Craig

I just got an email from Mark B. I will put material from my email to him in quotation marks, and Mark’s thoughts and reflections in normal font. Sorry again for the length.

Hi Craig,

Sorry this has taken a bit longer to get around to – we had a bit more illness towards the end of last week.  
I think the best way for me to interact with what’s here, is to add my own thoughts and reflections after sections I want to comment on.

Hi Mark,
Thanks for your reply.
I passed on the meat of your emails (not the personal stuff) to a spot where Kristen hangs out. Kristen gave quite a thoughtful response so I asked her if I could share it with you. She was fine with that.

Heh, if I’d known this was what you meant by sharing it further I probably would have written something quite different. It wasn’t meant to be an argument why anyone else (certainly not an egal) should do this. It was a reflection on why I do. And I’m not an idealist about these things – people hold the views they do for good, bad and indifferent reasons, not simply because they have tight logical arguments. So if you ask me why I think something you’ll often get a different answer than if you ask me why I think something is right – those two aren’t quite the same thing. But that’s fine, spilt milk and all that.

Following Kristen’s comments to me regarding your emails, I have written some of my own comments.

From Kristen
Ok, I’m going to try to throw out a few thoughts here, off the top of my head. I’m not sure how clear they will be.?I think Mark’s view of the historical context oversimplifies. He says patriarchy is a “philosophy” (I assume he means a “system”) and patriarchal marriage, slavery and the parent-child relationship were all patriarchal in nature. Then he says that egalitarians believe Paul’s purpose was to subvert the practices of patriarchal marriage and slavery from within– but that in saying this, we ignore the parent-child relationship, which is also authority-based.?In order to say this, Mark appears to be defining “patriarchal” as meaning “based on the authority of one person over another.” But that’s not what “patriarchy” means– particularly as it was expressed in the 1st-century Roman Empire. “Patriarchy” in the Roman Empire meant a system of “households” which were different from our modern nuclear families. A “household” was an economic unit ruled by a patriarch– the “pater familias” who was the ruler of his wife, grown children, their children, and his slaves. It is a modern misconception to think that the only “children” who were being addressed in Ephesians 5 were minors.??Mark appears, then to be switching the real meaning of patriarchy with “relationships containing authority.” As you already pointed out, Craig, he starts with an apples-and-oranges comparison of “marriage” with “slavery,” where the true comparison would either be “marriage” with “economic relationships where one person works for another” OR “patriarchal rule in marriage” with “master-rule in slavery.” He then wants to say that the Bible’s approach to patriarchal marriage and patriarchal slavery was different– that there is evidence that slavery was not meant to be a permanent thing, while marriage (and therefore patriarchal marriage) was intended to be permanent. And the reason he appears to want to give for this is that parental authority over children is naturally a permanent thing. But he’s slipping in “marriage equals patriarchal marriage” as an unchallenged assumption.

I think Kristen is right in that I don’t find this clear – not surprising as I doubt I am being clear either. My point is that both the Jewish (missed by Kristen when she classifies my position as a simplification) and the Roman societies had fathers in charge of children (certainly including adult dependents as she says), husbands in charge of wives, and owners (predominantly but not exclusively male) in charge of slaves. And they didn’t see one of those as patriarchy and the other two as not patriarchy.  All three were fairly naturally paired together – Paul’s household codes aren’t all that revolutionary by putting those three relationships side by side.

And I’m not sure I’m slipping in ‘marriage equals patriarchal marriage’ as an unchallenged assumption.  My point was, I thought, that that is what marriage was for both Paul’s Jewish and Gentile readers. They didn’t have an abstract view of marriage and then go, ‘and of the ways marriage could be structured, we opt for patriarchal’ – they had one view of marriage: patriarchal. My statement has to do with what is being understood by the society and so what the words Paul writes are going to mean to that audience.

But let’s do an apples-to-apples comparison instead of an apples-to-oranges.?Paul is talking about three basic relationships: the relationship where two humans unite to produce children, the relationship where two or more humans unite to accomplish an economic goal, and the relationship where one or two adults and one or more children unite to accomplish the goal of bringing the child to adulthood. Patriarchy approached each of these relationships with the idea that all the power was to be concentrated in the hands of one central human male, with other human males (his adult sons) given some delegated power, and everyone else (women, slaves and minor children) having no power at all.?Given that idea, one can say without any inconsistency at all that Paul’s goal was to teach a new way of approaching ALL THREE of these relationships such that power was shared. The human males in whose hands the power was concentrated, were told to act like Christ in laying down their lives for their wives, treating their slaves with humility, and not exasperating their children. The ones without power were told to respond by yielding (for wives) and obeying (for slaves and children). By making this differentiation, Paul is acknowledging the economic nature of the slave relationship (that in an economic production unit, someone has to be in charge), and also the economic nature of the father-child relationship where the children are adult males working for the “company” (which was the household). But the nature of the wife relationship is not economic, but one of intimacy and oneness– and Paul seeks to restore the oneness God intended in marriage, partly through the use of that word “submit” (”yield”) instead of “obey.
For the relationship of parent to minor child, Paul also exhorts obedience– in this case because the child is not ready for adult responsibilities. But the fathers are to lay down power in that relationship as well.

I think the ‘lay down power’ here is pretty tendentious. Almost any complementarian would say something like all this, but would say that what is going on is the reshaping of authority to be used as an exercise of service to those under authority rather than as a lording over them. My question here is – does Jesus model the kind of way of using authority that Kristen is speaking about here? Does he use it with humility? does he lay down his life, does he not exasperate us? And would she (and you) be happy with describing that as Jesus ‘laying down power’ in his relationship with us?

I certainly wouldn’t be happy to use such language about the one I call Lord. And yet he is the model, and I don’t see it as a model of laying down power, but of using it in a servant way.

And again, this is the kind of ‘this but that’ reading that is just so hard to pin down. Is Paul writing in such a way that indicates that these relationships have authority or not? Kristen seems to be suggesting ‘yes’ – but in such a way that over time we’d move beyond the letter of what Paul has said to the spirit of it and move to more egalitarian relationships.  You seem to be saying ‘no’ – there’s nothing in these texts, we need to look elsewhere.

?

What Paul is NOT doing is saying that any and all authority in relationships is bad. But he IS saying that in authority relationships, those in power are to look on those under their power as of full, equal value and dignity. This would tend, over time, to subvert patriarchy– where power was concentrated in the hands of a male– in favor of more balanced-power relationships, such as our current employer-employee relationships, or modern parent-child relationships where the state views the children as having fundamental rights which the parents cannot violate with impunity.

Agree with the first two sentences. Partly agree with the rest, but not so sure it is as simple as Kristen thinks. If we lost the wealth that modern society can produce and went back to the kind of society where it is big grind to produce enough food to feed people and there is little discretionary capacity in society for people not to be involved in food production (and so not much of a police force or bureacracy, let alone any social welfare or universal education) then I think we’d return to more authoratarian society strucutres fairly quickly, even with a view of universal human dignity. I think we have little grasp how much what we take for granted is actually the conditions of a society where everyone is rich. Even our poor people have a kind of wealth unimaginable in earlier eras.

?

Given this context, then, the egalitarian can easily agree with Mark that the Bible– including this Eph. 5 passage– treats marriage differently than the other two relationships. But “marriage” does not have to mean “marriage in which patriarchy remains intact” any more than “an economic relationship where one person works for another” has to mean “slavery.” Marriage is an intimate relationship between two people, in which (in Paul’s time) all the power was concentrated in the hands of the male. Take power out of the hands of the male and share half of it with the female– and you have not changed the fundamental nature of marriage itself; you have only changed its patriarchal structure. It is MARRIAGE, not PATRIARCHAL marriage, which the Bible treats as a special, God-given relationship from the beginning of the creation of humanity. It is not inconsistent for Paul to seek to remove the male-power structure from this relationship at the same time he seeks to remove the male-power structure from slavery and parenthood (which I think he does), while at the same time treating marriage as something unique among all other relationships.

I think this might be begging the question – no insult intended there, it’s Kristen’s off the top of the head thoughts to my off the top of the head thoughts.

My argument isn’t that Paul can’t change the relationships. It’s that I find the egaltarian case implausible as a description of how it would be received in the patriarchal society of the day. The NT leaves slavery and children in place (but does that while somehow also saying that slavery is unequivocally wrong), but Ephesians 5 is radically redrawing the readers’ view of the nature of marriage – a shift as big for its day as the idea of Same Sex Marriage is for the modern era, and it does this while putting the three relationships next to each other and heading them up with ‘submit to one another’. All three are patriarchal, two are kept, one is transformed head-on, but all three are ‘submit to one another in Christ’. I can see how a modern can read it that way. But put yourself into the shoes of someone who does not even have the concept of egalitarianism in their head and the only way they think is patriarchal.  Is it plausible that they’d ‘hear’ it this way? They don’t have a view of ‘marriage’, they only have a view of ‘patriarchal marriage’ – will they hear this text this way?

So, given the above– what is it about the parent-child relationship that makes it still necessary for minor children to obey their parents? The fact is that in this relationship, the necessity for obedience still exists, due to the nature of minor children. It is not inconsistent for egalitarians to acknowledge this as a fact, while also acknowledging that the partriarchal system in which adult children were still supposed to obey the pater familias, was unnecessary, has now passed away and there is no need to go back to it. Similarly, the need still exists in an economic relationship for the worker to obey the business owner– but the old structure that gave the owner absolute power over the life and personhood of the worker, was unnecessary, has now passed away, and there is no need to go back to it. In marriage, the power structure that gave the male the power over the female is unnecessary, has passed away– and yet the church still clings to it and tries in every way to restore it. That is what the egalitarian objects to– not legitimate use of authority in necessary ways acknowledged by society, but illegitimate use of ancient forms of power that are now viewed as unjust by society– the perpetuation of which ends up damaging the gospel of Christ, in Whom we are supposed to be set free.

From Craig
Thanks for helping me think through the issues. I don’t find it easy but I think it is beneficial. My name may be “Swift” but it does take me a fair while to process the information 🙂
Just some thoughts and questions as I am thinking about what you have written. Sorry if some of them seem a bit jumbled.
1.The apples to apples comparison that I would see is
Patriarchal rule in marriage with Patriarchal rule in slavery or
Patriarchal rule over wives with Patriarchal rule over slaves. 
Sorry to harp on this one but I am just checking that this is the comparison in your mind, so that when you say things like “Marriage….  explicitly features in the story in Gen 1-2,”  and “Putting it together, marriage is basically seen as something given in creation, that is the pattern for the New Creation relationship with Christ, and that is fundamentally good.” I think to myself “Yes, but what has that got to do with the question?” Everyone agrees with these things. The question is not about how foundational marriage is, but rather how foundational is patriarchal authority in marriage. That is quite different in my mind and a much more difficult thing to establish. So I am wondering if your main argument is really things like “Patriarchal authority in marriage…… explicitly features in the story in Gen 1-2,”  and “Putting it together, Patriarchal authority in marriage is basically seen as something given in creation, that is the pattern for the New Creation relationship with Christ, and that is fundamentally good.”

Well, there’s a bunch of things going on:
1. The Bible indicates that marriage is built into Creation and New Creation, and is good.
2. The Bible doesn’t do that for slavery.
3. The society of the day had a unanimous strong view about both marriage and slavery that was patriarchal, and Jewish exegesis of the Bible understood the texts patriarchally.
4. The Bible does teach a structure of marriage, either patriarchal or egalitarian.

My argument was that the Bible does treat marriage and slavery as different – one is built in and fundamentally good, one is not built in and is not an unequivocal good.  That’s one argument.

The second argument is that the audience doesn’t have a view of marriage (big abstract category) and then has opted for a specific version – patriarchal.  They hold to ‘marriage’ which simply is what we call ‘patriarchal marriage’. Many of them wouldn’t even recognise an egalitarian marriage as marriage at all (in much the same way that many of us wouldn’t recognise same sex marriage as marriage at all), while others might but see it as very wrong (likewise us for same sex marriage).  For Paul to attack patriarchal marriage and reform its structure to bring out the biblical vision of an egalitarian marriage is, for the readers, to attack ‘marriage’ altogether and to put forward something new that is called ‘marriage’.  What is on view is a radical, truly radical, restructuring of the institution from the point of view of the original readers.

That is, on the egalitarian view, Paul is trying to address three problematic relationships his readers are faced with in a patriarchal society – slavery, marriage, children. What he’s doing is addressing those institutions, he’s not offering ethical teaching in a vaccuum. And those institutions, as they actually were in reality, were patriarchal, and the people wouldn’t have had a view like ‘there’s the true essence of marriage and then there’s the way you structure it, and we go for patriarchal’ so that Paul could easily drop the patriarchal structure and bring out the true egalitarian essence of the institution any more than people a generation ago would have found same sex marriage at all plausible – a bringing out of the essential nature of marriage and dropping the heterosexual structure for it. And in doing that addressing the actual patriarchal institutions he’s faced with, Paul’s responses are quite different even though he offers the same basic reasons for all three. That works for a modern reader, but the more I try and put myself back into the original context the less plausible it becomes. The argument only works if you already have a concept of egalitarianism in your head as a live option and then read the texts to work out whether they teach egal or comp. It doesn’t work if Paul is trying to create the concept of egalitarianism in a culture (even Jewish culture that has the Scriptures) that has no concept at all of such things. Hopefully that’ll go some way to your 2a and 2b below.

2.Regarding your problems with the egal approach.
a.I am not sure myself that the household codes are written to rescue or reform institutions (or to endorse them either). They seem to me to be more about encouraging godly living and relationships amongst the members of the household within the culture and situations people find themselves in. If you are a slave this is how you are to live. If you are a master, this is how you are to live.  Paul is encouraging mutual submission, mutual yielding to the needs of others, mutual love and servanthood. 
b.You said Mark,
 “ If the household codes are attacking authority and authority bound institutions, and sees treatment of women and slaves as two examples of the same category of sin, then its treatment of marriage must have the same goal as its treatment of slavery – to do away with it.  If that is not the case, then egals, just like comps see a huge difference between the two institutions – they too see one as fundamentally good, and the other as fundamentally problematic.”
 I agree that there is a huge difference between marriage and slavery. One is  fundamentally good, and the other is fundamentally problematic. But as I said above in 1. , the real comparison is between Patriarchal authority in marriage and Patriarchal authority in slavery. So if the real comparison is valid, marriage itself, doesn’t have to end up the same as slavery. The question is whether the patriarchal authority is a good thing in both, a bad thing in both, or a good thing in one and not the other. If it is decided that patriarchal authority is similar in both, and bad in both, it doesn’t necessarily mean that marriage and slavery need to end up the same way. If you remove patriarchal authority from marriage you end up with marriage. Marriage can exist perfectly well without patriarchal authority (1 Cor 7:1-5, Gen 1 :26-28, Gen 2:23,24.). Can slavery? 
c.With regard to parents and children, you said,
“In Ephesians 5 wives are to submit to their husbands as the Church does to Christ in everything. But this is seen to not have any authority implications because husbands aren’t called on to command their wives.  This either misses the fact that the same issue is there with slaves and masters in chapter 6 – slaves are to obey masters, but masters aren’t told to command slaves or, if it is argued that here too masters and slaves are being put on the same footing without any authority, it misses the fact that the same thing is true of children and parents.  Children are to obey parents, but fathers are not told to exercise authority or command them. The three relationships are clearly some kind of analogy of each other – three relationships where (at least traditionally in society at large) one party had some kind of authority over another.  Egalitarianism either extracts marriage out as the relationship that doesn’t fit, extracts marriage and slavery out, or is consistent to the end and puts children and parents on an ‘equal’ footing where there is no authority in that relationship either.”
Are the three relationships really an analogy of each other? Aren’t they just the three relationships that existed in the household with the Patriarch? Do they all have to end up the same after the principles of mutual submission and Christian love are applied? If there are good reasons for some authority to be exercised by parents over children I don’t see why this has to be the same for the other relationships.
The patriarch is not told to exercise authority in these passages in any of his relationships so I certainly don’t think that it can be drawn from these passages that he must do this, or that we must do this today. We must look at the rest of the scriptures to determine if this is so. I think we find from other scriptures and practical wisdom that there are good reasons for parents to exercise authority over children.

My point here has to do with the argument that Paul has no authority in view because it is not mentioned explicitly. And I think the argument is sound – if that’s a good principle of Biblical interpretation, then it must apply to all three relationships. It can’t just apply to one. I agree with you that we need to look more widely than just the words to the husband in the passage.
 For me, 5:22 and 5:24 can’t be reconciled to an egalitarian understanding.  Wives are to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, and as the church submits to Christ in everything so wives are to their husbands. Are there two kinds of submission that we offer to the Lord? One where he does not have authority, and one where he does? And if so, how do we distinguish between them? And if not, how can we submit to someone as to the Lord, and yet that not indicate authority? How would such words have been understood by an overwhelming patriarchal society with no pre-existent concept of egalitarianism?
Similarly the Petrine household code seems incompatible with an egalitarian reading of Eph 5 (as even Suzanne seemed to acknowledge on the threads, which I found interesting). In 1 Peter 2:13 Peter calls on Christians to submit to every human institution (and, interestingly in v16 this is part of what it means to be act as free men – the submission we offer is not slavish, but that of those who are free). He then tells slaves to submit to masters in v18. The same language, with a ‘in the same way’ is given to wives. He doesn’t tell them to only do this to unbelieving husbands (which one might expect if it really was just unbelieving husbands that was in view as many egalitarian readings suggest) and his invoking of Sarah calling Abraham lord and obeying him, as well as the holy women of former times who hoped in God, really cuts against that grain as Abraham and Sarah are OT paradigms of faith. In 1 Peter 2 and 3 husbands aren’t told to exercise authority either, but if Sarah and the holy women submitting to their husbands is the example, and it’s ‘in the same way’ as slaves to their masters, then it’s hard to see how it is not being assumed. 

d.All these things seem very different to the egal arguments I hear with regard to comparing patriarchal authority over women and slaves.
The argument I hear seems to be more along these lines:
“Historically, up until a couple of hundred years ago, the church read the passages about masters/slaves as universal and normative. A big change occurred when Christians debated the slavery issue. Some Christians argued that a plain reading of some very clear bible texts showed that slavery is approved by God. Others disagreed by examining some of the big themes in scripture and the culture in which it was written. They argued that these passages didn’t teach what had been thought for hundreds of years.
As Christians today have looked at the gender debate, many have seen a parallel between the arguments used for maintaining slavery and the arguments used for maintaing the authority of men over women in marriage and in the church.”
The argument I hear is not “slavery is in the household codes, and everything in the household codes must be the same as each other, so marriage must be the same”.
It is “slavery is in the household codes. It was always assumed to be normative. Perhaps we can’t just assume Patriarchal authority in marriage (and over children) is normative. We have to study the whole sweep of the scriptures to determine if what is said is normative, not just assume it is. We need to have some good reasons for what we believe.This was the error made by those who opposed the abolition of slavery. Patriarchal authority in marriage has to be studied throughout the bible to determine if it is normative, not just assume it is or isn’t because it is in the household codes”.

Well, the first bit of the argument is wrong, I think. Calvin and Luther don’t try and reintroduce slavery into the 16th Century, for example, which one would expect them to do if Christians have always considered slavery to be normative. The early church did not campaign to keep slavery going, or hold it up as something universally and unqualifiedly good. So it’s a misperception about how the Church understood slavery – similar to the argument that all Christians believed that the Bible taught a flat world before Galileo.  There are a number of early church fathers who believed (like many philosophers at that time) in a round world.

So the issues aren’t parallel. The mainstream tradition did not think that slavery was obligatory (i.e. normative) – that God wanted slaves in all times and places. Usually people argued (at most) that it was possible under certain conditions. And there had been different views on the shape of the world. But no-one believed that the passages in question taught an egalitarian view of marriage. The people arguing for slavery didn’t just peg their case on the household codes either – they drew on a wide range of texts as well for their position, so that part of the argument is wrong as well.

Further, there is a disanalogy in that those contesting slavery and arguing for a round world were going against the grain of the society of the day, while those supporting the received position were reflecting the consensus of their society. In the current debate that shoe is on the other foot – egalitarianism is the view that seems reasonable and obvious to our unbelieving contemporaries.

I agree with the basic point – have to show from the Bible as a whole, and not just assume. But I think the other side has to be in play as well. To say that the whole church got it wrong for two thousand years about something so ethically important is a big claim. To say that at a time when the view in question simply reflects the moral intuition of our own society is an orange light. The teaching of scripture has to be really, really, really clear for that to be the case. And egal reasoning on these things is hardly ‘clear’, even if it is true, it is more like ‘torturous’ or ‘subtle’ as a description. That can’t decide matters, but it needs to be given some significant weight.

Thanks for considering these things Mark, from your Christian brother,
Craig.

You’re welcome Craig, glad you’re putting so much thought into things. Sorry I’m a bit distracted at the moment.

in Christ,
Mark