Submission: A Cringey Concept?

The Bible instructs wives to “submit in everything to their husbands” (Ephesians 5:22). Does that phrase make you bristle or feel a bit embarrassed? It’s a very common response in modern Western culture, and many Christians go so far as to see it as a bug, not a feature: a cringey crust of Pauline chauvinism, or a culturally-temporal husk to be explained away and then discarded. On the other hand, especially if you’re a man, you might really like this teaching because you feel it empowers you.

In either case, it is very important to understand exactly what this means. After all, as Solomon put it, “To answer before listening—that is folly and shame” (Proverbs 18:13).

The Context of Submission: Spirit-Filled Living

The instruction that wives “submit to their own husbands” is not the beginning of a new sentence (although most English translations render it so), but the continuation of an imperative sentence that began much earlier, in 5:18: “Be filled with the Spirit.” That means that submission, whatever it is, is the manifestation of a life that consciously embraces the Spirit’s words, wills, and desires. The Spirit of God is the Person of the Trinity who brings God home to believers, so that God not only lives in them but through them, producing such beauty, order, and harmony that can be expressed in music. Thus, Spirit-filled Christians engage in “singing and making melody to the Lord in [their] heart” (Ephesians 5:19). Then, as Paul continues, the effect of the Spirit’s filling is also seen in the way in which wives relate to their husbands, husbands to wives, children to parents, and bond slaves to masters.

Don’t miss the significance of this flow of thought, proceeding from Spirit-filling to music and then to human society. Music is a fitting picture of the instructions given to husbands, wives, and children. This is because music solves two opposite problems: cacophony (individual sounds asserting themselves independently and badly-arranged) and monotony (a solitary sound lacking delightful variation or countermelody). In a similar way, there are two opposite evils that tend to plague marriages, families, and entire nations: chaos (individual persons asserting themselves and occupying no specific role with reference to others) and tyranny (a solitary individual exercising his power to stifle the powers of others).

In both social chaos and tyranny, the power and uniqueness of the individual is lost. It is lost in chaos because the individuals are poorly arranged. It is lost in tyranny because one individual dominates the others.

Doesn’t it make sense, then, that when God—who is himself a loving Union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—inhabits a marriage or family, the result would be much like music? Each individual person, equally valuable, is most fully oneself, not by being like all the others, nor by being stifled by one, but by operating each according to his or her unique powers.

The Genesis Background: Male and Female as Non-Interchangeable, Mutually Empowering

Let’s test the soundness of this symphonic metaphor by looking now at the particulars of Paul’s instructions to wives: “Wives, [submit] to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (5:22-23). 

When Paul said that the husband is the “head” of the wife, he was alluding to the account in Genesis about the origins of male and female. Genesis 2 tells us that at first there was only a man, lone Adam, and no woman. God looked at this situation, declared it to be “not good,” and said that he would create a “helper fitting” for Adam (Genesis 2:18). Don’t get tripped up here. The word “helper” is a highly unsatisfactory rendering of the Hebrew word ‘ezer, which is more often used to describe God as our help. A “helper,” therefore, is not a “side-kick” or “assistant,” but rather someone who channels their power to help someone who lacks that power.

And how did God make this ‘ezer, this “help”? Not by reaching into the earth and forming her from “the dust of the ground,” as he had made Adam. Instead, he made her from Adam by taking one of Adam’s ribs: “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:22). That the woman is man’s help who came from Adam as her source (or “head”) means that male and female exist toward one another in a non-interchangeable, mutually empowering relationship.

When a man and woman, therefore, come together in the covenant of marriage, this non-interchangeable, mutually empowering relationship now exists as a permanent social unit. In other words, the roles of husband and wife are different, and these roles are not merely culturally conditioned, but are rooted in maleness and femaleness going back to God’s creational design. The differences between male and female are not irrelevant to the way husbands and wives ought to function within marriage. The power of maleness and the power of femaleness are both necessary, distinct, and intended by God to reflect his divine being and enhance human society, especially as they are united within marriage. And these roles cannot be reversed, just as body and head cannot be reversed.

The Meaning of “Submit”

With this background in mind, it is clearer why Paul uses the word “submit” to define the relationship of wife toward her husband. The Greek word, hupotasso, has inside it the word for order (taxis), implying an ordering of oneself with reference to others. The one who submits, then, voluntarily recognizes one’s part in the whole, yielding one’s unique power for the common good. This word is applied to Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:28, when Paul writes that “the Son himself will also be subjected [submitted] to him who put all things in subjection [submission] under him.”

This tells us at least two things about submission: first, that it is not the response of an inferior to a superior since the Son is as fully God as the Father is; second, that submission is a good and necessary relationship of one self to another when those selves function in harmony. And what is marriage, if not two selves coming together as one person—or “flesh,” as the Old Testament puts it (Genesis 2:24). (Please note that I am being careful not to press the analogy of marriage into the Trinity; rather, I am making inferences based on Paul’s use of the word “submit” as it relates to the Son’s relationship with the Father).

So when a wife, as a result of her being filled with the Spirit, submits to her husband, what is she doing? To put it as succinctly as possible, she is honoring and aiding him in his responsibility to function as her leader.

Beyond this, we are not told what “submission” means in terms of specific duties—and for good reason. This is because, except where biology dictates as in childbearing and nursing, this honoring and aiding cannot be reduced to specific tasks such as cooking and cleaning any more than the husband’s responsibility to love and sacrifice for his wife can be reduced to working outside the home. After all, such tasks and duties may change from culture to culture, from couple to couple, and vary from time to time for the same couple. The essential thing is the husband’s and wife’s posture toward each other, each embracing his or her God-given role in the marriage.

Clearing Away Misconceptions

Now that I’ve stated it as succinctly as I can, I need to clear away several misconceptions about it. 

1. A wife’s submission is not a formula for a happy marriage. Jesus went so far as to say that loyalty to him might split up families (Luke 14:26). Beware of trying to obey the instructions in Ephesians 5:22 and beyond without obeying the command found in 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit.” The power for marriage lies upstream from the specific commands.
2. A wife’s submission does not imply inferiority. This is a fiction that is easily exploded from a number of directions. The fact that Paul addressed women at all was counter cultural enough, implying that they were equal members of the Christian community. Besides this, in a culture taught by Aristotle that “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled,” the rationale Paul gives for their submission to husbands is totally different. A wife seeks to honor and aid her husband as her leader not because he is superior and she is inferior, but because of the God-given social order in which two individuals possessing unique powers arrange themselves toward each other, in their mutual allegiance to the Lord Jesus. Lastly, if submission implies inferiority, then God the Son is inferior to God the Father, for the Son submits to the Father. Clearly, however, the Son is not inferior to God the Father; therefore, submission cannot imply inferiority.
3. A wife’s submission does not mean that submission is the result of the fall. Some say that the reason a wife must submit to her husband is because of Eve’s sin. People who hold this view not only have a deep misunderstanding of submission itself, but also of the meaning of Genesis 3:16, in which God tells the woman: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” This text was not saying that it was good for the husband to rule over Eve, any more than he was saying that it was good for “thorns and thistles” to infest the ground or for human beings to die. Rather, God was describing the unfortunate effects of the fall, in which the powers of masculinity and femininity devolve into self-centered aggression or manipulation. 
4. A wife’s submission does not mean that all women must submit to all men. The passage clearly says that wives should submit to their own husbands, not anyone else’s.
5. A wife’s submission does not mean unqualified obedience to her husband. No human being ever is given unqualified authority over another. A wife’s loyalty to Jesus goes above and beyond her loyalty to her husband. No wife should honor her husband’s sinful desires and expectations.
6. A wife’s submission does not mean that she is to be a “doormat,” passive and uninvolved in decision-making for the family. The ideal wife described in Proverbs 31 engages in commerce and real estate—no passive wallflower there!
7. A wife’s submission is not the sole responsibility she has toward her husband. Many marriages have been harmed, many wives have been abused, and many men enabled in their sinful behavior, by a misappropriation of the teaching that “submit” tells us everything we need to know about a wife’s relationship toward her husband. When it comes to a wife’s relationship to her husband, some say that it all comes down to this: she is to submit.

This view is both ludicrous and dangerous. It is ludicrous because clearly Paul did not intend to say that submission summarizes everything a wife is to do toward her husband, but only how she is to act toward him as it pertains to their exclusive relationship as a husband and wife.

If you lived in a three-story house and your bedroom was on the third floor, it should still matter to you whether the first and second floors were in good condition. For the stability of floors one and two affects the stability of the third. Similarly, marriage is an upper floor relationship that rests on lower floor relationships. Husband and wife are fellow human beings, fellow citizens, fellow siblings in Christ. Thus the responsibilities of human-to-human relationships and Christian-to-Christian relationships apply more fundamentally even than the husband and wife relationship. Let it be clear: the wife’s submission to her husband and the husband’s love for his wife are responsibilities that are on top of more basic responsibilities, including for example: loving one another, preferring one another, confronting and exhorting one another.

But this submission-as-single-duty view is also dangerous—particularly if a husband does something illegal or unethical. Does a wife’s calling to “submit” rule out her responsibility to report his abuse of their children or to solicit help from church leaders for his bad behavior? Of course not. While it is often difficult to sort out one’s various layers of responsibilities, we must insist that there is ultimately no conflict in the Christian calling. A wife must never think that by confronting her husband as her Christian brother, she is thereby failing to submit to him as her husband. Likewise, a husband must never dismiss the correction by claiming his wife’s submission forbids it. It is possible that her confrontation was mistaken, overly harsh, or vindictive. If so, it should be dealt with on that basis, but never on the false premise that she is not, as a wife, allowed to exhort, confront, or disagree.

8. A wife’s submission does not imply a cultural stereotype. Many people associate submission with a particular decade—the 1950s, for example—in which cultural factors put emphasis on a rigid division of labor. Biblical submission, however, calls wives not to particular tasks but to a certain posture or attitude toward her husband. How that attitude works itself out in the day-to-day operations of the household will vary from culture to culture and from person to person. 

God’s Spirit Restores and Beautifies

Far from being an embarrassment, the teaching that Spirit-filled wives submit to their husbands showcases the wisdom, beauty, and goodness of God’s design for men and women in marriage. It proves that when God’s Spirit works in individuals and human society, he neither minimizes distinctions between the sexes, nor puts one against the other, but honors, elevates, and restores those distinctions so that they operate in harmony, each according to their God-given powers.

Finally, just as it is the Spirit’s role to make real the life of Jesus in our hearts (John 16:13-14; Romans 8:9-11), so it is the Spirit’s role to make real the life of Jesus in our marriages. A Spirit-filled wife looks most like Jesus when she follows Jesus in honoring and aiding her husband in his role as leader. A Spirit-filled husband looks most like Jesus when he loves sacrificially, just like Jesus loved and gave his life for the church.  Thus, a Spirit-informed marriage becomes one of the clearest reflections of God’s relentless love for his people.

This post is adapted from a part of the sermon, “Marriage: What Does It Mean for Wives to Submit?” preached at Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, NH.