What About Ministry?
THE IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL STRUCTURES
Given Paul’s basic theological stance, and its impact on male/female (especially husband/wife) relationships, the question that remains for us is the problematic one: What are the implications of all this for social structures? To get at this issue we need to return to the three sets of structures singled out in Galatians 3:28, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” It is clear from several passages in Paul that he is not arguing that the new creation eliminates the fallen structures in which some of the differences exist. What Paul does with those structures is to radicalize them by putting them into the context of the cross. Everything is moderated by the fact that the cross rules over all.
Take slavery as an example. On the one hand, in Colossians 3:22- 4:1 and Ephesians 6:5-9 Paul calls on both masters and slaves to live as brothers and sisters in Christ, without urging that the structure itself be eliminated. On the other hand, in Philemon he radicalizes the relationship in such a way that it no longer carries significance. Paul does not say, “Philemon, stop having slaves”; what he says is that now “you have Onesimus back for good — no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother” (w. 15-16). How, one wonders, can the old structures carry their former significance in this context — where the slave who has stolen and run away, and who in Roman law merited death, is now accepted back as a dearly loved brother in Christ? And remember that both the letter to the Colossians and to Philemon were read publicly in the gathered community, where both Philemon and Onesimus were present together to hear what God had established through the cross. The old distinctions may still exist in a sociological way, to be sure, but they cease to have meaning when both master and slave own the same master, Jesus Christ.35
When we turn to male and female relationships (in a culture where this primarily had to do with wife and husband in the home), we find the same thing. The problem for us in reading the texts (especially the “house codes” in Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:18-6:9) is that we have scarcely an inkling as to how much Paul was in fact radicalizing the Greco-Roman home. Thus before looking at the Ephesians text, one needs to have a sense for the sociology assumed by the passage. And here architecture says a great deal. Although the early believers lived in other kinds of settings — tenements; shopkeepers, who lived above their shops; etc. — this passage assumes a larger household of a kind shown in figure 1 (on p. 67),36 which included wives, children, and slaves.
The basic sociological model for this kind of household is that of patronage, meaning a communal relationship between unequals. In this kind of relationship each of the unequals benefits the other. The master of the house benefits the rest of the people in the household by providing for them; they benefit him by doing his bidding (slaves, in particular). The wife would benefit by the fact that she could now exist in a home besides that of her father, and of course the householder benefited because hopefully she would bear him male heirs.37
Figure 1: A typical domus
Key:
1. fauces
2.shop
3.atrium
4.impluvium
5.cubiculum
6.tablinum
7.andron
8.peristyle
9.triclinum
10.oecus
2.shop
3.atrium
4.impluvium
5.cubiculum
6.tablinum
7.andron
8.peristyle
9.triclinum
10.oecus
(Drawing by Deborah Wells)
By law, the man was the master of his household (thus the patron). Paul’s text is written into a context of “totalitarian patriarchy,” which was absolute, and sustained by law.38 Usually, but not always, the patron required the household to serve his gods. Unlike our understanding of home, such a household was not a place of consumption, but of production; not a private refuge, but often semipublic. The patron’s was the only public role, and the atrium often served as a place to do business and was basically open to others. The women, especially daughters, lived in the rear and were not permitted to stray into the public domain of the house — for fear of her becoming abused or a seductress. Much of this is described in a passage from Philo of Alexandria:
Market-places and council-halls and law-courts and gatherings and meetings where a large number of people are assembled, and open-air with full scope for discussion and action — all these are suitable to men both in war and peace. The women are best suited to the indoor life which never strays from the house, within which the middle door is taken by the maidens as their boundary, and the outer door by those who have reached full womanhood.39
What did it mean for a woman to enter such a household as wife? We know from a large number of census lists from Egypt that the average age of the man when he married was 30, of the woman, less than 18. The reason for marriage was not “love” in our usual sense, but to bear legitimate children, to keep the family line going; indeed, failure to bear children, especially sons, was often cause for divorce. Moreover, almost all men were (from our point of view) promiscuous. As Demosthenes says in an offhanded, matter-of-fact way: “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of the body, but wives to bear us legitimate children.”40 Wives, therefore, were often promiscuous as well — although they tried to be more discreet, since their infidelity was a matter of shame!
The idea that men and women might be equal partners in marriage simply did not exist, evidence for which can be seen in meals, which in all cultures serve as the great equalizer. In the Greek world, women scarcely ever joined their husbands and his friends at meals; and if they did, they did not recline at table (only the courtesans did that), but sat on benches at the end. And they were expected to leave after eating, when the conversation took a more public turn. It is especially difficult for most of us even to imagine our way back into such a culture, let alone to have any sense of feeling for it. Which is what makes what Paul actually says so counter-cultural in every way, without eliminating the structures themselves.
Our difficulty in getting back into Paul’s text is that we are heirs of a culture in which two major events in the past three hundred years have radically altered Western culture forever, and turned the basically patronal culture that preceded it completely on its head: the so-called Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the individual, created a culture in which individual rights came to be regarded as the highest good, so much so that by the late twentieth century the concept of individual rights has finally superseded that of the common good (an idea with a rich history that has now become passé).
But the Enlightenment alone did not create the structural changes in our understanding of home and family (after all, look at the British manor house, with its “enlightened” autocrat, that has got such bad press in a whole series of recent movies). It took the Industrial Revolution to turn things around; and it did so by drawing both men and women out of the home into the marketplace, so that, whereas in 1885 in the United States 88 percent of all goods were produced in the home, by 1915 that was totally reversed.
With these, and all the more so if we add the onset of the “tech-nological age,” also came the wonderful opportunities that women now enjoy: equal opportunities for education, including finally the right to vote and to serve in almost every way in the public domain. But it also resulted in our homes being thought of as havens for rest and, until recently, as the place for the nuclear family to exist — a concept almost foreign to Paul’s world.
But the Apostle Paul preceded these events by two thousand years, with the message of a crucified Messiah, which was culturally subversive at its core. Indeed, perhaps the most radical thing was that all people who participated in God’s new creation also shared a common meal together and thus celebrated their Lord’s death until he was to come again — which, as 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 makes clear, created considerable tension for the traditional household.
When we turn at last to Ephesians 5, we need to begin where Paul’s own sentence begins, with verse 18, because “be [keep] filled with the Spirit” is the only imperative in the passage until verse 25 (“Husbands, love your wives”). Thus Paul is urging that believers be filled with the Spirit, and evidence that by singing, giving thanks, and submitting to one another.
In the relationships that follow, three things need to be noted. First, in the ordinary household the husband, father, and master are all the same person, while the wife, children, and slaves were different persons. Second, when Paul tells the wives to submit, and children and slaves to obey, he is not offering some new idea, or countering insubordination, he is merely speaking within the culture. But those who are filled with the Spirit and worship Christ as Lord, do so as those serving their true Lord, not an earthly one.
Third — and here is the truly radical moment — both the structure of the passage and the word count (four words to the husband for every one word to the wife) indicate that the emphasis lies with the householder, the husband/master/father. And the only thing Paul says to him is repeated three times: “Love your wife.” Love (agape) is what rules, and agape, it must be noted emphatically, does not refer either to romance or sex. Rather, it refers to his giving his life in loving service to her for her sake.
One should note especially the regular emphasis on loving his own wife. That eliminates the courtesans. Love your wives (v. 25); love your own wives (v. 28); love your own wives (v. 33). She is the one who deserves all of your love and commitment of loving service. The model, as throughout the New Testament, is Christ’s love for the church which is expressed in his death on the cross. The imagery Paul uses is that of a man taking a bride, deliberately echoing language from Ezekiel 16, where God betroths the naked and orphaned teenager and washes her and dresses her in the finest of clothes. Paul now images the husband as treating his wife as just such a bride, adorned and glorious to behold.
It is assumed in this text, of course, that the husband will continue to provide leadership in the household. But such leadership will be radically transformed into caring for the people, not having them around to serve his own self-interests. And that is why Paul goes on to speak of the slaves and the children. In each case, the husband, the master, and the father is the person Paul is after. If he can radicalize the home in light of the cross, the life of the child, of the slave, and of the woman is set into new perspective in the new creation.
So where does that put us hermeneutically? I would argue that the structures are ultimately quite immaterial for believers; that is, first-century households can no more serve as models for Christian homes at the turn of the twenty-first century, than the Roman Empire with its self-serving, destructive economic policies and its insistence on emperor worship, should serve for contemporary political structures. All structures, ours as well as theirs, are predicated altogether on cultural givens. There simply is no biblical structure for the household.
Thus in our culture, structures tend to depend largely on the two people involved with regard to their own giftings, personalities, and how they relate to each other. But whatever the structure, at issue is that we live Christ-like in our relationships with one another in our homes. God calls us to shalom, to be filled with the Spirit, thus submitting ourselves to one another in reverence to Christ, to love with Christ’s love by self-sacrificial giving of ourselves. And I would suggest that if we do that well, the matter of structures will pale into insignificance.