Lies About Submission

Here's a topic that came up recently on one of the message boards I frequent. What lies about submission have you been taught? I've sure been taught a lot of lies about submission! Many of them from Christian forums. Here are some that come to mind right away.

• The husband is the boss of the wife.

• The wife has to obey her husband.

• Egalitarian marriage is a myth.

• If the husband isn't in charge of the finances, he's rebelling against God.

• If the wife works outside the home, she's rebelling against God, especially if she earns more than her husband does.

• The wife should follow her husband except into sin. She lacks the discernment to know if something is sin or not, so she should just give him the benefit of the doubt and obey anyway.

• A wife can't go wrong by obeying her husband.

• If the husband beats his wife, it's because she isn't submissive enough.

• If she questions his decision, she is usurping his authority and is engaging in witchcraft (rebellion).

• All husbands want quiet, submissive, stay-at-home wives who raise the children and keep house perfectly... even if they say otherwise.

• The male ego is fragile; a wife shouldn't be better than her husband at anything, or else he'll feel threatened.

• Marriage should be based on a military model. The man giving the orders and the woman jumping to obey them. This is a relationship of "equals."

• The husband is spiritually stronger than the wife; that's why he should obey God, while his wife should obey him.

• God gave women husbands because they're incapable of discerning his will for themselves; they need husbands to act as "priest of the home" and be their go-between.

• Wives are more easily deceived than husbands; that's why they should trust his judgment over their own, keep their mouths shut, and obey him even if their intellect and instincts are leading them differently.

LIES, LIES, LIES!

Thank God that neither my husband nor I are trapped by these lies any longer, and that our marriage is able to grow as God intended it.

Paul, Priscilla, and Phoebe

I recently discovered this wonderful article about women ministering in the church, based on the words of Paul. It discusses the gender biases of the translators, in terms of women ministering, and it does it with a simple word study of Paul's writings.

I used to think the Apostle Paul was a misogynist, but after doing a shipload of research, I'm discovering that he really wasn't. His translators were.

Enjoy the article; if anyone's interested, I'm adding it to my ever-growing list of links in the sidebar.

My Marriage Testimony

I thought I would share here what a large part of the impetus was for me to start researching all that Greek that I've referred to in earlier posts, about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. The impetus was my own marriage.

First of all, my husband suffers from clinical depression. He's usually okay when he's medicated properly, but sometimes he builds up a tolerance to the medication and it simply stops working. His depression isn't expressed as sadness or feeling "down" -- it's expressed as anger. All anger. He is usually the most laid-back man around, but when he goes into a depression all bets are off. He has never been violent to me or our son, but he starts fantasizing about random violence to strangers... ALL the time.

Anyway, it was during his last MDE (Major Depressive Episode) that we actually started to work all this stuff out. When we first got married, he was a new Christian and had never been exposed to "Christian" sexism before, and I had been attending a secular university for 6 years. We married as equals and functioned very well that way. If anything, I made more of the decisions simply because of the two of us I'm the more "Type A" -- he just doesn't care about the same stuff I care about, or as much. It worked out very well for us.

Then I got involved with a patriarchal church and a couple of spiritually abusive message boards. Hearing the message from all these sources that we were in sin and shirking our God-given responsibilities made us start questioning our relationship. Even though it goes against the grain of both our personalities, we gave in to the "peer pressure" of the church and decided that we should try to be more like we were being taught husbands and wives should be like; that we should fight our "sinful" personalities and sublimate them so that he could "lead" us and I could "follow".

So I backed off. When we had to make a decision, I would do all the research and legwork required, all the information-gathering, and then present it to him and he would make the decision.

When he got angry and yelled at me, or at our son, for no reason, I "submitted" and tried to be self-effacing. I did what he asked me to do. I ventured opinions, sure, but always left the final decision up to him. According to the teachings of our church, the people on those forums, and the likes of Debi Pearl, our marriage was finally "in line with God's will."

Living like that caused so much grief and discord in our lives and household that we very nearly split up. It even affected our sex life. He would get angry, actually angry, when I tried to initiate, an HE never initiated anything at all. The results of some of his bad decisions came back to haunt us, and knowing that he was the one who had made them made him even more depressed. Mind you, those few times when we had both done the info-gathering and decided things together, those decisions had great results! But living like that, with him being the boss and my unilateral submission, nearly killed our marriage... and definitely did kill our joy, love, and pleasure in each other.

It wasn't until I lovingly told him, "The next time you snap at me or our son for no reason, I'm taking him out of the house and you won't get to see us for the next [span of time]," that he discovered lo and behold! He didn't HAVE to yell and berate us all the time! (Thank you, Cloud & Townsend!)

He hadn't wanted me to even bring up the topic of medication for his depression, so I hadn't. Until things got so bad I just decided "This is insane. I'm doing everything according to God's will and not being rewarded for it. If not submitting is a sin, then I'll by golly sin and take the consequences for it, but I'm not going to continue like this anymore."

About the same time as I made that decision, my husband (during an angry outburst) told me he didn't WANT a submissive wife anymore! He loved the wife he used to have, doggone it, and why couldn't I be her anymore? If we were going to go against God's will in going back to the way we were when we married, then if he was the leader, he'd take the consequences for it, but he wasn't going to continue like this anymore.

Hmmmmmm.

So after that, I started mentioning his medication more often. As I said, he NEEDS antidepressants in order to function at a human level. He'd been off his meds, or on the wrong ones, for a long time. He didn't like hearing that he should go back to the doctor and get new ones, but I kept mentioning it and kept mentioning it persistently (and lovingly) until he did. A month later it was almost like I'd gotten my true husband back.

Worried that now that we were being true to our own personalities and each other's desires, we were outside the will of God, we started to research and study the scriptures about it...

Only to discover that what we'd been taught was the "will of God for marriage" was only the teachings of our church for marriage... and that God's will is something VERY different. Not only that, but it was something of a "duh" moment when we realized God gave us our personalities, too! And we had been rejecting that gift thinking we were more in line with his will by calling them sinful. God made us this way for a reason, and it was very wrong of us to try to preempt God and tell him how he should have made us.

That's our story. We walked together through the valley of the shadow of patriarchy, and God be praised, came out egalitarian on the other side. Hallelujah!

Further Thoughts on Husbandly Headship

My good friend on TMB, Dena, posted this idea once in a thread talking about the husband being the "head" of the wife, and whether that entailed authority over her or not, and if it entailed any authority at all, what would it look like? The thread got fairly heated as I recall, but I stopped paying much attention when I read Dena's post. Literally -- her post was so thought-provoking that I had to walk away from the computer and think about it for an hour or so. And the best part is, she discusses authority in the church as well as in a marriage. Here's what she had to say (with emphasis mine -- pay special attention to it, at the end!). Check it out!

Within the house church, we don't have titles, or positions, or offices... we have individuals whom God has called to various functionings... those who function as deacons (practical servants), those who function as elders (spiritual servants), those who function as teachers, shepherds, evangelists, prophets, apostles...

None of them are "over" anyone else... they're servant-leaders (servants who lead by example). There's no hierarchy -- just Jesus as Head, and all the other brothers and sisters functioning, as called, under HIM - in unity.

They don't have "special rights" to be above anyone else... but they do have "special responsibilities", as called by God, to serve others in their various capacities. We don't so much submit to the person, or the position, or the title... we submit to the calling that the Lord has on that person...! Because that calling is for the blessing of the rest of the Body -- it's the Lord Himself, working through that person, and it's really to HIM that we're submitting!

And the PURPOSE of their servant-leading is to bring the whole of the Body into full, functioning maturity -- to reflect Christ.

So, within marriage, God has called the husband to a particular responsibility ... he's usually larger, stronger, and therefore more able to be a protector of the wife than vice versa. He's designed by God to focus, to zero in, to concentrate, on one specific thing (while the woman is more global, balancing several things at once - each has it's strengths and weaknesses), and to take initiative in a particular direction.

We're designed to work in concert -- not with him as the "boss," but with him making a way for me to go (as he would if he were literally leading me through a dense forest/jungle... getting rid of the obstacles, making it easier for me to navigate.

Perhaps, since this world, the cultures, even the historical Church, tends to be suppressive of women, and God would know this would happen, as a result of the Fall, He designed men with the task of creating an environment for his wife to thrive... to protect her, to lift her up, to encourage her, to present her to others in a way so that others would respect her and receive what she had to share... so that she wouldn't be sidelined...?

It's not because I'm "less than", it's because the enemy has sought to destroy the influence of women, and thus, my husband's responsibility is to present me as a person worthy of equal honor in the Body ...

And, I'm to submit to what the Lord has called him to do... to not get in the way, but to cooperate with what He is doing.

Because the PURPOSE of the husband's servant-leading is to bring the whole of the marriage into full, functioning maturity -- to reflect Christ.

My previous research on "kephale" (Greek "head") showed me that it had a connotation of the husband as "point-man" -- the first one into battle. Physically speaking, this makes sense because men are nearly always physically stronger than women. But Dena points out that part of his job as protector might very well be to make sure she gets equally respected by others who might not otherwise listen to her.

Since Grey does an admirable job of that, and I adore him for it, I am definitely inclined to agree with Dena!

Thoughts on Authority

Been thinking a lot about authority issues lately. I know that I have them -- "issues" (read: problems) with accepting someone's authority over me who in my opinion isn't supposed to have it. Especially among believers this seems to be a problem.

On one of the message boards I sometimes haunt, a poster called "Nice" has this to say: "I wanted to add my thoughts on...the difference between to have authority to do something and to have authority over somebody. I think there's big difference between these two...I think that when authority is being exercised, it’s always in some kind of context; usually an organization that contains some kind of hierarchy. Organizations and hierarchies can be either flat, vertical or both (in it's structure). Such “organization” could be the family, the workplace, the government, an association etc. It is often said that the biblical "organization" is the vertical; most often referring to the order of creation (genesis 1:28 and 1 cor 11:13 and also Rom 13:1 (that last scripture isn’t about the order of creation)).
But I think Jesus, He who himself is the Word of God, adds another perspective when he says

"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." (Mark 9:35)

“Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. (John 13:14)

“Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Jesus talks about himself as if he was” the least” in heaven??) (Matt 11:11)

“The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Jesus identify himself with the least) (Matt 25:40).

Some say those scriptures are about the attitude we should have as christians, and I think that's right. However I do think Jesus turns the human perspective up side down. I wonder if this could mean that there is a difference between “to have authority over …” and “to have authority to ….” if you understand what I mean with that. The first one can only (I think?) occur in a vertical organization. The second may very well be exercised in a flat (and more equal) organization.
For example if you have a spiritual gift, let’s say, to prophecy, than you have a God given mandate to do so. The person who prophecy has an authority to do so, but does he has authority over them who are receiving the prophecy? Hardly. At least I don't think so anyway.
Another example is if you’re a doctor, then you have the authority to diagnose and treat people but you don’t have authority over them do you?

In a marriage, we have different roles. The husband have the authority to be the head but does that mean that he has authority over his wife? Well, not if they are equal. That would seem contradictory to me. The children however, we can say we have authority over because they aren’t adults. When one says women can’t teach men because then they will exercise authority over men, then one must consistently say that women cannot exercise any form of prophesying, teaching or caring or anything else where the man must submit to the woman’s ministry. However, it seems to me that the Bible contradicts that (Luke 2:36, Rom 12:6 fwd, 1 Cor 11:5 )...
We are all to serve each other with the amount of talents ("authority") we've been given. Matt 25:14

And for that to be possible... We must submit to one another!

"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" Eph 5:21

Nice has hit the nail on the head here. She is talking about authority in a marriage, while I was talking about authority in the church, but the basic principle is the same. The pastor does not have authority OVER his congregants. He has authority TO... do what? Serve them. And yet how often does he serve them without lording it over them as well?

That's one of my biggest beefs with the institutional church lately: one person (a man) has charge over the whole group. He's the one who decides who is to speak when, what songs they'll sing, how everything will fit together, and he's the one who does the preaching.

This attitude of one man being in charge of everything is TOTALLY against scripture. As is the concept of one person doing all the preaching and teaching. The Bible tells us that "each of you" is to prepare a teaching, a song, offer a prayer, etc. and then take turns so that everything remains orderly. When's the last time you attended an institutional church where that happened? Even so-called "Bible believing" churches tend not to follow the format for gatherings that is laid out very clearly in 1 Corinthians.

Every believer is anointed, yes. Every believer is also an authority over every other believer, and is also to submit to every other believer.

Re Ephesians 5: I know I've mentioned this elsewhere on this blog, but I'll say it again: I discovered that in Ephesians 5, when it says wives should submit to their husbands, it's a continuation of thought in the previous verse: we believers are to submit to each other! It's not a separate thought at all, as I had been taught: it's the same word. It's not even a repetition of the same word -- that word is used only once, in the Greek, to cover BOTH the submitting to each other AND the wives submitting to their husbands.

That seems to say to me that all believers are to submit to one another -- wives in one way, and husbands in another. Husbands get to be the servant, "point man" and protector, and wives get to be the servant, strong rescuer (gen 2:18), and rule over the household (Prov. 31).

Key point there is that both partners are servants to the other. That is where TRUE authority lies: in serving. Not in taking charge.