In light of the responses to Friday’s post, I get the distinct impression that some of you are hankering for a little exegetical action. A few commentators have argued that Mike Huckabee was absolutely correct when he claimed last Thursday that the Book of Ephesians teaches us that: “as wives submit themselves to their husbands the husbands also submit themselves [to their wives].” But I am sticking to my guns. His "egalitarian" reading of that Scripture strikes me as extremely problematic. But more to the point, he is evasively backing away from the less-than egalitarian conclusions of the Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee to the Southern Baptist Convention—conclusions which he enthusiastically endorsed in a 1998 USA Today advertisement. First let's deal with the Scriptures. Then with the SBC report.
As opposed to Huckabee, I see no “mutual submission” clause in Ephesians 5:22-25 (Though he and others are, as we shall see, looking beyond those verses). As far as I can tell women, and women alone, are enjoined there to submit to men. In order to get our bearings let’s go to the fifth chapter of the Book of Ephesians in the New King James translation:
(22) Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. (23) For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. (24) Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
(25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her . . .
In this passage it seems clear that only wives must submit, not husbands (their job is to love). Now some have insisted that if I had only considered the preceding verses of the same chapter, I would have realized that men are commanded to submit to their wives as well. Those lines are rendered in the New King James as follows:
(20) giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, (21) submitting to one another in the fear of God.[]
The argument, then, is that verse (21) urges mutual submission. If that’s the case then it must override or at least soften verses (22-25) where only women are urged to submit. Fair enough.
A few years ago I wrote a book urging nonbelievers to familiarize themselves with religious thought if only so that they could effectively counter arguments such as the one made above. Readers of The Secular Bible also know that I am loathe to categorically claim that “the Bible says this!” Rather, I prefer to show how difficult it is for any politician or demagogue to persuasively claim that his or her interpretation of the Scriptures is the right one.
Which brings me to Huckabee and his defenders. Most Baptists I know consult the New King James Version, the King James Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version or the New American Standard Version. Why is that relevant? Because in all of those versions (except the occasional KJV rendering), line 21 is thematically separated from lines 22-25.
In other words, these translations wedge a section heading between verse 21 and 22-25. Why did the translators do that? My guess is that they inserted those section dividers because they did not believe that verse 21 had any close thematic connection to what followed. Indeed, line 21 does not appear to address the question of how spouses should relate to one another. That problematic, a new problematic, seems to begin in verse 22.
Of course, this is just one argument in what could easily transmorgify into an endless stream of exegetical back-and-forth. Both sides will adduce their Scriptures, their corroborating verses, their variant readings, their para-biblical texts. And in the end the same thing will happen that always happens when the Bible is brought into American political disputation: no one will agree about anything and the Good Book will illuminate nothing.
What is more important is that on Thursday Huckabee seemed to evade a reading that he himself had endorsed in 1998. Back then he ratified a Southern Baptist Convention position which stipulated: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
The same statement goes on to read: “Redemption in Christ would call for husbands to forsake harsh or selfish leadership and to extend loving care to their wives (1 Pet. 3:7) and for wives to forsake resistance to the authority of their respective husbands and to practice willing, joyful submission to that leadership (1 Pet. 3:1-2).”
For whatever it’s worth I think the SBC better approximates the position of Ephesians than Huckabee does. In any case, “willing, joyful submission” to a husband’s leadership was a position he wholeheartedly supported in 1998. In 2008 a more liberal (or politically savvy) Huck has emerged, one who urges husbands to submit as well,
That’s enough Bible talk for now. Back to the broader relevance of Huckabee’s remarks tomorrow.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
