Craig

Hi Kristen,
Sorry to hear you are not well. I hope you are feeling better soon.
I wasn’t going to post this just yet until we finished more of the subject at hand, but just in case you do get a chance to focus on Mark’s comments this weekend, I thought you (and others) might be interested in his latest email that arrived today. I sent him some thoughts along the lines of #189, comparing serving one another, and submitting to one another, and this is his reply. Sorry again for the length. I have left out my comments and some of Marks for the sake of brevity, but I think you will be able to follow his main arguments.

Hi Craig,

A couple of thoughts. My impression is that doulew had a semantic range that included ideas that did not involve being a slave or a servant (in the social status sense). So at that level the NT’s use of the word is not doing something outside the semantic range the word had. Nonchristians could speak this way as well. So I agree that authority did not have to be on the radar in the NT, but that’s because it didn’t have to be on the radar with this word.

However, doulew and its linguistic relations certainly had strong associations with slavery and servility. The choice of this word is saying more than ‘voluntarily giving ourselves to meet the needs of others’ – it is casting the flavour of being a slave towards others in our mutual relations. Being a slave had more connotations than just being in an authority relationship, so such a flavour could apply even to someone who had authority.  I doubt that non-christians would feel comfortable with putting so much weight on this wordgroup. I think that’s important for the debate, for it means that the associations are not lost, but it’s not directly related to your point above (it more affects your approach to ‘submit’). The previous paragraph is though, I think.

I think egals have reconstructed ‘submit’ to mean something like ‘voluntarily yielding our own desires to put others first and meet their needs’. You won’t find that meaning in any greek lexicon I know of (not that I’m a linguistic guru) that covers extra-biblical examples. It is a meaning that simply doesn’t work in many contexts in the NT. Submit to the authorities = voluntarily yield your desires to put them first and meet their needs? Submit to God means I meet his needs?

I don’t think submission is in Phil 2. I think that is a crux passage for this debate, but I think you only see submission there once you’ve decided that submission means putting others before yourself and meeting their needs. The word isn’t there (from what I can see), and in this instance I think the concept isn’t either.

While the word ‘serve’ can (and did) have non-authority usages, it is harder to see how that can be done with the ‘submission’ words without changing their base meaning in a way that then doesn’t make sense in their non-biblical usage. ‘Obeying your instructions’ ‘Bowing the knee’ etc becomes ‘put you first and meet your needs’. That’s what Peter is telling slaves to do in 1 Peter 2:18? There’s no indications of submitting to authority there? It’s putting the master first and meeting his needs? It’s what he is saying in 2:13-15 to Christians generally with regards human rulers of different kinds? It’s what Paul is saying in Roman 13:1ff on the same topic?

Or do we now have two “submits” in the NT? In some places it means what it normally meant and its meaning hasn’t been transformed by Christ—submit to masters, rulers, God means what any contemporary would immediately recognise. But other places, oh let’s see, ah, husbands, there it means something different. There is some connection being made between 1 Peter 2:18 and 3:1, so I think the ‘submit’ needs to be the same in the two instances—either it has no authority connotations for slaves, or it does have authority connotations for wives.

And if we have to accept that ‘serve’ and ‘submit’ must both have been transformed by Christ, because both were part of being a slave, but were put to different usages in the NT, why leave out ‘obey’? Slaves had to obey their masters, but obedience is a general Christian virtue, and slaves need to obey their masters in Eph 6, and Sarah obeyed Abraham in 1 Peter 3 (and surely the case could be made that in the record we have in Genesis it is hard to see Sarah’s relationship with Abraham being her doing what he tells her to do – so the example in Genesis should shape how we understand it in the NT). If it is inconsistent to say ‘serve and not submit’ then surely it is to say ‘serve and submit but not obey’ are transformed.

The irony I find, is that you are asking for the very thing that egalitarianism insists cannot happen with regards to ‘equality’. Complementarians argue that the word ‘equality’ must be compatible with notions of permanent submission (and possibly even subjection on some accounts). They don’t (in my view) argue this because they’ve made a reconstruction that the word has been transformed this way and then look to see if it fits. They look at the texts and go, “Based on normal meanings of the words, the texts seem to be saying that you can be equal to someone you always have to submit to”. And then fumble around trying to give some kind of account of that, with varying degrees of success. That ‘varying degrees of success’ to my mind indicates that what we have, basically, are people getting their views out of the text and finding it hard to work out a framework for it—similar to how the Nicenes struggled to articulate orthodoxy whereas Arianism was able to put forward its view clearly from the beginning, it was a priori. Egalitarians say, “No the word just can’t mean that, it makes it meaningless”. And yet, their argument hinges on a transformation of the meaning of at least two word groups (at least on your take) that isn’t, from what I can see, ever explicitly taught in the NT (so we are taught to have a different view of what submit and serve means) but only ever assumed even if the egalitarian account is right. The transformation of their meaning happened ‘off camera” and in the text we have the signs the change occurred.

Let’s do what you suggest, and put your view of submission into the relevant verses:

Wives put your husbands first and meet their needs as to the Lord.

But as the Church puts Christ first and meets his needs in everything so also the wives ought to their husbands in everything.

My thoughts about that as an exegetical solution:
1)       It still raises the question I asked you earlier in this context. There is a parallel here between husbands and the Lord. If the submission to Christ that the Church offers is without authority then it is for wives to husbands. And so my question to you is – do we sometimes submit to Christ in an authority-kinda-way but we don’t other times in the NT? And if so, how do we work out which submit is on view in which text? Or do we never submit to Christ in an authority-kinda-way, submission to Christ, God, ruling authorities et al just does not have any authority connotations in the NT? And if that’s the case, how would you go about indicating that we should (pick a word that we used to use ‘submit’ for to do the work) to God’s authority from the NT? The issue for me is not what it could mean, but what it does given the parallels.
2)       If ‘submit’ here means ‘put others first and meet their needs’ or it means something like ‘serve’ then I cannot see any substantial difference between Paul’s instructions to wives and to husbands. The ‘submission’ wives offer to husbands is basically the same as the ‘love’ husbands offer to them. Different words are used to indicate the same basic reality. If not, what is asymmetrical at this point? What should wives be doing that is not a requirement for husbands in this context and what is a requirement for husbands that is not for wives in this context?

There’s a whole raft of problems I see from that:
a.        The counsel Paul is giving is as radical a turn for wives as it is for husbands, if not more so—he’s at least used ‘love’ in a way that fitted its normal semantic range. And yet he grounds the teaching to husbands with expansive content with reference to Christ’s example. But offers nothing concrete for the wives as to what this new submission looks like in the church’s relationship with Christ. And surely something like that is called for? The Church submits to Christ in everything in a way that has no authority connotations? This is revolutionary! What does that mean? What does it look like? No idea, we need space to talk about what love looks like—something that is dealt with at length in the NT already and involves no fundamental transformation of its basic meaning.
b.        What does it add to the exhortation to the wives to say that they are to do it like the Church does it to Christ? If what is on view is mutual submission of the kind that we offer to one another, why bring Christ in at all at this point as the one to whom we submit? Usually it is Christ’s example that is held up, not the Church’s (!!! For how rare this is). What is gained by this unusual step? Why not appeal to Christ’s example of submission to the Church in line with an egalitarian reading of Phil 2, rather than the Church’s imperfect example of submission to Christ just as he does with the husbands? It wouldn’t affect the material to the husbands on this reading (from what I can see)—the husband section can still be a type of Christ and the Church. Or why not just drop Christ out altogether and go with ‘as the Church submits to one another’ or the like?
c.        Again, does this mean that the Church in its relationship with Christ is in a mutual-submission relationship, with no authority on view in the relationship? Or does it mean that some aspects/dimensions/names for the Church’s relationship don’t have authority and other ones do? Does Christ, inasmuch as he is the Church’s groom, not have authority, but inasmuch as he is something else (Lord maybe, or possibly firstborn) he does? (Or have all these terms been transferred by Christ and how do we know?)
d.        Does the NT really intend to collapse ‘serve’ and ‘submit’ into each other so that we can swap them in for each other? Is service and submission really the same as love (or almost the same)? When Paul says through love serve one another is he basically saying the same thing twice?
3)      If we put ‘serve’ in instead, it works for you for verse 22. But “as the Church serves the Lord in everything, so wives should serve their husbands in everything” raises the same questions I’ve raised. Do we offer two types of service to the Lord? In one case it is a joyful submission to his authority and in other places (like here) it is a mutual service? Or when we serve the Lord mutuality is always on view between him and us and this word group also is devoid of authority connotations in the NT when used of Christ and us/God and us?
4)      I don’t know where this goes, so I’ll throw it in here. If this view is right, then why doesn’t the NT (as far as I know) never say that God submits to us, that Christ submits to us? If the meaning has been transformed, surely the way to drive that home, and possibly cut off 2000 years of complementarian dead end exegesis and ethical thinking would be to clearly and strongly state in several places that God submits to us. If the word has no authority connotations that’s a perfectly fine thing to say. We don’t have to hedge by saying, ‘he submits to our needs/need for salvation’ (that was what my Church used to say to avoid saying outright that God submits to us, but be consistent with the view that its base meaning had been transformed to remove any sense of submitting to an authority).