So Done with Patriarchy
Maybe it’s because I just finished reading a paper on Ephesians 5 by a friend who is in seminary.
Maybe it’s because #MeToo.
More likely, it’s because bad theology that dehumanizes and disempowers anyone drives me up a wall. And when Kaitlin Curtice issued a challenge on Twitter to reply to a post called “Husbands, Get Her Ready for Jesus” by Bryan Stoudt at Desiring God (John Piper’s website promoting what he calls “Christian Hedonism”, which in practice sounds to me a lot more like “Christian Judgmentalism and Legalism Wrapped Up in Gilt Paper and Tied with a Velvet Bow”, but that could be another post for another time), I decided I’m all over it. Because I am SO DONE WITH PATRIARCHY.
A simplistic but ultimately ineffectual post would be to copy Stoudt’s post and swap every husband and wife reference so it puts women in the position of power. Alas, “the Bible doesn’t say that!” would negate the argument right off, so instead, I need to recap and then respond.
According to Stoudt, “God calls husbands to be instruments of his sanctifying work in the lives of our wives.” (Side note: I’d have changed all references to God to the feminine, too.) He uses Ephesians 5:25-26 to back up this claim—more on that in a moment. His whole article stems from an encounter with a friend (male, natch) who told Stoudt that he doesn’t challenge his wife enough about her sinfulness, both petty ongoing sins and the occasional major sins she commits. You may have heard my eyes rolling about 8:35 this morning when I got to that part of his article (and it's a minor miracle "Sustained Silent Reading" was actually "Silent" while I was reading).
Stoudt goes on to outline four specific principles that he and every Godly husband can take to “get her ready for Jesus”:
- “Repent” to God and to one’s wife. God, of course, delights in repentance. Did you know that “Most wives will be thankful when [husbands] seek their forgiveness, too”?
- “Learn when to speak” about one’s wife’s sinful ways so that she will not tune one’s droning out. Even God doesn’t nitpick all the time.
- “Consider your timing” so that one is not angry when one speaks, nor is one piling onto one’s wife when she’s had a bad day with the children or a hard day at work.
- “Be a student” of one’s “particular wife” (as opposed to every wife? WTH?) so that one speaks in language that she can hear and heed.
Holy. Hell.
I’m not married, but I guarantee you I wouldn’t marry a man who thought any of these principles were good advice unless I could do the same toward him! And not to “get him ready for Jesus” but just to have a strong marriage, because it’s not that these are bad ideas if one substitutes “spouse” for “wife” and “husband”. It’s the condescension toward women in particular that frosts me.
And it all goes back to demeaning, dehumanizing, disempowering theology.
Let’s start with Genesis 1:26-27, wherein God creates human beings in “our” image, female and male. These two verses alone go a long way toward empowering females because they tell us before we learn much of anything else about God that God has created human beings to be equally representative of God’s image in the world. Female and male are my concern here, but I’ll note that this applies also to every skin color, ethnicity, physical and mental ability, gender identity, sexuality, and all the other facets of our humanness that are inherent within us (God deals with the other things that we human beings create for ourselves and others later in the Bible; spoiler alert: NONE OF THE DIFFERENCES MATTER TO GOD. God loves us anyway.)
In their book The Meaning of the Bible, Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine note that the Hebrew word “adam” in Genesis 1-2 is a generic term understood to mean and translated as “man” for two thousand years. However, they argue, because it almost always appears as “ha-adam”, it is best translated in almost every instance as “the human” or even “humankind” rather than as the gendered word “man,” a point preserved in its translation as “anthropos” (a form of the root word in “anthropology”, which is the study of human beings and our cultures) in the Septuagint. Hebrew has gendered words that specify “male” and female”, including “ish” and “zakar” for man/male and “ishshah” and “neqebah” for woman/female. “Zakar” and “neqebah” are used in Genesis 1 for the male and female images in which humanity (“adam”) is created. “Ish” and Ishshah” are used in Genesis 2 following the rib removal by the divine surgeon to differentiate male and female from the human being (“adam”). (209-210, 300; see also the Strong number entries for H2145/zakar, H5347/neqebah, H376/ish, and H802/ishshah).*
Now we get to Ephesians 5:15-33, a portion of which Stoudt quotes in his essay. I never really gave this particular passage much thought except for verses 22-31 as basic patriarchal misogyny—and I have only once had a couple request that section for a wedding, to which I acquiesced only after thorough discussion. In her recent paper for a class at Boston University School of Theology (go, Terriers!), my friend Amie K. McCarthy wrote persuasively that the traditional interpretation misses the mark. Instead of wives being subject to their husbands and husbands then to God, as Stoudt and his theological bedfellows since early Christian days insist, Ms. McCarthy follows the line of scholarship toward an understanding that “being subject” is a mutual condition of marriage. It comes down to the grammar of the Greek in Ephesians 5:21-22, in part, but also relates to how counter-cultural early Christianity was in its radical proclamation of equality. The hierarchical household structure of Greco-Roman society was turned on its ear by Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:26-29, particularly verse 28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.” (CEB)
We can also rebut this patriarchal interpretation of Ephesians 5 from other places in Paul. His later appeal to Philemon for the freedom of Onesimus underscores and affirms his early statement of the equality of all believers, even if we can’t get Paul to full equality for all humans. It is also Paul who speaks of the mutual responsibility of spouses to meet each others’ needs in the first extant letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7:2-5). Heed especially verse 4: “[T]he wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband does; the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife does. [CEB, emphasis added] Later, in verse 14, Paul says that a non-believing spouse—wife OR husband—belongs to God because of the faith of the spouse who does believe. There is full equality here in Paul’s eyes, and lest we miss that point, in verse 17, Paul further says that “each person should live the kind of life that the Lord assigned when he called each one.” That makes sense because Paul acknowledges the gift of celibacy (and presumably singleness) that some people have, in which case they (including Paul himself and me!) don’t have a spouse who can “get us ready for Jesus.” But in so far as we help each other—spouse, sibling, parent, child, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, church member, friend—to be better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than today about the work of building heaven on Earth, then we have influence on but not authority over each other.
Given all of this evidence from the Bible about the equality of human beings, it’s hard to justify any theology of marriage that does not originate in this same equality. Any notion of a husband getting his wife “ready for Jesus” falls flat in this more holistic understanding of human relationships, thousands of years of patriarchy notwithstanding. Whether one is married or not, every human being has been affected to some degree by the assumed superior place of males in society encouraged—nay, mandated—by patriarchal thought. Our ideas about sex, gender, marriage (and singleness), parenthood, education, military service, political voice and leadership, economics, and a host of other facets of daily life have been shaped by the idea that males of the species H. sapiens sapiens have a birth right to dictate how the world is run and by whom. We now know how damaging this assumption has been to women and men, girls and boys, and everyone who identifies as neither female nor male or as both female and male over the centuries. It is well past time to overturn the patriarchy for good. Countering interpretations of the Bible that call for the domination and disempowerment of any human being or group is a key step in this process.
One final observation about Stoudt’s essay, and oh, how it makes me laugh to think about the ways subjugationists like Stoudt (they call themselves “complementarians” and think that women and men have proper places in the hierarchy of human life assigned by God for all eternity) might turn themselves into pretzels to escape the ramifications of what I’m about to point out…
Stoudt says near the end of his essay, “Husbands have the staggering privilege of getting our wives ready for Jesus, their true husband.” If his statement is true, then one of three things is also true:
- Jesus is genderqueer and also the true wife of husbands.
- Jesus is male and all husbands will be transgender in heaven so they, too, can be wives to their true husband.
- Equal marriage, at least for men, has always been a reality in heaven and husbands will be ready for their true husband in heaven.
While most of us realize that the metaphor of the Church Universal—and by extension, all believers—as the Bride of Christ fails, as all analogies do, at the extremes, it is a helpful image to have for some parts of our relationship with Christ. We are to have an intimate relationship with our Savior and it should be exclusive of all other gods, just as marriage should be intimate and exclusive between two spouses (sorry, polygamists/polyandrists, I just can’t justify that as an equal partnership, so it doesn’t fly with me this side of heaven, and even in heaven, really? Is marriage the actual relationship we will have with Christ?). And beyond the Church as Bride, we each have a unique relationship with Christ just as every marital relationship is unique to the two equal partners in it. The reality is that each one of us has now here a unique relationship with God, and if we are Christians, with Jesus Christ, and will have an equally unique relationship with God and Christ in whatever the next realm may be. For the purposes of our lives on Earth, remembering that each of us already has a relationship with God, who sees us all as equally beloved regardless of our individual differences, is a great thing to remember as we dismantle the oppressive patriarchal cultures around us.
*I know this is far-fetched because Knight and Levine argue credibly that the removal of the rib is actually a just-so story/euphemism to explain why human males don’t have a penis bone, but…What if the removal of the rib from the gender neutral human led to an appendage in the (newly created) males of the species? That would also mean that the original human “gave birth” to the second one and in the process became the female.
References
The Blue Letter Bible Online at www.blueletterbible.org, specific pages:
The Common English Bible Committee. The Common English Bible. Nashville, TN: Common English Bible, 2011. Web. 20 December 2017.
Knight, Douglas A. and Amy-Jill Levine. The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us. New York, NY: HarperOne, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2011.
McCarthy, Amie K. “Does Ephesians 5:21-33 Call for Women to Submit to Their Husbands? A Feminist Criticism Interpretation.” Unpublished paper for a class at Boston University School of Theology, December 13, 2017.
Special thanks to Peter D. Johnston, whose work for a class at Chicago Theological Seminary inspired me to reread parts of Knight and Levine’s work, laying additional groundwork for my visceral reaction to Bryan Stoudt’s essay.
A divinely inspired piece and one that gives me a feeling of peace. Certainly in my view one of your most powerful essays. I could see you using this as a basis of a not a lecture, but a performance -- a one-WOMAN performance. This indeed was brilliant!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mike!
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