I think a lot of people learn ancient Greek in order to read
the New Testament for themselves. That
wasn’t my primary motivation, but it was certainly on my mind. For the most part, I haven’t found any great
insights into Scripture by reading it in the original. I suppose that’s to the credit of our
translations. The other day, though, I
did notice something that I found rather interesting.
Ephesians 5:22, as we all know, says, “Wives, submit yourselves
to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
That’s the New International Version.
The New Revised Standard Version says, “Wives, be subject to your
husbands as you are to the Lord.” Both the
English Standard Version and the New King James say, “Wives, submit to your own
husbands, as to the Lord.” Translation
after translation carries the imperative: submit, submit, submit.
It’s the sort of thing that we often find embarrassing, and
many a sermon has been preached on just what Biblical “submission” means, and
how it really isn’t that bad. The
exegete might grab onto the phrase “as to the Lord” to differentiate this submission from
abject subjugation. Or the sermon might
focus on the later verses, about how husbands are called to “give themselves up”
for their wives. I’ve grown up with
these sorts of sermons all my life, and while I think they are morally sound as
far as they go and on firm textual footing, there’s something I noticed just
recently that I don’t think I’ve ever quite heard before.
Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t say, “Submit.”
I don’t mean that in the original, “submit” isn’t in the
imperative. I mean that the word “submit”
isn’t in the verse at
all. In point of fact,
Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t even have a verb.
What it actually says is, “the wives to their own husbands as to the
Lord.” This is not a sentence in Greek any
more than it is in English. This should
give the reader pause, and perhaps put him in mind that Ephesians 5:22 is not
an appropriate place to begin a citation.
So where is an appropriate place to begin the citation?
I don’t actually think that’s very clear. This may be surprising, and lest we think
poorly of our translators, I think a short digression is in order.
The issue of how to break up sentences is not quite so
trivial as it might first appear.
Ephesians was written prior to the adoption of punctuation, so we must
infer punctuation from content.
Oftentimes this is reasonably straightforward, but there are times when
it isn’t. Ancient Greek is also fairly
fond of embedded clauses and phrases and the like. For
instance, you might encounter a sentence with a structure like this:
“Hesitating on the front stoop, holding each option in his
mind and considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house.”
Even without the punctuation, this is fairly obviously a
sentence. If you know enough English,
you can identify that by the presence of the verb (“entered”), and you can
infer that the preceding clauses and phrases relate to the main clause. But suppose you had a sentence like the
following:
“hesitating on the front stoop holding each option in his
mind and considering whether to knock or to leave he entered the house with
trepeditation looking this way and that trying to make as little noise as
possible he crept through the empty rooms”
Is that one sentence?
Is it two? Is it two, with a
fragment of a third? There are multiple
ways that you could punctuate the passage above that are equally correct, even
if the actual meaning of the passage is quite clear.
Now imagine that what I have written is not actually English
but another language, one in which my stringing together so many gerund phrases
is not bad style. If asked to translate
that, you might actually take some of my gerunds and turn them into verbs. For instance, you might render it like this:
“He hesitated on the front stoop, holding each option in his
mind. Considering whether to knock or to
leave, he entered the house with trepidation.
He looked this way and that, trying to make as little noise as possible,
and crept through the empty rooms.”
And that might not be a bad translation at all, at least for
general purposes. Even though it isn’t
exactly “word for word,” it flows much better, and that’s not a quality to be
despised in a translation when none of the meaning has been lost.
In the case of Ephesians 5:22, though, I submit that this
practice has resulted (all inadvertently, I am sure) in some meaning being lost. So let us return to that passage. Let me back up to what I think is the clear
start of a sentence and refuse to impose any punctuation after that. Keeping the verb forms as close to their
original as possible, I would translate that block of text (Ephesians 5:15-30) like this:
“Look extremely closely how you walk not as unwise but
rather as wise buying out the moment because the days are painful through this do
not become foolish but rather understand this the will of the lord and do not
become drunk with wine in which is wastefulness but rather be full in spirit saying
to each other psalms and hymns and spiritual songs singing and strumming your
hearts to the lord thanking always above all god the father in the name of our
lord jesus christ submitting to each other in fear of christ the wives to their
own husbands as to the lord because a husband is the head of his wife as christ
is the head of the church himself the savior of the body but rather as the
church submits to christ so also the wives to their husbands in all things husbands
love your wives just as christ loved the church and himself gave for her in
order that she be cleansed purified in a bath of water in the word so that he
might stand her esteemed the church not having either spot or wrinkle or any
such thing but rather so that sacred and blameless in this manner the husbands
must love their own wives as their own bodies he loving his wife as himself for
nobody ever hated his own flesh but rather rears and warms it just as christ
the church that we are limbs of his body …”
And so it goes on.
You can probably see several places where you might put punctuation in
that block of text. One thing I don’t
think you can get around, though, is this: “the wives to their husbands as to
the lord” is grammatically tied up with “submitting to each other in fear of
Christ.” That is where our translators
feel they have license to insert the word “submit” into Ephesians 5:22, and you
can see that for most general purposes it isn’t a bad translational choice at
all. Moreover, all translations are
careful to keep Ephesians 5:21 reading something like “… submitting to one
another in the fear of Christ.”
What I think is particularly noteworthy, though, is that the
omission of the verb from 5:22 makes it clear (to me, at least) that this whole
notion of wives submitting to their own husbands is simply an illustration of
the larger point about everybody submitting to one another. In other words, while it is true that wives
are told to submit to their own husbands, it is equally true that husbands are told to submit to
their wives, and in fact that all Christians are told to submit to each other.
I am hardly the first person to have noticed that, but seeing where the verbs are (and are not) casts the various teachings I have heard about submission in a new light. In light of this new, more nuanced reading, I
think it is clear that when we exegete this passage by pointing out that the “submission”
referred to cuts both ways between married persons, we aren’t just making
frantic excuses for an inherently misogynist text. We are instead correctly pointing out that
the thrust of the text is not on wives at all, but on the entire body of
believers living in a state of submission.
And that too makes clear that when we talk about “submission” in lofty
spiritual terms and pooh-pooh the notion of a wife being subject to her husband’s
reign as a mere strawman, we actually aren’t just whistling in the dark. If the entire church is supposed to be
submitted one to another, then the “submission” being referred to really can’t be some
misogynist subjugation. Everybody can’t
be subjugated to everybody else. So if
everybody is “submitted” to everybody else, then clearly something less literal
than subjugation must be going on.
And although it’s been said many times by other people, I
suppose at this point it might be appropriate for me to offer up my own short
exegesis about what this “submission” is, if the context of the passage
precludes it from being literal subjugation.
The main thing I get from this block of text vis a vis “submission”
is that it is a desirable state for the entire church. But what else can we tell about it? It seems to be contrasted with the
wastefulness (dissipation, if you like) of being an alcoholic. Rather than that, Paul says, we should be filled
with the Holy Spirit, speaking psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to each
other, singing and making our hearts thrum (psallontes the heart,
playing it like a stringed instrument), giving thanks and submitting to one
another. To me, all these gerunds, with
their musical imagery, sound like they are being arrayed to describe the same
thing, a sort of spiritual harmony among persons. But what has submitting to do with music, or
harmony? At this juncture we might safely
observe that the word “submitting,” hupotassetai,
means “arraying under,” as one might “array” things in an orderly fashion, such
as a body of troops - we might observe this etymology without fear of being
told we are simply making excuses for the obvious misogynist meaning of the
text (we might also observe that another use of this verb is "to place in the shelter of"). This idea of arraying ourselves
under one another strengthens my opinion that the concept Paul is trying to get
across is not subjugation, one to another, but rather harmony and interleaving with each other.
Still, of course, Paul does say, “the wives to their
husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is
the head of the church, himself the savior of the body.” So very well, we might object - insofar as
husbands and wives are a subset of everybody, clearly husbands are told to
place themselves in harmony with their wives.
And then wives are told to place themselves in harmony with their
husbands, because a husband is the head of his wife. What are we to make of that? We might observe that the very next words (in
the same sentence?) are, “But rather as the church submits to Christ, just so also the wives to
their husbands in all things.”
We are starting to get far afield from the point of this
post, which is that “modern” interpretations of submission as some sort of
spiritual harmony rather than misogynist subjugation are in fact much more
grounded in the text than they might first appear. But to carry things through to conclusion, at
this point we really must confront the issue of just how the church submits to
Christ. If we imagine that Christ is the
head of the church in that he gets to tell the Church what to do and what not
to do and sets punishments for the church when it contravenes his words, then I
suppose we really are in trouble. But I
don’t think that is either a textually or historically correct view of Christ’s
relationship with the church. Paul does
not define Christian morality in terms of obedience to Christ’s dictates (not
that Christ had a great many moral dictates in the first place, so far as we
know), but rather in terms of reaction to being. We are the church, and therefore we act in a certain way. I don’t want to further digress by backing up
that assertion with other examples from the Pauline corpus, but even the text before us, which has a certain moralistic cast (talking about how best to live life in the moment), has nothing to do with what Christ tells the church to do. If the reader can accept this morality-from-status assertion for now (cf. Ephesians 5:1-14, the lead-in to this whole thing, which also ties direct exhortation towards specific moral behavior not to the command of Christ, but to the status of the believer), we may observe that this
is a perfectly unobjectionable way for a married woman to model her life. She alters her behavior, to the extent that
she alters it, not because her husband tells her to do anything, but simply because she is married to the man she chose to marry. We
might object if he were ordering her about, but it would be quixotic if she
chose to marry him and that choice meant nothing to the way she acted.
And yet, I think, the egalitarian (feminist, if you like) objection
to this passage is not so much that it envisions a husband as his wife’s
dictator so much as that it envisions the husband as superior to the wife at
all (even if that superiority doesn’t involve subjugation). The response I am used to in sermons to this
objection is essentially incredulity: a reader who seriously thinks that Christ,
or even Paul, teaches that men are superior to women must simply not be very
familiar with the whole body of our extant texts. And I do think there is something to
that. It is difficult to imagine that the
man who wrote that there is neither man nor woman in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28) believed that
in the proper Godly order of things, men were superior to women.
Still, let us consider the text before us in light of this
objection. It must be admitted, for one
thing, that Paul uses different language towards husbands and wives. Even if we don’t believe those exhortations
to set up an inherent superior-inferior relationship, they aren’t literally the same. Neither does Paul say, "... submitting to one another in fear of Christ, husbands and wives to each other ..." or something like that.
On the subject of sameness, however, we might observe that
the principle relationship between Christ and the church in this passage is
that the church is the same flesh as Christ: “That we are the limbs of his
body,” it says; and earlier, “himself the savior of the body.” Paul
is not here just trotting out his familiar turn of phrase for the church, “the
body of Christ.” He spends some time
discussing how, through Christ’s sacrifice of himself, the church becomes to
Christ as Christ himself. “Loving his
wife as himself,” he says, “for nobody ever hated his own flesh.” Again, the theme of spiritual harmony - and,
significantly, of equality (indeed, identity).
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the church is Christ in all
respects, indistinguishable from God himself.
Rather, I want to point out what Paul is pointing out. Paul is plainly using Christ’s relationship
with the church as a metaphor here, and I think it is an uncontroversial
assertion that when one uses a metaphor, one intends only to highlight certain
similarities and not others. When Lincoln used the metaphor of birth for the American War for Independence in the Gettysburg Address, he did not mean that the Revolution was like birth in all respects. Figuring out in what respects
a metaphor applies and in what respects it does not (for instance, presumably Lincoln did intend his birth metaphor to express the idea that a new entity was created through a tumultuous, blood-soaked process, but did not intend to express the idea that the new entity was incapable of existing on its own and would in fact be dependent upon its mother for a very long time, or that the new entity was incapable of rational thought) is something we have to do from context.
Here, Paul spends all of his words highlighting one
particular similarity: that Christ went through a great deal of personal
trouble vis a vis humanity in order to bring about a state of such harmony between
man and God that humanity could be, as it were, Christ’s own flesh. We might expound on other similarities
between Christ-and-church and husband-and-wife, but this is the similarity that
Paul is
expounding, and I submit that if we take it farther than that we are simply
riffing on our own. To bring the
metaphor home, the text here is saying that husbands should love their wives in
such a way that they expend great effort, and brave what hazards may be, in
order to bring about such a state of harmony with their wives that they are as
inseparable as a person from his own body. Is that something that only a husband can do, while the wife simply waits to be integrated? I don't think so. As every married person knows, after all, the process of altering your identity in light of your spouse - that which "the wives" are called to do - is not only an exceptionally active one, it is the very means by which two spouses harmonize with and become inseparable from each other. The metaphors used when talking about wives and husbands are different, but the actual activity described is the same: husband and wife achieving a state of profound harmony, a metaphorical oneness. So I am not really very comfortable saying that the text here is setting
up some kind of second-class citizen status for wives.
So what are we left with?
We begin with a depiction of “submission” as an example of the mystic
sort of harmony that is supposed to hold sway among all believers, which should
put us off the idea that “submission” means subjugation right away. Paul then goes on to give two more particular
examples of what this sort of submission looks like, or perhaps applications of
the principle. It is, he says, the sort
of thing that causes wives to care that they are married to their own husbands
(and here I think we perhaps see why the text bothers to say “their own
husbands,” instead of simply “their husbands,” as some translations have it -
implicit in this profound, life-shaping recognition of choice is the fact that this man, and not
just any man, is
the one that I married). It is, he says,
the sort of thing that causes husbands to chance any consequences in the goal
of achieving profound marital oneness.
As I said, these are far from original thoughts, and I hope
that they are old hat to anybody who reads this. But I also hope that, having read this, the
reader may feel more confident that these are not attempts to dodge the real
thrust of the passage, motivated by a modernist or feminist desire to twist the
words of Scripture away from their original antiquated misogyny. They are the real thrust of the passage, and it is those who have attempted (and
attempt) to use the text to justify misogyny who do the twisting.
