Mark

Dave

You sound like a hoarder with your bikes…you are spending too much time on blogs and not on your bikes!

Let me try to be a bit clearer. Submission is a choice, i.e we choose to be humble and meek. But that is far different than saying I ‘submit’ to a 12 year old boy. I do not submit to a 12 year old boy because he is not in authority over me. I will serve him or be ‘submissive’ but not submit or ‘yield to his superior force’. This is the crux of the matter, distinguishing between an adjective and a verb, especially in light of the verbal use in Ephesians 5.

The difference between the husband/wife paradigm and the slave/master is that the former is directly related to the Christ/church analogy. So I believe Paul allowed for the cultural custom of slavery and told servants to submit, but in terms of the wife’s submission, to say it was only a ‘cultural’ thing and not a binding condition, would mean that the church/Christ analogy is only cultural at Ephesus. So if you wish to continue to draw a parellel between slavery and the marriage, you must explain how the two are connected culturally only. This is the fundamental difference- the wife is told to submit as the church is told to submit to Christ- it’s a lasting ordinance until the second coming. The whole slavery argument never works Dave, I would have thought you would know that, unless of course you wish to show me where the slave/master paradigm is linked with Church/Christ!

No I wouldn’t describe it as ‘mutual love’ because it’s not mutual. You can say the act of love is mutual but the love itself is not mutual, it is different. This is the same point I brought out about the term ‘mutual submission’, when what you really mean is ‘mutual submitting’ i.e. the verbal action. To submit requires to yield to a power or authority. How can it be mutual when one is over the other?