More on submission and headship
I wrote the following in response to a comment on my post on headship. By the time I’d finished it, however, I thought I might as well post it. The comment said:
‘The thing with formulas is that they reduce a wider concept into an easy repeatable solution. Can you reduce the love to this? How does equality fit within this definition? Men and women are created equal and all are one in Christ. It has been said that ’submission and love are two sides of the same coin.’ Submit to one another is a key verse in this debate surely?’
As I said in the article, submission and love are very close. But they cannot be synonymous since the throughout Ephesians 5 is Christ and the church. My relationship to Christ is not a mirror of his relationship with me. Christ does not submit to me!
‘Submit to one another’ is important. But it is not the ‘heading’ of the section on marriage, but the climax to the previous section. Although most English translations hide this, ’submitting to one another’ is one of four participle sub-clauses qualifying the command to be filled with the Spirit (the NIV hides this badly by making it a separate paragraph). Paul says, in effect: ‘Be filled with the Spirit, by speaking to one another … by singing in your hearts … by giving thinks to God … by submitting to one another.’ The husband does not submit to the wife in the same way that the wife submits to the husband.
Of course men and women are equal. But equality does not rule out complimentary roles or headship. Otherwise we cannot have a proper doctrine of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity are equal in terms of their being (their ‘godness’). But the Son subordinates himself to the Father: he puts the will of the Father before his own (John 5:19; 8:28 etc.) This is the point Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 11:3.
Biblical teaching on this issue clearly runs contrary to the spirit of our age. But the answer is not to make the Bible conform to our worldview, but to make our worldview conform to that of the Bible – to be counter-cultural.
This does not mean, to anticipate the ‘What about …’ scenarios, we must defend all the abuses of male headship over women – quite the opposite!
The big issue is what does it mean to to exercise authority. As my earlier blog on marriage and Ephesians 5 tries to show, our problem is we understand authority in the image of Satan’s lie rather than in the image of God’s rule. So we think of authority of repressive and restrictive. But God’s rule is liberating, life-giving and loving. Men believe the lie when they abuse authority and women believe the lie when they reject headship.
