Audio only:
Joe breaks down Ephesians 5 and some common errors people interpret from the text. He explains what authentic Catholic male-headship looks like.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and for many people one of the hardest biblical teachings to know what to do with is this idea of male headship. When the Bible talks with the husband as the head of his wife, what does an authentic biblical headship look like? How should we not understand these passages and how can a proper understanding of headship actually improve your marriage? I think the best place to start is with scripture itself, particularly St. Paul’s hotly disputed words from Ephesians chapter five, quote, wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior as the church is subject to Christ. So let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. So what does that mean? Well, I want to take a look at a few examples of how some people interpret or maybe misinterpret it, but first I want to go ahead and say thank you to all of you supporting me over@shamelessjoe.com.
You really do keep this show going. And you know what? This topic actually came up in a recent Patreon live stream q and a where I got the idea to do it. So just know these live streams are a great way for me to hopefully answer your questions, but also for me to find out the kind of topics you’d be interested in learning more about. And you get all of that for as little as $5 a month over@shamelessjoe.com. Okay, so let’s consider a couple of real life interpretations of male headship that are in this case, both coming from the Protestant world. The first one is a model of headship that I think is expressed well in a letter that a woman named Mary wrote to Pastor John Piper, in which she says, I know that submission is a requirement of the wife, and I’ve been working hard lately to hold my tongue and agree with my husband even when I have a different opinion. In her letter, she goes on to ask if she’s erred by going along with her husband’s decision to unwisely buy a new car even when she knew he was making a mistake. So that’s the first model of headship means something like the husband makes all the decisions. The wife’s role is just to hold her tongue or to agree with him even if she really knows he’s wrong. On the other side of the issue though, you’ve got this very different understanding of male headship from people like Kate Wallace Nunnelly of the Junior Project.
CLIP:
Women are often told that they are less than in the church, but we believe the Bible tells a different story. At the Juah project, we are all about teaching biblical equality, equipping women and resourcing the church. If you struggle understanding what the Bible really says about women or how to articulate your egalitarian beliefs, you’re in the right place.
Joe:
None only argues that male headship in the church is a myth that the Bible never says that the man is ahead of the household and that the idea of the husband is to lead. His wife is actually unbiblical. Now, she concedes that the man eats the head of the wife in the Bible, but she insists we’ve been getting that passage wrong in her view. When Paul talks about Christ being head of the church, that actually has nothing to do with leadership or authority, but with love, sacrifice, death and giving of life. So similarly, she argues that when Paul calls the man and the head of the wife, this refers only to giving himself up for her, sacrificing for her to give her a flourishing life. Now, she of course, concedes that Jesus did lead and have authority over others, but she claims that these are traits that husbands are meant to imitate as they imitate the headship of Christ.
Instead, she says the husband’s headship is a servant role, not a leadership role. So I think that’s a clear example of the second model of headship. Husbands are called the serve not lead. So which of those models is correct? Or maybe a better question is why are they both wrong? First, let’s be clear, the biblical texts really are dealing with authority and submission. You can find all kinds of modern claims. Ephesians five is being mistranslated and there is genuinely an ongoing scholarly debate about just what Paul means in calling the husband the head of the wife in terms of whether he means this to signify authority or origin or preeminence. But you know what? What’s perfectly clear is that Paul says wives are to be subject to their husband. Now, St. Peter says the same thing and the two of them use the same Greek word high tasso to describe that relationship.
Now that word comes from military usage. It originally referred to the troops under the authority of an officer, but it came to be used more broadly for anybody under the authority of anybody else, whether that’s demons being cast out in the name of Jesus by an exorcist or the subjects of the Roman Empire being under their political authorities or even us submitting to God. So we’re very clearly dealing with the themes of authority and submission. Now, having said that, hypos is a pretty broad term on its own. It doesn’t tell us just what the nature of that authority or that submission looks like. It’s used for everything from a master slave dynamic to simply respecting your elders. But fortunately Paul gives us the key to make sense of his teaching in Ephesians five because immediately like a verse before calling upon wives to submit to their husbands in verse 22, he says in verse 21, that we are to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
And you know what verb he uses there? High potassium. So as Pope St. John Paul II observes when Paul speaks of the mutual subjection of the spouse’s husband and wife, he’s giving us the framework for the words that follow on the subjection of the wife to the husband, and he’s showing us that we’re not dealing with a question of one-sided domination. So before we can make sense of male headship in the marriage, we first need to understand the Christian vision of power and leadership and service and submission as Jesus tells the apostles at the last Supper, let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader is one who serves and he points to himself as the model saying, I am among you is one who serves. So if your image of male headship is one in which the husband lords his authority over his wife, well that’s precisely the model of leadership that Jesus tells us not to follow.
On the other hand, this is what strikes me about Nelly’s argument in which she claims that the husband’s headship is a servant role, not a leadership one. From a Christian perspective, a leadership role is a service role. So men are called to be servant leaders to their wives in some way. Does that mean then that wives just shut up and go along with whatever the men decide? It does not. Submission in the biblical sense here doesn’t mean you just turn your mind off and shut up and put up go along with whatever they tell you to do. After all, we don’t do that even in our submission to God, as John Piper pointed out in his response to Mary’s letter,
CLIP:
Even in the church’s relationship to Christ, we the church let our will, our desires, our wants, be known what we think is wise, be known in prayer. That’s what prayer is in telling God what we would like him to do. And since Christ being perfect does not need our counsel at all, thank you very much. He doesn’t need our prayers to tell him how to run the world but welcomes it. How much more is it fitting for a wife to let her request be made known concerning what’s about to happen in the marriage?
Joe:
In any functioning system, whether it’s a family or a company or a political society, there are going to be those whose God has put into place to make decisions, but those in decisionmaking roles need the input of the people that they’re trying to lead. If they’re going to lead well, a good leader doesn’t make every decision personally much less on his own. One of the strangest arguments I sometimes hear against the papacy is that Peter couldn’t have been the Pope because he participates at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 instead of just unilaterally deciding everything himself. But of course, he participates in this collaborative way because that is precisely how a good servant leader behaves. So Christians in any kind of leadership role, we are warned against Lord in our authority over the people we’re called to serve In his encyclical, Casty Canobie papacy 11th warns against several different distortions of male headship and of wifely submission.
First authentic submission does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman, both in view of her dignity as a human person and in view of her most noble office’s wife and mother and companion, a woman who imagines that her job is just to shut up and nod. Well, she’s hardly living out what it is to be a good mother to her children or a true companion and wife to her husband. Second, authentic submission does not bid her, obey her husband’s every request, if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife. Think about it this way. All authentic authority, whether we’re talking about the authority of the state or your husband or parents or any authority, all authority comes from God. When we obey an authority that God has placed in our lives, we’re ultimately obeying God.
But on the other hand, if any of those human authority tells us to do something contrary to the will of God, then we should say with St. Peter that we must obey God rather than men. Never forget after all, that the St. Peter and Paul who talk so much about our spiritual need to submit to the emperor, for instance, they’re killed by the emperor for refusing to submit to laws outlawing Christianity. So our submission to any human authority is always going to be checked by ultimately our submission to God himself. If for instance, you discern God is telling you to become a Catholic and your husband tells you not to become a Catholic, well, you must obey God rather than men. But Pius is clear that this principle actually goes further. It also means that you don’t have to go along with everything your husband says if it’s for instance contrary to your dignity, simply if it’s contrary to right reason.
Male headship is not a blank check for a husband to ruin his family by acting in irrational or selfish ways, and a Christian wife is not called to abbet her husband in his selfish or sinful or ruinous behaviors. The third distortion that Pius warns against is in treating your wife like a child. Now, to be clear, the word hypo potta can be used to describe a minor child obeying their parents, but your wife isn’t a minor. I hope and Pius points out why that matters. Children typically are not allowed free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment or their ignorance of human affairs. But if you’re a husband, hopefully you’ve married a woman whose judgment and knowledge of human affairs you respect treat her like it. On the flip side, the fourth distortion that Pius warns against is what he calls that exaggerated liberty, which cares not for the good of the family in which he describes it as the head and heart of the family as being separated from each other.
Now, I’m reminded here of a 2019 New York Times piece entitled I’ve picked My Job Over My Kids, in which the lawyer Laura Balon talks about how she realizes she can’t actually have a work-life balance, and she’s resolved this by prioritizing her job, even if it means missing her kids’ birthdays or family vacations or school events or simply being emotionally unavailable even when she is home. She’s gone so far as to make a book claiming that prioritizing your career like this is good for your kids. Now, Balon is divorced, but you can find plenty of women who have the same mentality who aren’t divorced yet, they should just go do whatever they find fulfilling and hopefully it’ll turn out okay for their husbands and kids. In contrast to this, Pius argues that the head and heart of the family should be in union, and if here he lays out the clearest positive vision of the biblical model of the family for if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling.
So she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love. So in fact, both the husband and wife are called the lead within the family, but in these two different areas, I think that’s a beautiful image of the family. But I also think actual family life can be more complicated. Every man, every woman has their own strengths, their own weaknesses. Some men are better at leading a family than others, or maybe they’re better in one area and not in other areas. Maybe for instance, your wife is great with money and you’re not. You don’t have to ignore her gifts in the name of male headship. As Pius points out, headship and submission are these concepts that are going to necessarily play out differently and even in different degrees in the different families and cultures and eras we might consider. So that basic family model is given in the Bible, but it shouldn’t be understood in a one size fits all sort of way.
Indeed Pius warns that if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family. So you might find a situation in which a woman is left calling the shots in her family, not because she’s usurping or undermining her husband or anything like that, but simply because he is not leading in the way that God has called him to lead. So hopefully from everything that’s been said so far, it’s clear that belief in male headship is not the same as believing that women are completely incapable or that they’re inferior to men or anything like this, and one need only to look at the holy family. After the second stage of Joseph and Mary’s marriage is complete and they come to live together from that point onward, the angelic revelations come to Joseph rather than to Mary. So God himself treats Joseph as the head of the family, but it doesn’t mean that God thinks he’s holier than Mary.
We can see even more plainly Jesus submits to both Joseph and Mary. So we should take from the three clearly that the fact that God has put one person in a role of authority doesn’t mean he thinks that they’re holier, wiser, or even more capable than those who they might be leading. On the other hand, while men and women are equal, we’re not interchangeable. As I point out in this episode here, that’s just scratching the surface of the modern errors about manhood and womanhood. So if you want, you can go check that out for some more of our modern errors on gender as well as some tools for how to combat them charitably. Either way, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.