Colossians 3:18-4:1 (TNIV) -
18 Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
19 Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
20 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
21 Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
25 Those who do wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.
Colossians 4
1 Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.
My thoughts -
I wasn't going to post on this, but that felt like a cop out. When I read some things in the Bible that I don't really know how to approach my instinct is to either just skip right over them or to try to bend and shape them into something that they're not. Neither approach seems appropriate, though.
Here we have Paul saying two things that, quite frankly, I wish he didn't. The first is that wives should submit to their husbands. Yes, husbands are told that they should love their wives and, in essence, not abuse their wives' submissiveness, but only one gender is told to submit. That just doesn't jive with my marriage. Maybe I'm not living Biblically here but my wife and I are equal partners. We share responsibilities. We communicate our wants and desires to each other. There's nothing I can read into that she is to submit and I am to not be too harsh that doesn't just feel like a major power imbalance in the relationship. How is that one flesh? I don't know. I don't know how to answer that. And I don't want to be unfair to the text and try to twist Paul's words into something he's not saying.
And that gets to the next part I have a hard time with. Paul explains here how slaves and masters are to relate to each other. I just don't know how to touch that. Slavery is a fact of human history and a lot of what we do as humans trying to obey God is to make the best of some bad situations. Part of my desire to "gloss over" this passage would be to take what Paul is saying about slaves and masters and shift that a little to apply it to employers and employees. In fact, that could work with the text and maybe even be good advice. It's just that the boss/employee relationship is clearly not what Paul is dealing with and to ignore that fact is to sugar coat human history for the sake of my own comfort and to make Paul's words say something that they did not say.
So I'm wrestling with this. My instincts in dealing with the text are, I think, all wrong. I want to make it mean something that it didn't, and I want that for my own comfort level. It would make me feel a lot better if these words said something else. It would make me feel a lot better if there was never such a thing as slavery or patriarchy.
But this is our world. We're not perfect, and we never have been. Sin has tainted everything in human history. The powerful have oppressed the powerless. This has been so for as long as we've been here, as best I can tell. And no wishing this weren't so can make that a reality.
I hear what you're saying here! It's worth noting in your final paragraph that you hint at the fall and how that affects the world's systems. In Genesis 1 & 2, we have a much more egalitarian (equal partners) view of marriage. That Eve was called 'helper' isn't a way of saying she's like the Robin to Adam's Batman. The only other places in Scripture where that word for 'helper' shows up, it is referring to God. The patriarchal system seems to an effect of the fall. Isn't living in the aftermath of the Incarnation and resurrection mean that we work against the effects of the fall? If you look at what Paul says about women and slaves in comparison with the way they were treated in the society at large around them, he actually treats them with much more dignity than they were used to. What if Paul were guiding the Church in the right direction? Other passages suggest equal partnership (most notably Gal. 3:28, I think, "neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free..."). In the Ephesians passage that resonates with this Colossians passage (see Ephesians 5:21ff), there is a command that husbands and wives submit to each other. Many modern translations misread the Greek. It says, in effect, "Submit to one another; wives, to your husbands..." The wife's submission there is only within the larger context of mutual submission (so it seems).
ReplyDeleteI hope this helps a little bit. Like you, I don't want to put words in Paul's mouth (or on his pen). But I also don't want to treat his words like the Pharisees were treating the Law. Does that make sense?