Wives Do What?

by Rachel Fay

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Anyone who picked up a newspaper or gave his attention to a radio or television last summer will recall that the Southern Baptist Convention received more attention than it probably wanted. The convention adopted a position on the family that included a statement to the effect that the biblical injunction "Wives, obey your husbands" (Eph. 5:22) actually meant that wives should obey their husbands. Predictably, the media—and even much of the Christian community—zeroed-in on that phrase and condemned it out of hand. They didn't bother to ask a very basic question: Are the Baptists right?

Before we can presume to answer that question, it is necessary to know what the Southern Baptist Convention actually said. This isn't hard to do; the document that caused such a fuss can be downloaded from the Internet (www.sbcnet.org), and it is quite brief. Stripped of procedural notes and the seven lines of Bible references at the end, article 18 of the "Baptist Faith and Message" contains 272 words divided into four straightforward paragraphs.

The first paragraph defines the family. The second states that marriage is a revelation of the union between Christ and his church, is the means for procreation, and is life-long. Particularly stressed is the equality of the partners: "The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the church."

All of what the Baptists say so far is in concert with Catholic teaching. Really, among church-goers of any stripe, little of it would cause controversy. Across the theological spectrum, the unanimity of opinion on the virtue of husbands loving their wives is widely evident. Indeed, in all denominations, whenever the famous verses of Ephesians 5:22 and 1 Peter 3:1 are read (if they are), the sermons that follow are almost always on how husbands should love their wives, to the exclusion of everything else the passages say.

The next sentence the Baptists offer is where many begin to get uncomfortable: "[The husband] has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family." Some, but certainly not all, of the resulting discomfort is due to the common failure of Americans to distinguish between leadership and tyranny. Still more results from the equally serious failure to understand that Christianity forbids the latter.

After this misunderstood sentence comes the source of all the fuss: "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation."

The Baptists clearly say men and women are equal and that women are not less important to God. They backed up their entire proclamation with a crushing load of Biblical references. Still, the general public rejected the notion that married women have obligations to their families, and that among these might be submitting their wills to someone else's.

The condemnation was not surprising, as secularized and as used to feminist rhetoric as we have become. But it is distressing that a large segment of the Christian community reacted the same way, for all Christians, men and women, are called to be submissive to Christ legitimate authority. Detractors of the Southern Baptist Convention offered little objective research and less reasoned argument (as opposed to unreasoned assertion), yet they refused to consider the possibility that a husband might represent legitimate authority to his wife. But unless Paul, Peter, and Peter's successors have been speaking and teaching in error for two thousand years, the Baptists—in this instance at least—are right.

For Christians, Peter and Paul codified the authority of husbands. But these men did not come up with the idea themselves, nor did they write out of misogyny or first-century prejudice. Rather, they wrote from a thorough understanding of God's plan for the family, a plan that can be seen in the very first marriage.

In Genesis, Adam calls the helper God has made for him "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh" (Gen 2:23), for he knows she is equally beloved of God and, like Adam himself, made in God's image. But when Adam and Eve sin (by disobedience, lest that point be overlooked), it is Adam who comes in for the greater condemnation. Not only did he eat of the forbidden fruit, he also let his wife lead him, something which God finds very displeasing: "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree . . ." (Gen. 3:17). His punishment, and ours, too, is toil and death.

Then God turns his attention to Eve. Her distress in child-bearing is increased, and then God adds: "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you" (Gen 3:16). God, it appears, is a good deal less tactful than the Southern Baptists; they at least talk about "graceful" submission.

Eve is not alone in the category of disobedient Old Testament wives. Samson's two wives, Gomer, Lot's wife, Rebecca, and Michal, among others, brought grief to themselves or to those around them. But in the Old Testament there are many wives of the other sort, too. Peter recalls some of them in the course of his instruction to contemporaneous married women: "Rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God's sight. It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord" (1 Pet. 3:4-6).

When Peter, the first pope, and Paul, the greatest missionary, wrote "Wives, obey your husbands," neither was promulgating anything new. They simply reminded wives—and husbands and children too—what their duties and responsibilities were as members of Christian families. The apostles had good reason to do this. There was a tendency among some early Christians to confuse the freedom bought through Christ's sacrifice with license to do as they pleased: "For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence" (Gal. 5:13). God's plan for Christian marriage has not changed between the first century and ours. Therefore, Christians must ask when and by whose authority was the direction of the first pope countermanded?

The answer, of course, is that it has not been. Pope Leo XIII minced no words on the subject in his encyclical Christian Marriage: "The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman; but because she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, let her be subject and obedient to the man, not as a servant but as a companion, so that nothing be lacking of honor or of dignity in the obedience which she pays."

In 1930 (the same year Protestantism parted company with Rome on the issue of contraception), Pope Pius XI gently reaffirmed what his predecessor had bluntly said: "There should flourish in [domestic society] that 'order of love,' as St. Augustine calls it. This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commands" (Casti Connubii).

In his encyclical Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II repeated the principle: "In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: he will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother" (FC 25).

Though Peter and his successors have been consistent, those who dislike "patriarchy"—and such persons are not always women—resist mightily. Genesis, they argue, was shot through with Bronze-Age chauvinism. Paul was a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist whose animus got the better of him. Peter's authority is ignored. But even if one embraces these faulty arguments, he must still deal with how Christ—true God and true man, founder of the Church, someone who respected women and included them in many aspects of his ministry—treated the subject.

Christ made his teaching on marriage clear. He rebuked and corrected those who considered divorce allowable. He attended the wedding at Cana with dramatic results, rescued and absolved the woman taken in adultery, and let the woman at the well understand that he knew the man she lived with was not her husband. By these actions he made marriage indissoluble, prefigured the wedding Mass, and told spouses to forgive each other even the most heinous sins against marriage.

To the people of his time, who lived in a Roman culture where divorce was rampant, these precepts must have been astounding. But as any Sunday school child knows (or should know), not all of Jesus' teachings were given in the form of verbal pronouncements. Many were given by example.

Jesus loved women. He befriended many, and when he rose from the dead, he chose three women to be the first witnesses and messengers of his resurrection. Yet despite these departures from first-century customs, Jesus had a clear idea of how the family should be ordered, and he followed the rules for the governance of the family that God promulgated with Adam and Eve, that Peter would affirm, and that later popes would reaffirm.

The Gospel of Matthew shows that the family into which Jesus was born was headed not by the immaculately conceived Mary, nor by her divine son, but by Joseph. Obedient to the civil authorities (another Christian teaching), Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem at a most inconvenient time. Later, when it was necessary to fly to safety in Egypt, direction was again given to Joseph.

The boy Jesus seems to have been a model child, one who obeyed his parents as Peter and Paul would instruct Christian children to do sixty or seventy years later: "Then he went down with [Mary and Joseph] and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them" (Luke 2:51). Years later at the wedding at Cana, though he no longer lived in his mother's house, he acceded to her request to solve the problem of the wine, though the account makes it clear he would have preferred not to. And when he died, he entrusted Mary to the care of John, as a good only son should. John, showing a greater grasp of the concept of obedience than is commonly found, did as he was told.

The Old and New Testaments, the first pope, and three more of the last hundred years are behind the politically incorrect Protestants of the Southern Baptist Convention. Unfortunately, the accuracy with which the leaders of the largest sect of American Baptists speak on family life does not stop them from being vilified.

Yet the same popes whom critics of the Baptists ignore or publicly disagree with would provide some comfort to their detractors. For as anyone who has sat through a homily on Ephesians 5 knows, both Peter and Paul were adamant that husbands meet their heavy responsibilities and that they love their wives.

Recent popes are no less vehement on the subject. Quoting Ambrose, John Paul II writes: "Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: 'You are not her master...but her husband; she was not given you to be your slave, but your wife. . . . Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love."' (FC 25). Pius XI stressed even more than John Paul the intrinsic equality of men and women: "This subjection [to her husband] does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband's every request if not in harmony with right reason or the dignity due to wife, nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors. . . ." (CC). So much for not letting women vote, own property, or enter into contracts.

It should not be thought that Pius XI and John Paul II are myopic naifs who had no idea of what life is really like. They understand that all too many wives do not have the kind of husbands Peter wanted for them. "If the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family" (CC). But the fact that some women are prevented from living their proper roles does not mean all married women are dispensed from obedience, as Pius XI makes clear in the next line of his encyclical: "But the structure of the family and its fundamental law, established and confirmed by God, must always and everywhere be maintained intact" (CC).

The reason for this is that authority in marriage and male/female equality are separate issues. John Paul II insisted on this point: "In creating the human race 'male and female' God gives man and woman an equal personal dignity, endowing them with the inalienable rights and responsibilities proper to the human person. . . . But clearly, all of this does not mean for women a renunciation of their femininity or an imitation of the male role" (FC 22-23). It is bad enough that the issues of authority and equality are confused, but an incorrect broadening of the concept and nature of obedience worsens the current epidemic of defiance. All persons, male and female, are subject to legitimate authority (government, law, teachers, employers), but apart from these, the only person a wife has to obey is her husband.

Therefore, while wives are subject to their own husbands, women are not subject to men. It is a crucial distinction. Further, while obedience to parents is an obligation ordained at birth, once a woman is of age, obedience to another is optional. A woman who finds the duty of obedience too distasteful to contemplate can avoid it altogether by making the legitimate choice not to marry. The single life is a legitimate choice for a Christian, and a single woman is a free agent.

The woman who chooses to marry, however, takes on the duty of obedience. The reason for this is that sacramental marriage is a symbol of Christ's union with the Church, and in that most sacred union, the partners are not equal in authority any more than they are equal in the amounts of love they can and do give. Pius XI wrote: "For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love" (CC). Leo XIII put it this way: "Let divine charity be the constant guide of their mutual relations, both in him who rules and her who obeys, since each bears the image, the one of Christ, the other of the Church" (Christian Marriage).

Christ the bridegroom is the head of the Church, and the Church must be obedient to him who died for her. But if she is not, the bridegroom will not "put her away," for the marriage of Christ with his Church can never be broken. Also, since Christian marriage is like the divine, husbands must never be vindictive or abusive to their wives. The model for their behavior is found in the Song of Solomon, something they would do well to remember.

As last summer's hue and cry over the Southern Baptist Convention's action demonstrates, there are a great many people of both sexes who would like to excise from the Bible, "Wives obey your husbands," who wish to disregard Peter and his successors. But as with all acts of rebellion against God, the consequences of such efforts are not borne solely by the dissenters. Just as all humanity suffered for Adam and Eve's sin, so does everyone pay for this latter day example of disobedience.

Family members hurt each other in many different ways, and conflict tears the fabric of relationships. Children take their cues from their mothers and become rebellious to authority, including maternal authority. Futility and discord abound, love dies, and divorce and bitterness take its place.

Even if some women manage to escape these consequences, women as a group become less respected. In Casti Connubii, Pius XI wrote: "False liberty and unnatural equality [in authority] with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as among the pagans the mere instrument of man." Riding the wake of filth, violence, debasement, and rank misogyny of modern times, few objective persons would suggest the today's women enjoy greater respect than their grandmothers did.

It is tragic to see the prediction of Pius XI come true, to see what supposedly emancipated women—with considerable help from some men—have wrought for womankind. Even sadder and altogether scarier is that, while the defiance of wives is directly contrary to the Church's teaching, the revolt has been endorsed or, worse yet, cultivated by many inside Christianity. Last summer, many Christian publications—not a few Catholic ones among them—could not move fast enough to condemn the Southern Baptist Convention for its "backward thinking."

In an irony that can hardly escape Catholics, the Convention itself lost many individual members and some congregations because it declared that what the first pope had written was still true. But pride was the first sin, and—as the battle cry of "individual rights" shows few signs of abating—it looks like it may well be the last, too.

• Rachel Fay is the author of "That Celibate Bachelor Was Right!" in the April 1998 issue of This Rock. She writes from Mary Esther, Florida.

© This Rock, Catholic Answers, P.O. Box 17490, San Diego, CA 92177, (619) 541-1131.

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