Here We Go Again

I have alluded before to certain conversations that Chris and I have been having with the leadership of our church in Beijing. Most of those discussions have centered on the issue of women's role in leadership. We are decidedly egalitarians, while many people in our church are more complementarians – namely people who believe that men and women hold different and complementary roles. Simply put, they believe that women cannot teach men in church. To date, these discussions on leadership and teaching have resulted in more or less of a detente, in which we all recognize that 1) everyone disagrees and 2) the issue has not been decided in a formal, public manner.

This past week, however, the egalitarian vs. complementation debate raised its head again in a slightly different way. The guest speaker at our service spoke on Ephesians 5:22 to 25. His approach was decidedly complementarian, with a central argument that happy marriages are those in which women submit to their husbands, and husbands sacrifice themselves for their wives. My reaction is as follows: the true depth and meaning of Paul's passage cannot be fully understood by simply isolating these three verses and reading them in English. Obviously, these words were originally written in Greek, so English translations may lose or distort some of the original intent. They were also part of a larger message Paul was trying to convey to followers of the Way in Ephesus.

Before I begin, let me say that a while host of bible scholars have written excellent discourses on this particular passage that will put my writing to shame. I am most certainly not an expert, but I do bring the topic up because we HAVE to talk about this. So please, if you have any interest in this issue, I implore you to go read the experts. I will list a bibliography of links and references at the end of this blog entry.

The Passage in Question: Ephesians 5:22 to 25

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. Now as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. NIV

Note that I have bolded one English word in this passage: head. In ancient Greek, this word is written as “kephale.” Kephale deserves special attention in the examination of this particular passage.

Several authors, most notably Kreoger and Fee, have established that kephale is probably best interpreted as origin and source, not as ruler. A nice summary of the literature is presented here. This interpretation allows for us to see that Paul is not arguing for hierarchical ordering within families. Male is the source of female, just as God is the source of man. Men and husbands are not "ordered" above women and wives. To further quote Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28, NIV)

Grammatical Structure

It is really important to note that verse 22 is not a complete, stand-alone sentence at all (Fee 2002). In the original, this phrase is part of a longer sentence which begins with verse 18 and ends with verse 25. The NIV, which I quoted above, erroneously inserts a header entitled “Wives and Husbands” after verse 22. This breaks up the second part of the sentence from the first, and incorrectly separates the command given to women from the command expressed in verse 21, which is “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (emphasis added).

Paul is admonishing all members of the church community, male and female, to submit to one another in mutuality. Immediately after that, in the same sentence, he reiterates the point to wives. So the directive to wives comes as no surprise; Paul is restating a directive sent to the entire congregation – Submit to one another, even at home!

The next portion of the passage – really verses 25 to 33 – go much further in directing the husband. In effect, Paul is saying not only do you, men, have to engage in mutual submission at church (verse 22), but you must go even further at home. You must love your wife as your own body, as Christ does the church. You must love her so much that you will sacrifice everything for her, die for her. That must have been a surprising directive in a Roman society where men reigned supreme over women in all areas of social life.

The Passage in Context

One of the best discussions of the Roman social context for this passage that I have read to date is in Craig S. Keener's Paul, Women & Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul, specifically in the chapter entitled “The Social Situation of Ephesians 5:18-33.” Keener very clearly summarizes the Artistolean foundations of the existing social hierarchy, which emphasized the male as dominant over female. He also makes a great point about the xenophobic fears in Roman society of foreign cults.

Keener's argument is that Paul is encouraging women to be respectful of their husbands, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is socially expected. To behave otherwise could jeopardize the status of the followers of Christ in the eyes of the greater community. Paul “emphasized the wife's submission because it was an essential part of her witness in that culture” (p148).

In spite of all of this, however, Paul is not arguing that Christian women be subjugated under the authoritarian rule of their husbands as would be expected in contemporaneous Roman society. Keener concludes this particular chapter as follows.

A brief examination of Ephesians 5:21-3...places her submission squarely in the context of mutual submission, and qualifies her husband's position of authority as one of loving service. (Ibid)

Summary

When I was younger, I avoided this particular passage as I ignorantly thought that it was admonishing women to place themselves in subjugation to their husbands. I have been delighted to find that, contrary to my initial reading in English, Paul's writing in this passage is strikingly egalitarian. He calls men and women to mutual submission at home and in the church community. Most notably, he further calls husbands to sacrifice all that they are and have for their wife. I am not angered by this passage; I am empowered.

References Worth Reading

Keener, Craig S. Paul, Women & Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul. Hendrickson Publishers: Massachusetts. 1992.

Malone, Mary T. Women and Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Orbis Books: New York. 2001.

English Bibles Blog

Christians for Biblical Equity
- Fee article on Ephesians 5:18-33
- Johnson article on Christian submission
- Kreoger article on "Kephale"

http://www.geocities.com/equalitycentral/writings/6questions.html

http://www.geocities.com/about_biblical_equality/frameset_pages/eph523.html