Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, 23 because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. 27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless. 28 In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 since we are members of his body. 31 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. 32 This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.
I have been reading an excellent journal article this past week, entitled “What Does “Submit in Everything” Really Mean? The Nature and Scope of Marital Submission” by Steven Tracy, which has clarified my understanding of Ephesians 5:22-33. Many of my points below are distillations of his article. His article explores how we should biblically understand a husband’s authority as head over his wife.
Last week, I wrote about the potential of a healthy loving marriage to point to the beauty of our relationship with Jesus Christ, when we yield to His authority, enjoy His love and flourish as humans in His image. Even as we affirm that marriage points to our relationship with Christ, marriage is not identical to our relationship with Christ. Even a good marriage is a limited image of the real thing. Christ is the Living God, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect. Husbands at their best are mere mortals, frail and sinful. They cannot give their lives to cleanse wives from sin. From verse 25b to verse 27, Paul is talking about what Christ has done for His bride, the Church, not what a husband can do for his wife. The husband does something like what Christ does but far short of it. Therefore it is logical that Paul would be saying the wife’s submission is something like her submission to Christ but far short of it.
So what does Ephesians 5 mean by “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord?” Below are some thoughts on how we can understand this passage.
- The verb “submit” is a middle voice verb in the Greek. It is more clearly translated as “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands.” Submission is an action I, as a wife, perform. It is very important to see that husbands are never commanded to make their wives submit. Many writers describe this submission as “voluntary.” That doesn’t mean it is optional, because this is a command of Scripture to wives. Yet it still makes a world of difference that I submit myself. That means that I am thinking about how to submit, and that I evaluate to whom and to what I submit myself. I am still a person with individual agency, making decisions as a follower of Christ with my own mind. Submission to my husband does not mean that I let my husband do the thinking for both of us.
- “As to the Lord” is a phrase that makes a comparison to our submission to Christ, but does not equate my husband with Christ. Christ is our one and only Lord. He is the One whom I am called to love first, and with no rivals. He commands me to love others, and so my love of others is not by definition a rival to Him. But it can become a rival to Him if I love others more than Him and submit to their authority or wishes when it conflicts with His.
- A husband is a legitimate human authority for his wife. But in the Scriptures, we see that all human authorities, while established by God, are limited. They cannot and must not compel those under their authority to disobey God or to violate their consciences. It is also important to note that Ephesians chapter 5 follows chapter 4, which talks about the ways Christians are to treat one another. For instance, they are to speak the truth to one another in love (4:15, 25), and this undoubtedly means that fellow Christians speak up to correct sin they see in one another. The relationship of the husband and wife is a subset of general relationships between members of God’s family, and so the “one another” commands of Scripture also apply to our marriages.
- What does “in everything” mean? As I have just implied, it does not necessarily mean that I must obey my husband’s every command. Furthermore, the kind of marriage that Genesis 1 and 2 evokes is not a marriage where husbands give commands and wives subserviently carry out orders. It evokes corresponding partners working together under the husband’s headship on a project they received jointly from God, bringing their corresponding strengths to the endeavor to produce together what they could not produce separately. I believe “in everything” means that the focus of my life is devoted toward this joint endeavor. It means that I respect my husband as the head and myself as his indispensable helper. We bring to our marriage all of our talents, opportunities and resources for use in our joint endeavor of kingdom building. In that process, if the wife disagrees with specific plans or actions because her conscience and skill tell her that plan is unwise, submitting “in everything” could lead her to respectfully speak up to influence her husband to improve the plan, rather than abandoning the ship and leaving him to his own devices! There isn’t an exact recipe for these situations,and the details are worked out together in unique ways in each marriage. For instance, building God’s Kingdom together might be carried out in the form of two careers or one. Each marriage looks somewhat different from others, because we are to submit to our own husbands, not to a generic husband.
There is more to say on this subject! We have just scratched the surface on both submission and headship. Next week, Ruth will be writing more on the topic of husbands.
Steven R. Tracy https://mendingthesoul.org/wp-content/uploads/PrePubVersionSubmitinEverythingTJ.pdf