2 responses

1. I appreciate your exhortations to me in my couple positions of limited authority. It is good for us to remember the limits of our authority, and to be alert and aware of the superior powers of those under our authority and to be humble about elevating and learning from those superior powers.

   Your comments are less helpful to me in the places where I’m under authority. One of your last comments was that we should submit to authorities even if they don’t have the power needs for that authority. I agree with that. Commands to submit to authorities are throughout the Bible, without any wiggle room other than don’t obey commands to sin. Wives to husbands, children to parents, slaves to masters, people to the governing authorities, church members to elders. No mention of superior powers seems to be in any of these commands (Eph 5-6, Rom 13, 1 Tim 2). But in your comments on marriage it seemed you were suggesting that the submission commanded is predicated on the customary distribution of powers between the spouses, and if a particular marriage had a different distribution of absolute powers, the command of a wife to submit to a husband is not in effect. I can’t see the support of this in Scripture. The headship of the husband over the family appears as a role, like an elder, or a president, or an employer. And just because a congregant, citizen, employee, or wife has superior power doesn’t mean the role is changed, or the God-commanded obligation to support our leaders has changed. The leader does well to be humble, but the one under authority still is required to lend her voluntary support to his leadership, because God asks it, not because he’s worthy.

   Finally, I loved that poem. Thanks for sharing it.

   Reply

   • Thanks for commenting, Lisa! And I’m glad you liked the poem.

     I’m less sure the command to wives in the Scriptures is not based on average or even basically universal distributions of power. If it is in fact the case that Paul’s exhortations are not concessional for a particular ancient context (like his advice to slaves most obviously was) or organized according to creational natural averages (as his reference to Eve/Adam as archetypes would indicate), that would change only a little I think. Only in extremely rare, perhaps nonexistent, cases, would a woman have the superior will in a marriage (a strong woman would be making a mistake to marry a weaker-willed man, in my opinion). But in such a case, the same necessity for submission would apply. And the distribution of responsibilities would, I think, need to be voluntary and mutually agreeable. In other words, if two people had largely egalitarian ideals, and they agreed together on these ideals beforehand, the wife would in that case still be submitting to the will of her husband in that. And this could work if they were willing to mutually submit in the face of evidenced superiorities. This would be part of their covenantal arrangement. On the other hand, if they mutually agreed that the woman should be subject to her husband, and that Paul’s exhortation was not contextual or cultural, but universally binding, the woman would need to follow that. The difference with employment and government and parents is that those structures of authority are already in place, and what choice we have concerning them is limited. We could choose to leave our job, for instance, but as long as we were there, we would have covenanted to respect and honor our superiors, even if they were not easy to honor or didn’t have the proper power to wield their authority. This is obviously especially difficult with parents, which we cannot actually change at all. Hence, the fifth commandment is directly concerning parents, since that covenantal arrangement is fixed as soon as we exist and basically immutable.

     I don’t know if that clarifies anything of what I was thinking. Thanks again for engaging!

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