Original Meaning
Wives and Husbands (3:18–19)
THE INSTRUCTION THAT the wife submit to her husband fits the norm of what was regarded as becoming conduct for a wife in Paul’s culture. Plutarch argued, “If [wives] subordinate themselves to their husbands, they are commended, but if they want to have control, they cut a sorrier figure than the subjects of control.”6 Husbands congratulated themselves on having an obedient wife.
Paul does not overtly dispute this cultural assumption. The change in women’s status in our age and modern sensibilities lead many today to wish that he had. The command for wives to submit, however, was not inappropriate in his context. (1) It reflects the legal state of affairs. The husband as the paterfamilias (the head of the household) was the only fully legal person in the family and had power over all property and almost absolute authority over every member in it. They were all obligated to obey him, and Paul does not challenge the existing legal order.
(2) The verb “submit” (hypotasso) does not convey some innate inferiority but is used for a modest, cooperative demeanor that puts others first. It was something expected of all Christians regardless of their rank or gender (Mark 10:41–45; 1 Cor. 16:16; Eph. 5:21, 24; Phil. 2:3–4; 1 Peter 5:5). According to the Letter to Aristeas 257, God welcomes this attitude, and “the human race deals kindly with those in subjection.” The command therefore promotes a demeanor that was believed to help elicit kindness from the husband.
(3) The command addresses wives directly as “ethically responsible partners.”7
(4) The directive is not one-sided; demands are also made of the husband.
Some nuances may also help to mitigate the command’s harshness to modern ears. In contrast to the commands to children and slaves, Paul does not tell wives to “obey” their husbands.8 In the commands to children and slaves, he uses the active imperative. The verb “submit” (hypotassesthe), however, is in the middle voice and can imply a voluntary submission. It makes the wife’s submission her willing choice, not some universal law that ordains masculine dominance.
Paul also qualifies this submission further with the phrase, “as is fitting in the Lord.” Lohse comments that what is regarded as “fitting” (aneko) is determined entirely by custom and tradition. Those who have ever lived in another culture for any length of time soon learn that things “fitting” in their own culture are unseemly in another. But Paul does not just say that it is culturally proper or correct but “fitting in the Lord.” The Lord determines what is fitting or not. Some things may be culturally acceptable, but reflection on them “in the Lord” leads to the realization that they are unfit for a Christian. This qualification recasts the wife’s submission to her husband by turning it into allegiance shown to Christ (cf. Eph. 5:22–24).
Husbands are presented with a much more demanding task. (1) They are told to love their wives. This command reveals that Paul is not writing to prop up the authority and rights of husbands, which everyone took for granted. Instead, he reminds husbands of their obligations “in the Lord.” Most in the ancient world did not expect a marriage to be grounded in love. It was considered to be an accord, albeit an unequal one, between a man and a woman to produce legitimate heirs. Soranus contended, “Since women are married for the sake of bearing children and heirs, and not for pleasure and enjoyment, it is totally absurd to inquire about the quality or rank of the family line or about the abundance of their wealth, but not to inquire about their ability to conceive children.”9 Veyne observes that “love in marriage was a stroke of good fortune; it was not the basis of the institution.” The many epitaphs recording the husband’s affection for his “very dear wife” attest that loving relationships developed, but just as many others simply say that the wife “never gave me any reason to complain.”10
In a Christian marriage, the husband knows himself to be dearly loved by God (3:12) and is commanded to love his wife in the same way. He is not to exercise his rights over his wife but his love, which means he never thinks in terms of rights and is always willing to forego them. Caird states it well: “If a wife is asked to submit, it is to the husband’s love, not to his tyranny.”11 Love in the New Testament context means more than having affection or romantic feelings for a wife (see the fuller explanation in Eph. 5:25–33, where Christ is the model).
The NIV translates the next command that husbands are not to “be harsh with [their wives].” If this is the correct rendering, it rules out any overbearing, tyrannical, or intimidating behavior toward the wife. But the verb pikrainesthe is in the passive voice and may be translated, “Do not become embittered [or resentful] toward her.” Anyone can refrain from harsh treatment of others; Christians must do more, however. They must refrain from becoming flushed with rage or petulant when others treat them or respond to them in ways that irritate them. This directive addresses the eventuality that the wife might not always be properly submissive, which in turn would likely trigger bitterness in her husband.
Sirach, who regarded a “silent wife” as “a gift from the Lord” (Sir. 26:14), advises: “If she does not go as you direct, separate her from yourself” (i.e., divorce her; 25:26). Paul’s advice is quite different. Any defiance or insolence on the wife’s part does not cancel the husband’s absolute obligation to love her.12 Sulking, fuming, grumbling, or worse, lashing out in verbal or physical violence, regardless of the provocation, real or imagined, is strictly forbidden.13 Paul recognizes that if bitterness is allowed to taint the relationship between husband and wife, the whole household will suffer.
Bridging Contexts
CAIRD IDENTIFIES A key problem in bridging this material to our contemporary context:
The modern readers may feel a sense of disappointment that Paul’s lofty ethical principles should prove to be reducible to such humdrum instructions, and may find it hard to square this passage with the sweeping declaration that in Christ, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28).
We may feel particularly squeamish today about the demands placed on the so-called “weaker” parties in the pairs, the wives and the slaves. The rules strike many as not only antiquated but anti-Christian. Telling slaves to obey their masters upholds the interests of slave owners and seems to give an odious, oppressive institution divine sanction. Modern developments in women’s legal rights and in the relations between husbands and wives also make the call for the wife to submit to her husband sound outdated, if not outlandish.
Times have changed. Sir William Blackstone’s legal observation on marriage that “husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” is no longer presumed to be the case today.37 Many, already suspicious that Paul was a male chauvinist or perhaps even a misogynist, regard his advice on family with a jaundiced eye or even embarrassment. Those who take these commands seriously may be disdained for wanting to take us back to the days when wives were expected to be dutiful drones, bowing their necks to the yoke of their husband’s authority.
Paul’s culture and ours. Our culture is quite different from Paul’s. Today, slavery is outlawed; and most modern wives do not take for granted that they owe their husbands absolute, unquestioning obedience, as they did in the first century. Wives assume that they enter marriage as their husbands’ equals. A pastor testifies that when he plans the marriage ceremony with couples, many brides insist, “I don’t want anything in the vows about obeying my husband.”38 Paul does not tell wives to obey their husbands, but he usually gets blamed for it. His call for submission also receives a chorus of boos in a culture that glorifies individual rights.
The question for us is: Does Paul have anything relevant to say about family life for people living two millennia later with different social norms? How does it apply to the dual-career marriage, which has become the norm for most American families? Is Paul too out of date? Is his advice too culturally bound to the patriarchal ways of the first century to be useful today? Or does he convey God’s intentions for how humans should live together in families, which will always have relevance?
Lohse represents those commentators on Colossians who believe that the instructions in this section can be safely ignored:
They do not offer timelessly valid laws, nor do they endow a particular order with ageless dignity. As times change so does the general estimation of what is fitting and proper. Christian exhortation, however, must constantly impress on new generations the admonition to be obedient to the Kyrios. How this obedience is to be expressed concretely at any given time, will always have to be tested and determined anew.39
According to this view, these time-bound rules cannot be relocated to our dissimilar situation. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza goes even further, arguing that we can only preach on the household codes “critically in order to unmask them as texts promoting patriarchal violence.”40
Melick, on the other hand, represents those who find no problem with Paul’s words in these verses. He asks, “By what standard is the culture to be measured?” and concludes, “The end result is an authority [the Bible] which is no authority since at any place where the culture differs with express biblical commands the Bible will be perceived as secondary to culture.”41 He asks an important question: Is “cultural acceptability” an acceptable hermeneutical key?
Before we resolve these questions, we must first cross over to Paul’s side of the bridge to understand the cultural context in which he gave these rules. Culture in many ways is like water. We usually do not notice that the water we drink every day has any taste. Only when we travel somewhere else does it strike us that the water there tastes “funny.” When we get a taste of these commands on family living from a foreign culture two thousand years distant, our initial reaction may be that they taste funny or bad. We cannot fault Paul, however, for living in a different culture from ours, and we should appreciate how apt these instructions were in his context.
(1) Women did not usually receive any kind of formal education in Paul’s day except in the domestic arts. Consequently, they were forced to rely on their husbands for a wide range of things.42 In a culture where spouses are equally educated and have equal legal standing, however, things may be quite different.
(2) Patriarchal hierarchy was firmly entrenched. Ulpian’s Digest defined the family as follows: “In the strict legal sense we call a familia a number of people who are by birth or by law subjected to the potestas [power] of one man” (50, 16.195).43 It was the father’s legal duty to guard the welfare of those under his authority—his wife, children, and slaves—and it was their duty, in turn, to show him total obedience and deference.
Shelton points out that the Latin word most often used to express this family relationship is pietas, which referred to duty combined with affection: “A Roman was expected to be devoted and dutiful to his family, friends, fellow citizens, country, and gods.”44 In a more self-centered culture such as ours, the focus is more on my individual rights and what the rest of the family owes me. In Paul’s world, the question was framed differently: What is my duty to the family? The family was the main basis of economic production, and Paul gives a list of mutual obligations that each member had to shoulder to maintain its smooth functioning.
(3) In contrast to what we today call “the nuclear family,” the household in the ancient world consisted of the father, mother, and children, plus any foster children, slaves, unmarried relations, freedmen, or renters. Sometimes brothers with their families lived together under the same roof. We need to keep in mind “that Romans regarded with admiration the large household run on frugal lines by an inflexible paterfamilias.”45 Such a large group needed some kind of ordering lest it slip into anarchic chaos, and the universally accepted pattern was that all came under the authority of the father of the family (paterfamilias).
Paul had no intention of turning that world upside down.46 Instead, he focused on how to live within one’s cultural framework in obedience to Christ. If we read Scripture sympathetically, using a hermeneutic of trust as opposed to suspicion, we can see how Christ’s lordship subtly deconstructs the old habits of domination and exploitation. These instructions do not simply parrot the social conventions of the culture, they work creatively on them. The cultural norms are filtered through a Christian sieve, which both critiques and transforms them. On the other hand, if one reads Scripture with overt hostility or with a particular agenda, one is likely to reject or scoff at Paul’s counsel.
An apologetic aim? While we are on Paul’s side of the bridge, we should also remind ourselves how strange and threatening this new Christian faith would have seemed to his contemporaries. The Roman historian Tacitus maligned the Jews as a seditious source of trouble: “Those who converted to their ways follow the same practice, and the earliest lesson they receive is to despise the gods, to disown their country, and to regard their parents, children and brothers of little account.”47 The same charges were leveled against Christians. Tacitus accused them of a “hatred of the human race,” a charge based on the assumption that Christians forsook their familial and social obligations.48
Loyalty to Christ did create domestic problems for some married to unbelievers (see 1 Cor. 7:12–16). Christian wives, children (who continued under the authority of the father after they reached adulthood), and slaves would not consent to do certain things that went against their faith. Their religious scruples and their antagonists’ malicious gossip combined to give Christianity a sinister reputation for inflaming family tensions and wrecking homes.49
Today, we worry about the meltdown of the nuclear family as a sure sign of the decay of our civilization. It was no different in the first century, and people did not look with favor on anything they perceived as ripping the fabric of the family, which held society together. Insofar as the Christian movement was thought to disrupt the family, which Aristotle maintained was the basic unit and pattern for the whole political order, it boded ill for them and their message.50
Family life was also far more public in Bible times, particularly in the close quarters of the tenement building. Since everyone shared the same set of measures, everyone knew who were the “good” wives and the “good” husbands and who were the “bad” wives and “bad” husbands. A well-ordered household where love ruled was both a significant concern and a compelling witness.
Some have argued that Paul’s instructions on family life had an apologetic aim. If others did not perceive Christianity to be disruptive of society’s basic building block, they might be more willing to listen to the gospel.51 We find such an approach in Titus. Slaves are told “to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (Titus 2:9–10, italics added; see also 1 Peter 3:1–2). Irreproachable conduct became a missionary tool as Christians sought to persuade others by their behavior. Christians might worship exclusively a different Lord, but they did not incite insubordination, disloyalty, or disorder; and they did not upset family stability.
While an apologetic purpose may have been in the back of Paul’s mind, it certainly was not the key factor in these instructions.52 If there was any apologetic purpose, it was more likely directed against the asceticism and airy mysticism of the opponents (2:16–23). It will not do, therefore, to treat, and perhaps dismiss, these instructions as simply an apologetic attempt to show that Christianity was not a slippery slope that would cause the family to slide into chaos. Paul was not giving the Colossians tips on how to curb criticism but telling them what was fitting in Christ. Most important was his conviction that a harmonious, well-regulated household promised a harmonious, well-regulated church. As Lampe has pointed out: “The early church did not exist as an independent body beside the private households; it exclusively existed in them.”53 The church, founded on egalitarian ideals, needed some rules to guide relationships.54
In bridging contexts, we should be sensitive to contemporary impressions of how Christian faith affects family life. Opponents continue to vilify Christianity. Instead of accusing it today of sapping the foundations of family order with its egalitarianism, however, they accuse it of perpetuating the subjugation and ill-treatment of women. We should be careful not to interpret these texts so that it sounds like we are leading a march back to the gender caste system of the first century. We should also be careful not to dismiss or ignore the wisdom they contain that applies to relationships in any social pattern. These texts do not prescribe a hierarchy or endorse patriarchy or slavery, but they do prescribe attitudes that must govern a Christian’s relationships in the family.
How these instructions apply to us. These commands counter attitudes that create strife and alienation in relationships: the insubordination of wives and the bitterness of husbands, which lead to brutal mistreatment; the disobedience of children and the harsh discipline of parents; the malingering, hypocritical ways of slaves and the cruel injustice of masters. The principles underlying these instructions—submission, love, service, obedience, conscientious work, and fairness—transcend cultural limits and are applicable in any age.
(1) The instructions show a special concern for the weaker or powerless members of the pair: wives, children, and slaves. The rules cited do not simply reinforce the prerogatives of husbands, parents, and masters, for the stronger parties are given duties in addition to rights. In turn, those who are expected to submit or obey are given rights as well as duties. The commands therefore recognize that reciprocity exists, so that the entitlements are not all on one side and the obligations on the other. Schweizer observes that comparable instructions from other literature usually address only the male, adult, and free person. He comments, “The idea that women, children and slaves could also act in an ethically responsible way is scarcely considered. Indeed, the master is recommended to treat his slave well because it is in his own interests.”55
The gospel in which there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, male or female recognizes each individual as a full person and is concerned to protect each person’s rights, not to enforce his or her subordination. Wives are to be treated with love, children with understanding, and slaves as human beings deserving of justice in a time when slaves were not legally regarded as human. These commands also address wives, children, and slaves as responsible, moral beings, full members of the body of Christ. The commands acknowledge the authority of the husband, parent, and master; but those with power must exercise it with love, sensitivity, and justice, and must be willing to take the role of servant, just as Christ did.
(2) The motivation for the behavior becomes distinctively Christian. The text does not ground its advice in the created order, natural law, or reason, as if to say: “This is the way the world is; accept it and live in harmony with it.” Nor does it say that the husband is the natural ruler and the wife the natural subject.56 Paul bases his appeal not on the laws of nature but on “the law of the new nature: Christ releases you to be truly human, and you must now learn to express yourself according to the divine pattern, not in self-assertion but in self-giving.”57 These commands do not tell us how to order families but focus on the Christian motivation behind our family relationships—how we relate to others. Every member of a family, no matter the station, must allow Christ’s lordship to control his or her interpersonal relationships.
Paul has no intention of defying all the norms of first-century society in which Christians lived. He adapts the accepted pattern of households in the Mediterranean world of antiquity but transforms it by appealing to the Christian’s loyalty to Christ as Lord. The “Lord” (Gk. kyrios) appears seven times in this section: It is fitting in the Lord. Do what is pleasing in the Lord. Fear the Lord. Work as you were working for the Lord, not just human masters. The Lord shows no partiality and will render judgment and reward. Serve the Lord. Know that you have a Lord in heaven. The motivation behind each of Paul’s commands is charged with the phrase “in the Lord.” Christ’s lordship imposes itself on all aspects of our lives. Stern comments that the Lord becomes a third partner: “Like a magnet over iron fillings he orients things in the right direction.”58
Thus, what is fitting in the Lord is the hermeneutical key for bridging these instructions to our modern context. This phrase is not a pious platitude attached to the prevailing cultural pattern to bless the status quo. Putting our family relationships under the microscope of what is fitting in the Lord always challenges and renews them. Our model is how Christ submitted himself to God.59
Some reject such a positive, sympathetic reading of the text. Horrell, for example, argues that this section contains an implicit domination and exploitation ideology. It intends “to convince the dominated, the subordinate, that it is right and proper, or inevitable, or in everyone’s best interests for them to remain willingly and voluntarily in their place and to fulfill their duties.” He maintains that “ ‘everyone’s best interests’ may actually mean ‘in the ruling class’s interests.’ ”60 The ideology legitimates hierarchy, domination, and exploitation.
If one chooses to read the New Testament in this way, one is likely to reject the domestic codes entirely. But since our world, including families, needs some kind of ordering unless it breaks down into a free-for-all, what order will be substituted? The record of the modern family with its skyrocketing divorce statistics and the betrayal of vows, or the increasing avoidance of any vows at all, does not offer an attractive solution. Gilley cites the beginning of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which deals with adultery: “All happy families are more or less like one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.” He interprets it to mean that we can go wrong in all sorts of ways, “but there is only one way of going right.”61 Christians can only go right in their families when they are subject to Christ, when the family becomes a place where faith is lived and nurtured, and when each member submits to the lordship of Christ.
Human beings require institutions as well as some kind of order for the distribution of power among persons. The Christian doctrine of human fallenness reminds us that our sinfulness will corrupt any order and create disorder. C. S. Lewis writes: “Since the Fall no organization or way of life whatever has a natural tendency to go right.”62 Following these instructions in Colossians to the tee will not automatically make one holy or happy. The danger always lurks that they will be misused by the selfish who say: “Serving me is to serve Christ.” The next principle rules out this perversion.
(3) Domination of others is prohibited. We cannot eliminate the exercise of power from human relationships, nor can we eliminate the need for guidelines in relationships. The basic premise is that every Christian member of a family is equal as a recipient of God’s grace, which makes each a part of God’s family. But some have different roles and different power. Someone needs to take a leadership role as a necessary dike against complete turmoil. Others need to yield their freedom of choice to others. The power is given to them by the yielding parties, not taken from them. The freewheeling family where each does his or her own thing, refusing to give or assume power when necessary, will eventually fly apart.
The New Testament has definite views on how power is to be used. Each set of instructions addresses the use of power by the dominant partner and forbids any injustice, exploitation, or mistreatment. The controlling ethic of the gospel is that the greatest should become the servant of all, the one with the towel and basin who stoops to wash the feet of the others (Mark 10:42–45; John 13:1–17; 1 Cor. 9:19; Phil. 2:3–11). Paul served as a model of this service. In his dealing with the various house churches he founded across the empire, the apostle assumed the role of paterfamilias (1 Cor. 4:15; 1 Thess. 2:11), but he did not lord over them (2 Cor. 1:24). He also pictured his relationship to them as a mother (1 Cor. 3:2; Gal. 4:19), a wet nurse (1 Thess. 2:7), and a slave (2 Cor. 4:5).
Paul’s instructions do not appoint the husband as the overlord of his wife. Parents are not to domineer and crush their children’s spirits. Masters are not advised on how best to handle slaves to squeeze the most work out of them. The key is love, justice, and fairness. Ancient patriarchy had nothing to do with love or justice.
Anyone who reads the New Testament will quickly discover all that love entails. What it means to love your wives is explained more fully in Ephesians 5:25–33: Husbands are to imitate Christ’s sacrificial love. This kind of love does not love others because of the pleasure or utility they bring to us. Christ’s love was so deep that it cherished us when not a single one of us was worth it. His love was not some sentimental emotion; it was so great that he was willing to pay the supreme penalty to express his love by suffering a slave’s death, the unspeakable torture and humiliation of crucifixion. Love is a power that can penetrate the most impenetrable of hearts, but it is also powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. Love means caring more about the one you love than yourself. Love is never coercive and never seeks to wound, humiliate, or domineer.63
Contemporary Significance
THE BOOK OF Proverbs assumes that the household, not the temple, is “the primary place of moral formation and social duty.”64 The home becomes even more important as the center of Christian nurture and education when surrounding society becomes so wicked that it accepts and even promotes immorality. These texts are not about who gets the power and authority to run the family but affirm that the family is the primary context for faith formation and for living out one’s faith. How we live in our family says a great deal about our faith.
Paul’s advice in this section is rather sparse, which makes it clear that he has no intention of providing an advice manual on family relationships. He is affirming the family as the place where we first live out our newness as “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved” (3:12). In the previous section, he reeled off a list of virtues (3:12–15), but such virtues are empty talk unless they are lived out in the structures and relationships of everyday life.
New life begins in the home.65 Schweizer observes that Christian wisdom and instruction are not always put to the test in times of suffering, which requires a heroic response, but in the everyday situations of life—like in the home. “The real world is, according to our letter, first of all our husband or wife, our children or parents, our employees or chiefs. Only if and when we take this world seriously may we, perhaps, be called to serve our Lord on a greater scale.”66 One can do heroic battle in the public arena but lose the war in the privacy of the home.
The family is where, under the lordship of Christ, we learn to control our anger, rage, abusive language, and lying so that peace might reign. The family is where we first learn to work out the values of “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (3:12). There is no more difficult a place to exercise these virtues day in and day out than in the home. The new life enables submissiveness that puts others first, love that refuses to grow bitter, obedience, supportive and encouraging parenting, devotion to doing work well, and fairness and justice in our dealing with others.
Marriage. Most fairy tales end with the prince marrying the princess, and the stories always conclude with the words, “And they lived happily ever after.” After the hero has rescued the heroine, the marriage of the prince to the princess comes as an anticlimax. But that is not the Christian view of marriage. The wedding day with the bells and rice is not the arrival point that marks the end of the story; it is only the beginning. The wedding is the beginning of a lifelong adventure. It is a journey through uncharted seas, which explains why so many marriages today end with a shipwreck. We know the problems, but many today do not think that the Bible offers any help to solve them.
Paul’s counsel on the relations between husband and wife is interpreted by some to mean that the wife must knuckle under and do homage to her husband, who ascends some marital throne. This kind of relationship was lampooned on the legendary Archie Bunker television series. In one episode, Edith thought that she would experiment with fancier cuisine and fixed her husband a soufflé instead of his regular bacon and eggs. Needless to say, Archie turned up his nose at something he couldn’t pronounce and demanded his bacon and eggs. Daughter Gloria watched with disbelief as her mother dumped the soufflé in the garbage and scurried back and forth trying to appease her husband’s wrath. Gloria snarled indignantly: “Submitting to him … that’s what she is doing. Submitting to her ruler … her lord and master.” Archie responds, “Ain’t that a nice way of putting it?”
For ages the blustering, ill-mannered domination of males has been countered by the subtle manipulation of females. A Greek proverb has it that the husband may be the head, but the wife is the neck that decides which way the head will turn. Male jests about marriage over the centuries reveal an interesting point: Many feel it sentences them to a ball-and-chain existence, where they are ruled and regulated by their wives. Thus we might laugh at the student’s blooper that Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock. In the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a wife takes subtle revenge on her successful businessman husband for her own feelings of worthlessness. “She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent sounding phrase…. She was, in fact, a genius in planting in him an assurance of his inferiority.”67
Marriages fail when struggles for power between the couples get out of hand and one wants to dominate the other, whether by overt means or in more subtle ways. Commenting on Genesis 2:4b–3:24, Vogels writes: “What kills the relationship is the desire to possess, to keep, to hold, to dominate, or to crush the other.”68 The one who dominates with bellicose threats and the one who manipulates with domestic blackmail are motivated by self-interest, and both are wrong. They treat the marriage as if the goal was conquest of the other.
When Paul calls for submission, our “liberated” culture responds snippily: “How dare he tell anyone to submit to anyone.” Submission is out of style, though sinful human beings have always been resistant to it. The anthem today is: “Express yourself. Do not repress yourself.” Marriage bonds that were once thought to be irrevocable, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, have become limited, contingent, and temporary arrangements. Commitment to my personal welfare supersedes commitment to the welfare of others. The value placed on individual freedom and independence has become nonnegotiable; consequently, when a relationship becomes troublesome, it is scuttled. We do not want to yield control of our lives or our choices to others or to put ourselves at their disposal.
The problem is that when marriage partners get caught in the vortex of thinking, “My needs must be met first,” neither have their needs met. The result is divorce, particularly if we have bought into the modern marketing mantra that we should continually upgrade to new and improved versions. The incalculable damage to children and our family and community is considered less important than the pain in the relationship. We have become too devoted to ideas of self-assertion and self-fulfillment to appreciate the concept of servanthood and its very different joys. We may be afraid to trust our happiness to anyone else, so we keep our unconditional commitment to ourselves.
Burtchaell recalls an adaptation of the story of Pinocchio, the self-centered, wooden puppet who was given his growing nose to cure him of his egotism and to bring him to repentance. When that failed to work, he was taken on a tour of hell in hopes of shocking him into virtue. There he saw a ballet dancer and a carpenter so caught up in their dancing and their work that nothing Pinocchio did attracted their attention. “It was at this point that Pinocchio saw, in a flash, that in hell everyone is left to himself, to do only what he wants to do and to take no notice of anyone else.”69 Paul’s advice offers a way out of such a hell.
The instructions to wife and husband focus on how they are to live together responsibly, not on how they can get their needs fulfilled. In our context, “submission” might connote spineless acquiescence, cringing abasement, demeaning servility, and passive resignation. But Paul does not consign wives to servile bondage to their husbands or expect them to become doormats and compulsive pleasers, though this is how he has been misinterpreted for centuries.70 Submission is not submersion, losing our own personalities in another’s. Selflessness can be carried too far and can become detrimental. Submission can only be done with a healthy sense of self. Wall comments:
For example, if a wife sees herself as subservient to her husband, she will allow him to dominate and even abuse her. If, however, she views herself as Christ’s disciple and her husband’s equal in Christ, the understanding of submission will be changed: she will submit herself to her husband in the same way that Christ submitted himself to God…. Being made equal in Christ will radically alter the way two disciples relate to each other as husband and wife. The result will be the woman’s elevation within the Christian home and the end of her abuse there … , and this in turn will be a witness to a misogynistic world.71
The opposite of submission is not a craven spirit, but the belief that I and my perceived needs are more important than any others. It manifests itself in a variety of ways:
• a lack of consideration for the other
• indifference to the other’s needs
• haughtiness
• self-aggrandizement, using the other to get your own way
• living only in the present and promising no future commitment
Submission, on the other hand, is:
• committing one’s entire life and all its possibilities to another
• wanting the other person’s good (not just wanting the other person to meet my needs)
• being concerned for the ultimate well-being of another without trying to control that person or to win praise for such sacrifice
• accepting the demands of the relationship without bitterness and not tallying the labors and sacrifices to see when I have done enough
• accepting responsibility for another, accepting his or her problems as our problems
• listening to the other
Examples of such holy submission abound. When C. S. Lewis’s wife was dying from cancer, he was convinced that he had the power through Christian love to transfer to his own body his wife’s pain and made every effort to do so.72 The submission of the Samaritan to the needs of the mugged stranger lying helplessly beside the road best captures what submission means. The robbers acted on the principle that “what is thine is mine and I am going to take it.” The priest who passed by acted on the principle that “what is mine is mine and I am going to keep it.” The Samaritan acted on the principle that “what is mine is thine, and I am going to use it to restore your life.”
We live in a culture of violence, which has for too long silently tolerated abuses against women in the home, in the workplace, and through pornography. We must not allow this text to be misused to apply pressure on wives to put up with husbands who abuse them emotionally, sexually, or physically, or who abuse their children in any way. Wives are not called to accept mistreatment without complaint. They should be allowed to express anger and grief and may need to take tough stands to confront their husbands with the consequences of their abusive behavior—what is known today as “tough love.” Abusers need treatment; wives and children need protection. Such action may be the greatest sign of love. Wall asks:
Should a Christian wife continue to submit uncritically to her husband if it results in personal abuse (the vices of 3:5–9) rather than in spiritual maturity (the virtues of 3:12–15)? I think not. Should the measure of a husband’s love for his wife be whether her devotion to the Lord Christ is strengthened and God’s interests (rather than her husband’s) for her life achieved? I think so. In Christ God shows no favorites; God is for both husband and wife, and in equal measure.73
Today, we are also more conscious of spouse abuse, and we must recognize that Paul gives a general principle here and does not list possible exceptions. Modern society creates new and different pressures for marriage relationships. We should not neglect to address the stressors, such as unemployment, a high crime environment, financial pressures, and isolation, that can induce family abuse when we have the least resources within ourselves to resist it. William Aikman (1682–1731) wisely said:
Civilization varies with the family, and the family with civilization. Its highest and most complete realization is found where enlightened Christianity prevails; where woman is exalted to her true and lofty place as equal with the man; where husband and wife are one in honor, influence, and affection, and where children are a common bond of care and love.
Paul talks about fairness and justice in dealing with slaves. But fairness and justice apply to wives as well. The family is where children learn these things, and any mistreatment of the spouse undermines the discipline and moral nurture of the children.
The successful marriage is based on love. Since love is commanded, it is not simply a feeling. Romantic love may lead to marriage, but it does not sustain it for long. It is much easier to feel romantic love for someone when you do not live with them. The love that Paul commands husbands to have for their wives is something that can be willed. This kind of love is not a feeling but an action. It always puts the welfare of the wife and her needs first. It is never concerned with power or control.
Parental discipline. Sirach offers advice on parental discipline that differs considerably from Paul’s. He says the father who loves his son should whip him often (Sir. 30:1). He also tells us:
Bow down his neck in his youth,
and beat his sides while he is young. (Sir. 30:12)74
Sirach reflects the widespread assumption in the Mediterranean world that obedience does not arise naturally and can only be imparted through thrashings and stern discipline (Sir. 22:6; see Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:7–11). He thinks only in terms of how the pampered, spoiled child, who becomes willful and stubborn, will bring disgrace to his father (Sir. 22:3). The solution is to break the will of the son to prepare him for faithful obedience to a demanding God. Sirach has a spiritual counterpart in the English Puritan, Bartholomew Batty, who argued that God specially created the buttocks for children to receive just correction with stripes and blows without causing serious bodily injury.75
While Paul may have agreed with the accepted approach to discipline in his culture, he does not say so. Here he reflects the new insights we find in the New Testament, which appreciate the child’s point of view and feelings.76 The apostle worries more about the discouraged child, the one who is so bowed down that he or she is broken. He knows the danger that the one invested with the final word “in everything” may misuse that authority in destructive ways. His concern is not that children will grow up to disgrace the father by their disobedience, but that the father will hinder the nurturing of his children through discipline at all costs.
Constant criticism and reprimand can be as destructive as none at all and can destroy a child’s sense of worth. Beatings are counterproductive and tend only to teach children that physical violence is an appropriate means of handling conflict. It can also produce psychological damage.77 Shaming children almost guarantees that they will work out their anger in some kind of violence. Parents are to discipline their children in ways that will encourage and guide them into courageous and hopeful living. Parents must wrestle with trying to find the best way of doing this and adjust their approaches as the child grows in understanding and responsibility.
Wuthnow’s research on young people to see how they learn to care for others beyond their own families and friends led to some interesting conclusions.78 Caring is not something innate but learned, and we learn it in our family life from our parents and their everyday small acts of kindness—how they treat one another, their children, and others. These small acts show children that kindness is not something exceptional but a natural part of life. Youth associate their parents’ kindness with their personhood; that is just a part of who they are. In a world that is becoming increasingly indifferent and uncivil, parents need to inculcate in their children the spirit of kindness and compassion by setting good examples, beginning with the way they discipline their children.
The workplace. Paul’s counsel on slaves and masters has no contemporary significance in our culture, which now considers slavery to be intolerable. The relationship between employees and employers in democratic societies is so completely different from that of master and slave in the first century that we must exercise extreme caution in making any correlations. We cannot make a one-to-one correspondence, where slaves equal employees and masters equal employers. We must look elsewhere in the New Testament for help on such things, but there are certain principles in these instructions that apply in any setting, including the workplace. The statement in 3:17, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,” is the hermeneutical key for how this exhortation can be applied to our world.
(1) Many justify their dishonesty, their negligence, or their shoddy work because of perceived mistreatment by their employers. They assume that the injustice gives them a license to be dishonest or to use passive aggressive ways of striking back. One observer says that many people find their jobs futile, boring, and unproductive. When they are plagued by abusive bosses who weigh them down with ludicrous policies and incoherent strategies, they live only for the weekend. Throughout the work week they do as little as possible to get through.
A popular comic strip pillories the inanities of corporate America, draws the hair of the boss to make him look like a devil with horns, and refers to workers carrying their morale in thimbles. Its popularity suggests that many identify with this workplace malaise. Because the boss is a pompous idiot and the company policies unfair, burdensome, and ridiculous, the employees regularly seize every chance to become slack in their duties. The Christian ethic requires an altogether different approach to our assignments. If Christian slaves were expected to work heartily out of reverence for the Lord, every Christian, regardless of the circumstances, must do the same thing. The temptation may be to work only to attract attention or to get by with as little as possible. The Christian, by contrast, must give wholehearted service in the workplace in all circumstances, because our work is something done for the Lord. We work in the confidence that it will not be wasted but that it will be gathered up by God, who brings everything to its successful culmination.
(2) Those who find themselves in a position of control over others should always seek to preserve dignity, fairness, and respect and to avoid treating persons as disposable property. The common assumption that business is a battlefield in which competitors engage in warfare undermines this goal. Employers do not honor employees as persons but treat them merely as subordinates. Some managers use what one has called a “My Lai philosophy of management.” My Lai was a Vietnamese village that rogue American troops destroyed and whose inhabitants they massacred as part of the war effort to “save” Vietnam. Some managers, both secular and religious, believe they have to destroy a business or institution to save it. They do not seem to care about fairness or justice or what their strong arm tactics do to the lives of persons involved.
Those who are Christian, however, are held to different standards. Those whose management decisions affect the lives of others should not forget the biblical principle that the measure that you mete out to others will be the measure that you receive. Always trying to enhance the bottom line may lead one to cross the line of what is moral and just.
Original Meaning
Children and Parents (3:20–21)
CHILDREN WERE LEGALLY regarded as their fathers’ property, and their status, theoretically, was little better than that of slaves.14 A slave in one of Dio Chrysostom’s works responds to the taunts of a freedman: “Perhaps you do not know that in many states which have exceedingly good laws fathers … may even imprison or sell them [their sons]; and they have a power even more terrible than any of these; for they actually are allowed to put their sons to death without any trial or even without bringing any accusations at all against them.”15 Epictetus observes that the duty of a son is “to treat everything that is his own as belonging to his father, to be obedient to him in all things, never to speak ill of him to anyone else, nor to say or do anything that will harm him, to give way to him in everything and yield him precedence, helping him as far as is within his power.”16 The command for children to obey their parents, therefore, fits a universal expectation.
It was unusual, however, to address children directly, as if they were independent, responsible subjects. Children are told here to “obey your parents in everything,” a variation of the command to honor one’s mother and father (Ex. 20:12). This command assumes that parents will not demand anything unseemly from their children (cf. Mark 6:24–25). The command also takes for granted that the parents have the best interest of their children at heart. When their children ask for a fish, they will not give them stones (Matt. 7:7–9; Luke 11:11–13).
But the children’s duty to obey their parents is transformed into obedience “in the Lord.”17 Paul emphasizes a child’s pleasing the Lord, not just the parents. He or she owes obedience above all to the Lord. The child’s independent relationship with the Lord surpasses the relationship with parents, and Christ’s obedience to his Father in all things serves as the model.
Fathers are addressed in the next command, not mothers or the inclusive “parents,” because the father had absolute control over the lives of his children even after they were grown and married. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarked:
The law-giver of the Romans gave virtually full power to the father over his son, whether he thought proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, and keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death; and this even though the son were engaged in public affairs, though he were numbered among the highest magistrates, and though he were celebrated for his zeal for the commonwealth.18
This power only ended when the father emancipated his son or he died.19
The attitudes toward disciplining children in the ancient world varied, just as they do today. For some, ruling with an iron hand was the norm. Quintilian, however, contended that “physical punishment inflicts shame” and “breaks the heart.”20 Others complained—as they have throughout the ages—about permissiveness which allows the younger generation too much latitude.21
Paul identified himself as the father of the Corinthians and had to deal with their arrogant disobedience (1 Cor. 4:14–21). He drew a contrast between the slave guardian (paidagogos) and the father, telling them that they had “ten thousand guardians in Christ” but just one father. The paidagogos was a trustworthy slave charged with supervising the life and morals of upper-class boys. He led the child to the schoolhouse and back home and protected him from trouble. He became a comic type caricatured for his severity as a stern taskmaster. In pictures on Greek vases he is frequently recognizable by the rod in his hand, and in Greek plays he is often portrayed as harsh and stupid. Paul picks up on this image by contrasting the proverbial pitiless discipline of the guardian with the milder discipline of the father. “What do you prefer? Shall I come to you with a whip [lit., rod], or in love and with a gentle spirit?” (1 Cor. 4:21). As a father, Paul expected obedience, but he believed that a father’s discipline should be tempered by love, compassion, kindness, and patience (see Col. 3:12).
Paul therefore comes closer to Quintilian’s view on discipline and cautions fathers against alienating their children by being too austere. The causes that provoke a child’s resentment are countless but usually involve nagging, belittling, and overly harsh punishment. Pliny wrote to a friend cautioning him about his severe rebuke of his son:
I was reminded by this example of excessive severity to write to you, as one friend to another, lest you on some occasion treat your son too harshly and strictly. Remember that he is a boy, and that you were once a boy, and perform your duty as a father always remembering that you are a human being and the father of a human being.22
Paul has a greater concern that overly stern and heavy-handed parents might drive their children away from the faith.
Bridging Contexts
CAIRD IDENTIFIES A key problem in bridging this material to our contemporary context:
The modern readers may feel a sense of disappointment that Paul’s lofty ethical principles should prove to be reducible to such humdrum instructions, and may find it hard to square this passage with the sweeping declaration that in Christ, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28).
We may feel particularly squeamish today about the demands placed on the so-called “weaker” parties in the pairs, the wives and the slaves. The rules strike many as not only antiquated but anti-Christian. Telling slaves to obey their masters upholds the interests of slave owners and seems to give an odious, oppressive institution divine sanction. Modern developments in women’s legal rights and in the relations between husbands and wives also make the call for the wife to submit to her husband sound outdated, if not outlandish.
Times have changed. Sir William Blackstone’s legal observation on marriage that “husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” is no longer presumed to be the case today.37 Many, already suspicious that Paul was a male chauvinist or perhaps even a misogynist, regard his advice on family with a jaundiced eye or even embarrassment. Those who take these commands seriously may be disdained for wanting to take us back to the days when wives were expected to be dutiful drones, bowing their necks to the yoke of their husband’s authority.
Paul’s culture and ours. Our culture is quite different from Paul’s. Today, slavery is outlawed; and most modern wives do not take for granted that they owe their husbands absolute, unquestioning obedience, as they did in the first century. Wives assume that they enter marriage as their husbands’ equals. A pastor testifies that when he plans the marriage ceremony with couples, many brides insist, “I don’t want anything in the vows about obeying my husband.”38 Paul does not tell wives to obey their husbands, but he usually gets blamed for it. His call for submission also receives a chorus of boos in a culture that glorifies individual rights.
The question for us is: Does Paul have anything relevant to say about family life for people living two millennia later with different social norms? How does it apply to the dual-career marriage, which has become the norm for most American families? Is Paul too out of date? Is his advice too culturally bound to the patriarchal ways of the first century to be useful today? Or does he convey God’s intentions for how humans should live together in families, which will always have relevance?
Lohse represents those commentators on Colossians who believe that the instructions in this section can be safely ignored:
They do not offer timelessly valid laws, nor do they endow a particular order with ageless dignity. As times change so does the general estimation of what is fitting and proper. Christian exhortation, however, must constantly impress on new generations the admonition to be obedient to the Kyrios. How this obedience is to be expressed concretely at any given time, will always have to be tested and determined anew.39
According to this view, these time-bound rules cannot be relocated to our dissimilar situation. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza goes even further, arguing that we can only preach on the household codes “critically in order to unmask them as texts promoting patriarchal violence.”40
Melick, on the other hand, represents those who find no problem with Paul’s words in these verses. He asks, “By what standard is the culture to be measured?” and concludes, “The end result is an authority [the Bible] which is no authority since at any place where the culture differs with express biblical commands the Bible will be perceived as secondary to culture.”41 He asks an important question: Is “cultural acceptability” an acceptable hermeneutical key?
Before we resolve these questions, we must first cross over to Paul’s side of the bridge to understand the cultural context in which he gave these rules. Culture in many ways is like water. We usually do not notice that the water we drink every day has any taste. Only when we travel somewhere else does it strike us that the water there tastes “funny.” When we get a taste of these commands on family living from a foreign culture two thousand years distant, our initial reaction may be that they taste funny or bad. We cannot fault Paul, however, for living in a different culture from ours, and we should appreciate how apt these instructions were in his context.
(1) Women did not usually receive any kind of formal education in Paul’s day except in the domestic arts. Consequently, they were forced to rely on their husbands for a wide range of things.42 In a culture where spouses are equally educated and have equal legal standing, however, things may be quite different.
(2) Patriarchal hierarchy was firmly entrenched. Ulpian’s Digest defined the family as follows: “In the strict legal sense we call a familia a number of people who are by birth or by law subjected to the potestas [power] of one man” (50, 16.195).43 It was the father’s legal duty to guard the welfare of those under his authority—his wife, children, and slaves—and it was their duty, in turn, to show him total obedience and deference.
Shelton points out that the Latin word most often used to express this family relationship is pietas, which referred to duty combined with affection: “A Roman was expected to be devoted and dutiful to his family, friends, fellow citizens, country, and gods.”44 In a more self-centered culture such as ours, the focus is more on my individual rights and what the rest of the family owes me. In Paul’s world, the question was framed differently: What is my duty to the family? The family was the main basis of economic production, and Paul gives a list of mutual obligations that each member had to shoulder to maintain its smooth functioning.
(3) In contrast to what we today call “the nuclear family,” the household in the ancient world consisted of the father, mother, and children, plus any foster children, slaves, unmarried relations, freedmen, or renters. Sometimes brothers with their families lived together under the same roof. We need to keep in mind “that Romans regarded with admiration the large household run on frugal lines by an inflexible paterfamilias.”45 Such a large group needed some kind of ordering lest it slip into anarchic chaos, and the universally accepted pattern was that all came under the authority of the father of the family (paterfamilias).
Paul had no intention of turning that world upside down.46 Instead, he focused on how to live within one’s cultural framework in obedience to Christ. If we read Scripture sympathetically, using a hermeneutic of trust as opposed to suspicion, we can see how Christ’s lordship subtly deconstructs the old habits of domination and exploitation. These instructions do not simply parrot the social conventions of the culture, they work creatively on them. The cultural norms are filtered through a Christian sieve, which both critiques and transforms them. On the other hand, if one reads Scripture with overt hostility or with a particular agenda, one is likely to reject or scoff at Paul’s counsel.
An apologetic aim? While we are on Paul’s side of the bridge, we should also remind ourselves how strange and threatening this new Christian faith would have seemed to his contemporaries. The Roman historian Tacitus maligned the Jews as a seditious source of trouble: “Those who converted to their ways follow the same practice, and the earliest lesson they receive is to despise the gods, to disown their country, and to regard their parents, children and brothers of little account.”47 The same charges were leveled against Christians. Tacitus accused them of a “hatred of the human race,” a charge based on the assumption that Christians forsook their familial and social obligations.48
Loyalty to Christ did create domestic problems for some married to unbelievers (see 1 Cor. 7:12–16). Christian wives, children (who continued under the authority of the father after they reached adulthood), and slaves would not consent to do certain things that went against their faith. Their religious scruples and their antagonists’ malicious gossip combined to give Christianity a sinister reputation for inflaming family tensions and wrecking homes.49
Today, we worry about the meltdown of the nuclear family as a sure sign of the decay of our civilization. It was no different in the first century, and people did not look with favor on anything they perceived as ripping the fabric of the family, which held society together. Insofar as the Christian movement was thought to disrupt the family, which Aristotle maintained was the basic unit and pattern for the whole political order, it boded ill for them and their message.50
Family life was also far more public in Bible times, particularly in the close quarters of the tenement building. Since everyone shared the same set of measures, everyone knew who were the “good” wives and the “good” husbands and who were the “bad” wives and “bad” husbands. A well-ordered household where love ruled was both a significant concern and a compelling witness.
Some have argued that Paul’s instructions on family life had an apologetic aim. If others did not perceive Christianity to be disruptive of society’s basic building block, they might be more willing to listen to the gospel.51 We find such an approach in Titus. Slaves are told “to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (Titus 2:9–10, italics added; see also 1 Peter 3:1–2). Irreproachable conduct became a missionary tool as Christians sought to persuade others by their behavior. Christians might worship exclusively a different Lord, but they did not incite insubordination, disloyalty, or disorder; and they did not upset family stability.
While an apologetic purpose may have been in the back of Paul’s mind, it certainly was not the key factor in these instructions.52 If there was any apologetic purpose, it was more likely directed against the asceticism and airy mysticism of the opponents (2:16–23). It will not do, therefore, to treat, and perhaps dismiss, these instructions as simply an apologetic attempt to show that Christianity was not a slippery slope that would cause the family to slide into chaos. Paul was not giving the Colossians tips on how to curb criticism but telling them what was fitting in Christ. Most important was his conviction that a harmonious, well-regulated household promised a harmonious, well-regulated church. As Lampe has pointed out: “The early church did not exist as an independent body beside the private households; it exclusively existed in them.”53 The church, founded on egalitarian ideals, needed some rules to guide relationships.54
In bridging contexts, we should be sensitive to contemporary impressions of how Christian faith affects family life. Opponents continue to vilify Christianity. Instead of accusing it today of sapping the foundations of family order with its egalitarianism, however, they accuse it of perpetuating the subjugation and ill-treatment of women. We should be careful not to interpret these texts so that it sounds like we are leading a march back to the gender caste system of the first century. We should also be careful not to dismiss or ignore the wisdom they contain that applies to relationships in any social pattern. These texts do not prescribe a hierarchy or endorse patriarchy or slavery, but they do prescribe attitudes that must govern a Christian’s relationships in the family.
How these instructions apply to us. These commands counter attitudes that create strife and alienation in relationships: the insubordination of wives and the bitterness of husbands, which lead to brutal mistreatment; the disobedience of children and the harsh discipline of parents; the malingering, hypocritical ways of slaves and the cruel injustice of masters. The principles underlying these instructions—submission, love, service, obedience, conscientious work, and fairness—transcend cultural limits and are applicable in any age.
(1) The instructions show a special concern for the weaker or powerless members of the pair: wives, children, and slaves. The rules cited do not simply reinforce the prerogatives of husbands, parents, and masters, for the stronger parties are given duties in addition to rights. In turn, those who are expected to submit or obey are given rights as well as duties. The commands therefore recognize that reciprocity exists, so that the entitlements are not all on one side and the obligations on the other. Schweizer observes that comparable instructions from other literature usually address only the male, adult, and free person. He comments, “The idea that women, children and slaves could also act in an ethically responsible way is scarcely considered. Indeed, the master is recommended to treat his slave well because it is in his own interests.”55
The gospel in which there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, male or female recognizes each individual as a full person and is concerned to protect each person’s rights, not to enforce his or her subordination. Wives are to be treated with love, children with understanding, and slaves as human beings deserving of justice in a time when slaves were not legally regarded as human. These commands also address wives, children, and slaves as responsible, moral beings, full members of the body of Christ. The commands acknowledge the authority of the husband, parent, and master; but those with power must exercise it with love, sensitivity, and justice, and must be willing to take the role of servant, just as Christ did.
(2) The motivation for the behavior becomes distinctively Christian. The text does not ground its advice in the created order, natural law, or reason, as if to say: “This is the way the world is; accept it and live in harmony with it.” Nor does it say that the husband is the natural ruler and the wife the natural subject.56 Paul bases his appeal not on the laws of nature but on “the law of the new nature: Christ releases you to be truly human, and you must now learn to express yourself according to the divine pattern, not in self-assertion but in self-giving.”57 These commands do not tell us how to order families but focus on the Christian motivation behind our family relationships—how we relate to others. Every member of a family, no matter the station, must allow Christ’s lordship to control his or her interpersonal relationships.
Paul has no intention of defying all the norms of first-century society in which Christians lived. He adapts the accepted pattern of households in the Mediterranean world of antiquity but transforms it by appealing to the Christian’s loyalty to Christ as Lord. The “Lord” (Gk. kyrios) appears seven times in this section: It is fitting in the Lord. Do what is pleasing in the Lord. Fear the Lord. Work as you were working for the Lord, not just human masters. The Lord shows no partiality and will render judgment and reward. Serve the Lord. Know that you have a Lord in heaven. The motivation behind each of Paul’s commands is charged with the phrase “in the Lord.” Christ’s lordship imposes itself on all aspects of our lives. Stern comments that the Lord becomes a third partner: “Like a magnet over iron fillings he orients things in the right direction.”58
Thus, what is fitting in the Lord is the hermeneutical key for bridging these instructions to our modern context. This phrase is not a pious platitude attached to the prevailing cultural pattern to bless the status quo. Putting our family relationships under the microscope of what is fitting in the Lord always challenges and renews them. Our model is how Christ submitted himself to God.59
Some reject such a positive, sympathetic reading of the text. Horrell, for example, argues that this section contains an implicit domination and exploitation ideology. It intends “to convince the dominated, the subordinate, that it is right and proper, or inevitable, or in everyone’s best interests for them to remain willingly and voluntarily in their place and to fulfill their duties.” He maintains that “ ‘everyone’s best interests’ may actually mean ‘in the ruling class’s interests.’ ”60 The ideology legitimates hierarchy, domination, and exploitation.
If one chooses to read the New Testament in this way, one is likely to reject the domestic codes entirely. But since our world, including families, needs some kind of ordering unless it breaks down into a free-for-all, what order will be substituted? The record of the modern family with its skyrocketing divorce statistics and the betrayal of vows, or the increasing avoidance of any vows at all, does not offer an attractive solution. Gilley cites the beginning of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which deals with adultery: “All happy families are more or less like one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.” He interprets it to mean that we can go wrong in all sorts of ways, “but there is only one way of going right.”61 Christians can only go right in their families when they are subject to Christ, when the family becomes a place where faith is lived and nurtured, and when each member submits to the lordship of Christ.
Human beings require institutions as well as some kind of order for the distribution of power among persons. The Christian doctrine of human fallenness reminds us that our sinfulness will corrupt any order and create disorder. C. S. Lewis writes: “Since the Fall no organization or way of life whatever has a natural tendency to go right.”62 Following these instructions in Colossians to the tee will not automatically make one holy or happy. The danger always lurks that they will be misused by the selfish who say: “Serving me is to serve Christ.” The next principle rules out this perversion.
(3) Domination of others is prohibited. We cannot eliminate the exercise of power from human relationships, nor can we eliminate the need for guidelines in relationships. The basic premise is that every Christian member of a family is equal as a recipient of God’s grace, which makes each a part of God’s family. But some have different roles and different power. Someone needs to take a leadership role as a necessary dike against complete turmoil. Others need to yield their freedom of choice to others. The power is given to them by the yielding parties, not taken from them. The freewheeling family where each does his or her own thing, refusing to give or assume power when necessary, will eventually fly apart.
The New Testament has definite views on how power is to be used. Each set of instructions addresses the use of power by the dominant partner and forbids any injustice, exploitation, or mistreatment. The controlling ethic of the gospel is that the greatest should become the servant of all, the one with the towel and basin who stoops to wash the feet of the others (Mark 10:42–45; John 13:1–17; 1 Cor. 9:19; Phil. 2:3–11). Paul served as a model of this service. In his dealing with the various house churches he founded across the empire, the apostle assumed the role of paterfamilias (1 Cor. 4:15; 1 Thess. 2:11), but he did not lord over them (2 Cor. 1:24). He also pictured his relationship to them as a mother (1 Cor. 3:2; Gal. 4:19), a wet nurse (1 Thess. 2:7), and a slave (2 Cor. 4:5).
Paul’s instructions do not appoint the husband as the overlord of his wife. Parents are not to domineer and crush their children’s spirits. Masters are not advised on how best to handle slaves to squeeze the most work out of them. The key is love, justice, and fairness. Ancient patriarchy had nothing to do with love or justice.
Anyone who reads the New Testament will quickly discover all that love entails. What it means to love your wives is explained more fully in Ephesians 5:25–33: Husbands are to imitate Christ’s sacrificial love. This kind of love does not love others because of the pleasure or utility they bring to us. Christ’s love was so deep that it cherished us when not a single one of us was worth it. His love was not some sentimental emotion; it was so great that he was willing to pay the supreme penalty to express his love by suffering a slave’s death, the unspeakable torture and humiliation of crucifixion. Love is a power that can penetrate the most impenetrable of hearts, but it is also powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. Love means caring more about the one you love than yourself. Love is never coercive and never seeks to wound, humiliate, or domineer.63
Contemporary Significance
THE BOOK OF Proverbs assumes that the household, not the temple, is “the primary place of moral formation and social duty.”64 The home becomes even more important as the center of Christian nurture and education when surrounding society becomes so wicked that it accepts and even promotes immorality. These texts are not about who gets the power and authority to run the family but affirm that the family is the primary context for faith formation and for living out one’s faith. How we live in our family says a great deal about our faith.
Paul’s advice in this section is rather sparse, which makes it clear that he has no intention of providing an advice manual on family relationships. He is affirming the family as the place where we first live out our newness as “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved” (3:12). In the previous section, he reeled off a list of virtues (3:12–15), but such virtues are empty talk unless they are lived out in the structures and relationships of everyday life.
New life begins in the home.65 Schweizer observes that Christian wisdom and instruction are not always put to the test in times of suffering, which requires a heroic response, but in the everyday situations of life—like in the home. “The real world is, according to our letter, first of all our husband or wife, our children or parents, our employees or chiefs. Only if and when we take this world seriously may we, perhaps, be called to serve our Lord on a greater scale.”66 One can do heroic battle in the public arena but lose the war in the privacy of the home.
The family is where, under the lordship of Christ, we learn to control our anger, rage, abusive language, and lying so that peace might reign. The family is where we first learn to work out the values of “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (3:12). There is no more difficult a place to exercise these virtues day in and day out than in the home. The new life enables submissiveness that puts others first, love that refuses to grow bitter, obedience, supportive and encouraging parenting, devotion to doing work well, and fairness and justice in our dealing with others.
Marriage. Most fairy tales end with the prince marrying the princess, and the stories always conclude with the words, “And they lived happily ever after.” After the hero has rescued the heroine, the marriage of the prince to the princess comes as an anticlimax. But that is not the Christian view of marriage. The wedding day with the bells and rice is not the arrival point that marks the end of the story; it is only the beginning. The wedding is the beginning of a lifelong adventure. It is a journey through uncharted seas, which explains why so many marriages today end with a shipwreck. We know the problems, but many today do not think that the Bible offers any help to solve them.
Paul’s counsel on the relations between husband and wife is interpreted by some to mean that the wife must knuckle under and do homage to her husband, who ascends some marital throne. This kind of relationship was lampooned on the legendary Archie Bunker television series. In one episode, Edith thought that she would experiment with fancier cuisine and fixed her husband a soufflé instead of his regular bacon and eggs. Needless to say, Archie turned up his nose at something he couldn’t pronounce and demanded his bacon and eggs. Daughter Gloria watched with disbelief as her mother dumped the soufflé in the garbage and scurried back and forth trying to appease her husband’s wrath. Gloria snarled indignantly: “Submitting to him … that’s what she is doing. Submitting to her ruler … her lord and master.” Archie responds, “Ain’t that a nice way of putting it?”
For ages the blustering, ill-mannered domination of males has been countered by the subtle manipulation of females. A Greek proverb has it that the husband may be the head, but the wife is the neck that decides which way the head will turn. Male jests about marriage over the centuries reveal an interesting point: Many feel it sentences them to a ball-and-chain existence, where they are ruled and regulated by their wives. Thus we might laugh at the student’s blooper that Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock. In the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a wife takes subtle revenge on her successful businessman husband for her own feelings of worthlessness. “She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent sounding phrase…. She was, in fact, a genius in planting in him an assurance of his inferiority.”67
Marriages fail when struggles for power between the couples get out of hand and one wants to dominate the other, whether by overt means or in more subtle ways. Commenting on Genesis 2:4b–3:24, Vogels writes: “What kills the relationship is the desire to possess, to keep, to hold, to dominate, or to crush the other.”68 The one who dominates with bellicose threats and the one who manipulates with domestic blackmail are motivated by self-interest, and both are wrong. They treat the marriage as if the goal was conquest of the other.
When Paul calls for submission, our “liberated” culture responds snippily: “How dare he tell anyone to submit to anyone.” Submission is out of style, though sinful human beings have always been resistant to it. The anthem today is: “Express yourself. Do not repress yourself.” Marriage bonds that were once thought to be irrevocable, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, have become limited, contingent, and temporary arrangements. Commitment to my personal welfare supersedes commitment to the welfare of others. The value placed on individual freedom and independence has become nonnegotiable; consequently, when a relationship becomes troublesome, it is scuttled. We do not want to yield control of our lives or our choices to others or to put ourselves at their disposal.
The problem is that when marriage partners get caught in the vortex of thinking, “My needs must be met first,” neither have their needs met. The result is divorce, particularly if we have bought into the modern marketing mantra that we should continually upgrade to new and improved versions. The incalculable damage to children and our family and community is considered less important than the pain in the relationship. We have become too devoted to ideas of self-assertion and self-fulfillment to appreciate the concept of servanthood and its very different joys. We may be afraid to trust our happiness to anyone else, so we keep our unconditional commitment to ourselves.
Burtchaell recalls an adaptation of the story of Pinocchio, the self-centered, wooden puppet who was given his growing nose to cure him of his egotism and to bring him to repentance. When that failed to work, he was taken on a tour of hell in hopes of shocking him into virtue. There he saw a ballet dancer and a carpenter so caught up in their dancing and their work that nothing Pinocchio did attracted their attention. “It was at this point that Pinocchio saw, in a flash, that in hell everyone is left to himself, to do only what he wants to do and to take no notice of anyone else.”69 Paul’s advice offers a way out of such a hell.
The instructions to wife and husband focus on how they are to live together responsibly, not on how they can get their needs fulfilled. In our context, “submission” might connote spineless acquiescence, cringing abasement, demeaning servility, and passive resignation. But Paul does not consign wives to servile bondage to their husbands or expect them to become doormats and compulsive pleasers, though this is how he has been misinterpreted for centuries.70 Submission is not submersion, losing our own personalities in another’s. Selflessness can be carried too far and can become detrimental. Submission can only be done with a healthy sense of self. Wall comments:
For example, if a wife sees herself as subservient to her husband, she will allow him to dominate and even abuse her. If, however, she views herself as Christ’s disciple and her husband’s equal in Christ, the understanding of submission will be changed: she will submit herself to her husband in the same way that Christ submitted himself to God…. Being made equal in Christ will radically alter the way two disciples relate to each other as husband and wife. The result will be the woman’s elevation within the Christian home and the end of her abuse there … , and this in turn will be a witness to a misogynistic world.71
The opposite of submission is not a craven spirit, but the belief that I and my perceived needs are more important than any others. It manifests itself in a variety of ways:
• a lack of consideration for the other
• indifference to the other’s needs
• haughtiness
• self-aggrandizement, using the other to get your own way
• living only in the present and promising no future commitment
Submission, on the other hand, is:
• committing one’s entire life and all its possibilities to another
• wanting the other person’s good (not just wanting the other person to meet my needs)
• being concerned for the ultimate well-being of another without trying to control that person or to win praise for such sacrifice
• accepting the demands of the relationship without bitterness and not tallying the labors and sacrifices to see when I have done enough
• accepting responsibility for another, accepting his or her problems as our problems
• listening to the other
Examples of such holy submission abound. When C. S. Lewis’s wife was dying from cancer, he was convinced that he had the power through Christian love to transfer to his own body his wife’s pain and made every effort to do so.72 The submission of the Samaritan to the needs of the mugged stranger lying helplessly beside the road best captures what submission means. The robbers acted on the principle that “what is thine is mine and I am going to take it.” The priest who passed by acted on the principle that “what is mine is mine and I am going to keep it.” The Samaritan acted on the principle that “what is mine is thine, and I am going to use it to restore your life.”
We live in a culture of violence, which has for too long silently tolerated abuses against women in the home, in the workplace, and through pornography. We must not allow this text to be misused to apply pressure on wives to put up with husbands who abuse them emotionally, sexually, or physically, or who abuse their children in any way. Wives are not called to accept mistreatment without complaint. They should be allowed to express anger and grief and may need to take tough stands to confront their husbands with the consequences of their abusive behavior—what is known today as “tough love.” Abusers need treatment; wives and children need protection. Such action may be the greatest sign of love. Wall asks:
Should a Christian wife continue to submit uncritically to her husband if it results in personal abuse (the vices of 3:5–9) rather than in spiritual maturity (the virtues of 3:12–15)? I think not. Should the measure of a husband’s love for his wife be whether her devotion to the Lord Christ is strengthened and God’s interests (rather than her husband’s) for her life achieved? I think so. In Christ God shows no favorites; God is for both husband and wife, and in equal measure.73
Today, we are also more conscious of spouse abuse, and we must recognize that Paul gives a general principle here and does not list possible exceptions. Modern society creates new and different pressures for marriage relationships. We should not neglect to address the stressors, such as unemployment, a high crime environment, financial pressures, and isolation, that can induce family abuse when we have the least resources within ourselves to resist it. William Aikman (1682–1731) wisely said:
Civilization varies with the family, and the family with civilization. Its highest and most complete realization is found where enlightened Christianity prevails; where woman is exalted to her true and lofty place as equal with the man; where husband and wife are one in honor, influence, and affection, and where children are a common bond of care and love.
Paul talks about fairness and justice in dealing with slaves. But fairness and justice apply to wives as well. The family is where children learn these things, and any mistreatment of the spouse undermines the discipline and moral nurture of the children.
The successful marriage is based on love. Since love is commanded, it is not simply a feeling. Romantic love may lead to marriage, but it does not sustain it for long. It is much easier to feel romantic love for someone when you do not live with them. The love that Paul commands husbands to have for their wives is something that can be willed. This kind of love is not a feeling but an action. It always puts the welfare of the wife and her needs first. It is never concerned with power or control.
Parental discipline. Sirach offers advice on parental discipline that differs considerably from Paul’s. He says the father who loves his son should whip him often (Sir. 30:1). He also tells us:
Bow down his neck in his youth,
and beat his sides while he is young. (Sir. 30:12)74
Sirach reflects the widespread assumption in the Mediterranean world that obedience does not arise naturally and can only be imparted through thrashings and stern discipline (Sir. 22:6; see Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:7–11). He thinks only in terms of how the pampered, spoiled child, who becomes willful and stubborn, will bring disgrace to his father (Sir. 22:3). The solution is to break the will of the son to prepare him for faithful obedience to a demanding God. Sirach has a spiritual counterpart in the English Puritan, Bartholomew Batty, who argued that God specially created the buttocks for children to receive just correction with stripes and blows without causing serious bodily injury.75
While Paul may have agreed with the accepted approach to discipline in his culture, he does not say so. Here he reflects the new insights we find in the New Testament, which appreciate the child’s point of view and feelings.76 The apostle worries more about the discouraged child, the one who is so bowed down that he or she is broken. He knows the danger that the one invested with the final word “in everything” may misuse that authority in destructive ways. His concern is not that children will grow up to disgrace the father by their disobedience, but that the father will hinder the nurturing of his children through discipline at all costs.
Constant criticism and reprimand can be as destructive as none at all and can destroy a child’s sense of worth. Beatings are counterproductive and tend only to teach children that physical violence is an appropriate means of handling conflict. It can also produce psychological damage.77 Shaming children almost guarantees that they will work out their anger in some kind of violence. Parents are to discipline their children in ways that will encourage and guide them into courageous and hopeful living. Parents must wrestle with trying to find the best way of doing this and adjust their approaches as the child grows in understanding and responsibility.
Wuthnow’s research on young people to see how they learn to care for others beyond their own families and friends led to some interesting conclusions.78 Caring is not something innate but learned, and we learn it in our family life from our parents and their everyday small acts of kindness—how they treat one another, their children, and others. These small acts show children that kindness is not something exceptional but a natural part of life. Youth associate their parents’ kindness with their personhood; that is just a part of who they are. In a world that is becoming increasingly indifferent and uncivil, parents need to inculcate in their children the spirit of kindness and compassion by setting good examples, beginning with the way they discipline their children.
The workplace. Paul’s counsel on slaves and masters has no contemporary significance in our culture, which now considers slavery to be intolerable. The relationship between employees and employers in democratic societies is so completely different from that of master and slave in the first century that we must exercise extreme caution in making any correlations. We cannot make a one-to-one correspondence, where slaves equal employees and masters equal employers. We must look elsewhere in the New Testament for help on such things, but there are certain principles in these instructions that apply in any setting, including the workplace. The statement in 3:17, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,” is the hermeneutical key for how this exhortation can be applied to our world.
(1) Many justify their dishonesty, their negligence, or their shoddy work because of perceived mistreatment by their employers. They assume that the injustice gives them a license to be dishonest or to use passive aggressive ways of striking back. One observer says that many people find their jobs futile, boring, and unproductive. When they are plagued by abusive bosses who weigh them down with ludicrous policies and incoherent strategies, they live only for the weekend. Throughout the work week they do as little as possible to get through.
A popular comic strip pillories the inanities of corporate America, draws the hair of the boss to make him look like a devil with horns, and refers to workers carrying their morale in thimbles. Its popularity suggests that many identify with this workplace malaise. Because the boss is a pompous idiot and the company policies unfair, burdensome, and ridiculous, the employees regularly seize every chance to become slack in their duties. The Christian ethic requires an altogether different approach to our assignments. If Christian slaves were expected to work heartily out of reverence for the Lord, every Christian, regardless of the circumstances, must do the same thing. The temptation may be to work only to attract attention or to get by with as little as possible. The Christian, by contrast, must give wholehearted service in the workplace in all circumstances, because our work is something done for the Lord. We work in the confidence that it will not be wasted but that it will be gathered up by God, who brings everything to its successful culmination.
(2) Those who find themselves in a position of control over others should always seek to preserve dignity, fairness, and respect and to avoid treating persons as disposable property. The common assumption that business is a battlefield in which competitors engage in warfare undermines this goal. Employers do not honor employees as persons but treat them merely as subordinates. Some managers use what one has called a “My Lai philosophy of management.” My Lai was a Vietnamese village that rogue American troops destroyed and whose inhabitants they massacred as part of the war effort to “save” Vietnam. Some managers, both secular and religious, believe they have to destroy a business or institution to save it. They do not seem to care about fairness or justice or what their strong arm tactics do to the lives of persons involved.
Those who are Christian, however, are held to different standards. Those whose management decisions affect the lives of others should not forget the biblical principle that the measure that you mete out to others will be the measure that you receive. Always trying to enhance the bottom line may lead one to cross the line of what is moral and just.
Original Meaning
Slaves and Masters (3:22–4:1)
THE COMMAND THAT slaves must obey their masters in everything is jarring to those who now consider the institution of slavery to be abhorrent. In the first century, however, it was an entrenched reality that the early Christians could neither change nor ignore. Paul does not sanctify slavery with these commands but subtly undermines its very premises while encouraging obedience as an expression of loyalty to the family group.23
(1) Paul addresses slaves as responsible human beings when most regarded slaves as little more than animated machines (see commentary on Philemon). One does not impose moral obligations on animals or farm implements. By assigning them moral duties, Paul treats them as morally responsible individuals. One of the things that slaves lacked was what Vincent calls “the first element of manhood—self respect.”24 By issuing them commands, he gives them a measure of respect: I am commanded; therefore, I am.
(2) Most took for granted that slaves were morally incapable of deciding to do good. They assumed slaves were helplessly controlled by their passions and steeped in villainy. Consequently, they needed to be handled as if they were witless children. But Paul treats Christian slaves as morally independent individuals fully capable of Christian virtue. God will not overlook their wrongdoing just because they are slaves who are supposedly not responsible for themselves.25 They are responsible for themselves. Being in the miserable condition of slavery and even being a victim of injustice does not excuse returning evil for evil, or even halfheartedness for evil.
(3) Crouch points out the contrasts with contemporary parallels that only advised masters on how best to handle slaves.26 Since Paul begins with commands to slaves and then addresses masters, he has no interest in how to help masters run their slaves more efficiently. He is concerned to enhance the mutual solidarity between slaves and masters.
The expectation that slaves would obey their masters conformed to the societal norms. “In everything,” however, complicates matters. A slave might not have a Christian master, and slaves were frequently helpless victims of what today we call sexual harassment and abuse.27 Paul’s command assumes that the master’s demands were reasonable and appropriate; but the question does arise, How does one serve two masters, one on earth, the other the Lord of heaven and earth? The following commands deal with behaviors that might arouse a master’s ire, but they also keep in full view the greater obligation to the Lord.
(1) Slaves are warned against “eye service” (lit. trans.; cf. Eph. 6:6). This phrase may refer to performing tasks only superficially and doing only what can be seen—“going through the motions” of service. It may also refer to doing something only to catch the master’s eye, that is, to please those in authority. Or it may refer to working only when one is being watched (“not only when their eye is on you,” NIV). Such performance deserves the fitness report: “Works well when under constant supervision.”
(2) Slaves are not to beguile their masters (“to win their favor,” lit., be “man-pleasing”). This command proscribes working with ulterior motives and keeps slaves from becoming hypocrites, fawning before their masters. Christians, no matter what their station in life, are always to give sincere, wholehearted service.
(3) Positively, slaves are to serve with “reverence for the Lord” (lit., “fearing the Lord”; see 2 Cor. 5:11; 7:1; 1 Peter 2:18). Paul transforms the motive of their service. If Christians are to do everything in the name of the Lord (3:17), then Christian slaves must work for their earthly master as for the Lord. The master is not a substitute for the Lord, but slaves are encouraged to work “as if” for the Lord. Their deference to their earthly masters is therefore elevated to obedience to Christ, whom they must obey and serve with all their hearts (see Deut. 6:5). The slave’s most humble task then becomes a high calling and brings benefit to God.28
The three commands to slaves are coupled with a promise of reward and with a warning. Slaves were more accustomed to hear the phrase “you will receive” in connection with some kind of punishment; Paul uses it with the promise of a reward, an inheritance.29 Slaves who had no legal standing and could not inherit according to this world’s laws are promised an inheritance from the Lord of the universe—the same hope that all Christians have (1:12).
Paul’s next comment to slaves is interpreted by the NIV as a statement, “It is the Lord Christ you are serving,” which basically repeats what has been said in 3:23. The verb can also be an imperative and the sentence punctuated as a command: “Serve the Lord Christ!”30 This alternative best explains the “for” (gar) that follows (omitted in NIV) and makes it parallel to the imperative “work” in 3:23. It reminds slaves who the true Master is, Christ, and leads into the warning in 3:25: “Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong”—a kind of measure for measure.31 The “anyone” may refer only to slaves or to both masters and slaves. Since masters are specifically addressed in 4:1, it is more likely that it refers to slaves. Just because society might consider slaves to be morally incompetent or slaves might consider themselves to be victims of oppression, it does not absolve them from any wrongdoing.
Comparing these instructions to the slaves in Colossians with the parallel in Ephesians 6:5–9 points up several differences. (1) In Colossians it is clearer that slaves are to fear the Lord, not their masters. (2) The reward they receive is the “inheritance from the Lord.” (3) The slave, not the master, is reminded that there is no favoritism with God. In Ephesians, by contrast, the matter of receiving a measure for a measure is phrased positively: “The Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free” (Eph. 6:8).
This phrasing may seem to make more sense to us. Why do slaves need to be warned that God shows no partiality? Knox argues that “slaves are not accustomed to expect favor or partiality. Surely it would appear more fitting to say to them, ‘The one who does good will receive his reward, and there will be no discrimination against you because you are slaves.’ ”32 Consequently, this statement might seem more appropriate as a warning to those in the superior status, the masters. Slaves, by contrast, need encouragement.
The differences, however, are best explained by the recent business involving Onesimus. The pronouncement makes clear that becoming a Christian does not nullify past wrongs against others; the wrongs must be paid back. In Onesimus’s case, Paul assumes the obligations owed to his master: “If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me” (Philem. 18). With these instructions, Paul may want to forestall any unrest among other slaves who might misinterpret the leniency shown to Onesimus. If Philemon yields to Paul’s request, it may appear that running away brings a reward. With the warning of verse 25, Paul dissuades any slave from trying to take advantage of a Christian master’s forbearance and willingness to forgive.33
The commands to masters is startling in the context of ancient slavery laws. Paul demands that slaves be treated “with what is right and fair” (4:1). Other humanitarians urged slave owners to be good masters and moderate in their punishment. Most pundits advised slave owners on how to get the most out of their slaves. Xenophon records a purported conversation of Socrates concerning how a master handles a slave “who brings no master any profit” and reflects the normal way slaves were treated.
Is it not the case that they control any inclinations toward lechery by starving them? And stop them from stealing by locking up the places from which they might take things? Prevent them from running away by putting them in chains? Force the laziness out of them with beatings?
Aristippos, his dialogue partner, agrees that as a master he inflicts every kind of punishment on his useless slaves to get them to serve properly.34
The hard work and devotion of the Christian slave should avert such punishment. But Paul specifically puts limits on the master’s dominance over his slaves. Aristotle had said that it was irrelevant to talk about justice in the master/slave relationship because there can be no injustice relating to things that are one’s own.35 Everyone took for granted that justice has nothing to do with how one treats one’s belongings. Paul makes bold to dissent and defends the rights of slaves, who had no legal rights: They should be accorded justice and fairness. That is, masters are not free to set their own standards on how to treat their slaves; rather, it must match what any would regard as “right and fair.” The word translated “fair” (isotes) is related to equality (see 2 Cor. 8:13) and suggests “even-handed, impartial treatment.”36
The theological dimension, “because you know that you also have a Master in heaven,” explains the Christian peculiarity. The cosmic perspective fills the whole letter, and masters in particular should remember that no one is exempt from accountability to the Master in heaven, regardless of one’s station in life. This implied threat punctures any presumption of superiority in the master/slave relationship (see 3:11). If masters are mindful that God has not dealt with them from a strict code of rightness and fairness but by grace, they will be more forgiving and gracious toward those under their charge (see 3:13!). The commands to masters and slaves attempt to minimize the most egregious evils of the system.
Bridging Contexts
CAIRD IDENTIFIES A key problem in bridging this material to our contemporary context:
The modern readers may feel a sense of disappointment that Paul’s lofty ethical principles should prove to be reducible to such humdrum instructions, and may find it hard to square this passage with the sweeping declaration that in Christ, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28).
We may feel particularly squeamish today about the demands placed on the so-called “weaker” parties in the pairs, the wives and the slaves. The rules strike many as not only antiquated but anti-Christian. Telling slaves to obey their masters upholds the interests of slave owners and seems to give an odious, oppressive institution divine sanction. Modern developments in women’s legal rights and in the relations between husbands and wives also make the call for the wife to submit to her husband sound outdated, if not outlandish.
Times have changed. Sir William Blackstone’s legal observation on marriage that “husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” is no longer presumed to be the case today.37 Many, already suspicious that Paul was a male chauvinist or perhaps even a misogynist, regard his advice on family with a jaundiced eye or even embarrassment. Those who take these commands seriously may be disdained for wanting to take us back to the days when wives were expected to be dutiful drones, bowing their necks to the yoke of their husband’s authority.
Paul’s culture and ours. Our culture is quite different from Paul’s. Today, slavery is outlawed; and most modern wives do not take for granted that they owe their husbands absolute, unquestioning obedience, as they did in the first century. Wives assume that they enter marriage as their husbands’ equals. A pastor testifies that when he plans the marriage ceremony with couples, many brides insist, “I don’t want anything in the vows about obeying my husband.”38 Paul does not tell wives to obey their husbands, but he usually gets blamed for it. His call for submission also receives a chorus of boos in a culture that glorifies individual rights.
The question for us is: Does Paul have anything relevant to say about family life for people living two millennia later with different social norms? How does it apply to the dual-career marriage, which has become the norm for most American families? Is Paul too out of date? Is his advice too culturally bound to the patriarchal ways of the first century to be useful today? Or does he convey God’s intentions for how humans should live together in families, which will always have relevance?
Lohse represents those commentators on Colossians who believe that the instructions in this section can be safely ignored:
They do not offer timelessly valid laws, nor do they endow a particular order with ageless dignity. As times change so does the general estimation of what is fitting and proper. Christian exhortation, however, must constantly impress on new generations the admonition to be obedient to the Kyrios. How this obedience is to be expressed concretely at any given time, will always have to be tested and determined anew.39
According to this view, these time-bound rules cannot be relocated to our dissimilar situation. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza goes even further, arguing that we can only preach on the household codes “critically in order to unmask them as texts promoting patriarchal violence.”40
Melick, on the other hand, represents those who find no problem with Paul’s words in these verses. He asks, “By what standard is the culture to be measured?” and concludes, “The end result is an authority [the Bible] which is no authority since at any place where the culture differs with express biblical commands the Bible will be perceived as secondary to culture.”41 He asks an important question: Is “cultural acceptability” an acceptable hermeneutical key?
Before we resolve these questions, we must first cross over to Paul’s side of the bridge to understand the cultural context in which he gave these rules. Culture in many ways is like water. We usually do not notice that the water we drink every day has any taste. Only when we travel somewhere else does it strike us that the water there tastes “funny.” When we get a taste of these commands on family living from a foreign culture two thousand years distant, our initial reaction may be that they taste funny or bad. We cannot fault Paul, however, for living in a different culture from ours, and we should appreciate how apt these instructions were in his context.
(1) Women did not usually receive any kind of formal education in Paul’s day except in the domestic arts. Consequently, they were forced to rely on their husbands for a wide range of things.42 In a culture where spouses are equally educated and have equal legal standing, however, things may be quite different.
(2) Patriarchal hierarchy was firmly entrenched. Ulpian’s Digest defined the family as follows: “In the strict legal sense we call a familia a number of people who are by birth or by law subjected to the potestas [power] of one man” (50, 16.195).43 It was the father’s legal duty to guard the welfare of those under his authority—his wife, children, and slaves—and it was their duty, in turn, to show him total obedience and deference.
Shelton points out that the Latin word most often used to express this family relationship is pietas, which referred to duty combined with affection: “A Roman was expected to be devoted and dutiful to his family, friends, fellow citizens, country, and gods.”44 In a more self-centered culture such as ours, the focus is more on my individual rights and what the rest of the family owes me. In Paul’s world, the question was framed differently: What is my duty to the family? The family was the main basis of economic production, and Paul gives a list of mutual obligations that each member had to shoulder to maintain its smooth functioning.
(3) In contrast to what we today call “the nuclear family,” the household in the ancient world consisted of the father, mother, and children, plus any foster children, slaves, unmarried relations, freedmen, or renters. Sometimes brothers with their families lived together under the same roof. We need to keep in mind “that Romans regarded with admiration the large household run on frugal lines by an inflexible paterfamilias.”45 Such a large group needed some kind of ordering lest it slip into anarchic chaos, and the universally accepted pattern was that all came under the authority of the father of the family (paterfamilias).
Paul had no intention of turning that world upside down.46 Instead, he focused on how to live within one’s cultural framework in obedience to Christ. If we read Scripture sympathetically, using a hermeneutic of trust as opposed to suspicion, we can see how Christ’s lordship subtly deconstructs the old habits of domination and exploitation. These instructions do not simply parrot the social conventions of the culture, they work creatively on them. The cultural norms are filtered through a Christian sieve, which both critiques and transforms them. On the other hand, if one reads Scripture with overt hostility or with a particular agenda, one is likely to reject or scoff at Paul’s counsel.
An apologetic aim? While we are on Paul’s side of the bridge, we should also remind ourselves how strange and threatening this new Christian faith would have seemed to his contemporaries. The Roman historian Tacitus maligned the Jews as a seditious source of trouble: “Those who converted to their ways follow the same practice, and the earliest lesson they receive is to despise the gods, to disown their country, and to regard their parents, children and brothers of little account.”47 The same charges were leveled against Christians. Tacitus accused them of a “hatred of the human race,” a charge based on the assumption that Christians forsook their familial and social obligations.48
Loyalty to Christ did create domestic problems for some married to unbelievers (see 1 Cor. 7:12–16). Christian wives, children (who continued under the authority of the father after they reached adulthood), and slaves would not consent to do certain things that went against their faith. Their religious scruples and their antagonists’ malicious gossip combined to give Christianity a sinister reputation for inflaming family tensions and wrecking homes.49
Today, we worry about the meltdown of the nuclear family as a sure sign of the decay of our civilization. It was no different in the first century, and people did not look with favor on anything they perceived as ripping the fabric of the family, which held society together. Insofar as the Christian movement was thought to disrupt the family, which Aristotle maintained was the basic unit and pattern for the whole political order, it boded ill for them and their message.50
Family life was also far more public in Bible times, particularly in the close quarters of the tenement building. Since everyone shared the same set of measures, everyone knew who were the “good” wives and the “good” husbands and who were the “bad” wives and “bad” husbands. A well-ordered household where love ruled was both a significant concern and a compelling witness.
Some have argued that Paul’s instructions on family life had an apologetic aim. If others did not perceive Christianity to be disruptive of society’s basic building block, they might be more willing to listen to the gospel.51 We find such an approach in Titus. Slaves are told “to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (Titus 2:9–10, italics added; see also 1 Peter 3:1–2). Irreproachable conduct became a missionary tool as Christians sought to persuade others by their behavior. Christians might worship exclusively a different Lord, but they did not incite insubordination, disloyalty, or disorder; and they did not upset family stability.
While an apologetic purpose may have been in the back of Paul’s mind, it certainly was not the key factor in these instructions.52 If there was any apologetic purpose, it was more likely directed against the asceticism and airy mysticism of the opponents (2:16–23). It will not do, therefore, to treat, and perhaps dismiss, these instructions as simply an apologetic attempt to show that Christianity was not a slippery slope that would cause the family to slide into chaos. Paul was not giving the Colossians tips on how to curb criticism but telling them what was fitting in Christ. Most important was his conviction that a harmonious, well-regulated household promised a harmonious, well-regulated church. As Lampe has pointed out: “The early church did not exist as an independent body beside the private households; it exclusively existed in them.”53 The church, founded on egalitarian ideals, needed some rules to guide relationships.54
In bridging contexts, we should be sensitive to contemporary impressions of how Christian faith affects family life. Opponents continue to vilify Christianity. Instead of accusing it today of sapping the foundations of family order with its egalitarianism, however, they accuse it of perpetuating the subjugation and ill-treatment of women. We should be careful not to interpret these texts so that it sounds like we are leading a march back to the gender caste system of the first century. We should also be careful not to dismiss or ignore the wisdom they contain that applies to relationships in any social pattern. These texts do not prescribe a hierarchy or endorse patriarchy or slavery, but they do prescribe attitudes that must govern a Christian’s relationships in the family.
How these instructions apply to us. These commands counter attitudes that create strife and alienation in relationships: the insubordination of wives and the bitterness of husbands, which lead to brutal mistreatment; the disobedience of children and the harsh discipline of parents; the malingering, hypocritical ways of slaves and the cruel injustice of masters. The principles underlying these instructions—submission, love, service, obedience, conscientious work, and fairness—transcend cultural limits and are applicable in any age.
(1) The instructions show a special concern for the weaker or powerless members of the pair: wives, children, and slaves. The rules cited do not simply reinforce the prerogatives of husbands, parents, and masters, for the stronger parties are given duties in addition to rights. In turn, those who are expected to submit or obey are given rights as well as duties. The commands therefore recognize that reciprocity exists, so that the entitlements are not all on one side and the obligations on the other. Schweizer observes that comparable instructions from other literature usually address only the male, adult, and free person. He comments, “The idea that women, children and slaves could also act in an ethically responsible way is scarcely considered. Indeed, the master is recommended to treat his slave well because it is in his own interests.”55
The gospel in which there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, male or female recognizes each individual as a full person and is concerned to protect each person’s rights, not to enforce his or her subordination. Wives are to be treated with love, children with understanding, and slaves as human beings deserving of justice in a time when slaves were not legally regarded as human. These commands also address wives, children, and slaves as responsible, moral beings, full members of the body of Christ. The commands acknowledge the authority of the husband, parent, and master; but those with power must exercise it with love, sensitivity, and justice, and must be willing to take the role of servant, just as Christ did.
(2) The motivation for the behavior becomes distinctively Christian. The text does not ground its advice in the created order, natural law, or reason, as if to say: “This is the way the world is; accept it and live in harmony with it.” Nor does it say that the husband is the natural ruler and the wife the natural subject.56 Paul bases his appeal not on the laws of nature but on “the law of the new nature: Christ releases you to be truly human, and you must now learn to express yourself according to the divine pattern, not in self-assertion but in self-giving.”57 These commands do not tell us how to order families but focus on the Christian motivation behind our family relationships—how we relate to others. Every member of a family, no matter the station, must allow Christ’s lordship to control his or her interpersonal relationships.
Paul has no intention of defying all the norms of first-century society in which Christians lived. He adapts the accepted pattern of households in the Mediterranean world of antiquity but transforms it by appealing to the Christian’s loyalty to Christ as Lord. The “Lord” (Gk. kyrios) appears seven times in this section: It is fitting in the Lord. Do what is pleasing in the Lord. Fear the Lord. Work as you were working for the Lord, not just human masters. The Lord shows no partiality and will render judgment and reward. Serve the Lord. Know that you have a Lord in heaven. The motivation behind each of Paul’s commands is charged with the phrase “in the Lord.” Christ’s lordship imposes itself on all aspects of our lives. Stern comments that the Lord becomes a third partner: “Like a magnet over iron fillings he orients things in the right direction.”58
Thus, what is fitting in the Lord is the hermeneutical key for bridging these instructions to our modern context. This phrase is not a pious platitude attached to the prevailing cultural pattern to bless the status quo. Putting our family relationships under the microscope of what is fitting in the Lord always challenges and renews them. Our model is how Christ submitted himself to God.59
Some reject such a positive, sympathetic reading of the text. Horrell, for example, argues that this section contains an implicit domination and exploitation ideology. It intends “to convince the dominated, the subordinate, that it is right and proper, or inevitable, or in everyone’s best interests for them to remain willingly and voluntarily in their place and to fulfill their duties.” He maintains that “ ‘everyone’s best interests’ may actually mean ‘in the ruling class’s interests.’ ”60 The ideology legitimates hierarchy, domination, and exploitation.
If one chooses to read the New Testament in this way, one is likely to reject the domestic codes entirely. But since our world, including families, needs some kind of ordering unless it breaks down into a free-for-all, what order will be substituted? The record of the modern family with its skyrocketing divorce statistics and the betrayal of vows, or the increasing avoidance of any vows at all, does not offer an attractive solution. Gilley cites the beginning of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which deals with adultery: “All happy families are more or less like one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.” He interprets it to mean that we can go wrong in all sorts of ways, “but there is only one way of going right.”61 Christians can only go right in their families when they are subject to Christ, when the family becomes a place where faith is lived and nurtured, and when each member submits to the lordship of Christ.
Human beings require institutions as well as some kind of order for the distribution of power among persons. The Christian doctrine of human fallenness reminds us that our sinfulness will corrupt any order and create disorder. C. S. Lewis writes: “Since the Fall no organization or way of life whatever has a natural tendency to go right.”62 Following these instructions in Colossians to the tee will not automatically make one holy or happy. The danger always lurks that they will be misused by the selfish who say: “Serving me is to serve Christ.” The next principle rules out this perversion.
(3) Domination of others is prohibited. We cannot eliminate the exercise of power from human relationships, nor can we eliminate the need for guidelines in relationships. The basic premise is that every Christian member of a family is equal as a recipient of God’s grace, which makes each a part of God’s family. But some have different roles and different power. Someone needs to take a leadership role as a necessary dike against complete turmoil. Others need to yield their freedom of choice to others. The power is given to them by the yielding parties, not taken from them. The freewheeling family where each does his or her own thing, refusing to give or assume power when necessary, will eventually fly apart.
The New Testament has definite views on how power is to be used. Each set of instructions addresses the use of power by the dominant partner and forbids any injustice, exploitation, or mistreatment. The controlling ethic of the gospel is that the greatest should become the servant of all, the one with the towel and basin who stoops to wash the feet of the others (Mark 10:42–45; John 13:1–17; 1 Cor. 9:19; Phil. 2:3–11). Paul served as a model of this service. In his dealing with the various house churches he founded across the empire, the apostle assumed the role of paterfamilias (1 Cor. 4:15; 1 Thess. 2:11), but he did not lord over them (2 Cor. 1:24). He also pictured his relationship to them as a mother (1 Cor. 3:2; Gal. 4:19), a wet nurse (1 Thess. 2:7), and a slave (2 Cor. 4:5).
Paul’s instructions do not appoint the husband as the overlord of his wife. Parents are not to domineer and crush their children’s spirits. Masters are not advised on how best to handle slaves to squeeze the most work out of them. The key is love, justice, and fairness. Ancient patriarchy had nothing to do with love or justice.
Anyone who reads the New Testament will quickly discover all that love entails. What it means to love your wives is explained more fully in Ephesians 5:25–33: Husbands are to imitate Christ’s sacrificial love. This kind of love does not love others because of the pleasure or utility they bring to us. Christ’s love was so deep that it cherished us when not a single one of us was worth it. His love was not some sentimental emotion; it was so great that he was willing to pay the supreme penalty to express his love by suffering a slave’s death, the unspeakable torture and humiliation of crucifixion. Love is a power that can penetrate the most impenetrable of hearts, but it is also powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. Love means caring more about the one you love than yourself. Love is never coercive and never seeks to wound, humiliate, or domineer.63
Contemporary Significance
THE BOOK OF Proverbs assumes that the household, not the temple, is “the primary place of moral formation and social duty.”64 The home becomes even more important as the center of Christian nurture and education when surrounding society becomes so wicked that it accepts and even promotes immorality. These texts are not about who gets the power and authority to run the family but affirm that the family is the primary context for faith formation and for living out one’s faith. How we live in our family says a great deal about our faith.
Paul’s advice in this section is rather sparse, which makes it clear that he has no intention of providing an advice manual on family relationships. He is affirming the family as the place where we first live out our newness as “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved” (3:12). In the previous section, he reeled off a list of virtues (3:12–15), but such virtues are empty talk unless they are lived out in the structures and relationships of everyday life.
New life begins in the home.65 Schweizer observes that Christian wisdom and instruction are not always put to the test in times of suffering, which requires a heroic response, but in the everyday situations of life—like in the home. “The real world is, according to our letter, first of all our husband or wife, our children or parents, our employees or chiefs. Only if and when we take this world seriously may we, perhaps, be called to serve our Lord on a greater scale.”66 One can do heroic battle in the public arena but lose the war in the privacy of the home.
The family is where, under the lordship of Christ, we learn to control our anger, rage, abusive language, and lying so that peace might reign. The family is where we first learn to work out the values of “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (3:12). There is no more difficult a place to exercise these virtues day in and day out than in the home. The new life enables submissiveness that puts others first, love that refuses to grow bitter, obedience, supportive and encouraging parenting, devotion to doing work well, and fairness and justice in our dealing with others.
Marriage. Most fairy tales end with the prince marrying the princess, and the stories always conclude with the words, “And they lived happily ever after.” After the hero has rescued the heroine, the marriage of the prince to the princess comes as an anticlimax. But that is not the Christian view of marriage. The wedding day with the bells and rice is not the arrival point that marks the end of the story; it is only the beginning. The wedding is the beginning of a lifelong adventure. It is a journey through uncharted seas, which explains why so many marriages today end with a shipwreck. We know the problems, but many today do not think that the Bible offers any help to solve them.
Paul’s counsel on the relations between husband and wife is interpreted by some to mean that the wife must knuckle under and do homage to her husband, who ascends some marital throne. This kind of relationship was lampooned on the legendary Archie Bunker television series. In one episode, Edith thought that she would experiment with fancier cuisine and fixed her husband a soufflé instead of his regular bacon and eggs. Needless to say, Archie turned up his nose at something he couldn’t pronounce and demanded his bacon and eggs. Daughter Gloria watched with disbelief as her mother dumped the soufflé in the garbage and scurried back and forth trying to appease her husband’s wrath. Gloria snarled indignantly: “Submitting to him … that’s what she is doing. Submitting to her ruler … her lord and master.” Archie responds, “Ain’t that a nice way of putting it?”
For ages the blustering, ill-mannered domination of males has been countered by the subtle manipulation of females. A Greek proverb has it that the husband may be the head, but the wife is the neck that decides which way the head will turn. Male jests about marriage over the centuries reveal an interesting point: Many feel it sentences them to a ball-and-chain existence, where they are ruled and regulated by their wives. Thus we might laugh at the student’s blooper that Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock. In the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a wife takes subtle revenge on her successful businessman husband for her own feelings of worthlessness. “She had a high art of deflating him, of enfeebling him, with one quick, innocent sounding phrase…. She was, in fact, a genius in planting in him an assurance of his inferiority.”67
Marriages fail when struggles for power between the couples get out of hand and one wants to dominate the other, whether by overt means or in more subtle ways. Commenting on Genesis 2:4b–3:24, Vogels writes: “What kills the relationship is the desire to possess, to keep, to hold, to dominate, or to crush the other.”68 The one who dominates with bellicose threats and the one who manipulates with domestic blackmail are motivated by self-interest, and both are wrong. They treat the marriage as if the goal was conquest of the other.
When Paul calls for submission, our “liberated” culture responds snippily: “How dare he tell anyone to submit to anyone.” Submission is out of style, though sinful human beings have always been resistant to it. The anthem today is: “Express yourself. Do not repress yourself.” Marriage bonds that were once thought to be irrevocable, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, have become limited, contingent, and temporary arrangements. Commitment to my personal welfare supersedes commitment to the welfare of others. The value placed on individual freedom and independence has become nonnegotiable; consequently, when a relationship becomes troublesome, it is scuttled. We do not want to yield control of our lives or our choices to others or to put ourselves at their disposal.
The problem is that when marriage partners get caught in the vortex of thinking, “My needs must be met first,” neither have their needs met. The result is divorce, particularly if we have bought into the modern marketing mantra that we should continually upgrade to new and improved versions. The incalculable damage to children and our family and community is considered less important than the pain in the relationship. We have become too devoted to ideas of self-assertion and self-fulfillment to appreciate the concept of servanthood and its very different joys. We may be afraid to trust our happiness to anyone else, so we keep our unconditional commitment to ourselves.
Burtchaell recalls an adaptation of the story of Pinocchio, the self-centered, wooden puppet who was given his growing nose to cure him of his egotism and to bring him to repentance. When that failed to work, he was taken on a tour of hell in hopes of shocking him into virtue. There he saw a ballet dancer and a carpenter so caught up in their dancing and their work that nothing Pinocchio did attracted their attention. “It was at this point that Pinocchio saw, in a flash, that in hell everyone is left to himself, to do only what he wants to do and to take no notice of anyone else.”69 Paul’s advice offers a way out of such a hell.
The instructions to wife and husband focus on how they are to live together responsibly, not on how they can get their needs fulfilled. In our context, “submission” might connote spineless acquiescence, cringing abasement, demeaning servility, and passive resignation. But Paul does not consign wives to servile bondage to their husbands or expect them to become doormats and compulsive pleasers, though this is how he has been misinterpreted for centuries.70 Submission is not submersion, losing our own personalities in another’s. Selflessness can be carried too far and can become detrimental. Submission can only be done with a healthy sense of self. Wall comments:
For example, if a wife sees herself as subservient to her husband, she will allow him to dominate and even abuse her. If, however, she views herself as Christ’s disciple and her husband’s equal in Christ, the understanding of submission will be changed: she will submit herself to her husband in the same way that Christ submitted himself to God…. Being made equal in Christ will radically alter the way two disciples relate to each other as husband and wife. The result will be the woman’s elevation within the Christian home and the end of her abuse there … , and this in turn will be a witness to a misogynistic world.71
The opposite of submission is not a craven spirit, but the belief that I and my perceived needs are more important than any others. It manifests itself in a variety of ways:
• a lack of consideration for the other
• indifference to the other’s needs
• haughtiness
• self-aggrandizement, using the other to get your own way
• living only in the present and promising no future commitment
Submission, on the other hand, is:
• committing one’s entire life and all its possibilities to another
• wanting the other person’s good (not just wanting the other person to meet my needs)
• being concerned for the ultimate well-being of another without trying to control that person or to win praise for such sacrifice
• accepting the demands of the relationship without bitterness and not tallying the labors and sacrifices to see when I have done enough
• accepting responsibility for another, accepting his or her problems as our problems
• listening to the other
Examples of such holy submission abound. When C. S. Lewis’s wife was dying from cancer, he was convinced that he had the power through Christian love to transfer to his own body his wife’s pain and made every effort to do so.72 The submission of the Samaritan to the needs of the mugged stranger lying helplessly beside the road best captures what submission means. The robbers acted on the principle that “what is thine is mine and I am going to take it.” The priest who passed by acted on the principle that “what is mine is mine and I am going to keep it.” The Samaritan acted on the principle that “what is mine is thine, and I am going to use it to restore your life.”
We live in a culture of violence, which has for too long silently tolerated abuses against women in the home, in the workplace, and through pornography. We must not allow this text to be misused to apply pressure on wives to put up with husbands who abuse them emotionally, sexually, or physically, or who abuse their children in any way. Wives are not called to accept mistreatment without complaint. They should be allowed to express anger and grief and may need to take tough stands to confront their husbands with the consequences of their abusive behavior—what is known today as “tough love.” Abusers need treatment; wives and children need protection. Such action may be the greatest sign of love. Wall asks:
Should a Christian wife continue to submit uncritically to her husband if it results in personal abuse (the vices of 3:5–9) rather than in spiritual maturity (the virtues of 3:12–15)? I think not. Should the measure of a husband’s love for his wife be whether her devotion to the Lord Christ is strengthened and God’s interests (rather than her husband’s) for her life achieved? I think so. In Christ God shows no favorites; God is for both husband and wife, and in equal measure.73
Today, we are also more conscious of spouse abuse, and we must recognize that Paul gives a general principle here and does not list possible exceptions. Modern society creates new and different pressures for marriage relationships. We should not neglect to address the stressors, such as unemployment, a high crime environment, financial pressures, and isolation, that can induce family abuse when we have the least resources within ourselves to resist it. William Aikman (1682–1731) wisely said:
Civilization varies with the family, and the family with civilization. Its highest and most complete realization is found where enlightened Christianity prevails; where woman is exalted to her true and lofty place as equal with the man; where husband and wife are one in honor, influence, and affection, and where children are a common bond of care and love.
Paul talks about fairness and justice in dealing with slaves. But fairness and justice apply to wives as well. The family is where children learn these things, and any mistreatment of the spouse undermines the discipline and moral nurture of the children.
The successful marriage is based on love. Since love is commanded, it is not simply a feeling. Romantic love may lead to marriage, but it does not sustain it for long. It is much easier to feel romantic love for someone when you do not live with them. The love that Paul commands husbands to have for their wives is something that can be willed. This kind of love is not a feeling but an action. It always puts the welfare of the wife and her needs first. It is never concerned with power or control.
Parental discipline. Sirach offers advice on parental discipline that differs considerably from Paul’s. He says the father who loves his son should whip him often (Sir. 30:1). He also tells us:
Bow down his neck in his youth,
and beat his sides while he is young. (Sir. 30:12)74
Sirach reflects the widespread assumption in the Mediterranean world that obedience does not arise naturally and can only be imparted through thrashings and stern discipline (Sir. 22:6; see Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:7–11). He thinks only in terms of how the pampered, spoiled child, who becomes willful and stubborn, will bring disgrace to his father (Sir. 22:3). The solution is to break the will of the son to prepare him for faithful obedience to a demanding God. Sirach has a spiritual counterpart in the English Puritan, Bartholomew Batty, who argued that God specially created the buttocks for children to receive just correction with stripes and blows without causing serious bodily injury.75
While Paul may have agreed with the accepted approach to discipline in his culture, he does not say so. Here he reflects the new insights we find in the New Testament, which appreciate the child’s point of view and feelings.76 The apostle worries more about the discouraged child, the one who is so bowed down that he or she is broken. He knows the danger that the one invested with the final word “in everything” may misuse that authority in destructive ways. His concern is not that children will grow up to disgrace the father by their disobedience, but that the father will hinder the nurturing of his children through discipline at all costs.
Constant criticism and reprimand can be as destructive as none at all and can destroy a child’s sense of worth. Beatings are counterproductive and tend only to teach children that physical violence is an appropriate means of handling conflict. It can also produce psychological damage.77 Shaming children almost guarantees that they will work out their anger in some kind of violence. Parents are to discipline their children in ways that will encourage and guide them into courageous and hopeful living. Parents must wrestle with trying to find the best way of doing this and adjust their approaches as the child grows in understanding and responsibility.
Wuthnow’s research on young people to see how they learn to care for others beyond their own families and friends led to some interesting conclusions.78 Caring is not something innate but learned, and we learn it in our family life from our parents and their everyday small acts of kindness—how they treat one another, their children, and others. These small acts show children that kindness is not something exceptional but a natural part of life. Youth associate their parents’ kindness with their personhood; that is just a part of who they are. In a world that is becoming increasingly indifferent and uncivil, parents need to inculcate in their children the spirit of kindness and compassion by setting good examples, beginning with the way they discipline their children.
The workplace. Paul’s counsel on slaves and masters has no contemporary significance in our culture, which now considers slavery to be intolerable. The relationship between employees and employers in democratic societies is so completely different from that of master and slave in the first century that we must exercise extreme caution in making any correlations. We cannot make a one-to-one correspondence, where slaves equal employees and masters equal employers. We must look elsewhere in the New Testament for help on such things, but there are certain principles in these instructions that apply in any setting, including the workplace. The statement in 3:17, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,” is the hermeneutical key for how this exhortation can be applied to our world.
(1) Many justify their dishonesty, their negligence, or their shoddy work because of perceived mistreatment by their employers. They assume that the injustice gives them a license to be dishonest or to use passive aggressive ways of striking back. One observer says that many people find their jobs futile, boring, and unproductive. When they are plagued by abusive bosses who weigh them down with ludicrous policies and incoherent strategies, they live only for the weekend. Throughout the work week they do as little as possible to get through.
A popular comic strip pillories the inanities of corporate America, draws the hair of the boss to make him look like a devil with horns, and refers to workers carrying their morale in thimbles. Its popularity suggests that many identify with this workplace malaise. Because the boss is a pompous idiot and the company policies unfair, burdensome, and ridiculous, the employees regularly seize every chance to become slack in their duties. The Christian ethic requires an altogether different approach to our assignments. If Christian slaves were expected to work heartily out of reverence for the Lord, every Christian, regardless of the circumstances, must do the same thing. The temptation may be to work only to attract attention or to get by with as little as possible. The Christian, by contrast, must give wholehearted service in the workplace in all circumstances, because our work is something done for the Lord. We work in the confidence that it will not be wasted but that it will be gathered up by God, who brings everything to its successful culmination.
(2) Those who find themselves in a position of control over others should always seek to preserve dignity, fairness, and respect and to avoid treating persons as disposable property. The common assumption that business is a battlefield in which competitors engage in warfare undermines this goal. Employers do not honor employees as persons but treat them merely as subordinates. Some managers use what one has called a “My Lai philosophy of management.” My Lai was a Vietnamese village that rogue American troops destroyed and whose inhabitants they massacred as part of the war effort to “save” Vietnam. Some managers, both secular and religious, believe they have to destroy a business or institution to save it. They do not seem to care about fairness or justice or what their strong arm tactics do to the lives of persons involved.
Those who are Christian, however, are held to different standards. Those whose management decisions affect the lives of others should not forget the biblical principle that the measure that you mete out to others will be the measure that you receive. Always trying to enhance the bottom line may lead one to cross the line of what is moral and just.