Male Headship is a Human Tragedy

Here's what I believe: Male headship is biblical, but not Christ like.

It is biblical in the same way that all the other systems of the time and place in this book are biblical. Most Christians I know can acknowledge that for things like the rights of the first born male child and concepts of when divorce is allowable (in case it needs to be said in plain English, adultery is NOT the only sound reason for a divorce, if that man or woman is abusing you financially, emotionally, or physically, get the hell out of there without feeling like you are going to hell for it) and the big one, slavery. But for some of those Christians, it is sinful to question that the concept of male headship might also be a byproduct of the patriarchal and misogynistic culture of the time and place. Today's Christian men and women, for this issue and many things like it, are still choosing tradition over Jesus's message.

Jesus warned us about doing this very thing. Read Mark 7:1-13. Jesus is talking about how the Jews often conflate their tradition with the commandments of God. In this particular instance, he is discussing handwashing, but as Jesus himself said, "...thus nullifying the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this." Again, I want to challenge you like I did in my last post to really take a step back and consider which of your religious convictions are cultural traditions and which are truly rooted in the two commandments Jesus left us with?

For me, there is nothing else to say.

I wish that was enough to convince you, too. Or, I wish I had convinced you in those two previous posts that taking some of the verses as God's law and others as cultural tradition is a slippery, dangerous slope and that the only cohesive and sensical way to read the Bible is through the lens of, "How can this story/parable/fable/myth/ cautionary tale show me that God loves me or show me how to love God or other humans better?"

Sadly, tearing down millennia of the ideas of those in power to keep the powerless down isn't as simple as pointing out that there has been millennia of the ideas of the powerful keeping the powerless down.

So I'll play by your rules and show you that against all odds of time and place and the strategies of those in power to stay in power, there is a different way to understand the words of the Biblical text. Below are some of the points that are traditionally used to defend the concept of male headship and why I think they are misinterpretations of the message of Christianity.

I'll only be discussing male-female, husband-wife relationships because that is what I'm in and also because marriage was not legal between other combinations of humans in Biblical times. I believe that marriage between any two of age, consenting humans is just as worthy as any other, but that's a whole other post. Similarly, because the point of this post is the problem of male headship in a heterosexual marriage, I won't get too far into the issue of women as clergy until another post.

Misinterpretation 1: God is a man

Let's talk about God's penis. It has to be huge, right?

Oh, I'm sorry. Do you think that's inappropriate? Yeah, me too. Not because I'm talking about God's penis size, but because you think that God is a man (and we won't even talk about how you probably picture him as a white man) and as such has to have a penis because that is a necessary component to being a man in your opinion.

If you've read any of my other posts, you know I looooove to talk about how there are two different creation myths given in the book of Genesis. I bring it up so often because Christians use only the second of the creation stories, ignoring the message of the first, as the basis for male headship and heterosexual relationships as God's design- meaning they are the only way to live out a godly life and anything else is unnatural. Let me first prove there are two in case you haven't really thought about it before.

In the first, the sequence of creation is light, sky, dry land, plants, sun/moon/stars, sea and sky creatures, land creatures, and finally an unspecified number of male and female humans made at the same time. In the second, the sequence of creation is one man, garden, land and sky creatures, and finally one woman. There are other differences beside the creation order, but you get the gist. Google it if you want to read more.

In this case I bring it up because if God is only a man, how did he make both men and women in his image?

Genesis 1:26 Then God said, "Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness,..."

Genesis 1:27 So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.

Genesis 5:1-2 This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humans, he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and called them humans when they were created.

The way I have heard people try to get around this is to say that God made Adam in his image and then made Eve from Adam's rib. I'm no doctor, but as far as I know ribs are pretty similar across the board so if Eve was made from Adam's rib then why wasn't Eve just a copy of Adam? Or why don't men have one less rib than women? The text doesn't say that God caused Adam's missing rib to grow back, after all. You can't ignore those verses about male AND female being made in God's image.

Speaking of that myth, let's look at those verses.

Genesis 2:22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Wait! Wasn't Adam the first man in the second creation story we are working within here? Wasn't he created by God from the dirt? So how does he have a father and a mother to leave? Does this mean we can call God both Father God and Mother God? (As an aside, the same Hebrew word ishshah is used in both cases, but translated to either woman or wife, so sit with the implications of that for awhile.)

Oh, you say that this is just the author of Genesis editorializing and explaining why any man should leave his parents and cling to his wife, not Adam in particular? Careful, you are on that slippery slope again. Why apply a different standard of logic and interpretation to Genesis 2:24 than you have to Genesis 1:1-2:23?

At this point in the debate I am having with this imaginary but very real person, I can anticipate two rebuttals. First that Jesus was definitely a biological male and second that the broader expression of God (the Trinity) may not be physically or biologically a man, but that he is male in that he has male qualities.

To your first point, I agree. Shocking, I know. Jesus was definitely a man. We have no reason to believe that he deviated physically from what we would call a biological male. Jesus's physical attributes do not tell us anything about God's physical attributes because Jesus was fully human. We don't have any mention of Jesus's physical attributes besides his maleness, but if we are going to comment on that then anyone who doesn't have the physical attributes of that long ago middle eastern man is also less like God than those who do. You don't want to believe that, I know, because that puts white men below brown men.

I have seen John 14:9 and Colossians 1:15 quoted as examples of how the image of Jesus is the image of God the Father, but I think we can probably agree that it isn't a physical image Jesus is referring to. Jesus is in God's image in something greater than a physical sense in the same way that males and females all were made in God's image in something greater than a physical sense.

So let's recap what we've agreed on so far: in the Trinity we have a Godhead who is father and mother to all mankind and Jesus Christ the Son (male, but like Father God and Mother God in deeds as John 14 goes on to say, not physical appearance). So what about the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit is more often seen as being female or feminine than The Godhead or Jesus. The Holy Spirit is a comfort to us which we see as a female attribute. The word used for the spirit in Genesis is feminine in Hebrew, but even us gung-ho God is a Woman! shouters have to acknowledge that in Hebrew, like in other languages, a feminine noun doesn't make the thing it describes a female (la playa doesn't mean the beach is a woman). Let's just agree to agree on this one that the Holy Spirit is body-less and therefore gender-less.

So if we agree that the only expression of biological sex or expressed gender in the Trinity was Jesus, that doesn't really answer our original question of if the greater concept of God is male. This leads us into that second point of yours that even if God is not a physical man, he is at least male.

To discuss this, we have to agree on what male means. Taking all physical aspects off the table since God was only in a physical form for 33 years out of millions, we need to know what it means to be male without being a biological man. Before we get to that, let me just point out that saying someone can be male without being a biological male is what trans people and allies have been trying to tell you is possible but you refuse to acknowledge, but again, that's a different post.

If God is male but not a man that must mean he has male qualities and not female qualities. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm already sick of this line of debate, but I must persevere because that's what us women do. ironic wink

What are male and female qualities that aren't physical? An argument I often hear is that men are less emotional and less easily swayed than women and therefore more capable of firm, rational decision making. Lord, give me strength. Who the fuck came up with that and how the fuck can anyone believe it who has ever met a man?

Adam was just as gullible and fearful as Eve. Cain gets mad and kills his brother. Abraham was a fear-based liar. Isaac was a fear-based liar and practiced favoritism and was easily tricked. Jacob was a greedy, manipulative liar. Moses was a whiny little snot who also, shocker, got mad and hit something that God had instructed him to simply talk to. David was lustful and made a series of bad decisions because of that emotion. Lots and lots of examples in the Old Testament about how men let their emotions rule their decisions and actions. In the New Testament we have more of the same. Judas betrayed Jesus out of greed. Peter was impulsive, proud, loud, and after all that bluster denied Jesus out of fear. James and John wanted to burn a whole village down because they didn't get the welcome they wanted.

Men are no less emotional in their actions and decision making in this world than they were in the Bible. We are all guilty of leaning on our emotions instead of God's strength, promises, and plan. Still, God uses all of these men toward his purpose. What we learn from the way men wrote and edited the Bible is that men's mistakes are allowed to be written off as part of their humanity, and raised up as a triumph showing how God is able to use flawed people to fulfill the plan while women's mistakes are because of their femaleness and are held up as a cautionary tale for why women are not fit to lead. The double standard is sickening.

The other one I hear most often is that men are "stronger" than women. I'll agree with that on a physical level only. My husband can curl an impressive amount of weight with one arm that I can barely pick up with my whole body despite me weighing 50 pounds more than he does. My husband, and most men, are physically stronger than me. But applying this logic gets slippery really fast. Are men who are physically stronger than my husband more male than he is or are all the women who can lift more than your scrawny husband more male than he is?

And if you mean that men are "stronger" than women in a non-physical sense, welcome to your very first day on planet earth! You're gonna find it so fascinating here! I would recommend Wal-Mart as your first stop. I'll come with because I need toilet paper, some apples, and an area rug.

Seriously though, putting the concept of maleness down to strength is toxic for men. That makes it so "real men don't cry" and "real men are strong for their families in a crisis" and etc and now we have a whole planet of men who can only emote with anger if they want to keep their man card.

It is also dangerous for women. When you are so often pushing the strength of males as a positive and a reason for headship over women, you make it easier for men to tell themselves it is OK to use that strength against women in both a physical and verbal sense. Maybe you'd never hit your wife, but don't tell me it doesn't happen. Don't tell me there isn't a huge problem with men attacking women in and outside of the home.

A problem, by the way, that is somehow made into our responsibility. Don't go out after dark or in certain places in broad daylight and always carry pepper spray and keep your keys between your fingers like Wolverine. I know you are going to tell me that male headship is about protecting women, not harming them. I want to tell you, good Christian man, that while you may be convinced that you are protecting your wife and daughters (and you may actually be capable of doing that in a physical sense), what you are really doing is perpetuating a culture where women are looked down upon as not only weak physically, but also deficient in other qualities that make them unequal to men. You are perpetuating the idea that women need saving by men. That women need guidance from men. In the 21st century, that isn't true. All of the things that made physical strength the main quality for leadership thousands of years ago are no longer true. Leaders are no longer leading their troops into battle or restraining and beating women and slaves into submission. Women now have access to education as they didn't have back then. Women do not need headship from men. Women do not need anyone but God as their head.

Partnership with men, yes. 1000%. No one should be out in the world doing whatever they want or think is right all the time without running it by another intelligent, rational human being. My husband is a constant guide to me, I listen to his advice and his counsel all the time. Just yesterday, he reminded me that I have too much on my metaphorical plate to start a major baking project just because I was inspired by The Great British Bake Off. I listened to his advice. It was good advice based on his knowledge of my personality and the realities of my to-do list. That doesn't make Wes the head of our household. That makes Wes a valuable partner.

Considering your husband to be the head of you, the strong one, the one that displays the maleness of God is a path to disappointment. Women who feel comforted by the idea of male headship, I understand what you mean. It IS comforting to know that someone has your back, has your best interests in mind at all times, will step in to help you when you need it. But that's not headship, that's simply being a life partner. You don't have to think of your husband as the head of you, someone you must submit to, in order to get the comfort that God intended in the marriage state. If you look to him as the head of you instead of the human partner to you, every time your husband doesn't stand up for you the way you want him to and every time he shows weakness and every time you have to step in and find the ketchup in the fridge AGAIN because men can never ever ever find what they are looking for even when it is right in front of their face, you are going to be disappointed in him as a leader. The next time there is a disagreement and he exercises his headship over you, you're going to think about that time someone cut in front of you in line and you had to say something yourself because he was checking his fantasy football app/he's a non-confrontational kind of guy/he didn't think it was a problem or you're going to think about that time that he insisted on some factoid during trivia when you knew the right answer and y'all lost that round and you are going to think to yourself, "Why does this human with all his faults and failures get to be the head over me?" and you are going to be right. Your husband is just as human as you are and you have the same capability as him to be Christ-like. You are equals.

When people are given leadership positions for qualities that do not correlate with the task, it leads to disaster, disappointment, and hard feelings. When someone gets a promotion over someone else at work, it should be because they have worked there longer or had better sales numbers or they went back to school and got a degree or certification that other people on their level don't have. But when the person gets a promotion just because they are the boss's nephew or they are sleeping with the boss or they are a man instead of a woman, that's when shit goes wrong. That's when people stop responding to their leadership or when performance takes a nose dive because the person in charge isn't qualified to be in charge.

That's why I listen to Wes when it comes to time management. I'm bad at it. I take on way too much all the time and then I'm miserable. He has seen that pattern enough to know when to gently and lovingly step in and suggest that I shouldn't pick up another project. But if he tried to tell me not to do something because he didn't personally like it or he wanted me to spend more time at home cooking or cleaning or watching his kids for him, he could fuck off. Women, listen to your husband when he's trying to help you, when you know its coming from the love he has for you. That's partnership, that's a helpmate, that's a beautiful comfort.

When you are told and try to believe that this flawed human has headship over you and that headship is likened to God's headship over the church, you are going to be let down hard and often. How can you truly trust in God when the example you're told you have to look to as your source of protection and leadership is another human? You can't. You are going to think that there are cases where you know better than your husband and you will either begrudgingly allow his headship or you will go behind his back to do it your own way. And then when God asks you to do something, the only model you have of headship is your husband (or your father before him) and you will follow the same pattern.

It is impossible to put one human over another and expect it to work in every situation. Lean on God's plan, understanding, and strength, not yours and not your husband's. Women are just as strong and intelligent and capable as men in the everyday struggles and life's big traumas and in listening to God's call. When you put your husband in the role of headship, you are placing him as another step between you and God. Your husband is not God. Sometimes the things he says and the decisions he makes will align with God, but not every time because he's a human, just like you. You can't listen to two masters, but headship tells you to.

What about female qualities that aren't physical? I imagine you saying, "Duh! Women are natural caregivers". Are some women natural caregivers? Yes. Are most women expected to be caregivers and prepped to do that from birth so it looks like it is "natural"? Also yes.

I do want to stress that I am not downplaying the necessary role of women as the ones who carry and birth children. Women who are mothers are MOTHERS. I can tell you I sure ain't woman enough to even try it. But, we must not conflate the physical ability to carry a child with the non-physical quality of caregiving. Giving birth to a child does not mean you will be a good caregiver to that child. And the inability to bear a child or simply not having children does not make a woman any more or less of a woman. Shame on you if you think that women who aren't able to get pregnant or carry a child to full term or who know that they would not be able to give a child what a mother should give to a child and so do not have one are somehow not fulfilling their biblical or God-given calling of womanhood.

I hope you agree that we can't conflate actual child-bearing, a physical concern, with the non-physical concept of caregiving which is often held up as the major difference between men and women. It is still pretty gross to say that caregiving is an aspect of femaleness. It leads to the same sort of toxicity as the concept of strength being only a male attribute.

Putting caregiving off on women leads to a lot of unpaid and unacknowledged work by women (financial abuse, the wage gap, etc) in the world outside the home.

Putting caregiving off on women gives men in the home setting permission to be just plain shitty humans. It leads to them sitting down to a dinner that their wife cooked even though they both worked all day (either at jobs outside the home or in caring for the home/children) without saying thank you, eating that meal, and then getting up from the table without putting their dishes in the dishwasher. It leads to men "babysitting" their own kids. It leads to the daughter being the one who assumes the financial, emotional, and physical burden of caring for elderly parents.

Putting caregiving off on women makes women who aren't natural caregivers feel guilty. It makes them feel less than women who are. It makes them feel like sinners. Like they aren't capable of living out God's plan for their lives because they are fundamentally flawed. It is why the story of Mary and Martha is so necessary, thank you God for including this in your word, but so often overlooked.

Although I proudly display many "feminine" traits (I love to craft and make our house feel like a home and I'm empathic to the point that I cannot kill a mouse or a bug without thinking about it for days afterwards and I rely strongly on that female intuition that I believe in whole-heartedly and I don't have a competitive bone in my body), I am not and never have been a good example of a "Christian woman". I'm a leader. I'm loud. I cuss. I cuss a lot and I love it and I'll never, ever stop, thanks for asking. I'm independent. I'm a protector. I'm assertive and ambitious and I'll speak up whenever I need to. For a long time, that made me feel less than, guilty, in desperate need of change to be who God wanted me to be. Now I know that's bullshit. I'm a leader, by God and for God. I am assertive, I stand up and I speak up loudly for people who need my protection, by God and for God. I'm ambitious about what we can accomplish, by God and for God.

Most dangerously, I believe putting caregiving off on women leads to women who have no idea how to believe in a God who will care for them. If they are always given the burden of caregiving, how can they ever learn to lay their burdens down so God can give them rest? This I am still learning. My tendency toward rebellion and self-reliance have grown out of these life disappointments. I am, and I suspect I always will be, learning the lesson of leaning on God over and over and over again. For men who also have those qualities and think they are designed by God to equip them for headship, please don't fall into that trap.

There are verses where God is compared to a mother in the Bible and verses where God displays other qualities that men want to shove exclusively on women. God is both our mother and our caregiver. God gave birth to us and wants to be our mother bear, our mother hen, the one who feeds us and teaches us to walk, the one who comforts us, the one who hears our cry in the dark and gets up to tend to our suffering.

In conclusion, God is NEITHER physically male or physically female. God has BOTH culturally/stereotypically male and culturally/stereotypically female qualities that allow Them to love us completely and fully, in exactly the way we need.

It is incorrect to say that God is a man. It is correct to say that God is mostly referred to as a man because of the patriarchal and misogynistic culture prevalent when the Bible was written. We can find just as many "feminine" qualities of God in scripture as we can "masculine" qualities. Trying to convince women that God is more male than female is telling them not only that males should be the head of females, but that females can never be as Christ-like as males. You can't use the logic of God is male to give yourself final say as the one who was designed to most closely reflect the natural design of the universe and then ignore the other implications of that statement. When you say that the true nature of God is male, you are telling women that, try as they might, their femaleness will always stand as a wall separating them from the true nature of God. How fucking dare you.

Misinterpretation 2: The creation story indicates male leadership

Didn't buy that first section? Fine. Keep thinking of God as a man. Fine by me, really, honestly it is. Because even if you think God is a man, it does not mean that men are God. Holding the opinions and words of men up above the opinions of women, especially when that contradicts the two commandments Jesus gave us, is holding men up as idols.

Let's go back to the creation story because that is the basis for so much of the idea of male headship. You and I both agree that the creation story is in the Bible for a reason, it is not just a history (in my opinion not history at all). We agree that we are supposed to learn something from the story. What you learned, or I should say what you have been taught, is that God made man first and in that single act signaled for ever and always, in every situation, that women should be subject to men. I want to challenge that. I want to teach you that there is another interpretation.

In the second creation story, God gives Adam a specific command before Eve is in existence.

Genesis 2:16-17 And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Then God creates Eve in the rest of chapter 2. Chapter 3 opens with Eve in conversation with a snake! (As an aside that we might deal with in another post, we don't even consider this odd, y'all! The Lullaby Effect in the Bible.)

Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

There is no indication that God told Eve anything. God told Adam and we have to assume Adam told Eve about the rule. So then the serpent comes along, the WALKING TALKING SNAKE, and tells her a different story. Who is she to trust? Adam told her one thing and the serpent (who has to be very different from what we think of as a serpent today since it was walking and talking) told her another thing.

God has told her nothing directly. God has not even told her that Adam is to rule over her -- that doesn't happen until the "fall". The interpretation here should be that listening to ANYONE who isn't God is a problem. We can never be sure of anything unless we hear it from God.

There are other problems with this story as well. How can a tree be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but Eve supposedly already had the knowledge of good and evil if she was supposed to have the knowledge that it was evil to eat of the tree? The serpent tells her if she eats it she will be like God, but isn't she already like God since she was made in the image of God?

Also, are we just gonna pass right over Genesis 3:2 where the woman answers as "we" and not as "I" or Genesis 3:6 where it says that her husband was with her? Just how with her was Adam? Don't tell me he wasn't actually "with her" because that's you applying some of your own biases to the text in this place but not allowing it in others. The text tells us he was with her so we know he was with her. Was he standing right there and not intervening even though he knew it was wrong? Was he standing right there and agreeing with everything the serpent said and going along with it? Weren't they both punished by being sent out of the garden? Why does Eve get the blame in our culture? For the same reason that in John 7:53-8:11 the woman was the only one brought forward to be stoned even though it takes two to adulterate.

And speaking of the "fall", isn't that an odd, odd concept? We believe that God is our creator, the designer of the universe, that he knows everything before it happens, that everything that happens ultimately works toward that grand plan. If that is true, then God set this whole thing up perfectly on purpose. Eve is very necessary in God's plan. Eve isn't the cause for the "fall", she's just part of the plan of the "fall".

B, T, dubs, Genesis never calls it a "fall". The story of Genesis does not lead us to believe that God at all changes how he feels about us, the comfort She is willing to offer us. The grace freely given to us is still there. Even after BOTH Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, God still showed them grace and kindness and love by making them clothes so that they would feel more comfortable. Even though God knew there was nothing wrong with how they were made, He still clothed them. And isn't that a beautiful message?

The message here isn't that men must rule over women. The message of Genesis 3 is that we are made exactly how God wants us to be, metaphorical nakedness and that God will provide for us in a garden or in a desert, no matter what we have done. God feels the same way about us now as he felt about Adam and Eve at creation. This wasn't a fall from grace, this was a change of location. We get to keep the good grace of God because that has nothing to do with us, male or female, that is a characteristic of God. Isn't that much a deeper meaning, so demonstrative of the truth of God as a merciful, loving creator and provider and comforter that they have shown themselves to be over and over and over and over again?

Misinterpretation 3: The Bible gives examples of good male headship of husbands over wives

Adam wasn't a good example of male headship. Surely the next guy will be. Who's up next? Cain, come on down!

We touched on Cain earlier, but I think it's relevant to reiterate here. Cain was a farmer, probably had those giant farmer muscles. Very manly. And he sure does act like a lot of men I know. He didn't get his way so he got sad and angry. Surprise, men aren't allowed to be sad so anger won out and he killed his brother. Not a great example of how male characteristics exemplify leadership.

Next! Noah, we aren't given a lot of specific information about you and none about how you acted out headship over your family until after you got drunk and your son either raped or castrated you and you cursed your innocent grandson for it, so let's move on.

Next! Abraham! rubs hands together maniacally Abraham, the Father of our faith!

Abraham was human, like us all, so I don't want to call him out for every good or bad thing he did. That isn't fair to Abraham. It isn't fair when it is done to the women of the Bible, either, but it somehow seems to be all the women get a rep for. The emphasis put on Sarah in our culture's teaching is that Sarai made Abram sleep with Hagar to bear a son and then was mean to Hagar when she bore that son and laughed at God (so did Abram, btw) when told she would bear a son in her old age. What about how she made an obscene amount of bread to welcome those strangers or carried a baby at 90 years old? Remember that males had all the power here. Do you really think that Sarai "gave" her servant to Abram or in some way forced him to sleep with Hagar? Not likely. Again, we see that men's mistakes are allowed to be written off as part of their humanity, and raised up as a triumph showing how God is able to use flawed people to fulfill the plan while women's mistakes are because they are a woman and are held up as a cautionary tale for why women are not fit to lead.

Back to focusing on what Abraham and Sarah's marriage tells us about male headship. In Genesis 12, Abram makes Sarai lie and say she is his sister so that his own life will be saved. So begins a legacy of men using women for their own gain. In Genesis 26, Abraham and Sarah's son Isaac does the exact same thing to his wife Rebekah. Sarai is morally corrupted by Abram's instruction to lie and she is in physical danger being abducted and taken into a powerful stranger's household as his wife. This also brings plagues upon Pharaoh's household when he hadn't done anything knowingly wrong. Speaking of Hagar, she was in the household of Abraham so he should have been her protector as well. But he wasn't. He left her to Sarah's wrath.

To this point we have 2 examples of marriage (Adam and Eve; Abraham and Sarah) and they are both shitty. Why? The men and women are doing two things very wrong: 1) they aren't trusting (read loving) God and 2) they aren't talking to/considering (read loving) each other. Adam and Eve's sin was THE SAME. They didn't trust God enough to distrust the serpent. Abraham's sin was the same as Adam and Eve's. He didn't trust God enough to keep him and his family safe. If the couples would have been true equals with open lines of communication, Adam could have stepped in when the serpent was giving Eve the original sales pitch and reminded her of who God is, a trustworthy and loving protector working for their good. If the couples would have been true equals with open lines of communication, Sarah (or Rebekah for that matter) could have stepped in when Abraham (or Isaac) was plotting an unnecessary ruse and reminded him of who God is, a trustworthy and loving protector working for their good.

The women come out looking like the bad guys in many of these stories because of course they do, but if we look a little deeper we see that it isn't the women's woman-ness that is the problem. It isn't even the women's submission to their husband or lack thereof because in the case of the whole my-wife-is-my-sister thing the problem was that the wives did submit to their husbands. In all these cases, it is humans not loving God enough and not loving each other enough.

I recently learned of the story of Zipporah. I love how random it seems on first pass through the story of God leading his people out of Egypt, and how powerful it is upon inspection. I think it's another one of those against all odds God moments where God gives us an example of a woman standing up to her husband and doing God's will so God's plan can be fulfilled. Wonder why none of my male preachers ever based any of their sermons around this story? scratches head in fake confusion

Genesis 4:24-26 On the way (Moses is returning to Egypt), at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, touched his feet with it, and said, "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" So he (God) let him (Moses) alone. It was then that she said "a bridegroom of blood," because of the circumcision.

God had called Moses to do something and Moses was a grumbly, cowardly, and reluctant answerer of that call. Even after he agreed to go back to Egypt, Moses still hadn't fulfilled God's commands because Moses had not fulfilled God's covenant of circumcision with his own son. Zipporah, a non-Hebrew woman, had to fulfill a Hebrew covenant for her husband. And then what was her reward? She repeatedly gets ignored and sent away by Moses. And speaking of Moses, his sister Miriam (a prophetess!) and his brother Aaron call him out for his marriage that was against their customs. Moses was above reproach, apparently (the dangers of one person with too much power regardless of gender), but only Miriam was punished for voicing her concerns. rolls eyes with inequality exhaustion

One more example, of the human tragedy and comedy of errors that is male headship in the Old Testament. The story of Tamar is especially sad and desperate with an ending that makes me want to snap my fingers and yell, "Ah ha! I got you!" To summarize, the male head of Tamar's household is Judah. Judah does not provide his younger son to her after his older son, Tamar's first husband, dies as their custom required. This leaves Tamar without the protection women needed in that day. What does she do? The only thing she can do in her position. She impersonates a sex worker. Judah approaches her for her services (all she is doing is sitting on the side of the road so don't tell me about female wiles and men not being able to resist them) and then Tamar bares his children therefore ensuring her safety. Judah is married here and there is nothing said about it being wrong for him to engage a sex worker, but for getting pregnant outside wedlock Tamar is to be stoned. However, when Tamar calls him out, Judah says "She is more right than I" (Genesis 38:26).

I could go on and on and on, but I won't. You get the point, I hope. I think the inspired word of God shines very clearly on this subject through the flawed word of man. Although powerful men wanted to preserve male leadership, God is showing us just how dangerous and laughable that is. God created men and women in their image and both men and women are needed to fulfill God's plan. Both men and women have to trust God, not their own fear or what another human tells them. When men treat women as submissives, the women are put in danger, but so are the men.

There is no possible way that human men can treat women as equals within a system of male headship and when we try, we are elevating men to a status above humanity. If you think you, as a human man, can hold yourself up over another human to have them submit to you, you've got a problem. Are you better than Adam or Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or David? Nope. You aren't. God has shown us with all these men that men aren't, in any way, more able to act in line with God's will than women, no matter how men have shaped society, culture, or the Bible to try to make us believe they are. If men aren't able to act more in line with God's will than women, why do they get headship over women in a spiritual or practical sense? They shouldn't.

I believe that with all my heart and with every logical thought in my brain and with every single thing I've seen with my eyes in my 34 years. I'll say it again, human men are incapable of actually performing the kind of male headship they argue God has called them to practice and for me to submit to. Even men with "the best of intentions" who think that male headship is a command from God and a way for men and women both to live out their faith cannot actually do the thing they say they want to do.

Misinterpretation 4: The Bible gives clear instructions to males about how to be the heads of their families

Maybe you agree with me that men aren't perfect, but you still think they are capable of being the head over their wives in a Christ-like way.

I could give you some examples of male headship gone wrong to try to further prove that my case. Everything from men refusing to do housework to women not being considered fit to lead in the government to physical abuse to the point of death because women are expendable second class citizens. But to that, my imaginary but very real debate partner would retort that I haven't seen a true, Godly example of how male headship is supposed to work. I'd argue back that it's wiiiiiiiiiiiiiild that I haven't seen a good example of that in my real life in 34 years or in the Bible so maybe it doesn't exist.

Sure, the human authors of the Bible tell us that God meant for men to be the heads of the household, but they don't ever SHOW us an example of a human man being the head of his wife in the same way that God is the head of the church. Telling without showing, telling without showing. Hmmm. There's a name for that.... What is it? Hmmmm. Telling without showing --- OH! That's called hypocrisy. Paul, you were never married. Shut up about how to be married. Peter, you were married but you left your wife at home to deal with everything without you. Shut up about how to be married.

When I say the Bible doesn't give us good examples of male headship, I am not saying that the men who wrote and edited the Bible didn't give men that command or give instructions. I'm not blind or illiterate. But I think we need to be very, very careful about how we interpret those lines.

I've dealt mostly with the Old Testament thus far so this section will focus primarily on the New Testament. In the context of the time and place, the instructions for women to submit to their husbands was a way to keep women down because Jesus had come and shown us a kingdom where everyone is equal - especially when you consider the importance of women in the running of the early church- and they couldn't let that stand.

In the context of the time and place, marriage was an institution that could be used to illustrate how God offers us protection from the dangers of the world. In that time and place unmarried women were in danger of poverty and being taken advantage of and all manners of evil. There is nothing wrong with thinking of God as our life partner who is going to keep us from poverty and loneliness and despair. It is wrong to use that example to mean that men are like god to us in that women have to submit to men as they do to God.

Ephesians 5:22 Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.

WOW! What a very clear example of male headship as male idolatry if you take it as anything other than a simile. If you take that literally, it is clearly idolatry. If you don't believe me, put any other word in the place of husbands.

Women, be subject to your appearance as to the Lord.

Women, be subject to money as to the Lord.

Women, be subject to your children's whims as to the Lord.

Women, be subject to your boss at work as to the Lord.

Women, be subject to society's expectations as to the Lord.

Idols, idols, everywhere.

If we cherry pick some other verses on either side of Eph. 5:22, we see a different story.

Ephesians 5:21 being subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

So we've gone from being subject to one another to women only being subject to their husbands IN ONE VERSE. When you try to read the Bible and pick things out of it like this, it starts to fall apart quick, fast, and ugly.

Besides the fact that male headship is somehow being compared to how we should act toward God and that in and of itself is un-Christ-like, we aren't told how to practice male headship with any particulars. My point is that we have no idea when male headship applies and when it doesn't. Once you start really looking at what the Bible says about male headship, it is a whole lot of telling us to do it, but not showing us how. Things start to fall apart quick, fast, and ugly when we try to apply this to daily life. It's like on The Great British Bake Off when the directions in the technical portion say something like "make the filling". On the surface, that's a very clear demand but when you see the finished product we find out the contestants needed a bit more direction. Again, we don't have a good example for how a human man can be a healthy head of his wife.

Wives, submit to your husbands. But what if my husband isn't as smart as me or doesn't have as much education as I do and tries to tell me something ridiculous that I have to do like never cut my hair ever again (as a benign example) because that's what God commands? What if my husband is an asshole or has a temper he isn't interested in tempering or holds a grudge like no other or has a jealous streak that makes him overly controlling? What if my husband is a clinically diagnosed narcissist or has clinical depression or clinical anxiety that inhibits his ability to make rational decisions. What if my husband wants me to do something that I know is wrong and that goes against the Bible or against my own convictions? What if my husband is too prideful and has an inflated sense of self because of something other prideful men with inflated senses of self said two thousand years ago? What if my husband isn't a Christian at all. What if I never get married?

So for an overwhelming number of people, male headship in its perfect and ideal state cannot exist and becomes a tool of oppression.

For the other 1%, male headship cannot exist because if a husband follows Jesus's commandments, he cannot also ask his wife to submit to him as to the Lord. If my husband loves God with everything he has then he trusts in God instead of himself so he would never ask me to put him on par with God. If my husband loves me as he loves himself and he would never make me submit to his will when we disagree about something because he wouldn't want that to be done to him. If my husband is living out the 2 commandments, he would want me to have a relationship with God that does not require at third party. Any third party in your relationship with God is, again, an idol.

If you don't agree with me, if you think that loving your wife as yourself includes making her submit to you when you wouldn't submit to her and if you don't think asking her to always submit to you keeps her from submitting to God as she should, then tell me exactly what you mean when you tell me that you are the godly head of your wife. Because when I look at this situation by situation, male headship just disappears completely. You are, in every situation, either the head of your wife where she has to submit to you and you have to protect and lead her (and she can't have the final decision or protect or lead you because that's not headship), or you are treating her like you'd want to be treated (Golden Rule, commandment 2) and considering her input and giving her the same rights as you (which is not headship, it is partnership).

Think about it. Christian men say headship is about sacrificing for, loving and protecting their wives and families. Cool, I like that. I'll take that deal, for sure. But shouldn't wives also sacrifice for, love, and protect their husbands and families? Yes. They should. If both people are giving each other sacrificial love and protection, that's not headship, that's partnership. Seriously, stop calling being good to your wife headship.

Another argument I hear a lot on this issue is that there has to be a head in a marriage and God intended that head to be the man. In a business, yes, there needs to be a head or there are too many opinions and its chaos. Even in a church, the priest needs to be there as a tie breaker when the vestry can't agree on something. But in a two person relationship, there does not need to be a head. If you need to delegate one person in a relationship with only two people to be the de facto tie breaker, you aren't in a good relationship- get to at therapist STAT. Whether that's a marriage or friendship or whatever. It is WILD to me that people think there has to be a tie breaker in a marriage.

Have you heard of compromise? Have you heard of open, honest, respectful lines of communication in every argument. I'm no expert on marriage, but I have been married for 10 years to someone who has wildly different views and values than I do. I'm a Christian and a spender and a Democrat, he's an atheist and a saver and a "staunch independent" (his words, idk even what that means). Oh yeah, I'm a sober vegan and there is nothing he likes more than a roasted pig butt and a cold beer. So we fundamentally disagree about The Big Three of religion, finances, and politics and smaller things like the food we like to put in our bodies. We're not a perfect couple. He hurts my feelings more and makes me madder than anyone else on this planet ever could. I'm sure I do the same to him. But he also makes me feel more loved and whole and peaceful and happier than anyone else on the planet. The bad will always exist because we are both humans, but the good outweighs the bad one million to one. What I'm trying to say is that we are overall a happily married couple, making decisions together even with wildly different values. You can't tell me its somehow harder for two Christians with more similar values than we have to make decisions together.

But when people insist on male headship, on women being subject to men, there is none of this compromise stuff, none of this talking it out and coming to a decision together. If you disagree about the meaning of a Bible passage, does she have to believe your interpretation? If you disagree about if or how to discipline your child for a certain offense or what to get a kid for their birthday or which sport a child should play, is it ultimately your decision even though you seem to think a woman is uniquely designed to be a caregiver to the children? If you disagree about what you have for dinner, does she have to always submit to what you want?

Maybe that last example was silly, but that was on purpose. The Bible says "in everything". So if you take that literally, then yes, wives have to submit to what you want for dinner every night. If you don't take that portion literally but you still take the other portion of that verse literally then you are that slippery slope of cherry picking that has been getting Christians in trouble since Christianity began. We have to quit doing that. We have to look at the bigger picture to get the whole picture.

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Ephesians 5:28 In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church.

Those verses are immediately after Eph. 22 so they help us see the bigger picture of this story. Let's look at the bigger picture of the whole trajectory of this religion and the message Jesus gave us to love God and love one another as ourselves. In that way, men can love women as themselves, husbands can love their wives as they love their own flesh. Men and women can both love God above all else. Men and women can both have an example in this physical realm of the unconditional and life-giving love of God without feeling like a stepping stone in a religious hierarchy.

The only way for husbands to love their wives as themselves is to treat them as equals and to give their wives' thoughts, opinions, callings, wants, and needs just as much weight as their own. Wives, you have to do that do, I'm not calling for a different kind of oppression. When a partner in a marriage tries to live their lives without a counterbalance, shit goes wrong as we saw over and over again in the OT. Tragedies happen when men assume the role of head over their wives.

When men describe what they mean by headship, it is at its worst oppression and at its best a description of an equal partnership - it is never actually headship. Marriages are about partnership and balance - balance that does not have to do with masculine and feminine qualities in the man and wife respectively because there is so much variation in people of all sexes and genders that we cannot all be expected to fit into those boxes.

As related tangent, complementarianism (equal but different aka equal but men are leaders) is another phrase that is ridiculously silly in that it assumes that all men have to have the same qualities to be godly men and all women have to have the same qualities to be godly women and then they find each other to become a perfectly complimentary couple. I am not saying that there isn't some truth in the stereotypical differences between men and women, but making it this simple is a complete disregard for the actual reality of the complexity of every human because it assumes all men are more capable of one role than all women and all women are more capable of another role than all men which is not the case. And to say that we are equal but have different roles is an oxymoron if you think equality means one sex always has to submit to another.

There cannot be a true, equal partnership when the word headship is at play.

Misinterpretation 5: Jesus didn't pick female disciples

Although this is possibly more related to women's roles in religious leadership, it is often used in support of male headship in the family as well, so I'll address it briefly here and in more detail in a future post in defense of women in clergy positions.

You're right, none of the Twelve were women. You know who else Jesus didn't pick to be one of the twelve disciples? White, American men. Any non-Hebrew man for that matter. He didn't pick slaves. He didn't pick people with a mutilated face or a limb-length discrepancy or broken hand or foot or a hunchback or a dwarf or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles.

There were lots and lots and lots of people that weren't one of the Twelve. As far as we know, none of the Twelve deviated in any way from what was considered fit in the OT Law (that list above is from Lev. 21). If we use this as an argument, then most of the world is out. You've got eczema, you're not fit. You're blind, you're not fit. I work for a podiatrist and we deal with limb length discrepancy all the time and let me tell you that no human has exactly equal limbs, so we're all unfit.

The question is Why? Even a staunch complementarian would agree that we can't exclude people with those above listed physical characteristics from roles of leadership based only on those physical characteristics. So why didn't Jesus pick people with at least some of these characteristics? I think its simple and I think its the same for people with some slight physical imperfection and for those who whose only physical "imperfection" was that they were a woman and not a man.

In the broken world he was sent into as a human, God had to present as a male or no one would listen to him at all. In the broken world he was sent into, Jesus had to recruit men as apostles so that people would listen to them and so that they would be relatively safe (or safer than women would be) as they went around evangelizing to resistant strangers who thought they were heretics. That world was broken and men have done their damnedest to make sure that women's voices are still not respected and women's bodies are still not safe. Do better, men.

While women may not have been one of the twelve disciples, they were a part of Jesus's inner circle, an important part of his ministry, and in some cases way better than the men. I think the common conception is that the women in Jesus's ministry where there, but only in the capacity of domestic servitude. Like you're saying that women had to be a part of the story because "a man's gotta eat". That's not it. Jesus proved that he could feed himself and thousands of others. Take a lesson, men, Jesus didn't rely on a woman to cook for him or clean for him or run his household for him.

Women did support the ministry by doing domestic tasks for Jesus and the disciples, but they didn't JUST do domestic tasks. Women also bankrolled the work of Jesus and the disciples, which goes against our ideas of manhood in which men must be the breadwinner. Women were the first to evangelize the good news of Jesus's resurrection. Women were church planters (Lydia). Women taught men the Way of Jesus (Priscilla, Phillip's four daughters who were proclaiming the message but not given names here). Women were imprisoned for their beliefs (Junia).

What we learn from Jesus's ministry and from that of the early church is that women are good for more than just domestic tasks and that men are also capable of domestic tasks such as serving food like the disciples did to the crowds in the loves and fishes miracles. It was so in the ministry of Jesus and it should be so in our homes.

Even in the Old Testament, against all odds, we see examples of women fulfilling God's will, sometimes over the will of men (like with Zipporah and Tamar, described above). We see examples of women being prophets (Miriam) and judges (Deborah). In fact, a woman who most of us never hear about, Huldah, was a prophet who authorized a lost-then-found text that would become the core of the very Bible itself. How you gonna hold up a text against women in leadership that we only have because of a woman in a position of authority?

My imaginary but very real debater would argue that women in leadership or other integral parts of ministry in the Bible are exceptions and not the rule. To that I will say, women are much less the exception than the text would lead us to believe. For instance, women are very rarely listed in genealogy, even though women are required to be part of any generation's existence.

Genesis 5:1-4 This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humans he made them in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and called them humans when they were created. When Adam had lived one hundred thirty years, he became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters.

We start out with the reminder that both men and women were created by God, in the image of God, that both are blessed. And then BAM! Adam magically becomes the father of a son who takes on only Adam's likeness and then goes on to have other children seemingly by himself. If the men who wrote and edited the Bible refused to include women in a process that women are biologically necessary for, why are we surprised that there are very few women in the other parts of the Bible?

In Conclusion

We cannot greenlight male headship on the idea that God is male. God is an ungendered spirit who displays "feminine" and "masculine" qualities - as do all people to varying degrees.

We cannot greenlight male headship on the idea that it was God's design. In the first creation myth, males and females were created at the same time and both in God's image. In the second creation myth, Adam and Eve both sinned in the same way, were punished the same way, and both received God's full grace after their transgression. The point of both stories is our concurrent likeness to God and full humanity, not the difference between men and women.

We cannot greenlight male headship based on the examples of male leadership in the Bible. The Bible makes it clear that there is no basis for men to be above women in spiritual or practical matters except for tradition and culture. Christians are to buck tradition and culture when it conflicts with Jesus's message of equality and love. From creation to today, there is a clear pattern of the failure of men to be heads over women in a godly way. That is purposeful. That is God telling us that it can't be done.

We cannot greenlight male headship based on the instructions given for men on how to be heads because there is not a list of specific ways men are to be heads of their wives. There is no such thing as godly headship. When taken on a situation by situation basis, headship is either expressed as oppression of a man's way over a woman's simply because he is the man or as equality when a man works with and listens to his wife. Quit calling it headship and call it what it should be, partnership. That preserves all of the good and doesn't lead us down a slippery slope to oppression for women and sinful pride for men. When Christians start treating women as equals and drop this joke of a concept of headship, we can start to chip away at the way women are devalued and abused.

We cannot greenlight male headship based on the gender of the Twelve. Jesus had many more than 12 disciples and many of them were woman, some of whom showed more faithfulness than the men. Jesus showed us over and over and over again that those who tradition and culture did not deem fit to lead were just as welcome, just as precious, just as fit to be a full participant in his kingdom as those in power or part of the majority. Jesus showed us there is a place at the table for every expression of humanity.

Male headship is deeply, deeply, deeply un-Christ-like. Let's do better. Let's love more and subjugate less. Let's be the example of how to treat all people well, how to love all people as ourselves. Let's show the world that there is room for full participation in God's kingdom for all people.

Christians, let's be like Christ, not like culture.