I'm going to take another stab at discussing the Ephesians verses about marriage and tying it more closely to what the Bible says in the broader scope of things. This is an off-shoot of something I expressed in posts 55999 and 56009: that while individual verses can be taken out of context and battered into saying just about what anyone wishes them to say, I maintain that there is precious little maneuvering room if the whole of the Bible is taken into account.

The Ephesians verses are good examples, actually. "Wives, submit to your husbands" (5:22) is all an ambitious male chauvinist needs to establish an inequality of the sexes and "prove" the "rightful" role of husbands as lord over their wives.

The thing is, such an interpretation is only feasible if this snippet of a verse, and maybe a couple others, are ALL you use. You can't establish this if you use all of what the Bible has to say about marriage and gender roles; in fact, you can't even establish this if you just take all of Ephesians 5. Interpreting what the Bible says is not hard: it's just that so often only pieces of it are used out of context.

All you really need to do is back up a verse. Ephesians 5:21 opens the passage instructing us to submit to *each other*. The biblical model for marriage is one of mutual submission. The rest of Ephesians 5 is almost poetic in style, addressing first wives, then husbands, with analogous directives.

For the verse that says "Husbands, love your wives," I gave an interpretation, but Dave pointed out (in a post I accidentally deleted -- sorry, Dave) that while he doesn't have any problem with that interpretation, how can one accept the Bible as Truth if there are other ways to interpret it?

There really isn't. The kind of "love" being referred to is defined elsewhere in the Bible, but also as a reminder it's right there in the same verse: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church." How did Christ love the church? Well he wasn't sitting on a throne and wearing a crown and telling women to get him dinner. He served, healed, fed, washed feet. Ultimately, he died for the church. "Love" in the Bible is always action and behavior, not the gooshy-feely stuff it means today, and this distinction is illustrated time and again, not the least by the way Christ loved the church. Biblical love includes submission: the command given to husbands is actually the stronger of the two.

Why? Perhaps due to the circumstances prevalent at the time in the pagan Roman Empire: husbands had the legal right to kill their wives. Didn't even need a reason. If a husband killed a wife, it was not considered murder. The life of a wife belonged to her husband for him to do with as he pleased.

Ephesians speaks out against this but it is careful to say not just *that* this arrangement should be corrected but *how*. "Wives, submit to your husbands" is saying, hey, the way to fix this barbaric inequality in marriage isn't for wives to revolt and also become dominant. Mutual dominance is not the way to go. Instead, submit to each other: wives, submit to your husbands, but hey, husbands, *love* your wives by putting their needs above your own, denying yourselves, serving in every way up through and including dying for your wives, even as Christ served and died for the church. ("Church," by the way, always refers to a congregation of believers, not a building or establishment; congregations that met *without* buildings or established meeting places were still called churches, and many of Paul's epistles were addressed to churches, rather than to people "at" churches.)

Essentially, Ephesians establishes a system of mutual submission rather than mutual dominance.

Nonetheless, it is true that the model of marriage portrayed in Ephesians is not symmetric, as indicated verse 23, "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church." In English, "head" can mean the physical body part, and it can also mean "leader." Interpreting it to mean "leader" doesn't make sense in context. It makes more sense for this verse to be an analogy to an actual, physical body part head, particularly since, in analogies of Christ being the "head" of the church, the church is called the "body." (Also because in Greek, the word does not have the double meaning it does in English: it only refers to physical heads.)

So this verse is an analogy that depicts an asymmetrical but not unequal model of marriage. The full dynamics of the analogy I frankly do not completely understand as of yet -- if I understood everything about the Bible, that means someone less smart than me wrote it, and what would I bother putting stock in it for? This is something that God will continue to illuminate for me with continued prayer and biblical study.

In any case, it should be clear that taking five words -- "wives, submit to your husbands" -- and basing a model of marriage just on that part and what it implies to members of our present time is biblically unfounded. It's not an alternate interpretation: it just isn't there.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)