Submission Isn’t What You Think It Is

Few words in the Christian vocabulary have done more damage than “submit.” It shows up in wedding ceremonies, in marriage counseling, in arguments about why women can’t lead churches, and occasionally in situations that, if we’re being honest, look a lot less like theology and a lot more like control. The word gets deployed with confidence, usually by people who benefit from the arrangement it supposedly mandates.

So let’s actually look at what’s going on.

The passage everyone reaches for is from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, where wives are told to submit to their husbands. That sentence has been quoted approximately ten billion times. The sentence that comes right before it almost never gets mentioned.

Paul opens the whole section by telling everyone, husbands and wives together, to submit to one another. Mutual submission. That’s the frame. That’s the context in which everything else sits. When you lift the wife’s instruction out of that frame and treat it as a standalone command while setting aside the mutual part, you haven’t discovered truth. You’ve manufactured a theology.

The Greek word is hupotasso. It appears throughout the New Testament in several contexts, and it carries the sense of voluntary, ordered cooperation rather than hiearchial obedience. It’s the word a soldier might use to describe falling into formation, or a citizen might use to describe participating in a community structure. It is not the word for servitude. It is not the word for silence. It is not the word for “your opinion doesn’t count.”

Paul then turns to husbands and tells them to love their wives the way Christ loved the church. That’s the comparison he makes. And what did that love look like? It looked like washing feet. It looked like touching lepers. It looked like giving everything away. If we’re going to hold wives to the submission standard, we should probably hold husbands to that one, and it’s a considerably impossible assignment.

Jesus, in all his recorded teaching, never once addressed the question of wifely submission. He talked about marriage. He talked about faithfulness. He talked about the way religious leaders used rules to burden people rather than free them. But he never pulled a woman aside and explained that her role was to defer to her husband’s authority.

What he did do was talk to women directly, in a culture where that was unusual. He taught Mary of Bethany theology while her sister was in the kitchen, and when Martha complained, he didn’t send Mary back to the domestic work. He let a Samaritan woman become the first person he explicitly told he was the Messiah. He appeared first to women after the resurrection and sent them to tell the men what had happened. In a world where women’s testimony was considered legally unreliable, he made them the primary witnesses to the most important event in human history.

That’s not the behavior of someone who thought women’s primary calling was subordination.

The traditional evangelical reading of submission tends to produce what’s called “complementarianism,” the view that men and women have distinct, God-ordained roles, with male authority and female submission baked into the created order. It’s a tidy system. It also requires some selective reading to maintain.

The creation accounts in Genesis don’t actually say what complementarians need them to say. The second account, where woman is created from man’s rib, gets read as establishing hierarchy. But the word used for woman’s relationship to man in that passage is ezer, which gets translated as “helper.” Complementarians love this word because it sounds like an assistant. The problem is that ezer is used elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures almost exclusively to describe God. God is Israel’s ezer. The word doesn’t imply subordination. It implies indispensable strength coming to someone’s aid.

The hierarchy reading also requires treating the consequences of the fall, where God describes the painful realities that will follow, as prescriptions rather than descriptions. God isn’t saying “here’s how things should be.” He’s saying “here’s what’s going to happen now that things have gone wrong.” Domination and pain aren’t the design. They’re the damage.

Paul was writing to specific communities in specific historical circumstances. The early church was navigating a Roman world with rigid social hierarchies, and Paul was often trying to keep new Christian communities from becoming unnecessarily scandalous to their neighbors. Some of his instructions about women reflect that pastoral concern rather than timeless theological architecture. He was managing a situation, not dictating the eternal order of creation.

This doesn’t mean we throw Paul out. It means we read him the way we’d read any thoughtful person writing in a particular time and place, which is to say, we try to understand what he was actually doing rather than treating every sentence as a universal command dropped from outside history.

What Paul was clearly doing in Ephesians, when you read the whole passage, was taking the existing social structure of the household and filling it with something it didn’t naturally contain: mutual love, mutual service, mutual regard. He wasn’t endorsing the hierarchy. He was trying to transform it from the inside.

The teaching of Jesus keeps returning to the same territory. The first will be last. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Power exercised as domination is the way of the Gentiles, not the way of the kingdom. The religious leaders who loved their titles and their authority and their carefully maintained social positions were, in Jesus’ view, missing the point entirely.

It’s genuinely strange that a tradition built around Jesus has so often used his name to defend arrangements where some people have authority over others by virtue of their gender, and where questioning that arrangement is treated as rebellion against God. Jesus spent a remarkable amount of his time doing exactly that kind of questioning, usually aimed at exactly that kind of authority.

Submission, in the actual theological sense, is something everyone is called to. It’s the posture of someone who has stopped insisting on their own importance long enough to genuinely care about another person. Paul calls husbands to it. He calls wives to it. He calls the whole community to it. It’s not a gender assignment. It’s a description of what love looks like when it’s functioning properly.

That’s a harder teaching than “wives, obey your husbands.” It asks something of everyone and focuses on what we owe each other. Which is probably why it gets quoted less.