The Household Code in Ephesians
by Joy Kingsbury-Aitken
Back in May, on Mother’s Day, I spoke about the rise of the Trad Wife movement among young evangelical Christian women. Much to my surprise that sermon generated considerable interest. Today’s text is one of several that underpin the philosophy of the Trad Wife movement, and has been used as a justification for the subordination of women to men not only within marriage but within society.
The Greek word hupotassōmai is a military term for ordering troops under their commander. Translated submit in the Kings James Authorised Bible, the English Bible of Protestant Christianity from 1611 until the middle of the 20th century, it was interpreted to mean obey by the men who wrote the wedding liturgy in The Book of Common Prayer, first published fifty-one years later in 1662. While the bridegroom vowed to love, comfort, honour and keep his bride, she promised to obey and serve, as well as love and honour him. However, Paul’s household code in Ephesians is far more nuanced than the authors of The Book of Common Prayer apparently appreciated. It is intended to explain what it means for Christians to submit to one another, irrespective of social status and gender. This has been lost by translators inserting, for grammatical reasons, submit (or its equivalent) into the verse referring to wives, where hupotassōmai is not in the original Greek, thus putting unintended focus on the submission of wives to husbands rather than on the esteem all members of a Christian household are to have for one another.
To submit means to yield to the will of another. Paul has been telling the Ephesian Christians that they are “one in Christ,”[1] so when he exhorts them to submit to one another he clearly intends Christian men to yield to Christian women as well as vice versa. Mutual submission implies mutual equality, or to put it another way, mutual submission requires mutual respect. Submission is not completely synonymous with obedience, for obedience requires a power structure. The people to be obeyed have authority over the people who are to obey them. Hence children are to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters. A happy marriage is not one in which one partner dominates over and demands obedience from the other, but one in which the love the partners have for each other leads to them supporting and serving each other.
In 1998 I attended a week long intensive for a Bachelor of Theology paper on Women in the Bible led by the Rev. Dr Judith McKinley. When Judith began speaking about household codes, fellow student Dale Peach (who is now the Superintendent of the South Island Synod of the Methodist Church), leaned towards me and whispered the question, “What are household codes?” I whispered back that she would find them in Ephesians, Colossians and 1 Peter. The Revised Common Lectionary does not include these codes in its programme of scripture readings, so those students who belonged to mainline churches were unfamiliar with them. I, on the other hand, who at that time belonged to an ultra-conservative evangelical church, was too well acquainted with them for they were used to keep us church women in our “proper place” – subordinate not just to our husbands but to all the men in the church.
While in my youth I experienced a toxic interpretation of the household codes in scripture, I have since come to see that they were intended to promote liberation not domination, to transform not oppress. Instead of emulating the household codes in the Greco-Roman world, they challenged them. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Seneca wrote household codes to teach their readers the proper ordering of society, which was, of course, patriarchal and hierarchical. Our nuclear families of a husband and wife and their children would appear quite strange to the people to whom the letter of Ephesians was addressed. Families in the ancient Mediterranean world were multi-generational, and included dependent relatives besides the children and grandchildren of the most senior male – in Latin the pater familias. The family’s slaves were also members of his household. The household was the foundational unit of society and the stability of society was thought to be dependent on the obedience of relatives and slaves to the male head of each household. Subordinate family members demonstrated their virtue by their obedience to him. Thus earlier in Ephesians Paul evokes the image of God as the great pater familias, the divine patriarch over every human family,[2] and, of course, we humans demonstrate our virtue through our obedience to our Father in heaven.
Undoubtedly there were cultural and social class variations in how families functioned in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Roman pater familias had, at least in theory, absolute authority and power over the members of his household to the point of being legally permitted to kill any of his children who displeased him, even when they were adults. The patriarchs of other cultures were probably more constrained than their Roman counterparts, although in Judaism, according to the Torah, the parents of a rebellious son could hand him over to the village elders to be stoned to death for his defiant behaviour. However, the execution was carried out by all the men of the village not just by the aggrieved father, and the charge against the reprobate had to be brought by his mother as well as his father.[3]
While the household code in Ephesians speaks of the responsibilities of wives, children and slaves towards the head of the household, a major focus of this code is on the patriarch’s responsibilities to his subordinates. Paul does not challenge the prevailing social structures of his world, and traditional gender roles, but proclaims that through reverence for Christ that structure and those roles are transformed. Our social relationships are to reflect our relationship with Christ. There was nothing radical about Paul’s instruction that wives submit to their husbands. This was a given in the ancient world. Good wives in the Roman era demonstrated their character by their modesty and chastity, by respecting and honouring their husbands, and by managing the domestic affairs of their households. This ensured the legitimacy of children and the domestic felicity of the family.[4] However, the wifely submission Paul calls for is more than a cultural norm; it is a spiritual response to husbands emulating Christ who is the head of the church. The Greek word kephale has several meanings, pre-eminent among them is the head of a body. A physical body cannot survive without its head, nor can a head survive without its body, which is analogous to the mutual dependence of spouses. Kephale also means source. We use head in this way when we speak of the head waters of a river, meaning its beginning or source. The church began with Christ, who is its spiritual source. The third meaning of kephale refers to being in authority, which is the meaning that dominates in conservative churches. While the church subjects itself to the authority of Christ its head, it does so freely rather than from compulsion. Likewise, wives submit to their husbands and husbands yield to their wives because they choose to not because they are forced to. What we are speaking of here is a love relationship, which had to be deliberately developed between couples whose marriages had been arranged for them.
The infamous quote from Demosthenes, a fourth century BCE Athenian statesman and orator, that “we have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to look after the day-to-day needs of the body, wives that we may breed legitimate children and have a trusty warden of what we have in the house,” illustrates the point that a love relationship between spouses could not be taken for granted in the ancient world. In contrast, Paul tells Christian husbands that they must love their wives self-sacrificially like Christ loves the church and gave himself up for it. The analogy of Christ as the bridegroom and the church as his bride occurs throughout the New Testament including in the teachings of Jesus, and has its origins in the Old Testament where the prophets speak of God as the husband of Israel, whose love for Israel is steadfast in spite of Israel often being depicted as an adulterous wife. Paul introduces the concept of Christ loving his body, which is not Jesus’ crucified physical body but the church, and exhorts husbands to likewise love their wives as they love their own physical bodies (a version of the instruction to love others as we love ourselves, which Jesus said was the second most important commandment in the Torah). Moreover Genesis speaks of a married man and woman becoming one flesh – an analogy of the oneness of Christ and the church, and a mystery (a favoured word of Paul’s in this letter). In summary Paul says, “Each of you… should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.”
Paul then turns his attention to the people at the bottom of the household hierarchy – children and slaves. That he has nothing new to say about how children should behave is illustrated by his quoting from the Ten Commandments – honour your father and mother. Telling fathers to raise their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord is not completely new either. One entire book of scripture – Proverbs – is dedicated to that topic. What is new, however, is that fathers aren’t to provoke their children to anger. Harsh punishments inevitably result in seething resentment, while sparing the rod is the way of grace more likely to encourage than spoil the child. Fathers should follow the example of their heavenly pater familias who is slow to anger,[5] and is gracious and merciful, and who desires mercy more than sacrifice (or other religious rituals) from humans.[6]
Finally Paul comes to the most oppressed people in the ancient household – the slaves. Nothing demoralises and disincentivizes a workforce more than being enslaved, so it is not surprising that slaves had a reputation for being lazy. Consequently masters were often inclined to bully their slaves, who they tended to see as property not people. Paul instructs slaves to serve honestly and enthusiastically whether or not they are being observed by their masters. He tells them to look beyond the man in charge to Christ, and to envisage the work they are required to do as being done for him. Masters are exhorted to treat their slaves with kindness, not threatening them, for like their servants they too will be judged by their Master in heaven.
To the outsider a Christian household in the Roman era would have looked no different to a pagan one, but if truly functioning as a Christian household it would have undergone a profound transformation, where the welfare of each individual member would have been of equal importance, for “there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.”[7] All are to be respected, all are to be cherished, all are made free in Christ, which is the goal Paul’s household code points us towards, irrespective of the social structures of the cultures in which we live.
[1] See also Galatians 3:28
[2] Ephesians 3:14-15
[3] Deuteronomy 21:18-21
[4] Russ Dudley, “Submit yourselves to one another”; A socio-historical look at the Household Code of Ephesians 5:15-6:9”
[5] Exodus 34:6
[6] Psalm 111:4, Hosea 6:6, Matthew 9:13
[7] Galatians 3:28. See also Galatians 5:1