Susanna Krizo

Hi Charis,
I am indeed busy right now, and yes, Cheryl, you were right, I am going to do a lot of baking! I must by necessity be brief, but I wanted to say that I read your comments (good questions, by the way) but I hope you do not mind waiting until after Christmas for us to resume the discussion.

I wanted to comment on one thing though:
That the devils and demons were subject to the apostles does not mean that hypotasso is involuntary when the relationship is voluntary. Demons are the enemy of the Light and in the Gospel they are said to be subjected to the apostles involuntarily as conquered enemies. We find this also in Eph 1.21-22, where the angelic beings (“powers and principalities”) are subjected to be placed under the feet of Christ (the Church is the feet of Christ and hence they cannot be under His feet, neither is the church His enemy, instead she is his beloved, whom He died for). If you look at Jas 4 you will find that the Christians had become enemies of God by choosing to be friends of the world. Only by resisting the Devil could they submit to God, i.e. draw near to Him and remain with Him.
A wife is not the enemy of the husband (although it may seem so sometimes in a marriage and theology has traditionally seen women as a woe rather than a blessing) hence the analogy does not hold. The same problem is evident in Gen 4.7 which is used to interpret Gen 3.16: Eve was not the enemy of Adam; sin was the enemy of Cain, hence an analogy between the two does not exist. Marriage is a voluntary association between a man and a woman in which the two become one by leaving their parents and cleaving to each other, by being literally glued to each other. But it is possible to leave this covenant (as it is called in the OT) and this is what Paul is trying to prevent. He admonishes wives to remain devoted to their husbands in all things instead of separating themselves from them either physically or emotionally, and husbands to love their wives as they love themselves (i.e. doing to her what he wishes her to do to him). He is not enlisting the couple into an army, neither is he trying to enforce a one-sided involuntary submission from the wife for it would be absurd for him to tell the wives to do something all Roman women were already doing. A good comparison is modern Saudi-Arabia: let’s say the Gospel was preached in S-A for the first time this coming year. What likelihood is there that the women would decide to throw of their veils, drive cars and demand equality if Christianity taught what Islam already does? I would say the change of it would be nil. But what if Christianity taught a radical equality which would cause women to suddenly consider themselves equal to men? There would be a need to address the dynamics of a relationship between two equals and this is what we find in Eph 5.