Between Submission and Submission
Or perhaps, Submission vs. Submission. Now that I’ve said that husbands can submit to their wives without biblical violations, I can’t let that fly without making another important distinction, the distinction between the kind of submission a husband should have to his wife and vice versa. I tend to agree with David’s thoughts in an earlier post that men and women are created differently and that those differences need to be respected (and I would also add NOT exploited) in how spouses submit to each other.
I’ve commented earlier that the question for Complementarians is not how much submitting should be excercised, but what kind. In his Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem makes the case that the role of a wife includes a unique kind of submission that wives should afford their husbands that isn’t replicated in any other type of relationship. I see nothing wrong with that. After all, my husband only has one wife–me–and logically should receive a unique and designated kind of love and respect (and deference) from me that I don’t show to anyone else.
Likewise, a husband should show his wife a unique kind of love and respect (and submission) toward his wife that isn’t replicated in any other relationship either.
Is this submission “mutual?” Yes. Is it equivalent? Definitely not. But what is submission anyway? Even in defining submission within the marriage context, there are varying connotations. Complementarianism holds that men and women do not require and are not made to require the same kind of submission from each other, but do require the appropriate submission from each other. Even Egalitarians seem to use the word ’submit’ a little differently when referring to whomever is doing the submitting. Again, the issue is about the nature of submitting, not how much or how often or to what degree one should submit to the other and if the other should reciprocate in equal quantities. I realize that this is a rather broad generality, and I think scripturally it is meant to be.
To throw a little more perspective onto things, imagine if wives always contested their husbands. Imagine if husbands continually ignored their wives. (Do we really need to imagine?) Now we can understand why Paul would spend time addressing the marriage relationship in scripture, for it appears that it was because wives were not submitting to their own husbands that Paul makes his declarations.
Perhaps this is where I should have started from the beginning. There is plenty of fear and suspicion to be had without a clear understanding of the motivations of the Apostle Paul whenever Christians talk about any kind of submission. We still have a long way to go to reach clarity, but I hope my making a distinction here contributes in some small way.
I’m enjoying your series Letitia
)
My husband commented last night that he heard David Jeremiah on the radio preaching about mutual submission. (I did cartwheels on the inside
One of the most significant lessons I have learned is that “submission” is NOT the same thing as “obedience”. Walking in “obedience” was death to me. Walking in godly submission is LIFE!
When I believed that my husband was “in charge” of me and I attempted to walk in obedience to him, I was committing the sin of idolatry. I was rendering lordship and masterhood to my husband instead of God. I confused obedience and submission. I thought obedience to my husband = submission. So I obeyed my husband and in so doing
-sinned against God
-enabled husband’s sin
-lied to the Holy Spirit
-could NOT maintain an attitude of humble cooperation:
ie was unsubmissive despite my obedience, I was resentful and bitter.
Ultimately, in my attempt to “serve two masters” I came to despise my husband.
Lu 16:13 No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
I find that genuine submission “as unto the Lord” is incredibly freeing and powerful! Because I am looking to the LORD for my guidance and instructions, not to my husband. The Lord has entrusted me with gifts, talents, abilities, and responsibilities and HE has given me wisdom, a conscience, and HIS Holy Spirit as counselor. Allowing myself to be run like an appliance from the outside was an affront to the God who made me and gave me good gifts. Not only that, I really know far more about running the household than my husband does and his micromanagement wasted many many hours of my and my children’s time on less efficient routes.
from Katharine Bushnell:
Woman can never be matured as a useful instrument in God’s hands, or an efficient servant of His Church, until she comes to understand that “she is not her own; she is bought with a price,” and it is neither her duty nor her privilege to give herself away to any human being,¾in marriage or in any other way….There is no social redemption for woman until…she maintains the inviolability of free will, as her sustained attitude towards every human being, including her husband. There is no method of moral improvement remaining, after the loss of a free will”
In giving myself away to be treated
in marriage
as a child or a slave (who MUST OBEY),
I gave up my free will,
and I remained immature.
It took me quite awhile-years- to untangle my mind from the idea that “husband is master”. When I believed that way, and confused the concept of “submission” and “obedience”, I would “obey” my husband’s every whim, but I was very unhappy about it! I was resentful and bitter. Which it turns out, is not submission at all! Submission preserves my right to say “no” (or “yes”). Submission is an attitude of humble cooperation.
Abigail in 1 Sam 25 is a submissive wife who disobeys.
Esther is a submissive wife who disobeys.
Sapphira (Acts 5) is a wife who should have submissively told her husband “no” but instead goes along with him agreeing to “lie to the Holy Spirit”.
I’m appreciating hearing a fuller picture of how you see marriage/complementarianism, Letitia.
One quick comment… You said,
…for it appears that it was because wives were not submitting to their own husbands that Paul makes his declarations.
I just wanted to say that I don’t know if that’s a supportable view/presupposition, at least from the texts themselves.
Ephesians and Colossians, where Paul tells wives to submit, don’t seem to imply that there was a wifely rebellion, anymore than there was a rebellion of children against parents or slaves against masters (which Paul also mentions in the same breath in which he talks about husbands/wives).
I’m thinking Paul’s words had a lot more to do with re-defining the normative Roman household code, which addressed those three relationships (slave/master, child/parent, wife/husband) as well. (Whether or not Paul was saying that submitting wives, submitting children, and submitting slaves was The Christian Ideal or not is another thing).
But I could be missing something, which I’ll quickly admit. Could you show me how and/or where you see your presupposition there supported?
The 6 examples following Eph 5:21 are all subordinate clauses to Eph 5:21 which is the verse which establishes the principle of mutual submission.
I would say that OF COURSE in any specific instance one submission will be different than another in the details. But I do not think this is what you mean by trying to claim a distinction of type of submission of wife to husband vis-a-vis husband to wife. I do not see a need for such complexity. Perhaps we are using different meanings for the word submission.
Daniel always submitted to the king but did not always obey the king.
Both “submission” language and “obedience” language are difficult to use under current cultural conditions. In biblical times, these words, and a wife calling her husband “lord,” came easily, with little or no negative weight attached all other things being equal.
In the past, when Christians used “obey” language in the marriage context to describe the attitude a wife was to have for her husband, it was not intended to suggest that a wife must serve two masters. The exhortation was given in the context of an expectation that the husband would be acting in accordance with Christ’s will, not his own.
It’s two-sided advice, and if one side is ignored, it becomes dangerous, an act of sacrifice or even martyrdom, to continue to follow the other side. Peter nevertheless encouraged wives to submit to their heathen husbands, but with a specific goal in mind: their conversion.
Still, I think it’s fair to say: if that goal is in reality impracticable, the submission is no longer in the service of a greater good, and should be abandoned or at least questioned.
In what sense is gender-specific submission taught in Ephesians 5? On the basis of an analogy: as the church submits to Christ. Christ who washed the feet of his disciples. Christ who, while on vacation, subordinated his needs to those of the Syro-Phoenician woman. Christ who does not his will, but the will of the Father. The analogy would no longer make sense if Christ did not conform his will to that of the Father. Likewise, the analogy no longer makes sense if the husband fails to conform his will to that of Christ.
Between submission and submission. The kind taught in scripture, the only kind, is not absolute, but goal-oriented: that of serving God and bringing God’s name glory. It takes spiritual discernment to know when that goal is no longer practicable, and what to do when it is not. But it makes no sense, biblically speaking, to speak of submission, gender-specific or gender-neutral, apart from that goal.
What bothers me about telling a woman that she needs to pick and choose when to submit it that is far too confusing. She WANTS with all her heart to obey GOD even to her own hurt and sacrifice. What happens is she tries to obey, and winds up extremely hurt, and the temptation is to think that GOD really does not care about women or he wouldn’t put such a “rule” in HIS Word. God has taught me that submission is NOT the same thing as obedience. Submission preserves MY freedom, MY right to say “no”, my personal God given authority and Call to protect my household- which includes my children and myself.
Based on personal experience, I believe the teachings which remove a wife’s authority to speak into the life of her husband, to “put her foot down” wind up enabling him to get off into unaccountable porn use. The church has proved impotent in holding him accountable on this issue. The ONLY progress has come from me standing up and saying very firmly (and meaning it!), “it STOPS or I’m outta here with the children”.
I think Stephen Tracy’s contribution should be considered in these discussions. He is a comp and reviews the comp literature on “submission” and finds just the kind of teaching which I imbibed which caused me to be a weak, powerless, controlled slave wife for 2 + decades. (see especially the footnotes- I have copied a sample from the paper and footnotes below)
FROM http://www.mendingthesoulministries.org/Perameters_of_Submission.pdf
QUOTE:
Stephen Clark, in what for many years was virtually the handbook for traditional gender role theology, makes such an assertion. He argues that modern secular society asks such questions merely to control “the scope of someone’s authority” whereas the biblical writers place virtually no limits on submission and authority. Hence, “the whole of the woman’s life (everything she does) has to be subordinate to her husband.”3 Other evangelical writers who also place great emphasis on marital submission (even asserting that it is essential to a Christian world view4) concede that there may be some occasions when submission must be qualified, but argue that this is so rare that it need not be developed or apparently considered. For instance, Mary Kassian argues:
Practically, there may be situations in which submission to authority is limited. However,
these situations are few and far between. Our focus should be on humility and obedience to authority in all circumstances. Submission may indeed have limits, but these limits are the exception rather than the rule. Obedience to God generally means obedience to those
in authority over us.5
But in actuality, universal human depravity has created a world in which power and authority is often misused and must be qualified. Scripture records hundreds of instances of ungodly authorities whose commands had to be disobeyed.6 Given the intimate nature of marriage, the abuse of authority and the dilemma of submission is particularly acute since even the more extreme forms of male abuse of power are common. For instance, one fourth to one third of North American women will be assaulted by an intimate partner in their lifetime.7 And physical abuse rates in Christian homes are similar to societal rates.8 Less severe forms of abuse (non criminal) are considerably more common. Kassian’s presupposition, that submission to authority need not be qualified since situations requiring such a need is exceedingly rare, is utterly divorced from reality.9 Many of the ugly situations that thousands of Christian women continually deal with are completely ignored in the non egalitarian literature,10 leaving Christian women to fend for themselves when seeking to discern what obedience to Scripture looks like in their real world. And the stakes are very high when we relate marital submission to ethical issues such as abuse, pornography, and the treatment of children.
For instance, it is widely recognized that we are in the midst of a moral and social revolution due to the effects of pornography….. Christian men are also viewing and being indoctrinated by pornography with tragic frequency.15 Our current epidemic level of pornography usage is having a dramatic effect on marriage and male/female relationships since pornography usage has a sudden and dramatic effect on how males view women and what they expect of them sexually.16 Sadly, virtually none of the non egalitarian marriage literature relates marital submission to the specific behaviors that pornography has influenced men to request or demand from their wives or to the way pornography programs men to demean and objectify women.17 While a Christian wife with a basic knowledge of Scripture might be able to recognize that her husband’s demand that she view pornography with him while they make love is clearly unbiblical and need not be submitted to, other sexual behaviors she finds objectionable are not plainly addressed in Scripture. So must she submit to these since Eph 5:24 tells her that she must submit “in everything”?
FOOTNOTES:
3. Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Roles of Men and Women in Light of
Scripture and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1980), 82-83. Hence, Clark refuses to place any
limits on the husband’s authority other than to say that righteousness, which he defines as obedience, “limits the
authority and protects the subordinate,” 82. Needless to say, this provides little guidance or protection for women
who are faced with the reality of obeying abusive, sinful, and harmful husbands.
4 Mary A. Kassian, Women, Creation and the Fall (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1990), 45.
5 Ibid., 38, emphasis hers. While this is an older work, it is very relevant to this discussion. Kassian has been quite
influential in conservative circles for her writings on gender roles and feminism, particularly The Feminist Mistake:
The Radical Impact of Feminism on Church and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), originally published as
The Feminist Gospel in 1992. Cassian’s influence is also seen in the fact that she is currently a Council Member of
the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Rebecca Jones argues that a wife should bring “all things”
under her husband’s headship. After emphasizing that a husband’s authority is all encompassing, she states, “we do
not have the time to examine all the practicalities of submission. God places women in extremely difficult situations
sometimes, and we are called to exercise great discernment as we ‘prove out’ the will of God,” Does Christianity
Squash Women? A Christian Looks at Womanhood (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 168. Unfortunately,
she never gives women in these difficult situations any specific guidance to discern the will of God in terms of
parameters of submission. This glaring omission is no doubt shaped by her failure to recognize the reality of
spiritual immaturity, sin, and abuse in Christian homes. She states, “The Christian men I know treat their wives as
precious treasures. They dote on them, admire them, depend on them, rejoice in them, cherish them, praise them,
and sacrifice for them,” 187. While it is wonderful that this has been Jones experience of Christian men, it is simply
not representative of the realities of many Christian homes.ENDQUOTE
On obey language, the Bible does mention this, but only in the context of a pagan king in Esther 1. Other than that, a wife is not told to obey her husband, even tho Aristotle taught this and was therefore seen as “law and order” for that time and Roman law codified it for the most part.
The “rule of thumb” was originally the rule that a husband could not beat his wife in order to get her to obey him with a stick thicker than his thumb, if he did so it was legally abusive. This just shows how far away from the Biblical concept some things got and we need to be careful with human traditions and not let them contradict what the Bible says and does not say.
Don,
I don’t think it’s helpful or true to scripture to think of submission and obedience almost as if they were polar opposites.
But you are right to cite Esther 1:15. It proves as do many other passages that obedience is not an absolute concept in the Bible.
Furthermore, a wife or a husband has no business submitting to or obeying directions provided by the spouse if said directions, if followed, would result in the violation of a divine commandment.
In real life, of course, things are more complicated than that. The locus classicus is Exodus 1:15-22. On this basis it has been argued that it is sometimes necessary to disobey one of God’s commands in order to remain faithful to another, more important command. I agree wholeheartedly.
For example, it makes sense, if one is a nurse or a doctor, not to obey or submit to a request to participate in (some or all, depending on one’s conscience) an abortion procedure, even though that violates the commandment to honor one’s employers (and may also damaging legal consequences). The greater good at stake is clear.
The rule has applications in the realm of marriage as well, applications to work out with care and discernment.
Who said obedience and submission were opposites, they are related but not the same.
Daniel submitted to the king ALL THE TIME, but did not obey ALL THE TIME.
Here is a killer for the non-egal system, as I see it: If a wife cannot do something in faith, then for her it is a sin, so says Paul. If a husband were to claim he can make a decision that is a sin for his wife, she should not do it. So there is no ability of a godly husband to require acceptance of his supposed final decision IF his wife cannot do it in faith.
And as she learns that she can do this, my guess is there will be more and more things she cannot do in faith, depending on how authoritarian the husband is. Being egal, I see this as a growth opportunity for both.
P.S. I do agree that sometimes commandments conflict and one needs wisdom how to proceed.
Don,
You say:
(1) Daniel submitted to the king ALL THE TIME, but did not obey ALL THE TIME.
Fine, that’s your choice, you are choosing to treat the two words in this way. But one could just as well say:
(2) Daniel did not always obey the king, and whenever he did not, that would have been understood as insubordination or a lack of submission.
The advantage of (2) is that it conforms better to actual usage of the relevant words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
As for the way you qualify the sense of “obey” in the case of “obey your husband,” I think all comps who are faithful to the biblical witness would agree with the qualification. Do you know of any comps, even hard-lines comps, who suggest that a wife should follow her husband’s lead even when to do so would result in sin?
Do you know of any comps, even hard-lines comps, who suggest that a wife should follow her husband’s lead even when to do so would result in sin?
I’ve frequently heard “don’t SUBMIT if its sin”. I would rephrase that to SUBMIT IN EVERYTHING! But don’t obey if you cannot do so with a clear conscience. Submission is an attitude I know from experience that I could obey my husband’s every whim and have a really BAD attitude about it. Underneath I was very resentful! And it really was not the best thing for him John. We both were losers all around as were our children when he had the final decision making authority over everything.
One can OBEY with a very resentful contentious(unsubmissive) attitude
OR one can DIS-OBEY with a sweetly submissive attitude.
I have a rather trivial example from my life with a “control freak” husband. This is the episode/the object lesson where it FINALLY registered to me that I was behaving like a “slave wife” and OBEYING instead of a free wife and SUBMITTING- in his best interests.
I now understand that I am not obligated to OBEY but to SUBMIT (humbly cooperate) I now exercise my God given authority over routine household matters and do my work the way I think best. And, frankly, all my children AND myself know that his ideas on how it “should be done” are mistaken mainly because he never DOES what he wastes so much time micromanaging and controlling The recent object lesson in my marriage was about a vacuum. He does not vacuum and has no idea of what equipment will help us with that job!
I bought a $50 electric floor sweeper and he was angry with me. He was not satisfied until I “repented” by agreeing to drive two hours back to the distant store to return the tool (which would have cost a minimum of $20 in gas plus my time). I felt very angry and resentful that I did not have the freedom to buy myself a very modestly priced tool for my household duties! I was boiling and resentful.
Actually, the Lord gave me a dream in which I was a slave fanning the king… and a girlfriend upon hearing about the incident and the dream started doing a little “fanning dance”. Ohhhhhhh. I am behaving like a slave instead of a queen! A QUEEN has authority in her household! I sweetly and submissively explained to my hubby that I felt I needed the sweeper and I had changed my mind about returning it.
Recently, I have exercised more “disobedient” submission in his best interests. I bought him a car when he was out of the country. He was driving illegally in a dangerous car with a broken frame. I took my children to the orthodontist for some work on their teeth. He is against anything which costs that much money, but I believe it is in his own best interests to care well for his children (and his income now permits this which was previously prohibitive for us)
gem said is better than me, being submissive not necessarily being obedient, not in the Bible and not in real life.
I agree that the topic of obedience and submission is confused by some teachers and some translations; that is no reason to continue the confusion.
Gem,
I follow your logic completely, and though I might use words in slightly different ways, there is not one iota of substance of what you say that I disagree with. Not that you need me to say so.
Thanks for commenting. It gives me a window into a kind of complementarianism that is clearly a perversion of biblical teaching.
” submission is NOT the same thing as obedience. Submission preserves MY freedom, MY right to say “no”, my personal God given authority and Call to protect my household- which includes my children and myself.”
I agree with that, Gem.
I think we often resent the command to submit because we equate it to obedience in every instance. I’ve done that and also questioned God’s love for me because I got into situations that were harmful for my family.
” Based on personal experience, I believe the teachings which remove a wife’s authority to speak into the life of her husband, to “put her foot down” wind up enabling him to get off into unaccountable porn use.”
Or unaccountable use of money, spending on things that are not necessary, and depriving the family from essentials.
Or leading the family into avoidable, very difficult circumstances.
Or raising children to not know right from wrong. A mother CAN and SHOULD teach her children right from wrong, even if it means telling her children that what their father is doing is very wrong.
Letitia,
” Is this submission “mutual?” Yes. Is it equivalent? Definitely not. But what is submission anyway? Even in defining submission within the marriage context, there are varying connotations. Complementarianism holds that men and women do not require and are not made to require the same kind of submission from each other, but do require the appropriate submission from each other.”
This sounds a bit like splitting hairs to me.
Submission is submission is submission. That’s it.
Submission is giving in to someone else. It’s voluntarily placing oneself under someone else. Giving up one’s rights. An attitude of humble cooperation.
Is it appropriate in marriage? Absolutely.
Could you give some situations where it wouldn’t be appropriate for a man to submit to his wife?
On the submission is submission comment, I agree.
This is one of the reasons I like being egal, it is SIMPLE; the non-egal model seems to have all these distinctions that do not seem useful to me and which I probably do not really understand. And then even the non-egals seem to disagree over them sometimes. For all the world, it reminds me of the Jewish Mishnah, making finer and finer points about the Sabbath or handwashing, etc. And Jesus freed us from that.
I like the “submission is submission” take as well. It seems a bit silly to describe my deference to the BH’s preferences as “submission, while simultaneously viewing the precise same responses on his part as “leadership.”
And I agree with Don: egal is simple. It just seems to come down to “checking in with one another” during the lunch hour, and sometimes a couple of times a day.
A wise girlfriend recently suggested that the ease of our interaction is a welcome product of…the empty nest…reminding me of more turbulent times in the past, when work, kids and community obligations kept us hopping, and occasionally at dagger points. In those days, we weren’t “checking in,” and we were most certainly practicing what I consider “secular egalitarian” interaction…to the point that counseling was needed.
The distinction is that these days, we do remember that God’s Will is that we demonstrate joyful consideration of one another.
Another thought related to submission being submission, regardless of who’s giving it.
Why are men instructed to expect their wives’ submission, and told that submission from their part (giving in) is sometimes sin?
Men shouldn’t be expecting more submission from their wives than they themselves are giving. The above described teaching on submission only supports an attitude of entitlement in men.
As an egal, I do not even understand how submission comes in flavors. When a husband submits to his wife, exactly HOW is this different when a wife submits to her husband according to a non-egal?
Or is it that a husband is not required to submit when he plays his trump card (final decision, tie breaker or whatever it is called) or what?
Can a non-egal explain how they see this?