Headship Under the Pattern of Christ: What happens when an interpretation of Scripture becomes a rule so absolute that mercy, wisdom, protection, and even ordinary human reality are no longer allowed to speak?
“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands” is Scripture. I do not want to explain those words away, soften them because they make us uncomfortable, or pretend that Scripture makes no distinction between husband and wife. But neither do I want to make those words say more than they actually say. The moment we begin treating submission as though it requires a woman to silence her judgment, surrender her voice, accept mistreatment, or refuse to act for the protection of herself or her children, we are no longer dealing only with what Scripture says. We are dealing with conclusions built around it.
Some conclusions may indeed follow from these words that require us to think very differently from the surrounding culture. But we should at least recognize the difference between what Scripture actually says and the assumptions we have attached to it. That distinction has become increasingly important to me, perhaps because all six of our children are now married, or have been married, and I find myself thinking more often about the kind of marriage they watched while growing up. Our home followed what we understood to be a fairly traditional biblical pattern. I worked and provided for the family. My wife stayed home and raised our children. We believed there was an order within marriage, and I believe we sincerely tried to live within that order with love. I am thankful for much of it. But looking back also requires some honesty.
My wife has always been extraordinarily kind and yielding. Her gentleness probably made our home appear more orderly than my own conduct always deserved. I can see now that there were times when I accepted her willingness to yield too easily and mistook the absence of resistance for confirmation that I was leading well. At the time, I could even congratulate myself that our home was functioning according to a biblical order. I am less certain now that everything I regarded as order was necessarily as biblical as I assumed. That is uncomfortable for me to admit, because this subject is no longer merely theoretical. I am not only asking what kind of marriages our children are building. I am also asking what they learned by watching ours.
For many years I probably would have approached this subject with considerably more certainty than I do now. There were words such as headship, submission, authority, and leadership that seemed to fit together rather neatly. The husband was the head. The wife submitted. Someone had to have the ultimate authority. The structure seemed fairly obvious. But what seemed obvious may have included more interpretation than I realized. I am no longer quite as certain that Scripture itself lays everything out as neatly as the systems we have built from it.
That does not mean I have concluded that headship means nothing, that submission can simply be discarded, or that husbands and wives occupy indistinguishable places within marriage. It means I want to go back and look again. And perhaps the question worth asking is not simply: Does Scripture teach that a wife should submit to her husband? It plainly uses that language. The harder question is: What does Scripture mean by it, and how much have we incorporated from the traditions and systems that shaped our understanding?
Much of what we think of as “traditional Christian marriage” has not come to us from Scripture alone. It has also been shaped by books, conferences, ministries, well-known families, church cultures, and entire systems built around ideas of authority and submission. Some of those influences may have helped us see Scripture more clearly. Others may have carried assumptions that deserve to be examined again. The fact that something has been called “biblical” for a long time does not mean that every part of the structure built around it is biblical.
And perhaps that is where we need to be careful. A biblical statement can gradually become part of a much larger system until we no longer notice where the words of Scripture end and our conclusions begin. We start with a wife submitting to her husband and a husband being the head of his wife. From there it can become almost an organizational chart: God over the husband, the husband over the wife, the wife over the children. Before long, the marriage relationship is being explained primarily through authority, jurisdiction, leadership, obedience, and who has the final word. I am not suggesting that every part of that understanding should be rejected. My concern is that it can become the filter through which we read everything, until the larger emphasis of Scripture fades into the background.
When Paul speaks about marriage in Ephesians 5, he certainly speaks of submission and headship. But those words do not stand alone. “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” Ephesians 5:21. “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Ephesians 5:22. And then, when Paul turns directly to the husband: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” Ephesians 5:25.
Whatever we ultimately conclude about the relationship between verses 21 and 22, or about the precise nature of the husband’s headship, it seems difficult to read this passage as though Paul’s primary concern were simply establishing who possesses authority over whom. The wife is addressed concerning submission. But the husband is not told to establish his authority, demand recognition, or make certain that his wife follows his decisions. He is told to love. And not merely to love in some vague or sentimental sense. He is given Christ as the pattern. Christ loved the church and “gave himself for it.” That changes the atmosphere of the entire discussion. Whatever headship means, Christ tells us what kind of head the husband is called to be.
If Christ is the pattern, then headship begins to look much less like a position to defend and much more like a responsibility to carry. The husband is not being handed a verse with which to bring his wife into line. He is being pointed to Christ, who loved His church and gave Himself for her. That should change the questions he asks. Not, “How do I make sure she submits?” but, “How do I love her in a way that seeks her good rather than my own?” Love “seeketh not her own.” I Corinthians 13:5. That seems especially important here. If a man’s understanding of headship leaves him increasingly concerned with being obeyed, having the final word, and securing his own preferences, then something has become badly distorted. Whatever authority may belong to the husband, it is never separated from the command to seek his wife’s good rather than his own interests.
Submission also loses its meaning when it has to be secured through pressure. Paul tells the wife to submit; he does not hand the husband a tool for making her do so. That distinction matters, because something freely given is very different from something produced by pressure. There is a real difference between willing submission and compelled compliance, and Scripture should not be used to make coercion appear spiritual.
Whatever submission means, it cannot mean the disappearance of a woman’s judgment, wisdom, initiative, or voice. Proverbs 31 gives us a very different picture. The woman described there considers a field and buys it. She plants, works, trades, provides, plans, speaks with wisdom, and exercises remarkable initiative. Her husband trusts her. She is not presented as passive, dependent upon constant direction, or unable to act without permission. Nothing in biblical headship requires a wife to surrender the abilities, conscience, judgment, and wisdom God has given her.
That matters because submission is sometimes spoken of as though the most submissive wife is the least assertive one, the least questioning one, the one least likely to challenge her husband’s judgment. But Scripture does not require a woman to become smaller in order to be faithful. She may speak plainly, offer counsel, exercise discernment, and bring her full wisdom and conscience into the marriage. Submission cannot mean becoming less of a person.
Nor does submission require a wife to agree with every conclusion her husband reaches. She may see something he does not, recognize a danger he has missed, or simply believe that another course would be wiser. Respect leaves room for that kind of disagreement. A marriage is not strengthened when one person’s judgment is treated as though it must always override the other’s simply because of some perceived position of authority.
And that points to another distinction: There is a difference between a marriage having love and order and a marriage being organized around power. Order may include real distinctions, responsibilities, headship, and submission. But once power becomes the controlling idea, those things can begin to change character. Headship can become entitlement, while submission is reduced to simply giving in. I have personally seen this happen, and it is painful to watch a relationship become so centered on one person’s authority that the other begins to move through life as though every step requires permission.
A marriage should not leave a wife feeling as though she must continually measure her words, choices, movements, and decisions against the possibility of her husband’s disapproval. That is not the kind of oneness Scripture seems to describe. Marriage joins two people together; it does not reduce one into an extension of the other. Whatever headship means, it should never require a wife to live as though her husband’s preferences define the boundaries of her conscience, judgment, or ordinary freedom.
A lopsided system gives one spouse duties and the other rights. A Christian marriage gives both spouses duties. Neither begins with what the other owes, but with his or her own responsibility before God to love, honor, serve, and seek the good of the other.
The responsibilities of husband and wife are not exactly the same, but they are deeply connected in practice. A husband who loves, listens, and seeks his wife’s good makes trust easier. A wife who respects and supports her husband strengthens that same relationship. The obligations remain each person’s own before God, but they are mutually reinforcing in practice. One spouse’s failure does not excuse the other’s, yet each can do much either to strengthen or weaken the atmosphere of the marriage.
Perhaps there is a kind of paradox here. The husband most worthy of being followed is probably the husband least concerned with insisting that he be followed. If Christ is the pattern, headship is not proved by how firmly a man can assert his place, but by how faithfully he can love, listen, bear burdens, protect, and give himself for the good of his wife. The more he understands headship as responsibility rather than privilege, the less likely he is to use it as a way of getting his own way.
That also matters when a marriage becomes harmful or deeply unbalanced. Submission does not require a wife to ignore what is wrong, silence her own conscience, or refuse to act when real harm is taking place. There are times when wisdom and love may require her to speak, resist, seek help, or protect herself and her children. No understanding of headship should require a woman to choose between faithfulness to God and the safety of herself or her children.
Perhaps I have fewer neat answers about marriage than I once did. I am less certain about some of the structures I used to assume were simply biblical, and more willing to leave room for questions where Scripture itself does not seem to answer every detail. But I am increasingly certain of this: whatever headship and submission mean, they must be understood in a way that is consistent with love, oneness, conscience, wisdom, and the self-giving character of Christ.
Headship without self-giving becomes entitlement. Submission without freedom becomes compliance. Order without love becomes control. And when those distortions are defended in the name of Scripture, we may preserve the language of a biblical marriage while losing the spirit of the passage itself. Paul’s picture is not of a marriage in which one spouse becomes larger while the other becomes smaller. It is of a relationship being shaped by Christ – by love, sacrifice, trust, honor, and the giving of oneself for the good of the other. MPJ