Susanna Krizo

Mark, you wrote: “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!”

Hey Mark, do you remember what Paul used to call himself? The slave of God. What did he call his co-workers? Co-slaves. Hence you have the problem in that the Church/Christ relationship is depicted also in the terms master/slave. But that’s not all of it. We are also called living stones of a building, Christ being the headstone (as in a pyramid); we are also his body, Christ being the head; and we are called a family, Christ being the big brother. I.e. the Bible uses more than just the marriage metaphor to describe the relationship between Christ/Church wherefore your argument fails. Get this point: the comparison in Eph 5 is only used to enforce the idea of unity.

Husband as hihg priest of his home? Totally Roman idea. The Pater Familias used to be the high priest of the cult of the ancestors, worshipped at the domestic altar.