Quick Hits: Doug Wilson on Women and Submission

From time to time, Doug Wilson posts quotations from some of his many books. I want to share two of his recent ones.

Here’s the first:

“A husband’s authority over his wife and a wife’s particular submission to her husband are a subset of this broader Christian duty for all believers to be filled with the Spirit and to be mutually submissive to one another” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 24).

I’m still trying to figure out how this statement even manes sense. How is the idea that a husband is to have authority and a wife is to submit in any sense a subset of the idea that all believers are to be “mutually submissive” to one another? Where’s the “mutually” part? It’s not there!

And here’s the second:

[Concerning 1 Cor. 11:1-16 and Is. 4:5] “The NKJV translates it this way: ‘For over all the glory there will be a covering.’ This is what Paul is referring to — a godly wife is to her husband what the Shekinah glory was to the tabernacle. Now this is how it all ties in with our foundational theology of marriage, and what we believe marriage actually is. The Bible teaches that a woman is the glory of her husband. She is his crown: ‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband’ (Prov. 12:4a). And a man does not walk down the street kicking his diadem in front of him in the hopes of making himself look better or more important” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 37).

Wilson is trying to do is make an argument that men shouldn’t mistreat their wives (and acting like people should jump up and down and pat him on the back for doing so), but what he’s actually accomplished is shamelessly reducing women to object status. Doesn’t it make you feel great to know that you’re your husband’s crown? Yeah, me neither. I mean, in that analogy my husband gets to be a person and I get to be . . . a crown. Yay?

Yeah, no.