Susanna Krizo

I am well aware that the NT uses the word hypotasso of our relationship to God’s law etc. I was looking for the usage in the personal relationship between the Christian and God which is alluded to in Eph 5. The only instance I find is Jas 4 and in the context hypotasso has the meaning “to associate with” and there is absolutely no hint of a hierarchy.
If hypotasso should be understood exclusively as a military term, here’s the problem: how does one arrange oneself under an impersonal object such as the law? I found this flaw in the thinking of the author of “Love and Respect,” Dr. Emerson Eggenrichs. He argues that hypotasso means “to rank or place under” but then he argues also that the husband submits to the wife’s need to be loved despite of a conflict due to Eph 5.21. How does one place oneself under a need? And how can the husband be “over” and “under” his wife at the same time in the same hierarchy? His entire research was based on the excellent book “Why Marriages Fail and Succeed” by Dr. Gottman (the best marriage book out there) but he failed to see Dr. Gottman’s point: both men and women need love and respect equally; when a husband treats his wife as a servant, he shows the kind of disrespect which will lead to a divorce. Dr. Eggenrichs ignored this fundamental point and argued that men need respect and women love and he based this conclusion on a hierarchy which he believes should exist in a marriage (not surprisingly, and he used to be in the army). No wonder Christian marriages are not thriving!

You have the same problem with the word hypakouo: how do you obey such an abstract thing as faith? (Acts 6.7 etc) And how do you obey a knock on the door? (Acts 12.13)? If you assign one meaning based on your need to have a word mean a particular thing, you end up creating problems elsewhere.

Kyrios in the NT, when referring to a human, invariably means “sir,” a courteous way of addressing a man; when referring to God, Kyrios invariably means Lord, for God is the Lord of all, a man is not. If you give kyrios the meaning ‘lord’ you make the man the absolute lord of the woman and you contradict what you just wrote in your previous post for a ‘lord’ had full authority over his slave.