But Scripture Supports Male Rule! (er, maybe)

I’m waiting up for my husband (see, you can not be a patriarchalist and still wait up for a husband—and he’s off fighting a fire in -30 F weather, so you can also be a “manly man” and not be completely sure about patriarchy) so I happen to have the time…and the interest…to answer a reader’s question from a previous post about male-rule…an answer in more detail than perhaps any reader here wants. 

  She writes,

Molly, I understand what you are saying about the effects of the fall in Genesis 3:16 (and I’ve never heard it taught as anything else), but then what do you do with Genesis 2:18, BEFORE the fall: “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” and 1 Corinthians 11:7-9, after the Lord’s coming: “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” and of course Ephesians 5:22-24: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” Are you saying that the Bible has been misunderstood and translated incorrectly all these years? (I am trying to understand your viewpoint.) Thanks.

Here is my attempt to briefly explain where I’m at in relation to a few of the more patriarchal-supporting passages in the Scripture.

Gen 2:18—the word for help is ezer, a word that simply means “help” and is frequently used for God. It is never used to indicate subordinate help (unless you count it’s use on Eve), but actually more the opposite—either help by a superior (like God helping man) or help by an equal ally, such as one army coming to aid another. (Either way, if one must find weakness somewhere, it denotes weakness on the part of the one needing the help. He/she wasn’t strong enough on his/her own to do the job).

The word for “meet” (help/meet) is kenegdo, again a word that means nothing subordinate whatsoever, but rather “facing him,” indicating an equality. I think that the end of Genesis 1 supports this too, with it’s pairing the two, male and female, as equals and as both being given dominion — him not given dominion over her, something worth noting that I never noticed as a patriarchalist.  (Previous ramblings on that, with a lot more detail given, here, written when I first began to try to work through this stuff instead of just push back down my many questions).

1 Cor. 11?  Er, okay, here’s my highly scholarly opinion:

I am not sure.

If I were to take that verse literally (literally meaning, “as my modern mind reads it in it’s English translation and seperated from it’s culture”), I would think it was implying head coverings as an eternal principle for women, signifying their subjection. Actually, that *was* how I used to take it. (I want to shine God with my life, did then and still do, and if that means full-time headcovering, I’m totally willing to do it, and was).

That being said, I’m not sure if reading words “literally” as I understand them, when they were written 2,000 years old and written in another language (now dead) and to another completely different culture, is always wise.

I think some things apply across the board, of course, but here is an instance where we are dealing with a particular custom, etc, that is perhaps wise NOT to read with 21st century assumptions, but rather seek to understand what the readers would have heard THEN.

There are a number of different options for 1 Cor 11, one being the cultural issue of women’s headcoverings during this time, women’s hair being seen as highly sexual and an uncovered woman being highly provocative.

Newfound-freedom-in Christ may have been causing women to meet with the church bare-headed, causing major upheaval among some. We know from Acts 15, Romans 13:8-10, etc and other passages that the law of love is to prevail in the Body, and what causes the weak to stumble is something to be avoided in the family of the church, even when it means someone has to give up their “right” to a thing.

Acts 15 demonstrates this, as we see Believers being “commanded” (by the Holy Spirit!) not to eat food sacrificed to idols…..yet later Paul tells everyone that it’s totally totally okay to eat food sacrificed to idols, only don’t do it if it will cause someone to stumble.

At first I was confused about Paul’s seemingly rebellious teachings (Romans 14 and 1 Cor 8), contradicting the edict in Acts 15 passed on by the council of Jerusalem and the Holy SPirit and that Paul himself agreed to follow, but then I “got it.”  Paul was saying that Love was the rule, that our own rights must sometimes take the backseat (even sometimes through rules made for the good of the whole) so that weaker aren’t hurt by the strong.

 But that doesn’t mean those rules are “for-all-time” mandates.  They’re simply rules for a time to help the family through a certain difficult slough. (Weakness is to be treated with great care by the Church, which is completely opposite of the world’s general viewpoint towards weakness).

It is interesting to note that Paul shares that same thing in the very letter that 1 Cor. 11 is found in.  1 Cor 8:9 shares a truth that Paul is ruled by:

“But take care lest this liberty [literally, “right”] of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.”

Can it be that this “rule” helps us understand what Paul says in chapter 11, when he is helping the Corinthians through whatever problem they were having with headcoverings (which appears to be that women weren’t wanting to wear them anymore—we don’t know for sure, because we don’t have the original letter that the Corinthians wrote to Paul before he responded back).

1 Cor 11 is also interesting in that it appears women *were* speaking in the assembly, and Paul does NOT say that’s wrong (which brings up some interesting discussion on 1 Cor 14, but that’s for another time). He does bring up culture, though, when making his argument, which again makes me think we might be dealing with a cultural issue here that had the potential for causing great offense.

 Again along the lines of culture, Paul says, “even nature itself…” Nature there is not meaning animals, because male lions have long hair and female lions have short, male peacocks have long ”tresses” and female peacocks none, so appealing to the world of animals wouldn’t help much on the old ”women oughta have long hair” thing.  However, his argument does make more sense if we read Paul talking about nature as in the world around them, their culture and it’s dress codes, customs, etc.

So is Paul saying that the Roman culture was God’s ideal? Or was he simply appealing to the cultural sense of propriety that the church then would have been steeped in? Is he simply saying, “Let not your liberty be a stumbling block for the weak.”

Another interesting thing (to me, anyway) is that Paul makes a seeming argument FOR head coverings, and then in 11:11-12 seems to make an argument against himself, especially in that he says, “however, IN THE LORD…” and then goes on to say that men and women are independant and interdependent and “neither one is without the other.”

Some use 1 Cor 11 (okay, actually most comps/patriarchalists) to prove that Paul was showing the heirarchy of life—God, Christ, man, woman, but the only problem is that the (very heirarchal) Greek wording doesn’t support that assertion, since it doesn’t originally order it in heirarchal form, as well as the orthodox teaching on the Trinity not being compatible with the idea that God permanently rules over Christ.  Not to mention that the sentance is written in three couplets, the NASB giving a fairly word-for-word rendition when it says,

“…Christ is the head of every man,

and the man is the head of a woman

and God is the head of Christ.”

In other words, it’s three relationships being talked about here (and somehow this has to do with headcoverings in the Roman culture-haha).  The three couplets are not written in proper order for a heirarchal view, for from everything I’ve read, the Greek language held word order as a way of showing prominence–who was more important than who, and so forth.  Yet in this case, it has God last in the line?  For a passage supposedly showing the heirarchal chain of command, this one is flunking Greek.   

Another question (boy, am I full of them, or what?): Does the word “head” here (kephale) mean “ruler,” as we English speakers would assume (since that’s what it would mean in our culture)?  Perhaps, but I’ve read Greek-geeks saying that it would have been better for Paul to use arche, then, a word specifically denoting headship as it pertains to authority.  Plus, do we want to say that God rules over Christ in a permanent sense?  (If so, fine, but know that in so doing, you deny orthodox Trinitarian teaching, as we’ve discussed in previous posts here and here). 

It would, however, support a translation that would suggest “source” or something similar for the meaning of “head,” and, indeed, this is a valid possibility.  Christ, though being God, was “sent” of God to be born in flesh, so in that sense, He (the incarnate Christ) originated from God.  We are told in the first chapter of John that it is through Christ that the world was made, which means that mankind (”every man”) comes from Christ—derives their origination from Christ.  And we know from Genesis 2 that “the man” was the source for the woman—she originally was found in him until God drew her forth.  

So does this passage (1 Cor. 11:3) spell out the hierarchal ordering of the world?  Only if we A.) Say that Christ is ruled over by God, B.) say that kephale means ruler without a doubt, and C.) ignore the grammatical structure of the verse altogether.  

Some say that Paul was saying the woman’s headcovering was her symbol of personal power—that the symbol of subjection was now the symbol that she had the right to speak in the assembly, using 11:10 as their proof text. In other words, that he was making both groups happy–—the “cover your head!” group was getting their way, yet the women’s symbol for subjection was being turned on it’s head (pun intended) and was now used as a badge of authority for women to participate as full equals.

So, with that being just the tip of the iceberg of my thoughts/ponderings on 1 Corinthians 11 (oh yeah, baby, I was just getting started! lol) I have nothing to conclude from it but a boatload of honest questions!  Meaning, I’m not willing to base female subjection on a passage that is highly complex and seems to be saying all sorts of things that sometimes seem contradictory, or could be dealing with cultural issues, etc.

For the literalists, I would add that that’s much like the way we deal with the holy kiss verses. Five times in the NT we are told to greet the brethren with a holy kiss. But very few of us, even though that’s worded in a command type form, take that literally. We get the general overarching idea from the commands—- that the church is family, that we are to greet one another in love and with warmth—-but do we go around kissing eachother every time we meet?

Well, why not? Scripture commands us to do so, 5 (or is it 6?) times, specifically! Well…we generally don’t obey those “commands” because we understand that there was a specific cultural application behind them, and that the specific words were not a “for all time” command. We know that we can derive the general principle behind the command as something we can follow, but we also know that the cultural specifics (the smooching part) are not God-ordained, but simply one of the ways Love was practiced in that culture.

Ephesians 5

Now here’s another interesting passage, especially if we look at the book of Ephesians as a whole and how it is emphasizing over and over again our “one-ness” with Christ. I’m not sure if you have a Bible handy, but it might be helpful. 

Ephesians 1: a testimony to what our “Husband” has done for us and how we are now “in Him” in that place of UNION, and the amazing things that union means for us.

Ephesians 2: how he has raised us up and seated us in the heavenly places with Him (2:6*seated* being an inference of ruling with Him).  It is also reminding us of our former division and then, thanks to Christ, our ONE-NESS now—2:14 speaking specifically how “that in Himself He might make the two into one new man…” and the picture of a building growing—a picture of unity.

Ephesians 3: a prayer that we might comprehend this incomprehensible Love that He has for us (3:18-19),

Ephesians 4: again this overarching theme of ONEness, Paul fairly screaming the words at us in 4:1-6, and then reminding us again of our oneness and about the leadership gifts given all to bring others up to the same level—there not being a heirarchy of one always over another, but a story of one-ness the whole way through, that those who lead do so in order that they may train up others to take their place (4:11-13), all for bringing others up to the same level of maturity and beyond.  Again, we are given an analogy to help us understand, that we are a body growing into our head (again, kephale), that we are ONE.

So then we get to 5, and after having been exhorted to to be humble, gentle, patient, and loving to eachother (regardless of status, race, or gender) in the preceeding chapters of the letter and in chapter 5 itself, WHY did I always read Ephesians 5:22-33 and throw out all the proceeding part of Ephesians and read it as if it, too, was seperated from it’s culture, was seperated from the rest of the text, and was a “for-all-time” general command to be understood as my 21st century brain would have read it?

I don’t do that anymore. Personally, I think Ephesians 5 is simply a continuation of the rest of the chapter and the rest of the entire letter, a continuation of the theme of UNION, of one-ness.

I think the passage on marriage, written to a highly patriarchal culture (both for the Jews and the Romans) was a slap in the face of everything those cultures believed about men and women.

Wives were commanded by law to obey their husbands in that culture. Yet here, Paul tells them (just as he does the slaves, also bound by law) that they *get* to obey as a service to their Heavenly Master—-that they can joyfully submit by CHOICE, as equals, as opposed to obeying because the power of their culture demands it of them. (Hupotasso, “submit,”  is a word indicating voluntary subjection). In other words, they are given the ability to not be victims, but to be full persons—still in subjection under law of humankind, but yet full persons of weight with God.

But then, as if that were not enough, Paul radically reinvents husbandry when he gets to the men, and again hits on this “one-ness, one-ness, one-ness” theme of his (even quoting the famous one-ness poem of Adam, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”).  Plus, Paul brings in a couple of analogies that all say the same thing—-you are two-made-one, what person wants to hurt his own self, what person wants to lord over his own self, what person wants to violate his own self, what person would not tenderly nurture his own self?

You are head of your wife just as Christ is head of the church (Christ being “head/kephale” mentioned twice earlier in Ephesians, both times having to do with nurturing, with oneness, with union, and NOT having to do with ruling over her).  How has Christ loved the church, he reminds the husbands (who have all power over their wives, who are taught to keep her in subjection by their culture, who have been taught to rejoice that they are not inferiors like women)?

The previous parts of Ephesians have told the Ephesian readers all about how Christ has loved her, how He has pulled her up to Him (not stayed above her), how He has made her ONE with Him (His body, with all in subjection under her-1:22-23), how He rules *with* her (again 1:20-23, and 2:6), how He loves her (even though she actually *is* weaker) as Himself.

We are specifically told that Christ has been seated at the right hand of God in the heavenly places (1:20).  Then we are told that the Church is His Body—that they are ONE (1:23).   Then we are told that we are raised up with Him and seated with Him (2:6)…and where is He seated?  On the throne!   Is this a picture of a husband ruling over His bride, or of a husband co-ruling with His bride?  We know who He is ruling, because the letter tells us that all things are put in subjection under His feet (1:22).  But that doesn’t say that the Church is under His feet.  Actually, the next verse says that the Church is His Body, ”the fullness of Him who fills all in all,” which would mean the feet are hers.  And His.  But also hers.  Their feet.   

So, no, I don’t think that Ephesians 5 is supporting male rule. I think that we’ve draaaaaastically misunderstood it.

Well, in the interest of attempting to be humble, let me just say that I think *I* drastically misunderstood it, both in not understanding the culture it was written to (that wifely obedience was law), and also not reading it with the full weight of the rest of the letter behind it. I’m not sure if I ever “got” the theme of the letter before, actually, though it’s a book plenty underlined in all my Bibles.  Anyway, I was reading Ephesians 5 assuming it was speaking “for-all-time” commands, somehow completely seperate from the culture and seperate from the context and the rest of the letter’s message.

So….

That’s where I’m at right now, anyways, and that’s the brief version (if you can believe that-ha), and (of course!) I do reserve the right to change my mind at any given time.

Warmly,
Molly