Short….this post
Has a Big But….the article I parse.
From “Making Right Choices in Marriage” by Tammy Darling:
We chose mutual submission. Although the Bible clearly teaches that the husband is the leader of the family, Scripture also emphasizes mutual submission among all believers, encouraging us to defer to one another when possible. The apostle Paul exhorts believers to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). The husband and wife who mutually submit do so with God as their guide.
See that big wobbly pasty thing? BUT…spelled: A L T H O U G H.
Nasty. Just nasty.
When you know what to look for, you find examples of this phenomenon everywhere within what passes for Christianity these days. Although it might become less common in the future, when they stop pretending to profess Christian teaching that they don’t like.
Unfortunately, Christians don’t study the Scriptures in order to determine why that verse is there. If they did, they would understand but alas.
http://deepstrength.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/is-there-mutual-submission-or-not/
Therefore, I super-heart this post. Except for that part. Amen.
Reference to mutual submission is part of the newish Pretzelian dialect.
“Pretzelian dialect.”
Good one, lol….
Most married men are accommodating and will try to adjust and make things work. But the children of a mutual submission marriage suffer greatly. They grow up with warped gender roles and a distorted view of what to look for in a spouse. I speak from personal experience, my parents were active church going, Bible reading Christians but my mother refused to submit and actively considered herself to be the more spiritual, more qualified to lead person in the marriage. I can see the gender role and authority dysfunction in myself and in my siblings.
In marriage mutual submission = male submission.
JDG has the gist, here.
A while back, the church I attend had a guest preacher who talked about Ephesians 5:22, then immediately used 5:21 to dismiss it. No attempt at hermeneutics whatsoever that I can recall. I believe he essentially opened the door for the cherry picking that more conservative Christians are accused of.
I’m not very well versed in the Bible, but I got the feeling that 21 was part of the previous verses, while 22 starts the next set, although Bible Gateway does the split between community and family between 20 and 21, lumping in “submit to one another” with “wives, submit to your husbands.”
Read them in The Message if you want to see the full frontal of the evangelical feminist take on Ephesians
I just looked it up, as I’m doing a straight read-through with The Message. I knew they injected the word “equals” into 1st Peter 3:7, which seems presumptuous at best when compared to other translations. But looking up their version of Ephesians 5 is not egalitarian. 21 doesn’t even mention (mutual) submission, but 22 says for wives to submit. Though there is a weird injection of leading “not by domineering but by cherishing.”
I stand corrected. I was attending a wedding last summer and they used a translation that lathered on egalitarian language, I thought it was The Message.