No Cheering Quite Yet

A friend sent me news of an influential evangelist in South Africa whose movement emphasizes the subordination of wives to husbands.  Careless or hostile readers of what has been written on this subject over the years, here and in the pages of Touchstone, might think the likes of us would be immediately gratified in hearing of it.  Not so.

What makes me nervous about movements of men that emphasize the subordination of women is that (1) how the Christian doctrine works out in practice is based upon a mystery that includes the woman's full equality to the man, so to those outside may not look very much like women's subordination in any crass or obvious sense, and (2) these operations are very much the creative province not of conferences of men, but of faithful women, not doing what they do because of the demands the law of the male places upon them--however just that law may be--but because they love the men to whom they are committed, so follow the lesser law within the greater. Christian women living near the center of their faith are simply too accomplished, too strong, too well-integrated, too wise, too fruitful, and too happy, to satisfy the expectations of either feminism or the subordinationism of those who would make them less than they are.  Christian men living near the center of their faith like them that way, and trust them with their lives.

This is what St. Paul is referring to when he speaks of mutual submission in marriage: charity does not efface or relativize the law of subordination of woman to man, but transforms it into a dance (C. S. Lewis) in which what each partner does in his own proper sphere is done in self-forgetfulness for the good and the glory of the other, which in turn becomes his or her own glory because of the possession, in love, of the other.  There is neither offense in the leading or resentment in the willing and creative response to that leadership (submission), that in its own turn informs and enlarges it.  Both feminism--as gender feminism or the egalitarianism of its ostensibly more benign religious form--and male legalism, each every bit as ugly and destructive as the other, have vested interests in killing romantic love and the charity of marriage into which it can grow (both founded as they are on interest in the other), either by abandoning them for isolation of the sexes, or reducing them to one element, typically sexual excitement.

So, on first hearing I am somewhat leery of religious movements in which the submission of wives to husbands is prominent.  This may be a very good thing, or quite the opposite.  One is wise, I believe, to question these things as one might question all reputed revivals of religion:  Is what we have here mostly the valueless and ephemeral froth of enthusiasm which will end in spiritual exhaustion and rejection of the faith it falsely claims to be--or does it result in denunciation and abandonment of individual and collective sin, in juster, happier, and more temperate societies, and an environment where virtue is rewarded instead of punished--none of which can be had apart from the right ordering of the sexes?  All these things are known by their fruits, not their advertisements.  

Comments

[Kamilla]

Steve,

Bravo! Your second paragraph is brilliant.

Kamilla

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Steve,

Whaddya doing?!?? Are you trying to ruin the strongly-held caricatures that egalitarians and unbiblical feminists have of complementarians and biblical patriarchy?

[Beth from TN]

Thanks for this most excellent exposition, Steve.

[smh]

The question will inevitably arise as to why, saying all these things as I do about the abilities, accomplishment, and fulfillment of Christian women, I remain insistent they should not be admitted to the presbyterial offices.

It's because we didn't make up the steps of the Dance, and that once we start doing it our way, it's no longer the Dance. All indications are that while the steps MIGHT have been written another way, in fact they were written THIS way, so that all reasons for dancing some other way are invalid. (That's precisely what Pope John Paul II said, using other words, in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women". He doesn't say that God doesn't have the authority--but that WE don't.

It is the same question as to why one should not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The restriction seems so arbitrary. There are all sorts of reasons one might do it, including that we possess all the necessary talents and abilities, that not doing it seems to deny this possession and leaves us feeling unfulfilled, that we can conceive of nothing but positive good coming from doing so, and that those who will not are cowardly, reactionary, unimaginative, hidebound literalists who simply will not use their God-given intelligence to work freely and creatively with the question of what God REALLY said.

Christians believe, however, that all the hopelessness and misery in the world can be traced to this act of disobedient presumption. They should not be anxious to receive the teachings of the egalitarians who wish to recapitulate it.

[Beth from TN]

Amen to that, too!

[Kamilla]

Yes! I have long been fond of The Dance as an almost perfect metaphor. It works so well because it is *not* about the character of man leading and directing and woman simply following. The Dance is about the woman completing the move with her own particular graces. If the man simply leads or directs and the woman simply follows, there is no beauty there, it is simply the dance equivalent of paint-by-numbers. You are placing your feet in the correct spots at the required moments, but there is no beauty, no music -- nothing to attract.

But being free to dance, truly dance, it's magic. That's when you know freedom, when you fly even though your feet are still on the ground. That is when beauty emerges and others are called on, are drawn in to see beyond themselves and the Scriptures they sometimes treat as an instruction book.

It is only then that we know ourselves as man and woman, only then that we can understand the picture of Creator and creation, of the Bridegroom and His bride.

Wow.

[smh]

Right you are, Kamilla. That is why the most intimate communion of man and woman is, by design, the apotheosis of the dance.

[smh]

I add this is a deliberately separate posting: . . . and when seen from outside the dance itself, meaningless, ridiculous, or obscene.

[smh]

Friends have posed the question of whether I am giving away the patrimonial farm by recognizing mutual submission within marriage as a teaching of Ephesians 5. This passage has been serving of late as the egalitarian camel's nose under the Evangelical tent, I am told. There is no good reason for this, I think, apart from the will that it teach something it does not. I have always believed (it seems difficult to dispute the grammar) that Eph. 5:21 subsumes all the relations that follow in the text, including wife to husband and husband to wife, under the rubric of hupotassein--"submission," but cannot see that that this gives any quarter at all to egalitarian interpretations of its meaning.

I obviously don't believe mutuality means mere reciprocity, but that the concept of submission is properly used with regard to the husband's service to his wife as it may be used for hers to him--he demonstrates his Lordship by submitting himself to her as a servant, for her good. The foundational dominical teaching is found in Christ's becoming a servant to his disciples while making it eminently clear he remains their Lord and Teacher, just as the papal title servus servorum is emblematic of the authority of the Vicar of Christ.

I would be reluctant to interpret Paul's teaching in Eph. 5 in any other way, since I understand it as a positive reference to the gospels' teachings on lordship and submission. I take Eph. 5: 21f to describe first the form of wife's submission in obedience, and then the husband's in self-sacrificial love. (The old Book of Common Prayer formula followed it perfectly.) It appears to me that indeed v. 21 obliges us to classify all the relationships that follow in terms of submission, but that the wife's and husband's submission, like that of the child and the slave, have different forms, and that the plain differences, clearly in the Apostle's mind, destroy all egalitarian arguments. Yes, one freely stipulates, both submit, but the husband from a different position and hence in a different way than the wife, a position and way she does not share. Mutatis mutandis the submission of the child to the parent and the servant to the master. Each is a submission, but of a different kind, based upon the peculiar character of the relationship.

Egalitarianism is based not on an affirmation of the substantial equality of men and women, for that is something in which all orthodox Christians believe, but a denial of the peculiar authority of the man over the woman, which Eph. 5 teaches as fully and clearly as any of the passages in which egalitarians can find only unrelieved contradiction of their beliefs. They must, according to their foundational principles, deny the truth of any authority in which a husband submitting to his wife can appear with perfect equanimity in a context where he is also her Lord (while she is not his)--and, as St. Paul indicates in I Cor. 14. 34f, in perfect consonance with the dominical example, her teacher.

[Bill R]

"Egalitarianism is based not on an affirmation of the substantial equality of men and women, for that is something in which all orthodox Christians believe, but a denial of the peculiar authority of the man over the woman, ....

And this denial in turn is based upon the more ancient denial of the general and absolute authority of God over man, a rejection we may trace all the way back to the Garden. The true egalitarian sees no authority whatsoever in his life.