Blog 4

            The regard to early Christian households as examined in Ephesians 5:21-6:9 is predominately patriarchal. That’s really no surprise, but the amount is almost comical. It begins with a preposterous analogy, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Saviour. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.”

            This analogy presents the husband as Christ in his own household. While the passage further instructs husbands to love their wives, it is instructing them to love them as Christ would love them. A rift is presented. While the love is mutual it is certainly not equal. Ephesians presents the husband as something to be loved in a way of reverence; while the wife is to be loved by the husband because it is the way of the Lord. When one loves the other in the way of worship a dichotomy exists that continues through a large majority of the bible.

            In Women’s Bible Commentary, E. Elizabeth Johnson mentions (in regards to the previously mentioned verses of Ephesians), “The result for women is thus a retreat from the initial freedom promised them in Paul’s preaching and a reassertion of conventional patriarchal morality.” This might be the greatest tragedy of Ephesians 5:21-6:9. A hope that was once promised is squashed once another author took his quill to parchment and etched their own views in the bible.