The Household Codes

Sometimes a question is posed like something like this. “If the husband is the authority over the wife, then how could she be an authority over the church because then that would place her over him?” As logical as this may sound, it is simply not an argument made in Scripture. The Bible never connects the issue of husband-headship with the question of women prophesying for God or ministering in the early church. It is as if that when a prophetess speaks for God, the husband had better listen too.

Biblically, the issue of women in ministry leadership and the issue of husband-headship should be separated. We find the idea of husband-headship in several passages in the New Testament, but it is never connected to the ministries of women. For example, in the Old Testament, we noted that Deborah and Huldah were both married but it made no difference to their spiritual or political authority.

We cannot put husband-headship language into perspective in the New Testament if we do not know its background. There is nothing distinctively Christian about the language and structure of the “household codes” in Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter. Here is what the philosopher Aristotle said in the 300s BC:

The household codes appear in Colossians 3:18-4:1, Ephesians 5:21-6:9, and 1 Peter 2:18-3:7. The three relationships mentioned are those of husband and wife, master and slave, parents and children. As you can see from Aristotle above, the structure of this discussion comes straight out of Aristotle and Greek culture. Aristotle says – as almost everyone in his culture would have also said – that the husband is the ruler of the household.

What we thus see is that there is nothing distinctively Christian about this structure. In the concept of husband headship, Paul and Peter are simply borrowing from the secular culture of their day to address church situations in an inspired way. This is how revelation works. God meets us where we are at and takes us from there. 

We find this incarnation principle throughout Scripture as well. Abraham lives in a world that believed in child sacrifice. What does God do? He meets Abraham in his understanding by acting as if he is going to ask him to sacrifice Isaac. And then he teaches Abraham that he actually does not require child sacrifice.

So it is particularly where the household codes are different from the surrounding culture that we hear God’s distinctive word in Scripture. Where is this? It is where God commands the husband to love his wife like Christ loved the church. It is where God tells the husband to treat his wife with respect. 

1 Peter especially has been described as a “defensive strategy.” The churches to which Peter writes are undergoing significant persecution (1 Pet. 4:17). Indeed, the well-known verse on being ready to give an account is in the context of being brought on trial for your faith (1 Pet. 3:15). You don’t start a campaign to change societal structures in the middle of intense persecution! 

Instead, Peter advises the church to “blend in,” as it were. “Hunker down because we have incoming!” Men, submit to the government and authority so that people won’t say that Christians are troublemakers (1 Pet. 2:11-17). Slaves, you may be mistreated, but they mistreated Jesus too (2:21). Wives, your husbands may not be Christians, but try to win them over by being model wives (3:1). 

Another point that is often made is that much of this instruction is to “submit yourselves” to the other. Greek has a grammatical feature called the middle voice that English does not. The middle voice in this context implies voluntary submission. The person submitting thus retains agency. They are not being forced to submit. They are choosing to submit.

This is the case in Ephesians 5:22, where the entire congregation is assumed to choose to submit to one another. Interestingly, the verb to submit is not even present in 5:23, where the relationship of wives to husbands is next mentioned. The implication is that the relationship of wives to husbands is simply one example of the members of the entire congregation choosing to submit to each other.

The same form is used in 1 Peter 2:18 and 3:1 where slaves and wives are told to “submit themselves” or to “choose to submit.” The slave and wife retain the agency. It was the right choice in that context but it was their choice.

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul’s concern is that women be able to pray and prophesy in worship. To get to that goal, he has to address the social tensions that the radical community of the Spirit has created. You have women and men in a small space. This is unusual. And the women are speaking words from God.

This would have created sexual tensions. The attention of men is being drawn to women they are not married to and would not normally be around. The wives of those men are tempted to be jealous by the attention those men might be giving the other wives. The husbands of those wives may feel awkward for other men to see their wives. What a strange new environment this age of the Spirit had created!

Paul uses the cultural structures and practices of the day to bring this chaotic situation under control. Husband headship is a way to do that. By advising that wives wear their hair veil indoors (1 Cor. 11:13), Paul brings order to the chaos. Now she is in proper relationship to her husband. Now the other men can see that she has the proper authority to speak (11:10). Now the other women can see she is behaving modestly.

And where is the distinctively Christian here? Yes, it is in the prophecy and prayer that these women are doing publicly. And yes, it is where Paul says that the man is not independent of the woman and that the man was “born of the woman” (1 Cor. 11:11-12).

The issue of women in ministry and leadership does not rise or fall on the issue of husband-headship. However, we have argued that husband-headship is not distinctively Christian and is clearly part of the culture of the New Testament world. It does not reflect the kingdom since women are not “given” to men in heaven or in eternity (Mark 12:25). In our world especially, it is a hindrance to the gospel and appears to contradict the more eternal principle of Galatians 3:28. 

The trajectory of the kingdom suggests that, in our culture, we can actually play out the core principles of the gospel more fully in this area than some in the New Testament church did. We can actually live out in our culture a structure that returns to the Garden of Eden, where husbands and wives are full partners and co-laborers in the family without hierarchy. And if we can make the world more like the kingdom of God and Eden now, why wouldn’t we?