The doctrine of submission puts our emphasis in the wrong place
Recently I decided to rerun a series that I did a few years ago on submission, because I point to the posts so often, and yet most of you weren’t following me when I wrote them! And once I write something, I rarely write the same thing again. So I thought it was time to revisit it. I started with the post about principles of interpreting the Bible: Scripture cannot contradict Scripture, but everything should tell one complete story. When you read something that’s jarring, then, you should ask, “what does the rest of Scripture tell us about this?” We did that with the Abraham and Sarah story, and Peter’s command that women emulate Sarah, who obeyed Abraham.
Today I want to talk about another principle (one that Zach Lambert talks about so well in his new book Better Way to Read the Bible, that we will talk about in tomorrow’s podcast), and it’s this:
Scripture was meant to point us to Jesus.
It is Jesus who is the ultimate Word of God (John 1:1). He is the ultimate embodiment of God’s message to us. If you want to understand the full picture of God, we look to Jesus (Colossians 1:15-19). Jesus tells us how to interpret Scripture–and over and over again He said things like, “You have heard it said…But I tell you.” He is the ultimate authority. All Scripture must be interpreted through what we know about Jesus.
And Jesus taught us two main things on this earth: How we are to treat other people, and how we are to understand our relationship with God. He modelled the perfect life for us, and it is He whom we should ultimately be following. Indeed, it is God’s desire that we be transformed into Jesus’ likeness (Romans 8:29).
With that in mind, I’d like to look at an incident in Jesus’ life that we find in Luke 6:6-11. It’s not specifically about marriage, but bear with me, because I believe it’s a perfect parallel to how people misuse the doctrine of submission.
Luke 6:6-11
6 On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. 7 The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. 8 But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Get up and stand in front of everyone.”So he got up and stood there.
9 Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?”
10 He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was completely restored. 11 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.
Let’s paint the picture for a moment. The Pharisees were devoted to faith and following God, as they knew Him to be. They loved the Law as it was revealed in the Torah. It was indistinguishable to them from God Himself. Following God meant following the Law, and following the Law meant following God.
And it was written that one mustn’t work on the Sabbath.
That meant, therefore, that in order to bring God’s favour, no one must work. This was what God wanted; this was what made God happy. And the nation was being punished by occupation from the Romans for not following God’s law, so it was vitally important for the well-being of everyone that people follow the Law.
So it infuriated the Pharisees that Jesus did not appear to love the Law as they did. It infuriated the Pharisees that Jesus talked as if He actually knew God, and had a relationship with Him. That wasn’t that way God revealed Himself! Jesus, in essence, was being “liberal”. He was all touchy feely, and He was abandoning the rock of Scripture. He was abandoning God’s Word. And that might jeopardize the nation.
Jesus walks into the middle of this mindset this particular Sabbath in the synagogue.
Present at the gathering is a man with a shrivelled hand. Jesus decides to deliberately make a point and reveal the Pharisees’ hearts. He asks them:
Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?
I’m not sure the Pharisees even understood the question, because they would never have framed the debate that way. To them, they were indeed saving life by preserving the Law! The only way we stay in right standing with God is to obey the Torah. Therefore, the letter of the Law becomes the ultimate good.
Jesus turned all that on its head. Jesus showed that what the Pharisees were doing was actually destroying life.
You see, the dichotomy here was not “should Jesus heal or should he not heal”? The dichotomy was living solely according to the Law at the expense of people, or helping people at the expense of the Law. Jesus was saving life; and He was insinuating that the Pharisees were destroying it by forcing people to obey rules.
But hold on a second–weren’t those rules set up by God?
Well, yes. But there’s something deeper (as Aslan would say in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there’s a Deeper Magic).
We get a picture of that in Mark 2:27, when Jesus says this:
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
In other words, God gave us the Sabbath to bless us. God wants to bless humanity! Our well-being matters to God. It is not blind obedience that God wants regardless of consequences; He put everything in place for our own good. In and of itself, rules are meant to point us to Jesus. Normally, taking a day to worship God and forget about our work enhances our well-being. But when it becomes about the rule, then we forget about God. We don’t understand who God is or why He made the Sabbath to begin with.
After this episode, the Pharisees were furious with Jesus. This moment in Jesus’ ministry was the moment that they first started plotting to kill Him. I don’t think they were furious because He healed; I think they were furious because He was threatening everything they believed about Scripture. They felt He was leading people away from God. They were righteously indignant. The only problem?
They totally misunderstood God.
This is what is happening with regards to the doctrine of submission.
Today, there are women in hurting marriages, who are being emotionally, physically, and sexually abused, who are being told, “you are to submit to your husband in everything.” They are being told that to speak up is sin, because women are to be silent. They are being told that it is God’s will that men rule over women, and so to try to assert your rights is to usurp men’s authority and go against the will of God. You don’t matter; only your husband’s will does, because you are to follow your husband.
Too many Christian leaders are taking verses out of context, ignoring the character of God and the words of Jesus, in order to maintain a religion that is built on a certain kind of power and that shows no grace at all.
And there are men in hurting marriages, whose wives are emotionally abusive, whose wives are even physically abusive. And if they try to get help, or try to say, “I’m drowning here!”, they are told, “God hates divorce.” Too many Christian leaders believe that what pleases God is maintaining the rule, not glorifying God in your relationship. In fact, their definition of glorifying God in your relationship is to save the relationship at all costs, even if it hurts you or enables sin.
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This dynamic of ignoring harm is happening with how evangelicals treat marriage.
When I speak up about how Jesus’ greatest desire is for us to look like Him, and how marriage should not be used to enable sin, people become furious with me.
I have been told that I am exciting itchy ears, that I have a Jezebel spirit, that I am in league with Satan simply by saying that to Jesus, God’s will matters more than a husband’s will.
I believe the problem is that we have placed a certain view of marriage–where it is absolutely permanent, with the husband exercising his will over the wife–ahead of the gospel. By saying that, though, I am going against everything that they believe in. They have clung to certain verses (and ignored the heart of God and the rest of Scripture), and believe that I am leading people astray, just like the Pharisees believed about the Sabbath.
Their fury is real, but it is misplaced.
So let’s get back to Jesus’ heart:
Marriage was made for us, not us for marriage.
And in marriage, God wants to be glorified. He is not glorified by sin. He is not glorified by abuse. He is not glorified by two people drifting away from Him because the husband won’t “lead” and the wife is waiting for him to. He is glorified when we step up and do the hard things–when we “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8).
And when we do those right things–when we start acting appropriately and setting boundaries–THAT is often when dying marriages are turned around. When people suddenly face the consequences of their actions (when they reap what they sow), then people often realize the need for change.
Don’t miss the point of Scripture. Jesus is the Word of God. If your view of marriage has absolutely nothing to do with how Jesus acted here on earth, then your view of marriage is seriously off-base. And it amazes me how, when I try to engage these people in the comments, none of them ever has anything to say about Jesus. They quote other parts of Scripture, but ignore Jesus altogether.
So let me ask with Jesus–what is lawful with marriage, to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?
If your view of marriage ends up destroying people, then your view of marriage contradicts the ultimate Word of God–Jesus Himself.
What do you think? Have you heard teachings on marriage that actually harm people? What’s a better way to think about it? Let’s talk in the comments!
Our Submission Series
- What does it mean to obey like Sarah?
- Does the way we talk about submission make marriage into an idol?
- In the case of ties, he wins--Is that what submission means?
- Are you following God or your husband?
- What does submission really mean?
You may also enjoy other posts on submission:
- The Marriage You Want--about the kind of marriages that thrive
- Keith's series on the Danvers Statement (the statement defending complementarianism)
- PODCAST: Are we making a strawman out of complementarianism?
- PODCAST: We sum up the Danvers Statement's issues!
Sheila, I absolutely love this article, and this has been what I’ve been saying and thinking a lot about lately.
I am a Christ follower and tried to engage with someone about the issue of marriage and divorce, someone who claims to be a Christian. Ultimately, I pointed to scriptures like Jeremiah chapter 3 verse eight where God divorces Israel. The person said that the word God used for divorce is not the same word that we use. In other words, he deflected. I finally got fed up with his argument, and asked him point blank if he thought his interpretation of the word of God and the Bible Overruled a spouses need for safety and their well-being? He said that it did. From this point forward, I am not engaging in any sort of serious debate with him. If someone is going to use an argument like that, to say the Bible is more important than a spouse’s safety or their happiness or well-being, I have no respect for their Christian beliefs. It doesn’t matter to me how often they read their Bible, pray, attend church, give to the poor, etc. Their claim to Christianity is dead. People often say the vow says until death do you part, but just before that, the vow says to love and to cherish. How could these Bible thumpers not remember that!?
I absolutely agree with you. They are showing where their heart is!
I’m so glad that happiness and well-being are getting their due here. God wants us to be safe AND happy. Most people only say the “safety” part, but even in situations where a woman is physically and emotionally “safe”, if you’re well-being isn’t right and not happy in your marriage, but you can’t divorce, what kind of world are we living in?
Sheila, I’ve been trying to articulate these very things. I’m working on a book for Baker on living faithfully as a Christian when your spouse doesn’t believe. So much of the damage in my marriage was the result of bad teaching about gender roles and a woman’s submission. I wrote this on a substack note the other day:
Some thoughts as I embark on the peacemaking chapter:
In my branch of the church I heard a lot of messages about the sin of divorce, about how a wife should submit to her husband, and how a man was to be the leader of the family, but I was never taught that Jesus wanted me to pursue a healthy marriage.
This side of the new Heaven and earth we will lack complete health in our relationships. But as Christians we should seek shalom, peace, wholeness, soundness, and health in our marriages.
I think so often we focus on staying legally married or not getting a divorce but fail to do the more important work of seeking a healthy relationship.
This imbalanced teaching reminds me of the hypocrisy Jesus called out in the religious leaders saying, ““Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
Matthew 23:23 ESV
Some of us have avoided divorce but we’ve neglected the weightier matters of seeking the health of our marriage.
That’s really profound! And sad. I think we so often brag about our “low divorce rates in the church” (even though they’re not that low! It’s just that divorced people leave), without actually measuring whether those marriages are life-giving or not.
Hi Sheila – I’d love to just share something the holy spirit showed me about peacemaking.
I had a friend that always wanted to avoid difficult situations and conflict by just either pretending to be ok about something, or by “agreeing to disagree” without ever really trying to come to common ground. In the end, it eroded our friendship because she kept hurting me and I her, but I was the only one who would ever talk about it, so I had no idea what I was doing to her, and she never resolved with me when she hurt me.
Shortly after this friendship was badly broken, I was reading the beatitudes and I read “blessed are the peacemakers” – and I remember how she would quote this as a reason to just ‘move on’ past every hurt without actually discussing it. The Lord spoke to me so clearly and said that she’d fallen for the lie that peace-making is the same thing as peace-KEEPING. Since then I have been talking about the myth of peacekeeping vs peacemaking – often the behaviours we have to do to do one of those are the opposite we need to do for the other! I think this needs to be said more often in our evangelical spaces.
Yes, I think that distinction is SO important!
The example from Jesus that comes to mind for me about how Law relates to what God wants for us is when he asks the Pharisees would you not try to save your own donkey if it fell over? A donkey wasn’t just an animal it could very well be your livelihood. If you rely on a donkey to get your goods to market and they fall into a ditch you may very well wind up financially devastated. Yet even the Pharisees realize wait a minute yeah I would save my own donkey if it fell into a ditch.
Notice Jesus never says that the Pharisees are lawless people. His concern is that they dont understand what the law is for.
If you want to see how God deals with lawless people we can turn to another story that Jesus mentions directly.
Jonah was asked to go to a people so thoroughly debauched that God said they didn’t know right from wrong. Even after Jonah goes there after having died Jonah wonders why God would save them. God responds by asking Jonah if it is right to get upset at the loss of a shade tree if you refuse to take care of it. How can you expect me to do all of this for you and not see that these people are in such desperate straights they need a man who was swallowed and spat up by death itself to shake them from their complacency? I destroy when I must not because I want to.
I honestly think that if Jesus showed up right now people wouldn’t know what to make of him. He is morally upright and unshakable so nobody could hope to put him in moral binds because he would have an answer. You couldn’t hope to manipulate him. You couldn’t hope to twist scripture because he wrote it. He would on the one hand be the one man who could claim the right to judge the world and you couldn’t stop him and yet he also would be able to peer so deeply into your very being that you would either recoil in terror or begin to cry out for him to help you.
People would at once claim he is the most unflinching champion of law order and theological acumen to ever exist and people would also claim that he is the most radically loving person to ever exist and both would terrify people.
I think you’re exactly right!
So the point is that we have to use our own thinking and common sense- we have to think about the intentions behind these rules, and decide whether it still makes sense to follow those rules in whatever specific situation we are in. I think there’s something about this that’s kind of incompatible with or threatening toward other evangelical teaching.
It’s incompatible with the idea of certainty- there’s a belief that “these are the rules from God, we can be *certain* these are the right rules, we just trust God and follow them” and you completely lose that when you introduce the idea “maybe you have to think about it for yourself” because then what if you’re wrong? There’s no way to be *certain* that you’re thinking about it the right way. You can just do your best.
Yes, Sheila has dignified this issue. Submission by wives is treated in the church as if Paul’s admonition ends at “Wives, submit to your husbands. (As if, “as unto the Lord” doesn’t exist) The former reflects servility, the latter an attitude of the heart. Could Paul possibly be implying, or may we simply read between the lines, “Insofar as a husband is submitted to God, (ie. not sinning, not abusive etc., ) …insofar a wife then submits to her husband….? It is due to this passage in Ephesuans that the marriage vow, “obey” was inserted. Yet submit and obey are not synonymous verbs in Hebrew, Greek and English.
Oops, Ephesians… missed that proofreading. 🙄