....was reading the bible last night. I have a bone to pick with 1 Peter 3:1-7, especially the 'weaker partner' bit and also Colossians 3:18-19. Why must I submit to my husband, but he only love me? I know I'm harping on, but for me, this really affects whether I want to be married in the Christian church or not.
Are you getting married sometime soon? ;-)
I want to start by asking some questions a little further back than the texts you raise, because that may give us some context and perspective on the issue. The questions are something like this: do you think of yourself as a follower of Jesus ? And, do you think that the Bible speaks with his authority? (you don't have to answer out loud btw) Because if you say yes to these questions then that changes everything about the way you approach the texts. And if you don't, then please don't have a church wedding in any case!
I say this because actually, the 'church wedding' question seems to represent something more significant (I could be wrong). You seem to be saying that, at least perhaps, the meaning and importance of these texts and others like them are for you determinative of whether you will continue to identify as a Christian or not at all. Is this fair?
From my point of view, if the Bible is the voice of Jesus and I am his follower, then though I expect to find some difficult, strange and counter-intuitive things in it - and I certainly do - I generally assume that the problem is with me, in my understanding or in my heart, rather than the text. I come to the text as one who knows as a first order reality the vastness of the love God has for me in Jesus, and the mercy he has shown me, a sinner and his enemy. This doesn't mean that I am not wrestling with these and other texts and trying desperately to figure out how they are God's word for me today. But it means I tend to assume that the Bible makes sense of the world and how to live in it.
This might make us two very different readers, then, though we both struggle with the text. From your point of view you are perhaps wondering if this really is for you, whether this really fits with your experience - in particular as a woman. If that is the case, then it is a pity to start here with these texts and this issue and not with the gospel itself. Decide whether that is for you, and the rest is just footnotes by comparison. You may decide that it isn’t for you: and that’s fine, but it will make for two very different perspectives on texts like these I think.
Sorry - that's a long preamble, which I hope makes some kind of sense. Let me start with 1 Peter 3. Along with Col 3 and Ephesians 5 it represents the NT's teaching on marriage: not a lot you would have to say. However, marriage itself is used as a great image of Jesus the groom and the church his bride - with one dying for the other and so on. So marriage in Christian terms is more than just a living arrangement - it is a living illustration of the gospel itself.
In 1 Peter 3 we need to take note of the whole letter and its themes. Peter is speaking to people in places where their weakness is apparent and frustrating: so, to slaves, to persecuted citizens, to wives and so on. He uses Jesus himself as his model of enduring injustice and suffering. He doesn't say 'oh, they don't have any authority at all'; rather he says 'win them over by doing good rather than being rebellious'. In particular, he is addressing the Christian wife of a non-Christian husband: her temptation might be to undermine the marriage because she has found a new Christian family. But her strategy is to be somewhat different. There is no revolution against authorities, whether masters, emperors or husbands.
BUT: there is also the verse about the weaker partner and so on. I don't think anything is being said here that isn't just a fact of life: Peter isn't saying something moral, or that women OUGHT to be the weaker partner. It is just generally true that women are more vulnerable than men, physically, and also because of child-bearing. But something crucial happens in this verse too, something that led to a true revolution: and that is, that the husbands were to honour the wives (as they were to honour the emperor interestingly) and to treat them as 'fellow-inheritors of the gracious gift of life'. In other words, here were the seeds of a transformation of the whole nature of marriage into a genuine partnership of the two in which men and women in their full complementarity (not their mere colourless interchangeability) were to serve one another.
Christian marriage is never about one partner forcing the other to submit - though in this as in many other things Christians have of course failed to live up to their own scriptures at times. Husbands are never told ‘make sure your wife submits to you’. Rather, they are told things like ‘lay down your life for her’, or ‘honour her’. I think that enormous cultural variation in practice is allowed within what the Bible says on this: but Christian marriages will always tend to the more ‘democratic’ and collaborative. Peter never condemns slavery: he doesn’t need to, because if you understand the Christian gospel slavery just melts away. Likewise, he doesn’t advocate a feminist revolution: he doesn’t need to, because where the Christian gospel is truly understood women are treated as the co-heirs of the gift of life, even though there be a physical disparity between the two. Peter’s teaching is utterly counter to his own culture on this.
As a footnote, it is not an accident that it was bible-believing Christians who fought to end slavery in the nineteenth century and who also formed the heart of the first feminist movements...
10 comments:
There is nothing in Christian 'submission' that indicates inferiority in being, wisdom, intelligence, or moral aptitude. If it were true that submitting meant inferiority, then the Son would be inferior in substance to the Father, and yet he is equally divine, sharing the nature of God and being "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being..." (Heb 1:3). Jesus submitted to the will of the Father (Jn 4:34, 6:38) in all things including the thing that mattered most (Lke 22:42, Heb 10:7-10), yet he was equally God (John 1:1), so a wife submitting to her husband does not imply that she is not equal with him or is an inferior kind of human being.
I think sometimes we think submission is a chicks' thing...whereas in fact, submission is pretty much descriptive of the whole of the Christian life, rooted in the model of Jesus Christ himself...
Indeed, check out Ephesians 5.21. We all get to submit - hurray! (because that means we all get to be like Jesus)
There is no revolution against authorities, whether masters, emperors or husbands.
Or rather (as you later point out), any attempt at revolution comes too late - Christ has already defeated the powers. The revolution has happened.
Actually that verse is often taken out of context exegetically to suggest that husbands and wives are to mutually submit (if logically there can be any such thing anyway?). Though it's true that we all have various people to submit to, they don't have to reciprocate. The logical flow of the sentence is submit to one another, x to y, a to b, c to d, etc. In each of those pairs, the submission is not mutual. Masters are not to submit to slaves, nor parents to children. Nor should we think that when we are told to submit to the governing authorities that means they should also submit to us!
The above notwithstanding, what you say is true. Christianity involves a life of submitting to others out of reverence for Christ.
Michael I agree with a good portion of what you have to say in this reply, but in putting the hard word on your interlocutor --- "You seem to be saying that, at least perhaps, the meaning and importance of these texts and others like them are for you determinative of whether you will continue to identify as a Christian or not at all. Is this fair?" --- I put it to you that you are not being especially fair: in fact, I think, you are being a bit obtuse.
At the risk of quoting myself: where there is smoke, there is fire, even if the fire is not where the onlookers are pointing. Does it really take too much imagination to see why someone might be reticent about letting the church in on their wedding ceremony? Within this very month a friend attended a wedding in this city, where the preacher chose to speak on Ephesians 5, and thought it necessary to make belligerent points against "you women of the liberation", compounding lack of judgement with a quite ridiculous failure to use English in an idiomatic way ...
Let me go right to the slavery example, since this is a question where we agree on the substance: I even once put the Letter to Philemon into the hands of a colleague, when discussing the matter --- in other words, I agree that the received street-statements on the-NT-and-slavery are slander. But I do not get on my high horse with people who repeat this slander. Why is that? Might it have anything to do with the loud, repeated, shameful use of Scripture in defence of slavery by many Christians as reformers (Newton and Wilberforce and other evangelicals of course among that glorious company) dragged them kicking and screaming into the modern moral consensus on the topic? Might it be because in my own lifetime, Christian letter-writers to the Herald have been pleased to argue that "master-slave relations" should be a timeless model for the conduct of affairs between employers and their employees ... and because there are pulpits in this town that would provide no easy rationale for why that argument is wrong-headed?
I am conservative enough that I even adhere to sola Scriptura, although this is a slogan to which I hold (as it were) by faith rather than by sight, since there are not above four people around here with whom I would trust this notion. After ten or more years I think I have just about got over a visit to a flagship Australian evangelical church where the preacher thought it important that the congregation held to the strict historicity of the Book of Jonah. I have a theology degree: what are the rest of the laity supposed to do? And what are my colleagues in the scientific community supposed to do? God knows, they have enough good reasons to despise conservative protestant churches, even if these are (by themselves) insufficient reasons to despise Scripture.
We should look to our own house. As a cardinal said some years ago, in criticism of RC heavy-handedness on unpopular but important doctrines: "nuance, it is everything".
Hmm, I am not sure I was particularly heavy-handed here. I was merely reflecting back to the person what she was expressing to me: that this was a crunch issue for her as far as the Christian faith goes. I should say that there is background to the discussion of course that I didn't put in the post.
"I should say that there is background to the discussion of course that I didn't put in the post." Well, that's fair enough. Let me then modulate my remarks:
In facing someone who (you say; I accept) has deal-breaking concerns about the church's teaching on marriage, you say that it's a pity to start there rather than somewhere more central: that these issues are "footnotes by comparison". This may be true, but I think it has limited application to a laywoman or enquirer who already has preoccupying concerns on these points. The chief application surely has to be against other preachers, such as the Eph 5 turkey I mentioned: if these issues are footnotes, then we should be slow to put them on others' consciences when we make official pronouncements.
What I understood as a hard statement (not the words I quoted, but equally in my mind), that the lordship of Christ means that one is stuck with Scripture, is true enough as far as it goes. As an evangelical you of course agree that it does not mean that one is stuck with the church's tradition of exposition in anything like the same sense. But as a critical thinker you know that the evangelical tradition tends to collapse the two --- Scripture, and its own tradition of interpretation --- being generally unaware that it is, in fact, a tradition, with all that that implies. I suggest that if we (broadly defined) go around saying "the Bible says X", it's a bit much for us to then criticise others for taking us at our word.
And I took you to be criticising your friend's this-is-determinative position, as much as characterising it. If I was wrong in this, then I think we're close enough to being on the same page. But if I was right, that you were criticising as well as characterising, then I would like to pursue this further.
My friend had indeed encountered some particularly egregious examples of teaching on this subject which had alienated her. In fact, it was the behaviour of some men relating to these texts which had (she said) caused her to leave church in the first place (though not to completely lose her faith). So there is a sense in which I was doing damage control, and trying to appeal to her better nature. My 'strategy' in the conversation was to try and shift the ground, however lamely. I don't think convincing her of a conservative reading of the texts was likely, nor really going to get very far any way.
What do you think would be a better way to go, Bruce? (that is a serious not sarcastic question btw). I really wonder what we are going to say to a person like this to commend Christ and the gospel.
I'll answer the question on what would be a better way, but it'd be dishonest to do so without also saying that I think the answer has broader implications. You may not like some of them, and I am prepared to guarantee that others will not like them at all.
Because there's a prior point here: as I see it, the evangelical church has a kind of congenital inability to deal with people who have other intellectual loyalties. I could speculate as to how that came about historically, and/or to what it correlates in a proper theological account. (I mean theology broadly conceived, that is, including ecclesiology and anthropology and so on.) But this is a job for someone else: I don't want to embark on it in my ignorance.
Evangelicals, I say, do not know what to do with such people. I of course speak from my own experience as a scientist, and moreover a second-generation member of that community: I was born into the culture. And it is a culture. It has its own obsessions and blind-spots, rogue subcultures, forgotten crimes, skeletons in the closet, misunderstandings, and what-not. It is neither infallible nor timeless, and stands under the judgement of posterity and (indeed) of God. And yet. It is a culture with unique value, and privileged access to certain things, by virtue of its history, its dedication to certain techniques, and The Way The World Is. And if someone in that culture takes the view that the world is 4.6-odd billion years old, the universe (a bit less than) three times that, and that human beings like all species have a prehistory of descent from other species, like and yet unlike, in one big tree (better: a bush) branching through time and space, and that they don't give a rat's arse how you exegete the early chapters of Genesis, then this is in some sense The Right Answer. Please do not misunderstand me. I would meditate on Gen 1-3 as often as I would meditate on any worthy thing; at least, as often as I reflect on what I just said. But the received evangelical view, that We Just Believe Whatever The Scriptures Are Found To Teach, is simply unreal at this point. It is not perhaps to be blamed for this, being conceived for quite different kinds of questions. But it is still woefully inadequate, and my ongoing complaint, that no-one in the church wants to reflect on this point out loud, stands, I think. This, from my perspective, is the substance of my dispute with your colleague MB, in which I signally failed to convey the following point: scientists regards creationism as a movement devoted to the promulgation of empirical falsehood under cover of loyalty to tradition; being consecrated to faithfulness to the phenomena, and having a (misconceived, but not ignoble) hostility to received tradition, we respond to such a project with visceral loathing; rather less defensibly, we treat this (although many could not describe it this way) as a purity issue. We regard transgression in this matter as polluting everything that it touches. The fact that Sydney Diocese is remarkable among conservative evangelical movements in being largely free of official creationism, is largely unknown to my colleagues, as is the fact that the second-to-last principal of the college was a creationist. But while the former point might surprise them, the latter would not, because they can smell it on you. The "the Bible this, the Bible that" rhetoric; the reluctance to engage in behind-the-text questions; the textual positivism: you sound like fundamentalists to them, and from my perspective straddling both communities, I think that they, in their ignorance, can see something that you, in your familiarity, are liable to miss.
I think that this is a really big deal. I know that I am quite alone on this, but it doesn't mean that I'm wrong. And it has bearing on the current project. For all of Australia's anti-intellectualism, Australians are not stupid, and the church's estrangement from other learned people causes it to bleed credibility from every orifice. Some people criticise the goal of having 10% of Sydney in Bible-believing churches as unrealistic, but to me this misses the point entirely. A movement that commanded that kind of loyalty, but which had not yet made some minimal peace with other traditions of learning, would be a fearful thing, and I would oppose it. There: I said it.
To me, these are the stakes. And so to the point at hand, here (with acknowledgement to certain 19th century lady novelists) is my Study For A Reply To The Alienated:
"Look, Janet (I will call you Janet), I can't defend these people. I can't honestly disown them, but I can't defend them: think of them as my dodgy cousins. And they are dodgy. The passages you mention are a handful of snippets of one half of a set of conversations in a quite different culture that's two thousand years dead, and they just can't be treated in the gung-ho, this-is-the-message, like-it-or-lump-it manner that my cousins think it can. I would beat them about the head on this, except that other people have tried and they stopped listening long ago. I'd like to apologise further on this subject but it would be absurd. They're just mistaken about the implications here.
As for the passages themselves, I don't disown them because they're part of my heritage. The same people who wrote these things taught me respect for the weak, and a proper way to hold the strong to account; and about membership, as opposed to uniformity; and they unpack for me what it is to follow Jesus. I'd say that the way they expound this was revolutionary in their own culture --- and it was --- but I'm aware that this sort of statement is used defensively by my cousins as a kind of magic talisman, to excuse their insensitivity to the present. Is that another apology? Probably, but there it is.
It's very hard to read this material fairly, from where we're currently standing. It's woven into the way the apostolic (I mean: the original Christian) generation thought, and so it's wrong to just set it aside: and the only real excuse for my cousins' behaviour is that they see this point, and have gone kind of zealous about it. Paul, and the writer of First Peter, don't have any kind of anti-feminist agenda, because they pre-date feminism, and are among its (many) sources. Everyone always talks about slavery as a parallel case, but this is actually much easier to address: the apostles didn't envision a future without slavery, any more than people thirty years ago envisioned a future without factory farming. They had other fish to fry, specifically reconciling men and women to God, and to each other (including estranged people-groups, which has become kind of topical lately). They were quite capable of sending a runaway slave back to his master --- with what amounted to orders, on religious grounds, that the master set him free and receive him as a brother. This was not the ethic of the nineteenth century social reformers, but it was unambiguously one of its sources. Christians who opposed this on what they called Biblical grounds were simply wrong about the matter, and this can't be said too often.
The marriage teaching is more complicated. I won't conceal from you that I [MPJ] am up the more`conservative' end of the spectrum on this, much as I dislike that way of speaking. I have colleagues who would appeal (as it were) to the apostles' principles over the head of their example, and see little fixed distinction between men and women's roles. I don't quite see how to square that with the Scripture, but I do honour the intent of it, and I think my cousins are wrong to dismiss this sort of manoeuvre quite so quickly. Some of my colleagues would say I'm little better than the cousins on this. Being stuck in the middle, I guess I could be the worthy guy who takes hits "from both sides", or I could just be foolish: but this is for other people to judge.
What I hope we'd all agree on is that you should look first to Jesus' example. Jesus is actually more of a hard-arse than the apostles in a lot of ways, but for some reason it's easy to see that there's no agenda involved: compassion and clear-sighted judgement, which in our culture we find so terribly hard to hold together, coincide in Christ so easily that you wonder why the church finds it so difficult. This is our tragedy, at least in this time and place. But I think even my cousins would agree that the church is a distraction in this matter. If you recognise the spirit of God in Jesus' example and teaching, the way I do, then the rest is commentary. And if someone makes that commentary in such a way that they exclude you, just on this controversial point, then you should feel free to refer them to me."
On short notice, that's my best effort. I see no way of saying this that does not involve, in however loving and measured a way, pissing on your "cousins" from a great height, conventional evangelical concerns about causing divisions within the church notwithstanding. Likewise I see no way of your making peace with my brothers and sisters that would not, if they should chance to overhear it, mortally offend the Baptists and (half of) the Pressies. So in my best polemical Sydney style, I think you need to choose now: the money or the gun?
If it is ordained by God in His Word to submit to our husbands then He will bless the woman who obeys Him. We don't always understand why He wants us to do something but His ways are higher then ours and obedience is the key. Submittance seems to make some woman feel like they are less of a person or lower then the man. It is not a lower thing to submit. I live to please God and obey His Word. he will take care of the rest. You don't need to worry about whether or not it is equal for the man to love and the woman to submit. Love includes submitting because the man is to submit to God and everything He says. He is to love you as Christ loves the church. Christ died for the church and therefore a man loving his wife is complete devotion.
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