Does the Bible Teach Mutual Submission?

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Alright Tim, the question for today's episode is, does the Bible teach mutual submission? That's one of those very frustrating things that people say when they're trying to basically get wives off the hook for submission.

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They'll basically ignore every single passage in the Bible on marriage. So as you're reading through 1

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Peter, you see that wives are told to be subject to their own husbands. You read through Ephesians 5, wives are told to submit to their husbands.

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When you're reading through Colossians, it's wives submit to your husbands. So universally when you get to these role passages, wives are told to submit to their husbands.

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But then some genius comes along, they read Ephesians 5, 21 essentially, and that says submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, and then they come to the conclusion that everyone is supposed to submit in marriage.

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Well obviously. I don't know, how can you not come to that conclusion Tim? Are you ignoring that passage of the

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Bible? The problem is the next verse, right? So the next verse says wives submit to your husbands.

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So the next verse says, wives submit yourself therefore to your own husbands as to the Lord. And so you have to have some sort of accounting for what's happening here.

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And part of what's happening is that the English translations are leading people astray when it comes to this.

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And it's one of those things that's hard to explain to English speakers because they're just reading the

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Bible in English, but then when you're reading it in Greek, it's just very clear what's happening. And it's just one of those gaffes that people are making that you wish that you could spare them of, but unfortunately you can't at times.

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So what's actually happening here as you're reading through this passage is that in Ephesians 5 .21,

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you basically have this word, hupotesimenoi, that's the word for submitting, right?

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Hupotesimenoi? Hupotesimenoi. Oh, hupotesimenoi. Hoop, hoop, hoop. Okay, hupotesimenoi.

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Yeah, hupotesimenoi. Greek vocabulary word for the week. That's right, that's right. So what's happening is you have hupotesimenoi and then to one another in the fear of Christ.

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And then when you're getting to verse 22, what you see is haigonakes, which is basically the wives to their own husbands as to the

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Lord. So you have one sentence in Greek essentially. So submitting to one another in the fear of Christ, and then it says the wives to their own husbands.

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That's all one thought, okay? And so what's happening is in English, it divides it up into two sentences.

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So submitting to one another in the fear of Christ, and then you get wives submit. The verb submit is supplied there to your own husbands as to the

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Lord. But what's really happening is submitting to one another in the fear of Christ, the wives to their own husbands. That's the flow of thought.

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And so when you think about it that way, submitting to one another in the fear of Christ, the wives to their own husbands, what you're not understanding is everyone submits to everyone, right?

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And then the wives are supposed to submit to their husbands just like everyone submits to everyone. What you're realizing is that you have a subject heading.

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Paul's just looking at a group and he's saying, hey, you guys need to be submitting to one another in the reverence of Christ.

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What does that look like? Wives submit to husbands. Slaves obey your masters. Children obey your parents. It's all the same thought.

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So you have practice authority relationships within the church. That's what it's saying. Practice authority relationships within the church.

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Wives submit to your husbands. Slaves obey your earthly masters. Children obey your parents. That's the way it works.

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So that's what is meant there, right? And so what is not meant there is that there's some sort of idea of mutual submission.

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That doesn't even make any sense. So basically the argument stands because Paul says, you know, submit to one another in the fear of Christ, right?

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And then he lists out the examples, wives to their husbands, slaves to their earthly masters, children to their parents.

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There is no example of like a husbands to your wives, right?

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Part of it is that, but part of it is just the grammar. Okay. So part of it is yes. So the husband isn't listed there as an example, but then the other part of it is just simply the grammar.

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So submitting to one another in the fear of Christ, the wives to the husbands, right? That's one sentence.

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That's one thought. Like you haven't even moved on to a new thought. So you need to be submitting, you know, submitting to one another, the wives to their own husbands.

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It could have said, you know, the wives and husbands to each other. But what it says is submitting to one another, meaning the wives to their husbands.

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So grammatically, like it's talking about wives submitting to their husband. It's one thought. It's not two thoughts, right?

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So what's happening for the mutual submission position to work is you have two independent thoughts. Submitting to one another, period.

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And then wives, you submit in a different way to your husbands. But what's actually happening is the same thought.

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So why do people gravitate to that interpretation? I know you said, hey, it's basically like a deficiency.

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I don't know if you're like necessarily blaming the English language itself or if you're just blaming the specific translations into English.

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No. I mean, it's a perfectly fine thing to translate. Okay. But you have to make,

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I mean, English translations are translating it, and they're not, like, there's an expression in, you know, translation, translators are traitors.

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And so you have to, like, you can't get everything that's in, you know, the donor language into the receptor language.

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Sure. And you have to make certain calculations. And if people knew how often verbs are supplied in English from Greek, like, they would be confused if they don't understand what's actually going on.

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So this is kind of a necessary dynamic of translation in certain ways. But, you know, people should, like, what's happening is you have people with an agenda to overturn the obvious reality that wives are supposed to submit to their husband.

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Because of verses that are completely unrelated to this one single passage. Right. Right.

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So, I mean, like, it's just overwhelmingly taught, you know, as you read through First Peter. I mean, it's just like wives be subject to your own husbands.

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Right. Even if some do not obey the word, even, you know, as they observe your chase and respectful conduct, even as, you know,

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Sarah obeyed Abraham calling him Lord. And, you know, you are her daughters if you do well and do not fear anything that's frightening.

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So, like, the issue, though, is that this is just taught everywhere. Wives are supposed to be subject, supposed to submit to their husbands.

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And then what you're having here is someone, like, making an argument that doesn't make logical sense.

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Okay. Like, if submission means anything, if being subject to your husband means anything like what that means is like, like for a wife to be subject to her husband to submit to her husband, she is like an inferior in rank to a superior in rank.

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So she's placing herself under his authority because he is spoken of as like the ruler of the home.

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Okay. Yeah. So when you get all that, then you're trying to argue for some sort of submitting to one another in the reverent, in the, in Ephesians 521.

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Like, if you're trying to harmonize them all, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to either do one of two options.

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One is to say that the submitting to one another in the reverence of Christ is talking about a very different kind of submission than what's happening in the very next verse, which seems unlikely.

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Right. Or what you would say is like, Oh, the submitting to one another is just a heading that's now going to work itself out in examples.

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Does that make sense? Yeah. And so I think you can read the English and get what I'm trying to say.

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It's not just like, you have to know the Greek to get it. If you have a brain and you're trying to honor the Bible, you're going to look at submitting to one another in the reverence of Christ wife, submit to your husband's slaves, obey masters, children, obey parents.

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Huh? That must be what he means by submit to one another. Right. Right. Follow authority relationships in the church.

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Right. Like, and that's not, um, so it's not like you can't get it apart from great

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Greek. It's just when you read the Greek, the Greek is much more explicit, explicitly shuts the door on that kind of argument than what people realize.

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So why not just translate it as one sentence? I mean, it, it doesn't sound like it would be that difficult, especially if the

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Greek is treating it as one sentence. Um, it, it seems like you could accommodate that in English as well as the rules of English.

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Oh, does it? Yeah. So you need a verb. Um, so submitting to one another and you know, the fear of Christ, the wives to their own husbands.

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Right. So the wives to their own husbands as to the Lord, like that's not a complete thought.

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Does that make sense? Like it's missing something, it's missing something in English. And so what they're trying to do is supply what's missing there.

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Like, so you're just, you have, um, you have bad English at that point, but then if you say it, if you say it, like, so like part of like translating it, it's putting it into good

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English. Does that make sense? Right. So, but if you say it like everyone knows what that meant though, even though it's awkward

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English, you get what I'm saying? Yeah. So like if I were to say submitting to one another in the reverence of Christ, the wives to their own husbands as to the

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Lord, you know what I said, you know what the implications of that are, even though it's bad

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English, do you get what I mean? Yeah. So then you're left saying, do we do like, do we do a poor translation here or do we do a translation that could be a little bit confusing?

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Does that make sense? But then it's clear, but it follows the rules of English, you know? And so part of what you're doing when you're translating is you're saying, what are the rules of the donor language?

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What are the rules of the receptor language? And they don't always match. Okay. Right. And so like, and then you just, you're trying to do the best you can.

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That's why you have translators or traders. Yeah. It's not like a math equation that works out equal every single time.

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It doesn't. Yeah. And anyone who knows two languages knows this. And so basically it's just the, you know, there's a certain type of person who's going to latch onto this quirk in translation here and do something strange with it.

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But you should be able to know, even without knowing what I'm talking about, that that would be inappropriate because there was no place in anywhere in the

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Bible where it says that husbands are supposed to submit to wives. Okay. Okay. All right.

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Fair enough. This has been another episode of Bible bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion.

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Now go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.