Cheryl Schatz

NN,
You said:

To reiterate – we are agreed that Christ (in human form) had authority and that Christ now has authority – in fact All authority (irregardless of its origin).

May I rewrite this to make a more Biblical statement? We are agree that the Word of God gave up His rights and His authority in order to become man and then in time God told Him when He could take authority again and eventually He was given back all authority that He had in the beginning in His existence as God.

You argue that Christ gave up said authority to be the Bridegroom. But both during His time on earth and now, He has authority.

What I was arguing is that the Word gave up His authority and His rights in order to become man. When He was walking on this earth there were times that He did not exercise His authority and times that He did not know things like who touched him and when He is coming back. It was the Father who chose when and where Jesus could exercise expressions of His authority.

Therefore, your argument that Christ gave up His authority to be the Church’s Bridegroom CANNOT logically be correct.

There is nothing illogical about this at all. The church has always believed that the Word gave up his rights so that he could live like us as a human being. He was not walking around as a five year old with all authority. Rather he learned obedience as a human and when the Father decided, Jesus acted in obedience with the Father’s choice to exercise parts of His dominion.

Furthermore, in Ephesians 5:22-33, Paul explicitly relates the proper mutual interaction of husband and wife as a parallel of Christ and His bride the Church.

That is true, however the church has always known that Paul did not give the example of Jesus and the church as a full example of a human husband and wife for no mere husband is the Savior of his wife.

In the marriage union the husband holds the same relation, namely, that of headship, as Christ holds to the Church, and the headship of the one represents the headship of the other.” With regard to the words, “and He Himself is the Saviour of the body,” the same authority says, “It is best taken as an independent clause, stating in a definite and emphatic way an important point in which Christ, who resembles the husband in respect to headship, at the same time differs from the husband.… The husband is head of the wife, and in that he is like Christ; but Christ is also that which the husband is not, namely, Saviour of that whereof He is Head.”
Wuest, K. S. (1997). Wuest’s word studies from the Greek New Testament

5:22–24. Most ancient writers expected wives to obey their husbands, desiring in them a quiet and meek demeanor; some marriage contracts even stated a requirement for absolute obedience. This requirement made sense especially to Greek thinkers, who could not conceive of wives as equals. Age differences contributed to this disparity: husbands were normally older than their wives, often by over a decade in Greek culture (with men frequently marrying around age thirty and women in their teens, often early teens).
In this passage, however, the closest Paul comes to defining submission is “respect” (v. 33), and in the Greek text, wifely submission to a husband (v. 22) is only one example of general mutual submission of Christians (the verb of v. 22 is borrowed directly from v. 21 and thus cannot mean something different).
Keener, C. S., & InterVarsity Press. (1993). The IVP Bible background commentary : New Testament (Eph 5:22).