Cheryl Schatz

It looks like the last post crashed with too many comments. I should have started a new post a lot sooner. I am going to see if I can remove a few comments if that will help and post them here.

Here is Susanna’s last comment:

Hay Mara, since you enjoy early church stuff, here’s some more:

“On the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Web site, Grudem challenges egalitarians to provide an example in which hypotasso is being applied “to relationships between persons and where it does not carry the sense of being subject to an authority.” We have already found this to be true in Ephesians 5:21-33, James 4:4-10, and 1 Pet 3:1-6, and we find additional examples from the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. Clement of Rome, who is believed by many to be the Clement mentioned by Paul in Philippians 4:3, is an early witness to the mutual subjection of all believers.

Let us take our body for an example. The head is nothing without the feet, and the feet are nothing without the head; yea, the very smallest members of our body are necessary and useful to the whole body. But all work (lit. all breathe together) harmoniously together, and are under one common rule (lit. use one subjection) for the preservation of the whole body. Let our whole body, then, be preserved in, Christ Jesus; and let every one be subject to his neighbour, according to the special gift (lit. according as he has been placed in his charism) bestowed upon him.

Polycarp was the disciple of John the Apostle, and in his letter love, humility and good works are all part of mutual subjection.

Stand fast, therefore, in these things, and follow the example of the Lord, being firm and unchangeable in the faith, loving the brotherhood, and being attached to one another, joined together in the truth, exhibiting the meekness of the Lord in your intercourse with one another, and despising no one. When you can do good, defer it not, because “alms delivers from death.” Be all of you subject one to another having your conduct blameless among the Gentiles,” that ye may both receive praise for your good works, and the Lord may not be blasphemed through you. But woe to him by whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed! Teach, therefore, sobriety to all, and manifest it also in your own conduct.

The disciple of Polycarp, Irenaues, wrote in his only surviving work, Against Heresies, “Submission to God is eternal rest, so that they who shun the light have a place worthy of their flight; and those who fly from eternal rest, have a habitation in accordance with their fleeing. Also Origen connected submission with salvation in the beginning of the third century.

What, then, is this “putting under” by which all things must be made subject to Christ? I am of opinion that it is this very subjection by which we also wish to be subject to Him, by which the apostles also were subject, and all the saints who have been followers of Christ. For the name “subjection,” by which we are subject to Christ, indicates that the salvation which proceeds from Him belongs to His subjects, agreeably to the declaration of David, “Shall not my soul be subject unto God? From Him cometh my salvation.”