“Be Subject”
It’s important to remember that this section grammatically and logically follows out of what’s gone before. Like all the other verbal forms in v.21, “be subject” depends on the imperative “be filled with the Spirit” in 5:18. “Be subject” itself then becomes the topic for the remaining section in this part of Ephesians.
This section connects up with everything from 4:1 on as this larger section has unfolded under the posture image “walk”. Under this image Paul lays out in various ways what “membership” (4th of the 5 M’s of the Missional Matrix which forms Ephesians) means in a “nuts and bolts” kind of way. This “Walk” section is, to borrow the phrase Timothy Gombis gives to the “Be Subject” section, a “radical manifesto for the new humanity” Christ has given birth to through the cross.[1]
This particular section of Ephesians has evoked more ink, I suspect, than any other. It has the infamous “wives by subject to your husband” texts as well as similar instructions for slaves towards their masters. You can easily imagine why there is such interest, both positive and negative, in them. I can’t rehearse all that discussion in these few pages so I’m not going to try. What I will do is lay out the way I approach these matters. If you want to look deeper into them matters, I will provide some bibliography you can read to do so.
What Paul tries to do in this section[2] is detail in terms of the normal Greco-Roman household structure what the new humanity birthed through Christ looked like in terms of his world. Romans believed that this household structure was also a microcosm or model of the larger structures of society. It was a template for those larger structures. So, as Paul addresses the household relationships, he is at the same time sketching a vision for how the larger world should look and function too. Radical changes at the smaller level of the household betoken, then, similar changes in the larger structures. Paul is here providing us with a vision of “politics,” that is, the shape of the life and quality of people gathered together to live in a city (a polis).
Politics is not primarily (or should not be, at least) about political parties and electoral campaigns. Politics is primarily about the way we relate to each other, evaluate the worth and value of others, distribute power and access to the goods and services of the community, the expectations of others, in short, the nature and quality of our community.
Christianity, then, theology, if you like, has definite ideas and convictions about these same matters. Who is “one of us,” how we value others, the distribution and sharing (or not) of power and access to goods and services, what expectations we have of others, and so on. And we believe our convictions about these things are the way God wants the world to work as well as the church. So, Christian faith is in this sense inescapably political.
So, if Paul is sketching this vision for how God wants the world to work, it’s doubly crucial to try and get this vision right. Far more is at stake than merely proper family order. Yet this “Be Subject” section has suffered more than any other of the letter from misinterpretation! This dilemma makes it necessary for me to make a few comments about how to interpret texts like these, especially since so many believe Paul is reinforcing what we would today call “traditional” forms of relationships which keep the power in them with husbands, parents, and masters over wives, children, and slaves.
Many think Paul’s aim here is to show the larger world that Christianity offers no offense to its patterns and standards by presenting a view of family that basically replicates Greco-Roman models. From what I just said it should be clear that the exact opposite is the case. I think that runs counter to the whole thrust of the letter and would defeat Paul’s purpose thus far in writing. But how he envisions that taking place is highly counter-intuitive to what we would normally expect.
Paul builds on Jesus’ way of practicing the freedom and power of God’s sovereign rule. I have called this way “subversive counter-revolutionary practices.” These practices are subversive because of the extraordinary freedom the gospel bequeaths on people. No longer do status, roles, gender, wealth, honor, or ethnicity lock people into certain roles or expectations in the church - and if not in the church, not in the world either (as we have seen).
So the church had the freedom in Christ to order their lives in a completely new way. But in reality that was scarcely possible. Christians lived in a culture that had it structures and mores and one they wanted to reach with this good news of freedom in Christ. To live in way that struck others as bizarre (if not perverse) and made no attempt to show the difference this good news made within the structures of life they were familiar with would be largely self-defeating. “The solution that Paul provides does not involve overthrowing such structures, but rather subjecting them to new creation dynamics so that relationships within the New Humanity take on a renewed character.”[3] Therefore, Paul helps us think through how the freedom of the gospel subverted the day to day relationships his people lived in ways more appropriate to God’s original design in creation.
It’s important to remember that Paul’s teaching here is an attempt to flesh out the dynamic of gospel freedom and equality in the forms of relationships that made up his culture. The forms of these relationships – husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave - were as unavoidable to Paul’s churches as they may be repugnant to us.[4] The trick is for us, first, to discern how the gospel has subverted those relationships. Our task is then to carry over and extend the changes the gospel has wrought in those relationships to the relationships in our own time and place as possible.
In other words, we are not to repeat the same kind of relationship Paul expounds for his time and place for our time and place are quite different. Rather we must allow the gospel dynamic to continue to reshape the relationships we have in our world in the direction of great freedom and equality. As this process unfolded throughout the centuries, marriage, parenting, and slavery have all been radically changed. Partnership and not patriarchy (male dominance) is reshaping marriage, nurturing and guiding is replacing authoritarian rule in parenting, and slavery has been abolished in most places and is recognized as a completely unacceptable and even blasphemous practice.
What Jesus and Paul set in motion have borne fruit in all these ways as the gospel has made its way through our history. It has undoubtedly taken far too long, painfully too long, for some of this to season and shape the way we live. And there is still much to do and long ways to go in seeking the continuing unfolding of this gospel dynamic in other areas of life.
So what is this gospel dynamic that Jesus and Paul used to instruct their followers in the first century? We can see it at work as Paul develops a “Household Code” in 5:21-6:9. These “Household Codes” were common in the ancient world. They gave an overview of how all the relationships in a Greco-Roman household were to function. A household in that world was very different from that of a modern nuclear family. It was much larger, multigenerational, and included the staff of slaves that served the family in various capacities. Guidance as to what was expected of whom was both needed and given in these codes.
Paul’s adaptation of these Household Codes shows how the gospel of freedom in Jesus leavens the dough of first century social relations. First, he begins each pair of exhortations by addressing the partner in the relationship who was deemed by the culture of that day as inferior, of less value, without standing or right – wives, children, and slaves. These are the folks who would have simply been told their place and expected to submit. In the church, however, these socially disadvantaged folk are given the dignity of being addressed first in their relationship and the responsibility of deciding what to do.
The freedom in Christ these folks received in baptism gave them a new future. No longer was it inevitable, at least in the church, that their status would be assigned to them once and forever based on gender, age, financial standing or the like. Now their future was something they could choose. Paul’s instruction to his readers to “subordinate” themselves to one another in these relationships shows as much.
That instruction also treats these folk from the underside of Greco-Roman society as responsible moral agents, treatment they never received in that society. Wives, children, and slaves were “players” in their own lives in the church.
Further, the power-holders, the husband, Father, and Master, are addressed and charged with reciprocal responsibilities to the partners in their relationship. This again was not a feature of the secular Household Codes which usually enumerated only the rights and privileges of the powerful. Paul, on the hand, holds them accountable for subordinating themselves to their partners as well.
The upshot of all this is that the church seemed to have had three basic options in relating to the social order of its world. First, was to simply fit in with things as they were, making no waves. Second, was to revolt against these things as they were and seek to set up an alternative social structure. Thirdly, they could seek to model new ways of relating within the structures presently in place. The first option was theologically untenable. The second practically impossible for Christians in the Roman empire. The third was the only real option they had within the realities in which they lived. This was the option Paul adopts here in Ephesians and his version of the Household Code bears this out. This is the way of a subversive counter-revolutionary. We’ll see how this works out in more detail as we look at the specifics of Paul’s “Household Code.”
In the marital relationship the counsel Paul offers differs in at least four key, “subversive” ways from the secular Household Codes. First, whereas in the secular codes women were not directly addressed but the duties and responsibilities were addressed to her husband, Paul directly addresses the wife, and her first, granting her the dignity and respect as a moral agent equal to that of the husband. Both now, are to choose to submit each other rather than simply following the cultural expectations of their time.
Secondly, to call the husband to “love” his wife is unique in these kinds of codes, as is Paul’s expectation that they will treat their wives sacrificially rather than dominating them for their own pleasure and comfort. To live this way in marriage is part of what Paul means about the church’s mandate to announce the wisdom of God to the powers that seek to excite us to dominating, divisive, and dehumanizing ways of relating, as seen in the typical secular code.
Thirdly, Paul crafts Christ’s headship in terms of his giving himself up for our salvation. Thus for the man to be “head” of the wife means a turning away from his own self-interest and to the nurturing and protection of those who “submit” to them. Scott Bartchy notes that “the aspect of God’s power that human beings should imitate must result in empowerment of others, which stands in striking contrast to the understanding of power on which every patriarchal system is based, namely, domination.”[5]
In the fourth place, if the contemporary codes privileged the benefit of the husband or the concern for order in society, Paul’s version, based on the relationship of Christ to the church, has as its chief concern that God’s people practice a subversive counter-revolutionary form of relationship even within the parameters of prevailing forms of marriage in the 1st century in the Roman empire. Here each person has the dignity of having a role to play in this new way of relating. And that role was essential to the people of God demonstrating to the world the new life they found in the risen Christ.
Thus Paul takes the way of Jesus which was lived out within a Jewish setting and ethos and theologically and creatively refashioned that way to serve Jesus’ subversive counter-revolutionary purposes in the wider world of Greco-Roman society. Our challenge, as I noted earlier, is not to replicate what Paul and his first-century contemporaries did, but to reproduce new forms of that same dynamic in the context of marriage in our own time and place. In fact, that in the west we largely hold up equality, dignity, consensus, and so forth as a marital ideal is in large part tribute to the way the Christian counter-revolution has subverted other more models of marriage that allow men to domineer and oppress the women.
While we may remain uneasy with terms like “submit” and “headship” (often for good reason), we cannot allow that uneasiness to blind us to the dynamic Paul is pointing us to, especially as it is played out in the relation of Christ to the church. When viewed in its own setting and with a sympathetic historical imagination, Paul’s vision here is quite liberating and would have been experienced as such in his churches. Ironically, the degree of subversion this vision has already worked in the cultural bloodstream from which we live here today is a chief reason we find Paul’s version for his first century churches somewhat troubling!
But we can’t judge Paul by our models of marital equality and freedom. We can only evaluate him in his own situation. The question we have to ask is what difference the gospel makes in marriage as it existed for him and his churches. And I have tried to show that in its own subversive way the gospel has radically transformed the relations between husband and wife in the direction we recognize today as genuinely Christian. Our task, as I have said several times, is to expose our own marital relations to that same gospel and discover our own blind spots and unexamined aspects of that relation and grow into an even deeper experience of marriage!
Next (6:1-4) Paul turns to parents and children. Actually, he begins with parents but then zeros in on fathers (6:4), for they held all the power over their children.[6] Again Paul addresses the lesser group, “children,” first as he did the wives earlier. This does for children what it did for wives: grants them a new dignity and makes them partners with their parents in the relationship. Rather than owing unconditional allegiance to parents, children owe them obedience and respect because it is “right” (6:1) or “God’s right order of things.” God is the one to whom they owe their ultimate love and loyalty because it is he under whose command and blessing as Creator they live (6:2).
“Fathers,” the power brokers in the relationship, are warned not to “provoke your children to anger” but rather “raise them with discipline and instruction about the Lord” (v.4). Since fathers held absolute authority over their children, the potential for them to use or abuse their children for their own ends, comforts, or convenience was legion. The children’s anger was a very real likelihood.
Positively, and here is the transformative dynamic of the gospel, fathers are to live under the Lord and responsible to him for the upbringing of their children, Now it’s God’s desires for these kids that the father must discern and further, not his own dreams or intentions for them. In essence, this is baptismal parenting Paul call for here. In baptism we turn our children over to Christ, to die, be buried, and raised to new life in and with him (Rom.6:1-4). In a real sense they are no longer ours. They belong to Christ and live with and under us as younger disciples whose identity and vocation as believers are entrusted to us as their parents. Hard to imagine a more radical recasting of a relationship than this!
Slaves and masters are up next. Though Paul and the early church are regularly condemned for accepting or even condoning the existence of this institution and its relationships, it is hard to see what else they could have done. They had no social or political power to advocate for abolishing it nor would the empire have acquiesced if they could have. It’s worth pointing out that our visceral connection of the word “slavery” with what happened in the south up to the Civil War in our country is not historically accurate. Slavery was less brutal and dehumanizing than what we experienced here. That does not make it a relationship that should exist in God’s world but we ought to at least separate the two in our minds as we read Ephesians.
Nevertheless, even in this detestable institution Paul believes the gospel can do its transformative work. If the institution could not be done away with, the relationships within it could be changed as with wives and husbands, and fathers and children. So he applies the same gospel logic to the slave-master relation he had to the others.
Slaves are addressed first and the same dignity and responsibility Paul conferred on wives and children he now confers on slaves. They too are to live and serve with “sincere devotion to Christ” (v.5). Since slaves were often “property” of their owners and sometimes treated as such, this “transfer of ownership” from the master to the slave had to be liberating. Now, they treat their masters according to God’s will, not because they belong to them but because they belong to Christ (“slaves of Christ,” v.6) and are answerable to him (v.8).
“Serve your owners enthusiastically, as though you were serving the Lord and not human beings” (v.7).
Incredibly, and it is hard for us to feel the force of this, Paul says Christian masters owe their slave the same treatment and respect (v.9a)! A more radical command to a slave owner can scarcely be imagined in that context. Yet it is just what Paul enjoins them to do. The reason: both belong to God and stand together under his judgment – and this God does not discriminate based of social status (6:9b).
If we take seriously what Paul is doing here and don’t superficially write him off as simply condoning the institution of slavery and browbeating slaves into degrading submission. What is really happening here, as in the other two relationships Paul addresses, is the redeeming of a relationship perverted through distorted and evil social dynamics (though pesky “powers” Paul mentioned several earlier in this letter). Here, however, redemption ultimately means abolishing this relationship for there is no form in which it can ever be appropriate for one human being to own another!
We are fortunate to have a case study of just such a relationship in the New Testament in Paul’s letter to Philemon. Philemon was a slave owner whose slave Onesimus had run away and found his way to Paul who was imprisoned in Rome. Onesimus apparently came to Christ under Paul and apprenticed himself to serve and learn from the apostle. Onesimus made himself valuable as Paul’s assistant and Paul was loath to return him to Philemon. But he knew it was the right thing to do and so he does. But he tells Philemon that he returns Onesimus as a “dearly loved brother” whom Philemon should receive as such as well (v.16). Paul hopes Philemon will return Onesimus to him and offers restitution for any loss Philemon has or might incur.
In this brief letter we see the transformation of a master-slave relation in action. And this transformation is what ultimately proves the undoing of the institution itself. How and family, brothers and sisters, own one another and abuse them with degrading and oppressive behavior. Onesimus’ future was with Paul, and Paul hoped Philemon would see that and respond accordingly. And apparently he did.
As the transforming leaven of the gospel worked slowly and torturously in the consciousness of the western world slavery became more and more problematic. Though it took a long time and cost many lives, eventually both the church and North American culture at large condemned and abolished slavery. That said, we must acknowledge that slavery still exists in our world, even here were it is legally outlawed. Its form has changed. Now it is young girls caught and enslaved for sex that seems its primary form. So the struggle is not over; the battle is not won. The Gospel continues to shape us and move us into this fighting this battle in whatever form it pops up.
Paul draws this section on “walking” by membership in the community of faith to a close by considering the relationship of wives and husbands, children and fathers, and slave and masters. In each case, working subversively within the givens of his world, Paul applied the gospel to the transformation of those relationships. The first two could be transformed in the direction of greater conformity to God’s intention for them in creation. The last, the salve-master relationship could not. It could only finally be abolished and declared in no way or ever appropriate for Christians or for God’s world.
As we read and acknowledge these dynamics in the text, we should give thanks for the direction they point, the work they did in Paul’s time, and seek to discover further aspects in our own marriages and families that need redemption in the directions Paul has pointed us.
[1] Timothy G. Gombis, “A Radically New Humanity: The Function of The Haustafel In Ephesians,” JETS 48 (2005), 317-330.
[2] I am dependent on Gombis, “A Radically New Humanity” in the section.
[3] Timothy Gombis, “A Radically New Humanity: The Function of the Haustafel in Ephesians,” JETS 48/2 (June 2005), 325.
[4] We must remember that the early church had neither the standing nor the access to power to launch anything like a “abolitionist” movement in the 1st century Roman empire.
[5] Scott Bartchy, “Who Should be Called Father?”……137
[6] Curiously, the CEB obscures this move by translating the Greek “fathers” as “parents” in 6:4.
No comments:
Post a Comment