Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
—EPHESIANS 5:22
TO DO THIS MONTH:
□ Submit to Dan “in everything” (Ephesians 5:22–24; see also Colossians 3:18–19; 1 Peter 3:1–2)
□ Serve as Dan’s executive assistant, based on Debi Pearl’s understanding of “helpmeet” (Genesis 2:18)
□ Observe the Good Wife Rules, circa 1950
□ Find out what biblical submission really means
My mother says she’s submitted to my father exactly three times: Once in 2004, when he preferred the gray Honda Pilot and she preferred the blue Honda Pilot. Once in 1995, when he preferred “silver stone” exterior paint and she preferred “peaceful sky.” And once in 1976, when he was sure they could make it the rest of the way down a snow-covered mountain road, and she was convinced it would be their deaths.
Mom says she remembers every word the two of them exchanged in their ’69 Camaro the night they almost died on Highway 226 through Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Having just survived a nasty slide that fortuitously sent them crashing into the side of the mountain rather than flying off of it, Mom had no interest in testing their luck twice. When you grow up in Florida, snow is not something you negotiate with.
“That’s it. We’re walking the rest of the way,” she reportedly said, unbuckling her seatbelt and reaching for the door
“No. We can make it,” Dad insisted.
“This is crazy! We’re going to die.”
“Robin, please. You need to stay in the car. I’m taking it down the hill, and I’m asking you to go with me.”
“You mean you want me to submit?”
Mom wanted to make him say it, but I guess that in the time it took her to realize he wouldn’t, she decided she’d rather die in the act of submitting to my father than to go on living without him.
Of course, my existence is a testimony to the fact that Mom and Dad made it down the mountain unharmed. When they reached the bottom, their car slid gently into the parking lot of Winters Motel, a run-down establishment that did remarkably good business in the months between Christmas and Easter. They walked to a nearby gas station to get dinner, called their coworkers in Salisbury to let them know they’d be coming in late on Monday morning, and watched the Steelers beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl X while the snow accumulated outside.
There are three New Testament passages that instruct wives to submit to their husbands (all quoted from the UPDATED NIV):
• Colossians 3:18—“Wives submit yourselves to your husband, as is fitting in the Lord.”
• 1 Peter 3:1–2—“Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.”
• Ephesians 5:22–24—“Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Of the more than thirty thousand verses in the Bible, two of these passages are listed on the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Web site as being among the five “key texts” useful in understanding the relationship between men and women.1 The belief that the womanly submission described in the epistles of Peter and Paul is normative, extending to all women everywhere, has led many conservative evangelicals to conclude that gender relationships are inherently hierarchal, that men must always lead and women must always follow.
“A man, by virtue of his manhood, is called to lead for God,” wrote Raymond Ortlund in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. “A woman, just by virtue of her womanhood is called to help for God.”2
John Piper describes the spirit of submission as “a disposition to yield,” and defines biblical femininity as “a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men.”3
According to Piper, a woman’s obligation to submit extends beyond marriage. In Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, he provides a continuum along which Christian women can plot the appropriateness of various occupations along two scales: (1) the degree of authority the woman has over men, and (2) the degree to which the relationship between the woman and her male coworkers is personal. A city planner who indirectly leads men by designing traffic patterns, Piper concludes, exhibits influence that is non-personal and is therefore “not necessarily an offense against God’s order.”4 However, a woman in military leadership or a woman acting as an official at a sporting event is overstepping her boundaries.
“Biblical submission” according to the CBMW requires that women yield to their husbands as the primary breadwinners, defer to them when making decisions on behalf of the family, look to men as the spiritual leaders in the home and church, and avoid pursuing careers that place them in a position of authority over men.5
“A situation in which a female boss has a male secretary,” wrote J. I. Packer, “or a marriage in which the woman (as we say) wears the trousers, will put more strain on the humanity of both parties than if it were the other way. This is part of the reality of the creation, a given fact that nothing will change.”6
When Dan and I got married back in 2003, we began our marriage with the assumption that I would submit to him because the Bible told me to, that, while I had a voice in our decisions as a couple, Dan held the reins. We just assumed that when push came to shove, we’d stick to the traditional gender roles emphasized by our religious community. Dan would bring home the bacon, and I would fry it. He would lead, and I would follow.
And then life happened.
When you find yourself running two businesses and a household together, tasks tend to get assigned based on efficiency rather than gender. And when you share a common goal of avoiding the nine-to-five lifestyle in order to make a living as creatives, you don’t care who brings home the bacon so long as it’s enough to pay the Internet bill. And when you realize that faith is not static, that it is a living and evolving thing, you look less for so-called “spiritual leaders” to tell you where to go, and more for spiritual companions with whom to travel the long journey. And when you learn that marriage is a slow dance, not a tango, you worry less about who’s taking the lead and instead settle into the subtle changes in each other’s movements, the unforced rhythms of each other’s body to life’s music.7
Life happened, and Dan and I quickly realized that we functioned best as a team of equal partners. Sure, we argued from time to time, but we never encountered a situation in which Dan had to invoke some kind of God-ordained gavel strike in order to get his way. It just didn’t feel natural to us. It didn’t seem necessary.
In fact, it was Dan who began celebrating all our successes, great and small, with a high-five and a lively declaration of “Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon the completion of a long road trip—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon signing the papers for our first house—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon beating another couple in Wii tennis—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
Upon a particularly fun romp in the hay—“Team Dan and Rachel!”
By the time we changed our minds about gender roles and submission, we’d been living in an egalitarian marriage for years. Team Dan and Rachel was doing just fine.
But this year was different. In deference to Commandment #1, I’d been trying to submit to Dan as his subordinate.
This meant relinquishing control over the Netflix queue, giving him the final say in restaurant choices, asking for permission before I made plans to go out with friends or start a new project, and trying to remember to do all those annoying little things he always pestered me about, like keeping track of business-related receipts and not putting lit candles next to the curtains. In turn, Dan replaced “Team Dan and Rachel!” with a playful, Family Guy–inspired dictum—“I have spoken!”—which he mostly invoked when telling me to stop working so late and watch Saturday Night Live with him instead. (He’s a pretty okay boss, actually.)
Our biggest argument in relation to submission occurred at Christmastime. I was swamped with work, we had friends staying at our house for over a week, I still hadn’t finished all my Christmas shopping, and yet I got it in my head that I wanted to throw a big, last-minute Christmas party for all my high school friends who were in town for the holidays.
“Absolutely not,” Dan said. “You’ve got too much to do, and it will just stress you out.”
“But I want to!” I protested. “It’s our only chance to all get together.”
“Can’t you get together at someone else’s house . . . or at a restaurant or something?”
“We’ve got the best space for it, and I don’t want to burden anyone else. I’m sending the Facebook invitations now—”
“Uh, hon. I don’t think you can do that.”
Under normal circumstances, Dan would have let me self-destruct, as he has in the past when it comes to my tendency to overcommit.
But this year was different. This year, Dan got his way.
I was mad because this was the first time my will had been usurped on something I really wanted, so I threw what you might call a fit, before realizing this whole embarrassing episode would end up in a book, so I’d better stop acting like a little kid.
Clearly, I needed to work on the virtue of submission, so I decided to devote the month of June to exploring what it means to submit to one’s husband, and to see if a strong-willed, liberated woman like me could truly cultivate a “disposition to yield.”
But then, of course, life happened . . .
Dan’s Journal
October 9, 2010
It’s like I have a trump card. I don’t know how I feel about it. For the last decade our relationship has been built on mutual understanding. If disagreements come up, we work through the issues on a level playing field. I’ve always felt respected by Rachel, so I’ve never felt the need to have a final, conversation-stopping, decision-making catchphrase. In many ways, our relationship is continuing as usual . . . but just knowing that I have in my possession a “you’dhave-to-if-I-said-so” trump card makes things seem a little out of balance. It’s kinda like having a hidden weapon in my possession that only Rachel and I know about. It may not change how other people view me, but I still know it’s there. Not sure how I feel about that. I can see why a person would feel powerful having it, but I’m not sure that makes it OK. I don’t generally walk around with hidden weapons in real life; I just don’t feel that insecure.
As wives, our life’s work should be to perfect how we may please our husbands.8
—DEBI PEARL, CREATED TO BE HIS HELP MEET
In the second Creation account of Genesis, after God formed man from the dust of the earth and placed him in the garden of Eden, God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (2:18). The phrase “helper suitable,” rendered “help meet” in the King James Version, comes from a combination of the words ezer and kenegdo.
Ezer appears twenty-one times in the Old Testament—twice in reference to Eve, three times in reference to nations to whom Israel appealed for military support, and sixteen times in reference to God as the helper of Israel. It means “to help,” connotes both benevolence and strength, and is a popular name for Jewish boys both in the Bible and in modern times.
Kenegdo literally means “as in front of him,” suggesting that the ezer of Genesis 2 is Adam’s perfect match, the yin to his yang, the water to his fire, the Brad to his Angelina—you get the idea.
Unfortunately, all the color of its original meaning is lost in most translations of ezer kenegdo. After the King James Version rendered the two words “help meet,” poet John Dryden came along and hyphenated them, describing his wife as his tireless “help-meet.” Over time, the expression bled into “helpmeet,” an independent term applied exclusively to the role of wives to their husbands, and to this day, the myth that Genesis 2 relegates wives to the status of subordinate assistants persists . . . as is painfully evidenced by Debi Pearl’s Created to Be His Help Meet, a book that has sold more than 200,000 copies since its publication in 2004.
“God made us women to be help meets,” says Pearl, “and it is in our physical nature to be so. It is our spiritual calling and God’s perfect will for us . . . God didn’t create Adam and Eve at the same time and then tell them to work out some compromise on how they would each achieve their personal goals in a cooperative endeavor. . . . God gave [Eve] to Adam to be his helper, not his partner.” To serve as a helpmeet, she tells women, “is how God created you and it is your purpose for existing. You were created to make [your husband] complete, not to seek personal fulfillment parallel to him.”9
Sprinkled with old-timey illustrations of Victorian women reading, picking flowers, carrying bread baskets, and tending to children, the book reads like an intimate advice column on everything from housekeeping to child care to sex from a fundamentalist perspective. It includes several Q&A-style sections in which Pearl addresses specific domestic scenarios. At one point, she encourages a young mother whose husband routinely beat her and threatened to kill her with a kitchen knife to stop “blabbing about his sins” and win him back by showing him more respect.10 I threw my copy across the living room a total of seven times.
According to Pearl, “God set up a chain of command” that places women under the direct authority of their husbands. “You are not on the board of directors with an equal vote,” she says. “You have no authority to set the agenda. . . . Start thinking and acting as though your husband is the head of the company and you are his secretary.”11
I’d been exploring biblical womanhood for nine months now, incorporating into the project the religious practices of a diversity of women, from the Amish to Orthodox Jews to contemplative nuns, even when those practices didn’t particularly suit my interpretation of the text. So against every good instinct in my body, I decided to try submission Debi’s way.
The first thing I did was make a flowchart as per Pearl’s “chain of command.” I found a photo of God from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and printed it at the top of a piece of paper, with an arrow pointing down to a picture of Dan, followed by an arrow pointing down to a picture of me. I stuck the flowchart on the refrigerator, ensuring that the few friends we had managed to retain to this point in the project would be frightened off for good.
Next I wrote up a job description for the executive assistant to Dan Evans:
The Executive Assistant to Dan Evans will serve as his helpmeet in all areas of life, assisting him in both home and business endeavors at his discretion.
Responsibilities include:
• running errands
• completing paperwork
• making meals
• doing chores
• assisting in home maintenance
• providing a supportive atmosphere in the home
• assisting as directed with Dan Evans’s business endeavors (Wylio, Chapter 2 Studios)
• providing food and support to business partners during meetings
In addition, the Executive Assistant to Dan Evans will yield to his preferences and wishes in all areas of life, including but not limited to:
• daily schedule
• entertainment
• errands
• household maintenance
• menus
• sex
• dress
• family decisions
To ensure that the Executive Assistant to Dan Evans meets or exceeds his expectations, the Executive Assistant will submit to him a daily schedule and will be subject to a once-weekly performance review.
I drafted a performance review template, which, along with a job description, Dan stubbornly refused to sign, saying the whole thing had gotten a little too “weird” for him. (Great. I’d spent all afternoon working on this and suddenly—after we’d babysat a computer, subsisted on matzah, observed three-thousand-year-old menstrual restrictions, and feasted with the Amish—Dan thought things had gotten a little too “weird.”)
“But I could definitely use some help writing copy for the Wylio site if you want to do that,” he offered, seeing a cloud of dejection spread across his poor help meet’s face.
Wylio.com is Dan’s web start-up. I like to take some credit for its existence because it was my whining about what a pain in the butt it is to incorporate creative commons photos into a blog that inspired Dan and his programming friends James and Matt to create a Web site in which you can find, resize, attribute, and embed free, creative commons licensed photos into your blog in just a few steps. Wylio had been featured on TechCrunch.com back in November, generating thousands of users, but the guys were about to launch a new version to spawn some revenue, and they needed to update the site.
I was a copy editor in a previous life, so taking a red pen to the first drafts of the new web copy proved therapeutic for me and helpful for Dan. Of course, I would have helped him with this task anyway—it had always been Dan’s job to keep our businesses in sync with the IRS and my job to keep them in sync with subject-verb agreement.
I felt like I needed to do more to make this month of submission stand out from the others. Debi Pearl provided just such an opportunity with her checklist for “How to Be a Good Wife Today” in Created To Be His Help Meet.11
The list, which she claims came from a 1950s home economics textbook, includes a list of do’s and don’ts befitting the stereotypical 1950s housewife.12 Pearl praises the list as “more Biblical in perspective than what the churches teach today,” so just before Dan came home from his part-time job tech job, I set about preparing for his arrival like a “good wife” should.
“Prepare yourself,” the instructions said. “Take 15 minutes to rest so that you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your makeup, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting.”13
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and put on some makeup. Then I slipped into a brown pencil skirt, white blouse, and canvas pumps, before wasting a full thirty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror in a vain attempt to wrestle my forest of hair into a pretty floral headband I’d picked up at J. C. Penney’s back when I was feeling a bit more optimistic about growing out my hair, as per the apostle Paul’s instructions. It was a quarter to five when I finally gave up and pulled it all back into a lopsided ponytail. If there was a ribbon in the house, I didn’t have time to find it.
“Clear away the clutter,” the instructions continued. “Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives, gathering up school books, toys, papers, etc. Then, run a dust cloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift, too.”14
I took “run a dust cloth” rather literally in this case and did a slap-bang dusting job in the living and dining rooms, after which I shoved all the clutter in the house into the guest room down the hall and closed the door.
Haven of rest and order? Check.
“Have dinner ready,” said the list. “Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.”15
Martha Stewart’s chicken piccata was on the menu that night, so I pulled my frilly, blue and brown polka-dot apron over my blouse and skirt, broke out four chicken cutlets, and dredged them in a mixture of four, salt, and pepper. I heated some oil and butter and threw the cutlets into the skillet until they cooked through, then set them aside in the oven to stay warm. By the time I’d deglazed the pan with some cooking sherry, sending a greasy plume of steam into the air, I could hear the garage door opening.
Of course he had to come home early today.
“Minimize the noise,” the instructions said. “At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile.”16
I could hear Dan’s heavy footsteps ascending the stairs as I rushed to whip up a sauce of lemon juice, capers, butter, and parsley. In my hurry, I dropped the wooden spoon, sending sticky brown sauce all over the counters, floor, and my white blouse. Dan was nearly through the kitchen doorway when I swallowed down an expletive, pulled off my apron, conjured up a sweet smile, and shouted over the still-sizzling skillet, “Welcome home, sweetie! I’m so glad you’re here!”
Dan walked in and looked around. “Is everything okay?”
“Don’t greet him with problems or complaints,” said the Good Wife instructions. “Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.”17
“Why don’t you go sit down in the living room and put up your feet?” I offered, with the perky intonations of a Stepford Wife.
Dan went back into the living room and sank somewhat hesitantly into the La-Z-Boy.
“Can I get you some cold water?” I asked.
“Um, okay. You sure everything’s all right?”
“Yes . . . It’s for the project,” I said.
Enough said.
I dashed back to the kitchen to survey the damage induced by my frenzied completion of the chicken piccata. The spoon still lay haplessly in a puddle of sticky brown liquid on the floor, and the sauce had thickened more than I would have liked, but otherwise the situation appeared manageable. I took the cutlets out of the oven, swirled the sauce around a bit, and poured it over the chicken. At that point I realized I’d forgotten to make a vegetable, so I threw a frozen veggie mix into the microwave and toasted some wheat bread.
I think I could hear Martha Stewart sighing all the way from Bedford.
“Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes,” the Good Wife instructions said. “Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.”18
I glided back into the living room, and in a saccharine voice that was not my own, sang, “Dinner’s almost ready, sweetie. Can I take off your shoes?”
“Uh, no, I’m fine, thank you . . . Weren’t you going to get me some water?”
“Oh, of course! Sorry!”
I ran back into the kitchen, poured a glass of ice water, and brought it back to Dan, who by that time had taken off his own shoes and powered on the Roku box. He seemed relaxed enough to me, so I went about setting the table and lighting a pair of white, long-stemmed candles in the center. Then I turned again to the list of Good Wife Rules.
“Make the evening his,” it said. “Never complain if he does not take you out to dinner or to other places of entertainment; instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure, his need to be home and relax.”19
“His world of strain and pressure,” I muttered back in a voice much closer to my own.
“Are you talking to me?” Dan shouted from the living room.
“No, just talking to myself, sweetie. You ready to eat?”
It was like a scene from Mad Men. In a matter of minutes, we’d become the model of marital repression.
“You know you don’t have to do any of this to make me feel more like a man,” Dan said at the dinner table as we dined on Martha’s chicken piccata and Wal-Mart-brand mixed vegetables. “In fact, treating me like a baby is a little emasculating.”
“I know,” I said. “This all feels kinda fake, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it does.”
We ate in silence for a while.
“So what would happen if I ordered you to stop submitting to me?” Dan finally asked, a mischievous grin spreading across his face.
“Well then, I guess I’d have to obey you,” I said.
“Then I order you to stop submitting to me,” he said. “Or at least stop submitting to me like this. It’s awkward.”
“But what about the Good Wife Rules?”
“Nope. No more.”
“But . . .”
“I have spoken!”
So that settled that.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
—EPHESIANS 5:21
Growing up evangelical, I learned to do inductive Bible study before I learned to balance an equation. Inductive Bible study is a method for reading Scripture which, as I remember it, involves three steps: (1) observation, (2) interpretation, (3) application.
One of the most useful tips for inductive Bible reading goes something like this: When you bump into the word therefore when reading the Bible, ask yourself, “What is the ‘therefore’ there for?” This usually sends you turning back a few pages to get the full context of the passage and a better sense of what the author is trying to say. The same applies to other conjunctive adverbs, such as “however,” “likewise,” “also,” “finally,” and “for example.”
So as I was looking at one of the three Bible verses that instruct wives to submit to their husbands—the one from 1 Peter that says, “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands” (3:1 UPDATED NIV)—my inductive Bible study skills kicked in, and I dutifully looked back a few verses to see what Peter meant by “in the same way.”
To my surprise, the preceding paragraph had nothing to do with the relationship between men and women, but was instead about the relationship between masters and slaves!
“Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters,” Peter wrote, “not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh . . . Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands” (1 Peter 2:18; 3:1 UPDATED NIV).
A little more research revealed that all three of the passages that instruct wives to submit to their husbands are either preceded or followed by instructions for slaves to submit to their masters. Right after the apostle Paul encouraged Ephesian wives to submit to their husbands as they would to Christ and Ephesian husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church, he instructed Ephesian slaves, “Obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). The pattern repeats itself again in his letter to the Colossians, where Paul wrote:
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. . . . Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. (3:18–22; 4:1 UPDATED NIV)
The implications of this pattern are astounding. For if Christians are to use these passages to argue that a hierarchal relationship between man and woman is divinely instituted and inherently holy, then, for consistency’s sake, they must also argue the same for the relationship between master and slave.
I kept digging, and as it turns out, Peter and Paul were putting a Christian spin on what their readers would have immediately recognized as the popular Greco-Roman “household codes.”20
As far back as the fourth century BC, philosophers considered the household to be a microcosm, designed to reflect the hierarchal structure of the society, the gods, and ultimately the universe. Aristotle wrote that “the smallest and primary parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children.” First-century philosophers Philo and Josephus included the household codes in their writings as well, arguing that a man’s authority over his household was critical to the success of a society. Many Roman officials believed the household codes to be such an important part of Pax Romana that they passed laws ensuring its protection.
Biblical passages about wives submitting to their husbands are not, as many Christians assume, rooted in a culture epitomized by June Cleaver’s kitchen, but in a culture epitomized by the Greco-Roman household codes, which gave men unilateral authority over their wives, slaves, and children.
As Sharyn Dowd has observed, the apostles “advocated this system not because God had revealed it as the divine will for Christian homes, but because it was the only stable and respectable system anyone knew about. It was the best the culture had to offer.”21
However, the household codes found in the epistles differ significantly from the household codes found in the pagan literature of the day. In a sense, they present us with a sort of Christian remix of Greco-Roman morality that attempts to preserve the apostle Paul’s earlier teaching that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 UDPATED NIV).
Where typical Greco-Roman household codes required nothing of the head of household regarding fair treatment of subordinates, Peter and Paul encouraged men to be kind to their slaves, to be gentle with their children, and, shockingly, to love their wives as they love themselves. Furthermore, the Christian versions of the household codes are the only ones that speak directly to the less powerful members of the household—the slaves, wives, and children—probably because the church at the time consisted of just such powerless people.
To dignify their positions, Peter linked the sufferings of slaves to the suffering of Christ and likened the obedience of women to the obedience of Sarah (1 Peter 2:18–25; 3:1–6). Paul encourages slaves and women to submit the head of the household as “unto the Lord,” reminding both slaves and their masters that they share a heavenly Master who shows no partiality in bestowing eternal inheritance (Ephesians 5:22; 6:5).
“When addressing those without power,” notes Peter H. Davids, the apostle Peter “does not call for revolution, but upholds the values of the culture insofar as they do not conflict with commitment to Christ. He then reframes their behavior by removing it from the realm of necessity and giving it a dignity, either that of identification with Christ or of identification with the ‘holy women’ of Jewish antiquity.”22
In fact, if you look close enough, you can detect the rumblings of subversion beneath the seemingly acquiescent text. It is no accident that Peter introduced his version of the household codes with a riddle—“Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves” (1 Peter 2:16 UPDATED NIV)—or that Paul began his with the general admonition that Christians are to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21; emphasis added). It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free.
The question modern readers have to answer is whether the Greco-Roman household codes reflected upon in Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter are in and of themselves holy, or if their appearance in Scripture represents the early church’s attempt to blend Christianity and culture in such a way that it would preserve the dignity of adherents while honoring prevailing social and legal norms of the day. The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further?
It is the question that divided Christians during the Civil War, and it is the question that divides those in favor of the hierarchalbased gender roles and those who believe that the best kind of submission is that which is mutual.
For Christians, the answer must be considered in light of Jesus, who made a habit of turning hierarchy on its head.
When his disciples argued among themselves about who would be greatest in the kingdom, Jesus told them that “anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35 UPDATED NIV).
In speaking to them about authority he said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:25–28).
This aspect of Jesus’ legacy profoundly affected relationships in the early church, to whom Paul wrote: “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:5–8 UPDATED NIV).
In the biblical narrative, hierarchy enters human relationship as part of the curse, and begins with man’s oppression of women—“your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). But with Christ, hierarchal relationships are exposed for the sham that they are, as the last are made first, the first are made last, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the God of the universe takes the form of a slave.
Women should not have to pry equality from the grip of Christian men. It should be surrendered willingly, with the humility and love of Jesus, or else we miss the once radical teaching that slaves and masters, parents and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, healthy and sick, should “submit to one another” (Ephesians 5:21).
This sort of mutual submission worked best in our marriage long before we knew what to call it.
That’s because I don’t respect Dan because he is a man. I respect Dan because when one of his friends moves, he’s the first to show up with his Explorer to help. I respect him because he’s the kind of guy who treats everyone with the same level of dignity, from his clients to the clerk behind the checkout counter. I respect Dan because he’ll come right out and say, “That’s not funny” when someone makes a racist or homophobic joke. I respect him because he likes to do things right the first time, even when no one is watching. I respect Dan because he has spent countless Saturday afternoons at my parents’ house, planting bushes and installing showerheads and fixing the computer.
I respect him because I’ve seen him cry on behalf of his friends. I respect Dan because he is smart enough to win just about any argument, but that doesn’t mean he always does. I respect him because he gets as excited over someone else’s success as he gets over his own. I respect Dan because he taught himself how to play guitar and design Web sites and invest in real estate. I respect Dan because he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he’s never afraid to admit when he is wrong. I respect Dan because he has more integrity than any person I’ve ever known. And I respect Dan because he has never once in our marriage demanded my submission.
I don’t respect my husband because he is the man and I am the woman, and it’s my “place” to submit to him. I respect Dan because he is a good person, and because he has made me a better person too.
This is grace. And for us, it goes both ways.