I said this morning that women have a high and righteous calling to teach each other how to love their husbands and children, and how to submit to their husband. And here there is a lot of teaching, some of which is good, and some of which is dangerous.

Submission and authority function hand-in-hand with all the other biblical directives about how Christians ought to interact with one another. Along with submitting to her husband, a Christian wife also has the responsibility to be transparent, speak truth, confront sin, and challenge her husband to ever increasing levels of holiness. As heirs together of the grace of life, both husband and wife have the responsibility to love, encourage, and build one another up; and to interact with forbearance, kindness and humility. Biblical authority and submission contribute to mutuality, and do not diminish or detract from it. (It’s “both-and” not “either-or.”)

Well, Paul told the woman married to an unbeliever to stay with him and obey him as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling her husband my LORD, for the sake of Christ, and that many a man is convicted and converted without saying a word. That seems to be lost in this. What this woman is teaching is not submission, it is a pseudobiblical excuse for nagging.

Note that she is describing the new family model created by Complementarians after being enlightened by the 1960s; it is not to be mistaken for biblical headship and submission. Under headship and submission the wife is to win a sinning husband without a word, and a husband is to wash his wife in the water of the word.

In the new model of servant leadership it is the exact opposite. Husbands are forbidden to call out the sin of their wives, and wives have the obligation to wash their husbands in the water of the word and avoid the newly defined feminist sin of lacking moxie. While husbands are forbidden from attempting to even encourage their wives to follow the instruction of the Bible, wives must closely monitor their husbands for any and all possible error and punish them if they transgress…

Well, the woman get some things correct. She understands that God hates divorce. And that there are many secular gurus arguing that divorce is a path to spiritual enlightenment. So she has some truthful teaching.

The term Gwyeth Paltrow used — conscious uncoupling — she got from her spiritual guides who seem to specailize in some form of therapeutic pantheism. Did I add that spirituality gives me hives?

Covenant and commitment I can understand. Doing things for the feels won’t even get you through a crossfit session.

Divorce is an assault against everything God created marriage to be. Divorce is not a sacred journey towards wholeness. There’s absolutely nothing sacred about it. Though it is sometimes unavoidable as the lesser of two evils, it is unholy and ungodly, for it is not part of God’s original plan. It spiritually rends and tears. It wounds. It is an unspeakable tragedy. Certainly, God pours out immeasurable grace for those who walk this difficult and painful path. He aches for them. And in His deep compassion and mercy He extends forgiveness, comfort and healing. But to suggest that divorce is anything but a negative, tragic assault against God’s design for marriage–to suggest that it is even remotely wonderful and desirable– is to elevate it from the gutter where it belongs.

As funnyordie.com’s Conscious Uncoupling Celestial Tea image suggests, conscious uncoupling sounds much more soothing than the word “divorce,” but in essence, it’s the exact same thing. The bottom line is that God hates conscious uncoupling . . . because God hates divorce.

The trouble is that this woman does not get what submission is. You are submitting, woman, to God. God tells you to obey your husband. That is your task. He tells his husband to love you, and lay down his life for you. That is his task. You don’t do your task by telling him how to do his task.

For men are not women. We need to be admired and we need loyalty: more than love, more than desire. And women are not men: they want, desire, need love, and have to give up control (all to often) to get it. This is the meaning of Shakespeare’s treatment of Katherine. As a strong independant woman she was vulnerable, angry and weak. But married, and accepting her place as a wife, she gained a peace and wisdom.

Which is probably why no one produces it as written.

Unfortunately, this is not what is being taught, and when people do correct (as Gorgo does, in the second comment below) they are ignored.

Went to a wedding today and all of the wife’s duties towards her new husband were removed to basically just her ‘being happy’, no joke. His roles of course are to be everything and to make her his number one, literally, that’s what the priest said, she is now his number one, in everything and his job is to make her happy to the point of laying down his life in sacrifice as Jesus did on the cross. It was an eye opener to see it in broad daylight like that..

I couldn’t clap for the couple or laugh at the snide jokes made at the groom’s expense. It just seemed so wrong on so many levels. Women have been made idols in the modern day Church.

One issue I have noticed consistently with CBMW is that they insist that the submission a wife offers to her husband correlates to the submission Jesus offered the Father, while the Bible instead teaches (in Ephesians 5) that it correlates to the submission the Church offers to Jesus.

At first glance this might not change things that much, but the two relationships are completely different. I think it’s really different to talk about Jesus choosing to submit to the Father given that they are both God, both the same in essence, than it is to talk about the church choosing to submit to Jesus.

Because imagine the ugliness of talking about whether and when we as the church decide to submit to Jesus? Husbands aren’t Jesus obviously, but THAT is the metaphor, and it’s worthwhile to note that Eph 5 places no limit on the wife’s submission.

The church needs to look again at what they are doing. What we are teaching. For good times do not last, and the home is not made magically. The weeds need to be removed from the garden and our lives. Much of the teaching we have is neither backed by science (the rate of suicide and depression increases post divorce in men, and alcoholism in women) nor scripture.

I suggest it is time to change the script.