This Might Be The Most Misunderstood Passage In The Bible
(ANALYSIS) The mid-week Bible study group at our church returns to Ephesians every few years, largely because it’s my favorite book in all of Scripture. Being the leader, I get to decide what we’ll study.
Ephesians is remarkable, divided almost 50-50 between two trains of thought. The first half of the letter is a magisterial revelation of God’s power and grace. It soars into the heavens.
The second half is a back-down-to-earth discussion of what this revelation should look like in our daily lives. If the first half of Ephesians is true, then how do we live that out? It’s the nuts and bolts. Do this, not that.
Ephesians is also quite possibly the most reviled and most frequently misrepresented of New Testament letters, or at least one lengthy passage of it is. That’s a portion in the second half that, among other things, tells wives to obey their husbands.
What uniformly gets overlooked in the ensuing gnashing of teeth, gloating and general ugliness by modern readers is that this commandment to submit nearly always gets taken out of context by its champions and foes alike. It’s actually part of a larger — and even more radical — teaching. More on that momentarily.
First, a caveat. Tradition held for almost 2,000 years that Ephesians was written by St. Paul, who has always been a lightning rod for controversy, in his own time and ours.
But contemporary biblical scholars contest Paul’s authorship. For instance, in “An Introduction to the New Testament,” renowned scholar Raymond E. Brown estimates that 70 to 80 percent of modern critical scholarship rejects Paul as the writer.
Normally, I genuflect to more learned heads than mine, of which there are myriad. But I stick with tradition here. I refer to Paul as the author because that’s what the church believed for millennia — and because that’s what I still believe.
So. Back to business.
Did Paul really tell wives to treat their husbands as if he were Jesus Christ in the flesh?
Yup, literally, he did. But, as the saying goes, context is everything. And in this case, the context is a doozy.
Paul isn’t picking on women. He’s not deifying men. He’s saying something entirely different, something so revolutionary that, if we understood it, it probably would horrify our 21st Century American sensibilities far more than his alleged sexism.
Paul’s real message remains as foreign to the American church as it was to First Century Romans, Greeks and Jews. As nearly as I can tell, on this count we’ve made zero spiritual progress in the past 2,000 years.
Remember, in the second half of Ephesians he’s telling us how to bring the eternal, otherworldly values of heaven’s kingdom down to the crusty, corrupt old planet we live on.
One of his main admonishments, which serves as the topic sentence for a section on family and work relationships, is: “Be subject to one another in the reverence of Christ.”
For him, each of us is to quit seeking our own good as our primary aim. Each of us is to quit stoking his own ego. We’re to instead become a humble servant to others, even when the cost to us is dear.
To women he says: honor your husband, seek his good, treat him as you would treat Jesus himself.
Then, he immediately turns to men. Do you see yourself as the head of your household?(This was something his First Century audience took absolutely for granted.) Then treat your wife as Jesus treated his church. Jesus gave up an exalted position to serve the church in all things, up to and including laying down his very life for it. Men, go act thusly.
Next, he turns to parents — and especially fathers. Serve your children, he says. Don’t make them angry. Bring them up in a nurturing manner, in the wisdom of the Lord.
Children, he says, become servants to your parents. Respect and obey them.
He moves to slavery. (This is another stance for which he’s often wrongly pilloried). By some estimates more than half of the early Christians were slaves, so Paul isn’t speaking theoretically here; he’s writing to people he knows, worships with and loves. Elsewhere, Paul tells slaves that if they have an opportunity to gain their freedom, they should take it.
But while you find yourself confined as a slave, he says here, serve your master with a sincere heart, doing your work as unto the Lord. Remember that even in this unfortunate position you’re representing Jesus, who can be glorified only through love, humility and mercy.
To the comparatively few slave owners in the church, Paul says: remember you’re no more important to God than the people you enslave. Quit threatening them — you’ll answer to the same God as they. In short, humble yourselves.
Paul’s message to all these people is exactly the same, whether they’re wives, husbands, parents, slaves or slave-owners: you can’t glorify God while guarding your rights, stoking your ego or brow-beating your supposed inferiors.
You glorify God — you introduce his kingdom into the world — by voluntarily becoming the inferior. That’s what Jesus did when he left heaven, came to Earth and died as a criminal.
Paul’s teaching is plainly stated, yet it’s been reviled and distorted by men and women alike, by theological progressives and reactionaries. Hardly anybody even seems to recognize it, because its premise runs counter to everything we’re been taught from birth.
Give up our rights? Become servants instead? Balderdash!
If it matters, I don’t find what Paul says in Ephesians any easier to put into practice than anyone else does. I fail miserably. But I think he was right.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.