Paul and the marriage dance

Paul’s teaching on marriage is none too popular these days. For those who misunderstand him, he is the ultimate misogynist, encouraging women to assume the position of doormat, while men get to play the role of shoe. Yet if Paul really is a misogynist, he sure shot himself in the foot with that part about “husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for her,” didn’t he?

This is the sort of thing that misogynists really ought not be uttering, if they want to be consistent in their contempt of women, that is. But somehow Paul slipped it in there, and so we are left with three options: Either he is a highly inconsistent misogynist, or he was having an off day, or maybe he just wasn’t a misogynist after all. It probably won’t surprise you to know that I belong to the third school of thought, and so I want to take a look at some of what his nonmisogynistic teaching is saying to us, looking particularly at the responsibility of men.

One of the first things to notice about Paul’s teaching is that although he mentions wives before husbands in both Ephesians and Colossians, the onus is clearly on the men to take a lead on this. He says that wives need to be in subjection to their own husbands, but the clue as to who ought to be taking the lead is in his statement to husbands where he tells them to “love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25). We are elsewhere in Scripture explicitly told the order of Christ/Church relations: “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). So if the husband/wife relationship is to look anything like the Christ/Church relationship, it is very much the responsibility of the husband to take the lead by ensuring he is loving his wife before he starts worrying about whether his wife is submitting to him.

Some men seem to take the Christ analogy in Ephesians as being all about headship, but conveniently ignore the fact that this is not about mere headship but about sacrificial headship. Their thinking goes something like this: “Christ commands His Church, right? And His Church is meant to be in subjection, right? That’s what Paul says, isn’t it? So if the marriage relationship is meant to be like the relationship between Christ and His Church, then clearly I get to decide everything and you must obediently follow.”

There are two big problems with this type of blockhead masculinity. The first is that although Christ commands His Church, and His Church is called to submit to Him, He commands her as a sinless, spotless Head. This means that all of His commands are made in love, righteousness and truth, that nothing He has commanded to His Church is dictatorial, and that nothing He asks His bride to do is necessarily grievous. Sure, the Church disobeys and acts like these things are grievous, but that is because the Church is stuffed with sinners, not because her Husband is in the wrong.

The other big problem with this way of thinking is that even Christ—though He had every right to just command and expect submission—had to die sacrificially in order to win His bride. His headship is not one of mere headship—I command and you obey—but rather a headship that is born of giving Himself, at great personal cost, for the bride that He loves. Any husband who just commands and expects obedience is therefore not only wronging his wife in expecting her to obey her command while he himself fails to obey the command directed to him. He is also failing to understand the import of Paul’s command, which is to not just assume headship, but to assume it in a self-denying and sacrificial way.

I tend to think that what Paul has in mind is something like dance partners. In any really good male/female dance that I’ve ever seen, the man leads and the woman follows. Yet the man does so in a way which is firm and masculine, rather than authoritarian, and the woman follows in a way that is neither overbearing on the one hand, nor a pushover on the other, but rather firm in a feminine way.

Let’s just play around with this analogy and see what happens when we add various factors into it. Picture the scene: A husband and wife are about to begin a dance up on a high stage with no barriers surrounding it, set to a Strauss waltz. First, a modern couple steps up. This looks, shall we say, a little different from what Paul had in mind. Instead of a graceful scene of husband and wife dancing in unison, with the man gently but firmly leading his wife while she gracefully and willingly follows him, many modern marriages look like the two spouses just doing their own thing on separate corners of the stage. Maybe he’s making one last attempt over here to perfect his breakdance technique before middle-age sets in, while she’s over there doing her own thing. The two of them are utterly independent of each other, and it is no surprise when they split, citing irreconcilable differences. And poor Strauss carries on in the background, treated in much the same way as that beautiful gold ring on the end of the pig’s snout.

Then there is the feminist dance. You know, where the powerhouse woman tries to lead the man around and he either willingly submits, and the dance ends up looking plain silly, or he resists, and they end up pushing each other over the edge.

Or there is the dance of the “apathetics.” This is where the performers are so floppy and without backbone, especially the man, that you wonder whether they are actually trying to dance or to do a distinctly underwhelming impression of two octopi skulking across the sea floor.

But what of the overbearing, authoritarian, she-ought-to-submit-to-me-because-that’s-what-Paul-says sort of thing? What does this dance look like? It looks like a man dragging his wife rather than leading her, and then when he starts veering too far toward the edge of the stage and his wife tries to pull him back from the brink, he gets mad, accuses her of not being submissive, and carries on doing his thing until they both fall over the edge. Such a guy thinks he’s doing what God commands, yet he is in far more danger of disobeying Paul’s instructions than his wife is.

So what will the kind of marriage described by Paul really look like? As with a beautiful waltz to a bit of Strauss, it will look like the man leading his bride gracefully but firmly around the stage, with his wife gladly following his lead. It will look like him making sure he does nothing to grieve her or put either her or the both of them in jeopardy. So he will not only be aware of his steps, but will be aware of her steps, too, and of both their steps together. If he happens to wander too near the edge and his wife gently pulls him back, he will not accuse her of being unsubmissive, but rather will accept the reproof and adjust his ways accordingly.

In practical terms, there is no thought in this type of dance of a man commanding his wife regardless of her feelings and opinions, and her being expected to just submit to everything he says. Rather the thought is that the kind of man Paul is talking about will always take his wife’s desires and opinions into account. If there is disagreement about a decision that needs to be taken, yes, it is ultimately the man who is called upon to make that decision and the wife who is called upon to submit. But if the man has not first spoken to his wife, sought her opinion, taken it into account, considered whether maybe she is right and he wrong and that perhaps he needs to die to self before making the decision—unless he has gone through those steps, he is not leading his wife in the dance of life the way Paul says he ought.

I realize that this piece doesn’t address any of the difficulties and problems that can arise, such as, “what if a woman is married to a husband who is a blockhead. How far should she go in obeying him?” That’s really not an easy question. Suffice it to say that when Paul teaches in Colossians 3, his command for wives to “submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” suggests that this is by no means a blank check. There are limits to her submission, as when Abigail didn’t just go along with her fool of a husband, Nabal (1 Samuel 25).

However, difficult as such questions are, a good place to start the recovery of godly, loving marriages would be for more and clearer teaching on the role of men. Men discipled in the love of Christ to His Church, and exhorted to follow this pattern in their marriages, is the surest way of warding off problems and creating the beautiful marriage dance that honors Jesus Christ, the true sacrificial head of His Bride.

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine, Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective atwww.theblogmire.com.