands and husbands are told to “head” their wives.

Second, you and your spouse should grasp one of the most startling aspects of the Biblical teaching on gender roles in marriage. While the principle is clear—that the husband is to be the servant-leader and have ultimate responsibility and authority in the family—the Bible gives almost no details about how that is expressed in concrete behavior. Should wives never work outside the home? Should wives never create culture or be scientists? Should husbands never wash clothes or clean the home? Should women take primary responsibility for daily child care while men oversee the finances? Traditionally minded people are tempted to nod yes to these questions until it is pointed out that nowhere does the Bible say such things. The Scripture does not give us a list of things men and women must and must not do. It gives no such specific directions at all.

Why would this be? Well, consider that the Bible was written for all centuries and all cultures. If it had written rules for the roles of wife and husband in ancient agrarian cultures, they would be hard to apply today. But the Scripture doesn’t do that.

What does that mean for us? It means that rigid cultural gender roles have no Biblical warrant. Christians cannot make a scriptural case for masculine and feminine stereotypes. Though social scientists have made good cases about abiding gender differences with regard to the expression of emotion, the conduct of relationships, the making of decisions, different individual personalities and different cultures will express those distinctions in somewhat different ways. A man considered an authoritative father in America may look rather passive in a non-Western country. We must find ways to honor and express our gender roles, but the Bible allows for freedom in the particulars, while still upholding the obligatory nature of the principle.²⁹

When we moved to Philadelphia for Tim to teach at Westminster Theological Seminary, we bought a home for the first (and only) time. We shortly discovered that Tim’s salary was not big enough to cover our living expenses plus a mortgage payment, so I took part-time employment with Great Commission Publications as an editor. I had to go out to work in the mornings, year round, while Tim’s more flexible daily and summer schedule meant that he could be the “Mr. Mom” who got the kids off to school and watched them during the summer break. An outsider looking at our marriage might have thought a role reversal was going on, or at least a negation of our gender roles. Quite the contrary, in fact. Although the superficial details of who did what had changed, I was still bringing my gifts as a strong helper to Tim, making it possible for him to teach.

I can imagine two objections to what I’ve been saying. The first comes from a person who wants more definition: “I need more direction than this! What exactly does a husband do that the wife does not? What does a wife do that the husband does not? I need details!” The answer is that the Bible deliberately does not give answers to you, and that helps couples with more traditional mind-sets to avoid falling into the pattern of simply saying, “Well in my family, this is how it was done.” But you and your spouse are different people and live in a different time and probably a different place. The basic roles—of leader and helper—are binding, but every couple must work out how that will be expressed within their marriage. The very process of making these decisions is a key part of what it is to think out and honor your gender differences.

But some women might chafe under the idea of male headship: “I agree that men and women are profoundly different according to their sex, but why does the man get to lead? If men and women are equal in dignity but different, why is the husband the head?” I think the truest answer is that we simply don’t know. Why was Jesus, the Son, the one who submitted and served (Philippians 2:4ff)? Why wasn’t it the Father? We don’t know, but we do know that it was a sign of his greatness, not his weakness.

I think there is also a more practical answer to the second objection and even to the first. It is our very effort to submit to the roles of servant-leader and strong helper that will help us get in touch with and honor our gender differences.

In the home, the Bible directs male and female to reflect our different gifts in our family functions—our job descriptions in the team. Wives are more directly and more often exhorted to be gentle supporters, to be encouragers (1 Peter 3:1–2, 4), and more directly and more often to be nurturing children and the home life (Titus 2:4–5). Husbands are exhorted more directly and more often to lead, provide for and protect the family, but are not let off the hook for the education and nurture of the children (1 Timothy 3:4; 5:8).

These gifts can be stronger or weaker along the spectrum, but if we accept our gender roles as a gift from God, we will try to nourish our weaker abilities rather than deny them. Tim and I, for instance, both come from homes that had domineering wives and passive husbands, so our default mode, when we married, was to duplicate what we had grown up with. It took a great deal of swimming against the tide of our own predilections for me to give Tim the headship (and for Tim to assume those responsibilities) and for him to likewise help me not to usurp his headship while ignoring my own call to nurture and support.

So Tim had to work on the leader side of being a servant-leader. Seeing this role as a gift of God matured and strengthened him. But some men may need to work on the servant side of being a servant-leader. Then submitting to the role will become a good gift for them. (For more thoughts on how gender roles bear on practical decision-making in marriage, see the appendix at the end of this volume.)

Embracing the Other Increases Wisdom

Submission to God’s pattern in marriage gets you more in touch with some deep things in yourself, your primary maleness or femaleness, yet marriage balances you and broadens you, too. The qualities of the other sex “rub off” on you, making you each strong and tender, serving each other in distinct ways. Tim likes to say that after years and years of marriage he often finds himself in situations where he is about to respond, but he knows instinctively what I would say or do if I were there. “In that split second, I have the opportunity to ask myself, ‘Would Kathy’s typical reaction be more wise and appropriate than mine?’ And I realize my repertoire of possible words and actions has been greatly expanded. My wife has taught me how to look at life as she does, and now I have a greater range of responses and a greater likelihood of doing the right thing.”

Therefore, marriage is for both the overly gender-typed and the under gender-typed. It broadens us and deepens us.

In some ways Tim is under–gender typed (such as in his desire not to offend others). But in other ways he’s quite frustratingly masculine. Sometimes I’ll say to him, “You’re mad, aren’t you?” And he’ll reply, “Not at all. I’m fine.” But three days later he’ll come back to me and say, “You were right. I was furious and resentful.” And I will think, “How can an adult be that out of touch with his feelings?” He tends to look outward; he doesn’t look inside his own feelings very well. Over the years, I have needed to respectfully teach him. But other times I have found myself saying, “You are going to have to lead on this one, because you are much better at detaching your feelings.”

Somebody might object: “These are sexual stereotypes”—the insensitive male and the emotional female. But they are not stereotypes; they are us—Tim and me. And what do you think stereotypes are? They are unbalanced and unredeemed masculinity and femininity. But husband and wife are there to complete each other. It’s a “great mystery,” as St. Paul says, but at some deep level, this person who is so Other is healing me, and I him.

Remember, this person is utterly unlike you. He acts differently, thinks differently, and operates differently, and in some cases, dealing with him is not only frustrating and scary, but it’s downright incomprehensible. But at a deeper level, you’re finding out who you really are. You’re seeing him as your other half. You see how God is completing you in your husband. The result of completion is personal ease. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed with each other before the Fall. There was no anxiety, no hiding. There was a sense of a primordial, ancient unity and accord that Adam and Eve had then that we’ve not experienced since, because sin entered and disrupted the unity that they had. When you see marriage as completion, submission finds its place.

What about a Marriage in which One
Party Doesn’t Get It?

Agreeing on gender roles as a foundational part of your marriage takes two people, but what if your spouse persists in a wrong interpretation of his or her role? Wouldn’t it just be better to assume the egalitarian, unisex roles that we use in the world as a protection against misuse and outright abuse?

Although it is true that sin has changed and twisted everything, the problem in jettisoning gender roles is this: Since every mention of gender roles in the Bible is tied to the creation story, it is not that easy to just lightly dispense with them. Further, if our assigned roles are rooted in the nature of the relationships within the Trinity, tampering with the revelation of that mystery that God intends within marriage is surely not our prerogative.

Instructions in the New Testament regarding the situation of believers who find themselves married to unbelievers are one place to start. But suppose a husband in a putatively Christian marriage has a wife who wants no part of a gender role that requires her to be “submissive” to her husband, the “head”? Or a wife whose churchgoing husband uses a misreading of the Bible to dismiss and marginalize her opinion, her contribution, even her person?

Though I have never been in those situations, I have friends whose marriages are all that and even worse. Furthermore, I am a sinner, married to another sinner, so we don’t always inhabit our gender roles perfectly, either.

One of the pillars of wise counseling is the statement, “The only person over whom you have control is yourself.” You can change no one’s behavior but your own. If a man or a woman wishes to bring him- or herself more fully into the biblically defined gender roles, it does not actually require assent from the other person. Since both the headship role of a husband and the submission role as a wife are servant roles, one can always begin to serve without waiting for permission.

Often this will be an invisible change of attitude before it is ever visible in action. For a husband to begin to channel his energies into helping his wife to flourish spiritually (no matter where she is at the moment), may mean that he begins a prayer life where before he had none. Or a wife accustomed to resenting every Archie Bunker–like behavior of her husband may begin offering her submission with graciousness rather than resenting the lack of honor she receives from her husband.

Just as working out the particulars of how to inhabit gender roles when both spouses are eager to do so will differ from couple to couple, so will the particulars of glorifying God in the more difficult situation of an unbalanced marriage. But you can be sure that if you aren’t getting any satisfaction from obeying God, you surely will get none from avoiding his pattern.

Why not give it a try, and inhabit the “Jesus role” that your part of the marriage calls you to?