Susanna Krizo

The question of authority really comes down to whether the man has authority in the first place. If the man does not have authority over his wife then there is no need to read anything into 1 Cor 7 which does not exist there. As already noted on the other threads, the idea that the man has authority over the woman as a created order comes from the 13th century; the early church used the fall account to justify the man’s rule over the woman. Modern comps do reversed theology compared to that of the patristic church in their rejection of Gen 3.16 as the beginning of the man’s rule and in their insistence on a creation-based female subjection. CBMW insists that their theology is an orthodox defense of the historic understanding of the church, but when you ask a comp to provide a quote from the first 13th centuries to that effect, they do not, for they cannot.
With the sole guilt of Eve and the belief that the woman was subjected to the man as a punishment for her sin, comes also the concept that the head rules over the body. This is of course Platonism, since the Bible portrays always the heart as the thinking and guiding element of the human being. A head which rules over the body within an individual, and by analogy the husband over the wife, is foreign to the Hebrew thought and absent from both the OT and the NT. In the OT marriage is a covenant, made by both spouses, and both are held equally responsible for not breaking the covenant of marriage. Moses permitted divorce to the man due to the hardness of their hearts, but when we go to 1 Cor 7, we find that the same is required from the man as from the woman: stay married, or separate and remain unmarried. In the Shepherd of Hermas we find that the early church saw the exhortation of remaining unmarried as a provision for the one who had committed adultery to repent and return to his/her spouse.
1 Cor 7 amplifies Gal 3.28: it is of no consequence whether you are a Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female; the same rules apply to all. The Jew has no greater privileges than the Gentile, the slave is the freeman of Christ and the freeborn is the slave of Christ, the man and the woman share all things in common, both in the bedroom and outside of it, wherefore it is better to remain unmarried if one wishes to serve God since the spouses will be occupied with pleasing each other.
A Jew could very well use the comp theology to argue that only Jews should be allowed to be in leadership: the Bible was written by Jews; Abraham was a Jew; the priests were Jews; all the Kings and Queens were Jews; Jesus was a Jew; all the apostles were Jews; the Gospel was first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles; Gentiles had a different “role” in the church (they did not have to follow the law, wherefore God held only the Jews responsible, not the Gentiles, Acts 15). Of course a Gentile would immediately point out that the death of Christ broke down the wall of enmity and that God had made one body of Jews and Gentiles, wherefore it did not matter whether one was a Jew or a Gentile, since they all share in the same Spirit (1 Cor 12.13).