What are the roles of husband and wife?

Question 11104

What Scripture asks of a husband and wife has become one of the hardest subjects to discuss calmly, partly because the words have been abused and partly because most people arrive at the conversation with a picture already in their heads. Some imagine a 1950s household with a silent woman and a man in an armchair. Others imagine an arrangement in which the differences have been sanded away entirely.

Neither picture comes from the New Testament. What we actually find is a pattern of distinct callings, both of them costly, both of them modelled on the relationship between Jesus and his church, and both of them a good deal more attractive than the caricatures suggest.

Husband and wife: equal in worth, distinct in calling

Everything here has to be built on Genesis 1:27. Male and female are both made in the image of God, which settles the question of value before any discussion of roles begins. There is no hint anywhere in Scripture that a woman is a lesser creature or a lesser Christian. Galatians 3:28 says that in Christ there is neither male nor female, meaning that access to God and standing before him are identical.

Equality of worth does not require sameness of function. Genesis 2 describes the woman as a helper fit for the man, and the Hebrew word ezer is not a term of inferiority. It is used most often in the Old Testament of God himself coming to the aid of his people. The word means a strong ally who supplies what is lacking, which is a rather different picture from the one the English word helper conjures up.

So a husband and wife are equal before God and are given different things to do. Holding both of those together is the whole task, and most bad teaching in this area has resulted from letting go of one of them.

What is asked of the husband

Paul spends three verses on wives in Ephesians 5 and nine on husbands, which is worth noticing before anyone claims the passage is weighted against women. The instruction is Ephesians 5:25: husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Take the measure of that. The standard is not a comfortable affection. It is the cross. A man is asked to spend himself for his wife’s good in the way Jesus spent himself for the church, which means putting her interests before his own consistently, over decades, without an audience and without applause. Any husband who thinks he has mastered that has not understood the sentence.

Peter adds practical texture in 1 Peter 3:7: live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honour to her, as heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. Understanding requires attention. You cannot honour someone you have not bothered to learn. And notice the sting in the tail, which is that a man’s prayer life is affected by how he treats his wife. God takes it that seriously.

What is asked of the wife

The instruction given to the wife in a Christian marriage is to submit to her own husband as to the Lord. I want to define that carefully, because the word has been used as a weapon often enough to deserve careful handling. It is voluntary, it is offered rather than extracted, and it is directed to her own husband rather than to men in general. Nothing in the text authorises any man to require it of any woman.

Neither does it mean silence, passivity or the surrender of judgement. Abigail acted decisively against her husband’s foolishness and Scripture commends her. Priscilla taught alongside Aquila. The woman of Proverbs 31 buys fields and runs businesses, and her husband’s chief contribution appears to be praising her at the city gate. A wife with strong opinions is not in breach of anything.

Nor is it unlimited. Where a husband requires sin, the higher allegiance governs and the answer is no. Where there is violence or abuse, submission does not require a woman to remain in danger, and any church that tells her otherwise is complicit. I say more about all this in my answer on headship and submission.

Husband and wife patterned on Jesus

The reason these instructions are not arbitrary is given in the passage itself. This mystery is profound, Paul says, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. A husband and wife are enacting something. The marriage is a picture, and the picture is of a self-giving Saviour and a people who gladly belong to him.

That explains why the roles are not interchangeable in the way modern instinct would prefer. It also explains why neither role is degrading. Jesus submitted to the Father without being less than the Father, and the eternal Son washing feet is not a picture of inferiority. Submission and greatness sit together in the gospel in a way they never do in the world.

Ephesians 5 opens the whole passage with a general instruction to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, and I take that seriously. Mutual deference is the atmosphere in which the specific callings operate. A husband and wife who are competing over rights have already lost the plot, whatever their theology.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

People often expect that a biblical view of husband and wife dictates who cooks, who earns and who does the accounts. It does not. Scripture says nothing about which of you is better with money or who should put out the bins, and the Proverbs 31 household would horrify anyone who thinks a wife should not be in commerce.

What Scripture does address is character and direction. Is the husband taking responsibility for the spiritual health of the home, or has he quietly handed it all to his wife while he watches the football? Is he making decisions that cost him rather than her? Is she supporting the direction of the household rather than undermining it in front of the children and the neighbours?

My wife and I have been married for a long time now, and I can tell you that the decisions which genuinely require someone to have the final word arrive perhaps twice a decade. Almost everything else is settled by conversation between two people who want the same things. Couples who spend their energy establishing the chain of command are usually avoiding a more ordinary problem, which is that they have stopped talking.

Where this goes wrong

The most common failure I see is not a wife refusing to submit. It is a husband who has abdicated. He is present in the house and absent from the family, leaving the praying, the discipline, the church attendance and the emotional weather entirely to her, then quoting Ephesians when he wants his own way. That is not headship. It is the opposite of it.

The second failure is the man who uses the language of authority to get his preferences met. Headship in Scripture is defined by sacrifice, not by getting the remote control. A husband and wife arrangement in which the man’s comfort is the organising principle has inverted the passage completely.

And I would add a word to churches. If we teach these texts only when we want women to do something, we should not be surprised when women stop listening. Teach the husband’s calling with the same force and frequency, because that is where the New Testament puts the emphasis. For the wider frame see my answer on biblical marriage.

The marriages that actually work

After many years of sitting with couples in kitchens and in my study, I have noticed that the healthy marriages have something in common that the textbooks rarely mention. The husband and wife in question quite obviously like each other. They laugh at the same things. They defend one another when the other is not in the room. Whatever their theology of roles, the affection is unmistakable and it does most of the heavy lifting.

I say that because it is possible to hold an entirely correct view of husband and wife and still have a cold house. Doctrine is not a substitute for kindness. If a man can recite Ephesians 5 and cannot remember the last time he thanked his wife for anything, the doctrine is not doing its work.

The other common feature is that these couples pray together, usually briefly and without ceremony. It is remarkable how difficult it is to nurse a grievance against someone you have just prayed with. If you want one practical change that will do more than any amount of reading, that is the one I would recommend, and the husband is the one who should start it.

So, now what?

If you are married, take the instruction addressed to you rather than the one addressed to your spouse. That single discipline would transform most Christian marriages within a month. Husbands, ask what you have given up for her recently. Wives, ask whether you are building the household or quietly resisting it.

If you are not married, this still matters, because the church is the household in which these patterns are learned and watched. And if you are in a marriage where these words have been used against you to excuse cruelty, please talk to someone you trust, because that was never what the text meant. What would change in your home if the standard really were the cross?

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:25, ESV)