What about headship and submission?

Question 11105

Few phrases in Christian teaching have done as much good and as much harm as headship and submission. Used as Scripture uses them, they describe a marriage of extraordinary tenderness. Used as some men have used them, they have kept women in frightening situations and given the whole idea a stench it did not deserve.

So I want to work slowly through what the texts actually say, take the objections seriously rather than brushing them aside, and mark out clearly where the limits fall. If you have been hurt by this teaching, I hope you will find here something rather different from what you were given.

The passages that teach headship and submission

The primary text is Ephesians 5:22-33, where wives are told to submit to their own husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, and husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Colossians 3 gives a shorter version, and 1 Peter 3 covers similar ground with a particular concern for wives married to unbelievers.

Then there is 1 Corinthians 11:3, which says that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. That last clause is the one that keeps me from reading headship as any statement about worth, because nobody who believes in the Trinity thinks the Son is a lesser being than the Father.

Notice something about how these passages are framed. In a culture where a man’s authority over his household was total and unquestioned, the apostles spend most of their words restraining the husband rather than instructing the wife. That is the opposite of what we would expect if the aim were to reinforce the existing arrangement.

What the word head actually means

Everything in the doctrine of headship and submission turns on one noun. The Greek word is kephale, and there has been a long scholarly argument about whether it carries the sense of authority or the sense of source, as in the head of a river. Both are defensible from the usage, and I do not think the debate can be settled by lexicons alone.

What decides it for me is the context. In Ephesians 5 the head is the one who gives himself up, nourishes and cherishes. In Colossians the head of the body supplies and holds together. Whatever authority is implied, Paul immediately fills the word with sacrifice rather than command. If headship and submission were about control, the passage would tell husbands how to lead. It tells them how to die.

The verb behind submission is hupotasso, a military term for arranging under. Its form here is in the middle voice, which carries the sense of placing oneself. That grammatical detail matters enormously in practice. Submission in the New Testament is something a wife does, not something a husband achieves.

The verse that frames everything

Ephesians 5:21 comes immediately before the household instructions and says: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. In the Greek there is no separate verb in verse 22 at all; the wives’ instruction borrows its verb from verse 21. Grammatically the two cannot be separated.

I take that to mean that headship and submission operate inside a general Christian culture of mutual deference. This does not dissolve the specific instructions, since Paul then goes on to give different words to different people. But it does mean that a husband who reads verses 22 to 24 without verse 21 has removed the frame from the picture.

The wider passage is about being filled with the Spirit, and the participles that follow describe what that looks like: speaking to one another in psalms, singing, giving thanks, submitting to one another. A Spirit-filled home is not one where somebody is asserting rank. It is one where everybody is looking to serve.

What headship and submission are not

A good deal of damage has been done by importing into these words things the New Testament never puts there, so let me clear some of it away. Submission is not obedience in the sense that a child obeys a parent or a servant a master. Paul uses different vocabulary for children and slaves in the very same passage, and the change of word is deliberate.

It is not the surrender of judgement or of speech. Sarah is held up as an example in 1 Peter 3, and Sarah told Abraham exactly what she thought on more than one occasion. Abigail acted directly against her husband’s foolish decision and Scripture treats her as the wise one in the story. A wife who disagrees openly with her husband has not violated anything.

It is not owed to men in general. The text says her own husband. Nothing in the doctrine of headship and submission gives any man authority over any woman who is not his wife, and the idea that women in a congregation owe deference to men as a class has no basis in these passages whatever.

And it is not unconditional. Peter and the apostles said that we must obey God rather than men, and that principle governs every human relationship without exception. Where a husband asks for sin, the wife’s answer is no, and that refusal is itself obedience to the Lord to whom her submission was always ultimately directed.

Where headship and submission must stop: abuse

I want to write this section as plainly as I can, because lives depend on it. Nothing in the doctrine of headship and submission requires a woman to remain in a home where she or her children are being harmed. Not physically, not sexually, not through the sustained fear and control that does damage no bruise records.

A man who is violent has already abandoned the only role the passage gives him. He is not exercising headship badly, he has forfeited any claim to it, and telling a frightened woman to submit more carefully is not biblical counsel. It is collusion. I have known churches that did this out of a sincere desire to preserve a marriage, and the result was a woman returned to danger with a Bible verse in her hand.

Safety comes first. If that means leaving the house, leave the house. If it means involving the police, involve the police, since Romans 13 puts the sword in the hands of the civil authority for precisely this reason. Reconciliation may be possible later, and it can only ever be built on genuine repentance demonstrated over a long period, not on a tearful apology on Saturday night.

If you are reading this and recognising your own situation, please speak to someone outside your household today. A doctor, a trusted friend, a domestic abuse service, an elder in a different church if your own is not safe ground. You are not betraying your marriage by telling the truth about it.

Why the church has handled this badly

Before setting out the alternative reading, I think we should be honest about our own record. Evangelical churches have frequently taught headship and submission as though it were chiefly a duty owed by women, mentioned when a wife was thought to be difficult and forgotten when a husband was thought to be lazy. That is a distortion of a passage which spends three times as many words on the man.

We have also allowed the language of authority to become detached from the language of sacrifice. Once that separation happens, headship and submission stops being a description of the gospel and becomes a description of power, and there is no shortage of men willing to take up an offer like that. The passage itself never makes the separation. Every clause about the husband’s position is immediately tied to what it costs him.

There is a third failure, which is that we have applied the teaching to the marriage and ignored the church’s responsibility to watch over it. A doctrine that gives one person a position of responsibility requires accountability to go with it, and elders who never ask a husband how his wife is really doing have left the arrangement without any check at all.

I say all this because the strongest argument against headship and submission is not exegetical. It is the accumulated experience of women who were taught it by men who did not live it. If we want the teaching to be heard, the repair work has to begin with us rather than with them.

The egalitarian case, stated fairly

Many sincere believers read these passages differently, and their case deserves to be heard properly rather than in caricature. They argue that kephale means source rather than authority, pointing to 1 Corinthians 11:8 where the woman came from the man. They argue that Ephesians 5:21 makes the submission mutual throughout. They argue that the household codes address the social structures of the first century in order to make the gospel credible within them, rather than establishing those structures for all time.

They add, with some force, that Scripture’s trajectory runs towards liberation. The same apostle who told slaves to obey their masters also told Philemon to receive Onesimus as a beloved brother, and the church eventually concluded that slavery itself had to go. If we no longer read the slavery instructions as endorsing the institution, why read the marriage instructions as endorsing hierarchy?

And they point to the fruit. Where headship and submission have been taught, women have too often been silenced, ignored and endangered. Jesus said we would know a tree by its fruit, and that argument should not be waved away by anyone who has sat with the people it describes.

Why I remain unpersuaded

I hold my position with respect for those who differ, and I hold it for three reasons. The first is that Paul does not ground his instruction in first-century culture. He grounds it in creation and in the relation between Jesus and the church, and both of those outlast the Roman household. The slavery parallel breaks down at exactly this point, since nobody argues that slavery was instituted in Eden.

The second is that mutual submission in verse 21 does not flatten the specific instructions that follow. If it did, Paul would be telling husbands to submit and wives to love, which is precisely what he does not do. He gives different words to different people, and the difference has to mean something.

The third is the argument from misuse, which I take seriously and do not find decisive. Almost every good doctrine has been abused by somebody. The remedy for a misused truth is to teach it properly rather than to abandon it, and I would rather spend my energy correcting the men than editing the text. On the practical shape of all this see my answer on the roles of husband and wife.

Headship and submission in ordinary life

What does this look like in a real house on a wet Wednesday? Far less dramatic than the arguments suggest. In a healthy marriage the moments requiring anyone to exercise a final word are rare, because two people who love each other and want the same things generally reach the same conclusions by talking.

Where headship shows itself is in initiative and in cost. Who notices that the family has drifted from church and does something about it? Who takes the difficult phone call? Who gives up the job he wanted because the family needs stability? A husband who takes responsibility for the spiritual temperature of his home is exercising headship whether or not he uses the word.

Where submission shows itself is in support rather than in silence. A wife who argues her case fully in private and then backs the decision publicly is doing something strong, not something weak. Anyone who has watched a couple undermine each other in front of their children knows what the alternative costs. See also my answers on biblical marriage and on singleness.

One further observation from years of watching couples. The husbands who talk most about headship are rarely the ones exercising it well, and the ones exercising it well rarely use the word at all. They are simply carrying things. They notice when their wife is exhausted and take something off her. They get up early to pray for a household that has no idea he is doing it. Nobody hands out awards for that, and it is the whole of the calling as Paul describes it.

Similarly, the wives who have understood headship and submission best are not the quietest women in the congregation. They are frequently the most formidable. They have views, they express them, and they have chosen to put their considerable strength behind a shared direction rather than into a private campaign. That is a long way from the meekness the caricature imagines.

So, now what?

If you are a husband, stop reading about your authority and start reading about your death. The measure Paul gives you is a man on a cross with his arms out. Ask your wife, sincerely and without defending yourself, whether she experiences your leadership as care or as weight, and then sit quietly while she answers.

If you are a wife, the question is whether you are building the household or resisting it, and only you know the honest answer. And if you are afraid in your own home, please tell someone this week. There is no version of headship and submission that requires you to stay in danger, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not speaking for God. What would your marriage look like if both of you competed to serve rather than to be right?

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant. (Philippians 2:5-7, ESV)

For Further Study

Readers who want to go deeper will find Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology useful on the doctrine of the Trinity as it bears on this question, since a great deal of recent argument has turned on whether the relation of the Father and the Son can be used as a model for marriage. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology both treat the household instructions within their wider dispensational framework, and J. Dwight Pentecost and Arnold Fruchtenbaum are worth reading on the way the New Testament letters apply creation order to church-age believers. The commentaries on Ephesians and 1 Corinthians repay slow reading here more than the popular literature does, and I would encourage anyone forming a settled view to work through the passages themselves with a good lexicon before reaching for a book that tells them what to think.