3. Mutuality In Living Color: Fashioning a Marriage Based On Equality
Fashioning a Marriage Based on Equality
A good marriage is like a kaleidoscope. With a few simple ingredients it is ever-changing, showing new facets of each other and the pleasure of working and living and loving as a team. A marriage can be whatever you want it to be . . . Your marriage is your very own; it belongs to no one else. If you try to live out someone else’s idea of marriage, you may . . . get a pattern that does not fit at all. So it is important to realize that it is your marriage and that you can write your own rules.
PATRICIA GUNDRY, HEIRS TOGETHER
I love kaleidoscopes fashioned with multicolored glass shards. On more than one occasion, I have given beautifully designed Sheryl Koch kaleidoscopes as wedding gifts—all the better when they are accompanied by the above quote from Heirs Together, a volume I wished my husband would have been willing to work through with me back in the 1980s when I still had some optimism that our marriage could be saved.
The book, however, is ideally read before a couple even becomes engaged. It prepares a couple for the potential that this kaleidoscope may shatter. It alerts them to shards along the way—a signal to the engaged couple that they should step back and slow down and perhaps each take a different course.
Yet despite all the warning signs during our courtship, I foolishly believed ours would be a kaleidoscope marriage made in heaven.
Just before we tied the knot in August 1968, however, new issues came to the fore. On the day before the wedding, he demanded that we each memorize his personally contrived and lengthy, convoluted vows. I was shocked. He had earlier demanded that my promise to obey him must be in the vows. I agreed without fully considering the implications. But now he was asking for much more. What about my input and editing? There was no time, he insisted. What could I do? I was trapped, convinced it was too late to back out. I knew the little Alliance church (not the Wheaton College chapel) would be filled the following evening with family and neighborhood friends. Canceling would absolutely humiliate my mother.
I was a beautiful bride (with pictures to prove it!) in the simple white floor-length dress I had purchased on sale for $124. But the ceremony was marked by my stumbling through sentence after sentence, with repeated promptings by the poor preacher. The pieces of cut glass that I had hoped would form the intricate kaleidoscope of our life together had already begun to scatter. Here, first in the little church in Wisconsin; then in Montclair and Cape May Court House, New Jersey; later in Barrington Hills and Woodstock, Illinois; Crown Point, Indiana; and finally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Bloody shards wherever we lived—until nothing beautiful was left.
Little matters of authoritarian control had arisen on our honeymoon. A few days into the trip, we were passing through Montreal in the early afternoon. Our stash of packed snacks had been consumed. I spotted a sign for twenty-five-cent hot dogs. Our night’s lodging had not provided breakfast, and I was starving. His plan was to find a smorgasbord dinner at around six o’clock, where we could eat enough to keep us fed until the following evening, something he did often. If it worked for him, it would work for me. So while Canada was passing outside our car windows, we were fussing and fighting. He prevailed. We did not stop for food. Nor, however, did I starve.
Perhaps what is most startling about my engagement story is that I was not entirely naive about life. On my own after high school, I applied for scholarships and worked my way through college and on into graduate school. I had owned vehicles and rented apartments. I was not seventeen and homeschooled. But whether the problem was serious gullibility or the serpent’s lie that male headship was God’s ideal, I stumbled into a very bad marriage.
When we revisit the Garden of Eden, we find that Eve has encountered the serpent, and she and Adam have taken the fall. God seeks them out in the cool of the evening. When charged with disobedience, Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. Then come the curses. For Eve, the penalty is harsh—bearing children in pain and sorrow and, take note of this, gender inequality—the man ruling over her. There is no hint of such in the garden, but now, banished outside its walls, the mutuality she had enjoyed with Adam is absent.
Some Bible interpreters argue that this curse of inequality is prescriptive for all times—that we dare not tamper with it. But the curse on the ground that meant Adam would be tilling the soil snarled with thorns and thistles has been largely reversed. Even as inventions of machinery and fertilizers have relieved the backbreaking work of agriculture (at least in many areas of the world), so have legal statutes mitigated the effects of gender inequality.
The struggle for gender equality in civic life, as well as in church and in marriage, has been long and hard, and it is certainly not over. In the West today, women’s equality in the political arena is assumed, though most people are unaware that a century ago, it was not. Women’s equality in the church and in marriage, however, is still seriously restricted, particularly among conservative evangelicals.
When I first began digging in to the subject of biblical equality in the early 1980s, those who did not affirm gender equality were termed traditionalists. Indeed, they identified themselves as such and forthrightly argued that the Bible did not support women’s equality in the church or in marriage. Today, the politically correct term complementarian is preferred, and along with it comes the claim that women are actually equal with men. They are denied positions of authority in the church and must be in subjection to their husbands, but they—as complementarians assert—enjoy equality all the same.
Imagine saying that African Americans are fully equal to whites before God, but they are not permitted to hold church office and must be subject to Caucasians. The claim would be ludicrous. And so it is regarding gender.
Yesterday, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2015, John and I went to the theater to see Selma, the heart-wrenching story of the preparations for the march from Selma to Montgomery. Highest on the agenda during the repeated efforts to organize that 1965 peaceful march was voting rights. For that right, Jimmie Lee Jackson and others were killed. Many more, including longtime congressman John Lewis, were brutally beaten. They risked their lives for equality—equal rights in voting. Others earlier had risked their lives by merely going to church—in particular, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. On September 16, 1963, four young girls were killed by a KKK bomb:
Addie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
Denise McNair
The film brought back stark memories of the first months of my marriage. The first violent outburst occurred in October 1968, barely two months after our wedding. My ex-husband, to my surprise, announced that he was supporting George Wallace’s independent run in the presidential race. He had been collecting literature and even attended a rally in Newark. I strongly opposed Wallace, though I mainly kept my thoughts to myself. Our differences erupted very suddenly one afternoon when I had returned to the apartment later than usual, surprised to find him still there. He asked where I’d been. I told him I’d gotten my absentee ballot in the mail, filled it out, and walked to the nearby mailbox to mail it. He asked me which candidate I voted for. I told him. He went into a rage, demanding why I hadn’t voted for Wallace. My words only infuriated him further. When he pushed me, I recovered and stood my ground, almost daring him to lay a hand on his new bride. I reminded him that women had won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1919—a right that did not mean a woman had to vote as her husband did. He angrily countered that my obedience to him was foremost.
The matter of my lack of submission simmered, as did his rage. I had defied him as “the head of the home” by not voting for the candidate I knew he supported. My refusal to support George Wallace had everything to do with his racist administration as governor of Alabama and his sending of officers to kill and beat peaceful marchers.
Until yesterday, I had not thought about Wallace in years. There he was on the big screen, mostly played by another but also in actual newsreel footage. True, he later apologized (after he was paralyzed in 1972 by a would-be assassin). But had he possessed moral scruples as a governor, he could have stopped the killings of innocent individuals. Instead he exercised his leadership in the state of Alabama with vicious power. Had he done what was moral and right, Addie, Cynthia, Carole, and Denise might today be cuddling grandchildren. Some of the decades-long racism so prevalent still today might have been stomped out. It was this man, I was reminded yesterday, I had refused to vote for.
Without equal rights there is no equality. To argue that male headship does not infringe on female equality is disingenuous. There is no definition of equality that does not at the same time grant equal rights and opportunities. If, on the other hand, complementarians were to argue that the Bible does not extend equal rights to women, that would not be disingenuous. In fact, as well versed as I am in the issues relating to the egalitarian and headship debate, I could make that very case myself. What I could not do is argue that the meaning of equality does not include equal rights and opportunity—that inequality in a marriage is actually equality.
Very early in my first marriage, the Ephesians 5 passage was frequently used against me, always in a one-sided manner. That my ex-husband failed to love me as Christ loved the church was not applicable. That I was not submitting to him was the overriding issue. Anyone familiar with this passage knows that it begins in verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The next phrase, “wives, to your own husbands,” has no verb in the original Greek. It is a verse that cannot be read without the topic sentence of mutual submission. Moreover, the entire passage places a far heavier burden of love and submission on the husband than it does on the wife, as I have written elsewhere:
It is safe to say that in the ancient world, Paul’s admonition to women did not amount to shocking news. That a wife should submit to her husband was obvious. That was part of the very fabric of society and culture. But that husband and wife were to “be subject to one another” had to be rather startling. And that a husband was to “love his wife as Christ loved the church” was certainly a standard far beyond what was expected of husbands in the ancient world.
If anyone squirmed in the pew of the first-century church, it surely must have been the husband, not the wife.1
Here Paul is speaking of mutuality as in 1 Corinthians 11:11–12: “Woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.”
An earlier passage in Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, frequently employed to bolster male headship, also supports equality in marriage. Here Paul starts by pointing out the benefits of celibacy and the immorality of adulterous relationships, clearly making the latter an equal prohibition. He continues with this advice for marital balance and mutuality:
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
1 CORINTHIANS 7:3 – 5
Mutual consent. Here Paul is dealing with ministry matters. He is a driven man—driven to preach the gospel—and he wants others to do likewise. Such activity is easily undermined when encumbered by a spouse and children. So he privileges singleness, something rarely promoted by complementarians today. When men and women do marry, however, mutual consent is the principle, and we are unnecessarily narrowing his focus if we apply the phrase to sexual intercourse alone. Mutual consent in any aspect of day-to-day intercourse between a husband and wife simply makes sense. If, on the other hand, Paul is admonishing the husband to be ruler over his wife, why does he not insist that he rule over sexual intimacies as well?
Referring to complementarian marriages that demonstrate male headship, Russell Moore writes, “Sometimes I fear that we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian.”2 If such marriages are not supposed to be functionally egalitarian, how are they supposed to work out? How do patriarchal marriages work out in practical terms? Years ago, I asked a colleague at Trinity to help explain how headship played out on a daily basis. He told me his family had just returned from Miami, Ohio, where his son visited a university. As they considered where to eat along the way, the others in the car expressed their preference for Taco Bell. He exercised his headship and chose a different fast-food restaurant. And thus he ruled. But what if the wife questions his decision. Here John Piper has provided a script:
Suppose it’s Noël and I. I am about to decide something for the family that looks foolish to her. At that moment, Noël could express her submission like this: “Johnny [who knew?], I know you’ve thought a lot about this, and I love it when you take the initiative to plan for us and take the responsibility like this, but I really don’t have peace about this decision and I think we need to talk about it some more. Could we? Maybe tonight sometime?”3
Why must a wife respond in such a way? Piper states elsewhere, “A wife who ‘comes on strong’ with her advice will probably drive a husband into passive silence or into active anger.”4 While he is no doubt explaining—not excusing—wife battering, the term “active anger” brings back a lot of memories of violence, and not always directed entirely at me. I know from experience that active anger can rip cabinet doors right off their hinges, a phone off the wall, and put a dent in a refrigerator door all in one episode, not to mention bloody knuckles and a blood-spattered floor. That I was cowering and pleading for him to stop had little effect on his “active anger.”
Bruce Ware, who years ago was a colleague of mine at Trinity, stated the matter even more forcefully at a 2008 conference when he said that “women victims of domestic violence were often to blame for their own abuse because they were failing to submit to their husbands’ authority.”5
Blaming the woman will be dealt with in a later chapter. Here the issue is practical insights on the workings of complementarian and egalitarian marriages. How do egalitarians work out differences in their marriages? Who is the tiebreaker? When I had asked my complementarian colleague about how his headship might look in relationship to the daily routine, I had actually expected something more significant than whether or not to eat at Taco Bell. As much as they may tout headship, most complementarian husbands do not want to be saddled with all the decision making.
This is certainly true for egalitarians. How do egalitarians deal with a tiebreaker situation? Let’s say the husband is offered a transfer with a substantial salary increase; the wife is settled in the neighborhood—near family, schools, and church. But the husband wants the opportunity to climb the career ladder. Or let’s say the situation is reversed, and the wife has an opportunity to climb the ladder to success. Such a life-changing decision should simply be based on mutuality, and no major move should be made until both husband and wife are fully on board. Can this lead to serious conflict? Of course it can, no matter whether the marriage is based on equality or on male headship.
It is interesting that the concept of male headship and wifely submission is rarely even broached in the Hebrew Bible. The longest passage in the Bible that deals with marriage features the wife. She is the Proverbs 31 superwoman who is more precious than rubies. But there is no hint of her being anything less than a full equal of any man around—including her husband, who “has full confidence in her” (verse 11). She is not waiting for him to make decisions and serve as tiebreaker. Rather, we find her busy with her cottage garment industry, selling items throughout the region, and not only that, but also dealing in real estate and planting a vineyard. She serves her husband and children as well, but the text shows her first and foremost to be a shrewd businesswoman, clothed with strength, dignity, wisdom, and laughter—a woman who opens her arms to the poor.
In the Gospels, we find Mary, mother of Jesus, in a nearly parallel role. If we were to travel with her, we might find it difficult to keep up. Priscilla is another wife who has a cottage industry (tentmaking) and travels in ministry, working alongside her husband, Aquila, and the apostle Paul.
When we move beyond the first century to the time when the church is beginning to become more organized, however, crucial restrictions are often placed on wives. “If the more important, most beneficial concerns were turned over to the woman, she would go quite mad,” wrote John Chrysostom. “God maintained the order of each sex by dividing the business of human life into two parts and assigned the more necessary and beneficial aspects to the man and the less important, inferior matters to the woman.”6 He emphasizes that this is not simply a societal measure, but a plan given by God “so that a woman would not rebel against the husband due to the inferiority of her service.”7 Tell that to those confident and capable biblical women.
Read and reread Proverbs 31, and it’s hard to imagine how one would find this woman to be “quite mad.” She is involved in both the “more necessary and beneficial” work as well as the “less important, inferior matters” (assuming—as I surely do not—that home, family, and charitable causes are “inferior”). Chrysostom was interpreting Scripture with a male bias—a bias that has been almost universally passed along and accepted from his time to the present day. The vast majority of Bible interpreters, after all, have been male.
A marriage based on mutuality offers many benefits that are not, at least in theory, applicable to a marriage based on male headship. Consider the matter of Alzheimer’s disease. What if Robertson McQuilkin, instead of Muriel, had been stricken. She would have had to, for all practical purposes, assume headship. A marriage of mutuality would have better prepared her for that. Consider widowhood. Would the Proverbs 31 woman have been prepared to manage the household without her husband? Of course she would have. Is a woman who is ruled by her husband prepared? When a husband makes the decisions, a wife is left in a vulnerable position upon his death.
Catherine Marshall married Peter Marshall when she was a junior in college. The following year, he was called to be the minister of the prestigious New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Several years later, he was appointed as chaplain of the United States Senate. He was handsome, charming, brilliant, and articulate, frequently asked to speak at important functions out of town. He lived out the doctrine of male headship in marriage, and Catherine remained in the background. In January 1949, he took part in the inauguration ceremony of President Harry Truman. Five days later, he was dead.
The heart attack that took her husband’s life took the wind out of Catherine. She was bowed down in grief. But there was more. I wrote of her situation in Private Lives of Pastors’ Wives:
As the weeks wore on, Catherine quickly discovered that there was more than grief to cope with. Few women could have been less prepared for independence than she. “In many ways, I was still a little girl. I had adored and leaned on my husband . . . I had never once figured out an income tax blank, had a car inspected, consulted a lawyer, or tried to read an insurance policy.” These were not the kinds of things that Peter believed ought to concern a housewife. To complicate matters, Peter had not left a will, which meant that, according to District of Columbia statutes, two-thirds of the estate would be placed in trust for young Peter, and Catherine would receive only a third. Even her son’s guardianship had to be established in court.8
In 1950, when Catherine was struggling to find her way, male headship was assumed. Only in recent decades, however, has male headship been politicized. An example of this can be found in the recent changes made in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in America. I am personally aware of the pain these changes caused many women through conversations I’ve had with the late Dellanna West O’Brien, onetime director of the Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU). In 1993, Adrian Rogers (three-time president of the SBC) proclaimed that the WMU must be “hardwired” to the SBC instead of continuing on in its supportive, though independent role. When the leadership of the WMU balked, they were likened to an adulterous woman.
Only a few years later, in 1998, the SBC, meeting in Salt Lake City, made a public pronouncement on women in the denomination, under the banner of the Family Amendment. Newspapers around the country carried this new directive. From The New York Times:
[The Convention] amended its essential statement of beliefs today to include a declaration that a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership and that a husband should “provide for, protect and lead his family” . . . Paige Patterson, a seminary president from North Carolina who was elected today as the Southern Baptists’ president, said the amendment was a response to “a time of growing crisis in the family.”9
A crisis in the family that Paige Patterson did not note, nor did the Family Amendment reference, was (and is) domestic violence. That the SBC added the Family Amendment might be regarded as a relatively harmless measure. But it was devastating for certain longtime SBC missionaries who were recalled from their posts because they refused to sign on to the new statement of faith.
One of the results of the SBC’s clampdown on the WMU is that the once very significant role that single women missionaries played has since plummeted. How strange that is in light of the apostle Paul’s emphasis on the ministry of single missionaries. Women like Lottie Moon, once regarded as the “patron saint” of Southern Baptist missions, would today not recognize their onetime denominational home. Indeed, the “Lottie Moon Christmas Offering” has over the decades brought in more money to missions than any other fund. She was an outspoken woman who proclaimed, “What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work . . . What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.”10
She was an intelligent, independent thinker who is remembered for remarkable accomplishments—a model for all women. She was not held back by a John Chrysostom or by a Paige Patterson or by a husband demanding that his wife submit to his headship. Today the Lottie Moons of a century ago have all but disappeared in the SBC—a truly sad turn of events.
It is also a sad story when a confident and capable woman marries, only to be stripped of her most compelling qualities. Yet the doctrine of male headship demands that an independent single woman turn into another woman—a woman who is under subjection. Reflecting on his marriage to Patricia, Stan Gundry’s words are well worth pondering.
I would not have been attracted to Pat in the first
place had I not seen in her one who was my equal . . .
But within a few days of marriage that began to
change. Traditional ideas of male leadership and
female submissiveness began to take over. It was
so ingrained in us that at the time I don’t think
we really understood what was happening . . .
After all too long a time, some years back we began
to try to rediscover that original relationship . . .
Living as equals has given me back the woman I was
originally attracted to. It has brought us back to the
basis for the relationship that we originally had.11