Christ, the church and Christian marriage

September 1, 2011 By

A few weeks ago, there was a bit of a brouhaha over Byron York’s question to Rep. Michele Bachmann at a Republican debate in Iowa. She’d previously made a comment about her interpretation of what it means to be a submissive wife. He asked her about it. The crowd booed. The media began writing up stories about submission. None of them terribly good.

But Bob Smietana over at The Tennessean had a piece on different ideas about gender roles. Mostly it looked at “complementarianism,” the idea that men and women are equal but have different roles that complement each other. And unlike a lot of those other pieces, it’s a good and worthwhile read.

At the beginning, readers are introduced to the Roses, a couple that explains how this works in their marriage:

Scripture doesn’t give husbands a right to be jerks, said the Rev. Jeremy Rose, pastor of the Axis Church in Nashville. And it doesn’t mean women have to do whatever their husbands say.

Instead, Rose said, men are supposed to love their wives and put their wives’ needs first when making decisions.

“If you quote that verse to your wife, you are not in a good place,” said Rose, 32.

If the Roses disagree, it’s Jeremy’s view that prevails, although he said he breaks the news as gently as possible.

He believes that men are in charge in the church and in their homes, a view known as complementarianism. It often appeals to younger men like Rose, teaching them to grow up and be better husbands and fathers.

And he’d be fine with a woman president. So would his wife, Jill Rose, 31. She thinks that most people don’t understand what the Christian idea of submission means.

“Men and women are created equally,” she said. “People have this stigma of the male chauvinist domineering over the wife, and that’s not what the biblical perspective is at all.”

Instead, Jill Rose said, the Bible passage about submission is about trust and respect, something that was missing in the early days of the Roses’ marriage. Jeremy Rose spent most of his time at work or out hunting, playing sports and hanging with his friends. His wife drove herself to the hospital to deliver their second child while he wrapped up a softball game.

“It was a very low point,” she said.

Things changed after Jeremy Rose took a class at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. The class focused on an often-overlooked part of the Ephesians passage. Women are to submit, according to the passage, while men are to love their wives in sacrificial ways.

As someone who is part of a couple that attempts to have a Christian marriage, I was pleasantly shocked to read this. It’s my experience that the male role of sacrifice for his wife is infinitely more difficult than the female role of submission. But frequently the male role — though so important — isn’t even mentioned in stories about this.

The article goes on to explain how this point is lost on many people and how a Christian marriage is about each spouse attending to each other’s needs. There’s a bit of a discussion about how much responsibility men in Christian marriages have, being held accountable for when things go wrong. Again, these are things that are typically not mentioned in stories.

The article includes various perspectives on gender roles, including some who hew to a rather strict interpretation of submission and leadership and some who reject it outright. I didn’t quite understand either of these group’s arguments, but space is tight in these stories.

The one thing I thought intriguing was what wasn’t mentioned in the story: Jesus Christ and the church. There is a reference to a part of a Bible verse that instructs wives to submit to husbands as to the Lord. But the passages about the roles of men and women in marriage are almost impossible to understand without understanding their relationship to what traditional Christianity teaches about Christ and the church.

It’s so much a mystery that this is the word used to describe it — a great mystery.

The book of Ephesians tells us that marriage is an image of Christ and the church. After telling all Christians to give thanks always to God for all things and to submit to one another in the fear of God, wives and husbands are given particular roles. The image used is how Christ loves the church and how the church receives that love from Christ. Men are to sacrifice as Christ sacrificed for the church (which, you might recall includes his own death by crucifixion) and wives are to submit as the church submits to Christ.

Now, after the Bachmann thing happened, and I wrote that I aim to be a submissive wife, I had a few radio and television producers contact me asking me to go on air to discuss this. When you’re contacted by producers, they pre-interview you to see if you’d be good for a given show. The pre-interview is particularly important for the television shows.

What was hilarious was when people asked me to explain why I believe in this understanding of marriage, and I began explaining this passage from Ephesians and about Christ and the church, they basically didn’t want to talk any more. I’m not blaming them but just pointing out how incredibly difficult it is to explain even basic (but mysterious) church teachings. And certainly many television shows no longer know how to discuss religion in any meaningful way. It made me long for a television show like the Phil Donahue Show I watched growing up where opposing sides got the time to actually explain their beliefs in longer than 23-second soundbites that were repeated — via shouting — three times in segment.

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Filed Under: Baptists, Evangelicals, First Person, Journalism, Marriage & family
  • Kris D

    I thought this was a well written article, but in checking the comments on the website, many people are not going to let facts on biblical literacy get in the way of their own preconceived notions.

  • Dale

    Amy-Jill Levine is a great source for giving an accurate outsider’s view of Christian doctrine. I’m glad Bob used her as a source; I only wish that the story included more of her background so that readers would understand her somewhat unique perspective as a feminist, orthodox Jewish scholar of Christianity.

  • http://religionnewsblog.blogspot.com Justin

    Separation of Church and State means you can’t mention anything religious in public, remember?

  • http://goodintentionsbook.com bob smietana

    Mollie:

    Thanks for mentioning the story. It created quite a stir here in town.
    Very good point about the reference to Christ and the church. The story alluded to the idea of sacrificial love of husband but didn’t include that specific reference. One source I talked to said you can’t understand Ephesians 5 without reading it alongside 1 Corinthians 13– unfortunately there’s never enough room in a story for every angle.

  • Jerry

    Bob Smietana writes another great story. Not only are such stories well-written but they serve as examples for those motivated to learn how to do a better job.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Hey folks who love to bash the press (and that certainly isn’t MZ, who is a veteran), read Bob’s comment at least four or five times.

    MZ’s point is valid. So is Bob’s.

    That IS THE REALITY of the daily press. The folks at GR know that and we all must work in that tension.

  • Home on the Range

    The whole submission thing was explained to me this way: it’s like a breakfast of bacon and eggs. The hen contributes an egg to the breakfast, walks away and the next day, contributes another egg. Ah, but the pig….the pig contributes his life for that breakfast. As Christ gave His life for the Church, the husband is called to love his wife as Christ loved the church…unto death if necessary.

    Rarely, if ever, is this concept explained in such a way that anyone would be able to understand it; so thank you, Mollie, for clarifying and also Bob Smietana for a well written, sensible article!

  • Theophile

    “It’s my experience that the male role of sacrifice for his wife is infinitely more difficult than the female role of submission.”

    Thank You Mollie!
    A husband is required to love his wife, but the Bible does not require the wife to love her husband, this means when your wife does/says something “unloving”, you are still required(as a husband) to respond lovingly.
    This “infinitely more difficult” role is observed in God’s perspective in the prophets where He calls “His people” His “unloving/ignorant” wife(paraphrase mine). Yet implores, lovingly a return to Him, with forgiveness and restoration.

  • http://ingles.homeunix.net/ Ray Ingles

    Justin – No, just that the Biblical model of marriage can’t be legally required or mandated. Unfortunately, some politicians do talk about doing that…

  • http://aleksandreia.wordpress.com Hector_St_Clare

    Re: As someone who is part of a couple that attempts to have a Christian marriage

    You know, it would be nice if you and Ms. Bachmann acknowledged that those of us who disagree with you about wifely submission are Christians, too. (And criticisms of the orthodox model of marriage are hardly new, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franklin's_Tale. I’m not a medieval scholar, but I’m pretty sure the whole Cult of Courtly Love had a rather different perspective on gender relations).

    I don’t have any problems with the way you, or Ms. Bachman, chooses to work things out in your own marriage. I don’t think there’s any universal requirement for women to submit to men, or vice versa: it’s a matter of private conscience for the couple involved, and in any case it’s none of my business. But please do those of us who disagree with the wifely submission model, the honour of recognising that we are Christians too.

  • http://aleksandreia.wordpress.com Hector_St_Clare

    Re: As Christ gave His life for the Church, the husband is called to love his wife as Christ loved the church…unto death if necessary.

    Women are supposed to be willing to die for their kids though (as are men too) so I don’t see that there’s really that much more sacrifice involved on one side than the other (and I would assume when it comes down to it, most men would die for their children before they died for their wife as well).

  • http://goodintentionsbook.com bob smietana

    What made this story was finding a couple like the Roses who could articulate the idea of submission in marriage and who were willing to put the details of their marriage in the paper. That’s a risk – I had talked to other folks who believe in this principle but didn’t want that publicized out of fear that people would not understand them.

  • MJBubba

    I looked through the comments page at the Tennessean, and there are the usual anti-Christian junk comments, and, since Nashville is in the Bible belt, a fair number of comments from various Christians trying to get in their own spin one way or the other. What I thought was interesting was the large number of comments that said the article does not belong in a general-circulation newspaper at all. And I very much appreciated that the staff has spiked a number of comments, I suppose for offensiveness.

  • Lori B.

    Wow, that was a great piece. Finally, somebody ‘gets’ wifely submission in a Christian marriage. I agree, Bob, the couple you interviewed was great. And the other viewpoints were good as well. I must admit, your stories lately are making me want to read The Tennessean more often. But since I am a submissive wife myself, I don’t take the daily paper. My husband has to haul our recycling away and doesn’t want the extra load ;)

    MJBubba, the comments on all of Bob’s stories follow the pattern you just mentioned. I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t read them anymore. The people who whine about religion stories being in a general-circulation newspaper make me especially crazy. It’s Nashville, things having to do with Christianity will always be news here.

  • David R

    The other thing, Bob, I notice is that you let the couple speak their views unobstructed. I think there’s a fine line reporters follow in letting a folks enunciate the needed information and, on the other, using that information for persuasive purposes. You show the ability to just let the speaker speak as you simply report, which clears the air of undue bias–especially on religious subjects.

  • http://!)! Passing By

    I sometimes disagree with Bob Smietana in these comment threads, but admire this article (and some others of his I’ve read). I do disagree with this:

    For the Bible’s authors, it was pretty clear how marriage works.

    Men lead.

    Women follow.

    That’s way oversimplified, first, because the bible contains a lot more than Ephesians 5 (Proverbs 31, for starters), and even for the passage in Ephesian 5, the whole business begins with this:

    21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

    Whatever “submit” means in that verse, it means in the verse concerning wives. Mimi Haddad alludes to it, but doesn’t cite the verse. In fact, I never encounter that verse as an organizing principle for what follows.

    While I’m on a critical role (the organizing principle of which is admiration, remember), a more articulate opposition to the Rose’s might have been helpful. Neither of the women cited really responded to the earlier claims in the article.

    “The word ‘submit’ means voluntary submission.

    Well, that’s helpful. The rest of the paragraph is assertions, not arguments. Heidi Huebner Weimer is almost a caricature of her own arguments. All I’m saying is that balance would have been better served by better arguments.

    And I really did like the article.

  • bob

    Mollie, you have a kinder recollection of Phil’s show than I do. Yes, he would allow a person to state their case. Then with his hand mike proceed to paraphrase it, ROLL his eyes and at once stick the mike in an audience member’s face…Repeat, repeat. Add ten years, it was Jerry Springer. I don’t miss either man. I never recall Phil doing anything but speak down to any believer whatever. He got religion; it got him a lot of cash.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    bob,

    That’s almost exactly what my husband said. And I agree that he was condescending, but what I also remember is that he let people talk.

    I distinctly remember a beautiful young woman who worked for the National Right to Life Committee who was a regular guest and would engage in debate with a pro-choice adherent. And you’d hear both sides.

    There was no question which side Donahue was on. None whatsoever — but still, at least he let people converse.