Ephesians 5:22
“Wives, submit to your husbands…”

Where It’s Often Cited: rhetoric around refusal to ordain women; fundamentalist premarital counseling, marriage retreats and/or women’s retreats, weddings, etc. In fact, a friend of mine once insisted I use this passage at his wedding, and his wife only okayed it because she trusted me to explain the following…

Original Context:
While this passage often gets used to demand modern women be subservient to men (no matter how abusive), it’s unlikely this was Paul’s intent, and it’s not even the context of the passage around it!

First of all, if Paul himself even wrote these words —which is uncertain—, keep in mind Paul was writing this nearly two millennia before women’s suffrage, feminism, the sexual revolution, marriage equality, and so on. Paul wrote for the people of his day who had a very different understanding of marriage, but even in this very different era, Paul still relied on female sponsors (Lydia), female deacons (Phoebe), a female apostle (Junia), and maybe even a female presbyter (Priscilla). The women in Paul’s circle held significant power, so there’s much more to Paul’s complicated relationship with women than this verse alone reveals. Whole books have been written on these sorts of inconsistencies and the question of where Paul would stand today. We’re barely scratching the surface here, so rather than try to sum up the more in-depth arguments of others, let’s take a look at the passage itself. After all, this whole series is about context.

Merely one verse earlier, Paul provides an important thesis to this whole section: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21, NIV with my emphasis) The point of the passage as a whole is for people to have open and obedient hearts toward one another regardless of gender. Paul goes on to elaborate on the roles of wives and husbands —again, remember he’s talking about how marriages looked two thousand years ago, and his tone is descriptive, not proscriptive—, but the whole passage only works under the umbrella theme of mutual submission and respect, not just one way. The point of these verses is not that wives should submit to husbands; the point is that all people should honor one another through mutual love and respect— the kind of love and respect Christ has for us.

That’s the context of Ephesians 5:22.