Over the last few years I’ve been studying the subject of complementarianism/patriarchy. One of the main doctrines espoused by complementarians is headship, the belief that man is the head of the wife and the family. This spills over into a theology of headship for men in the church. Essentially it means that men are born to authority, women to submission. Men to lead, women to follow. Men are up front, women behind the scenes. It also means that a woman’s identity is derived through the man. The essence of life becomes one of authority and submission. Structure comes before/is the relationship.
The more I’ve studied scripture, the more I’ve discovered this is so wrong (I was complementarian). Paul in his writing to the churches does not emphasise authority and submission as the basis of relationships in the home or the church. For Paul, all are equal in Christ Jesus. The church is a family. We are siblings, brothers and sisters in Christ. The idea of an equality of relationship (men and women are equal before God) yet a hierarchy of role and function (in life) that means the husband/man is the head over the wife, or the church, is just not there.
To some extent we all read scripture through the lens of our own knowledge and experience, a knowledge that comes through the teaching we’ve received within our own particular Christian culture, or to put it another way, our own Christian bubble, whether it be a denomination, stream, local church etc.. It’s hard not to. The challenge is trying to read and hear scripture outside of our particular bubble – to listen to others who nevertheless hold a high view of scripture yet come to different conclusions. I know, that’s been my experience.
God created both male and female in his image. Eve was as an equal partner, an “authority corresponding to Adam.” As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin put it, “We cannot partner with a lesser being whom we subdue.” They were created equal in person, service, responsibility, and accountability.
At the Fall a distortion came into our human experience and power and authority entered human relationships in a way that God never intended it to be. In this fallen world, power (and all that goes with it) plays became a big part in life – at all levels, in all spheres. But, and it’s a big one, at the cross all of that was found wanting and judged, and in Christ we have and are a new creation.
Though forms of patriarchy existed before, headship is particularly a 1970s/1980s doctrine, a doctrine set up to protect marriage, the family and the church from the advance of feminism. Watchman Nee, Larry Christensen, and Stephen B Clark were early promotors of it, though it wasn’t defined as such. It was George Knight III who really set the ball rolling, and Wayne Grudem and the Council for Biblical Christian Manhood and Womanhood expanded on it and set it in concrete. Grudem’s Systematic Theology became the complementarians bible on God’s structures for human relationships. The newly reformed and reformed charismatics ran with it. John Piper even stated that Christianity has a “masculine feel” and that God has ordained for the church a “masculine ministry”!
1 Cor 11:3-12 and Eph 5:22-33 are the go-to scriptures. It’s not my intention here to go into detail – it would fill pages! But here are some pointers.
1. Headship relied heavily on a supposed doctrine of the subordination of the Son from all eternity. If there was equality and subordination in the Trinity there could be equality and subordination in human relationships. This has been shown to be both untenable and dangerous, a doctrine rightly rejected by the early Church Father’s and contrary to the historic creeds.
2. The focus is now on the meaning of “head” found in 1 Cor 11 and Eph 5. The Greek is kephale and is variously referred to as ruler (as in headmaster), leader, foundation and source (as in the source of a river). Among complentarians, head/leader, is favoured, among egalitarians, source. As with any author, we need to ask how Paul used the word. It has all the appearance of a conceptual metaphor. A picture from one area of life to describe another. We take something from one domain and use it to explain the target domain.
3. Nothing in 1 Cor 11 or Eph 5 suggests Paul is setting up or endorsing a hierarchy of relationships in marriage or the church. Indeed in 1 Cor 11:11,12, Paul seems to be emphasising their dependence on one another, their mutuality. It’s also followed by chapters 12-14 which are all about the unity of the body and how each part serves the whole according to the gifts God gives – regardless of being male or female. Not only that a few chapters earlier, Paul says the husband and wife had equal rights over one another’s bodies (1 Cor 7:4). All of which would have been quite shocking to the world of the time.
4. Paul’s exhortation for wives to submit to their husbands flows out of what it means to live as the new people of God, redeemed by Christ and filled with the Spirit, a life that is representative of the incoming kingdom of God and of the age to come. Women already lived in subservient submission, so what does Paul mean? This needs to be read in context, otherwise we will be in danger of making it say more or something other than Paul intended.
5. The whole context is about how we are to live out this new life in Christ in a fallen world. After exhorting them to be filled with the Spirit, he then goes on to list four dependent clauses: speaking to one another…, singing…, giving thanks…, and submitting… Then the last one is followed by a sub clause: wives to your husbands… (submit is not in the original).
6. Mutual submission comes first, and is expected of all, whoever they are, male or female. This was and is a radical and major principle of the Christian life. That’s where the emphasis lies. It contradicts and subverts the principles of this fallen world that has been judged in Christ and is passing way. The Greco-Roman codes of the day held that women were inferior to men.
7. It’s not helped by a division between verses 21 and 22 in most Bibles which seems to mark it out as the beginning of another subject, as complementarians like to insist, Biblical order for Christian homes. But, even if we take that view it still follows verse 21, which is one of mutual submission.
8. Complementarians like to speak of the husbands loving rule. But rule is just not in there. It’s about sacrificial loving, a laying down of his life for his wife, even as Christ did for the church. Something so radical for the time. It esteems and lifts the wife up.
9. Paul does not command/demand obedience of the wife. If Paul had wanted to use that word, he could have done, as he does a few verses later in chapter 6 in relation to children and slaves/servants (even then, he tempers his instruction, Father’s shouldn’t exasperate their children, and masters shouldn’t be threatening and should know that both have the same master in heaven).
10. Paul addresses the wife first and not through the husband! Again this was radical and subversive.
The more I read and understand Paul, whether in his letters to the churches or to Timothy, the more I feel the last thing on his mind was developing or maintaining a hierarchy of relationships. Not only that but Paul was after maturity, growth in Christlikeness, and that is not achieved by hierarchies of authority and submission, and the last thing we need is a sanctified version of the effects of the Fall. We need to drop the doctrine of headship along with the word itself, the only head of the home and the church is Christ.
If you would like to read more please see my book, Exploring the Role of Women in the Church. It’s comprehensive, concise and accessible. Available across Amazon as an book or paperback.
https://amzn.eu/d/93aQrMl (Amazon UK link)
If you are interested in more on this I intend to publish a book on the subject, possibly called, Headship – False Doctrine or For Real? based on my master’s dissertation in the not to distant future. In it I examine the background, history and development of the doctrine, the arguments around the subordination of the Son from all eternity, the development of the idea of ‘roles’, the meaning of the Greek word kephale, and the other major texts that are called upon in support of the doctrine. Stay posted.
IT’S HERE! It’s taken awhile, but Headship: A False Doctrine or For Real? is now available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
https://mybook.to/Headship (universal link through Booklinker to Amazon)
https://amzn.eu/d/8JHTPou (Amazon UK)
https://a.co/d/7NYgaYz (Amazon USA)
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