This is part of a series on patriarchy, headship, and submission. See this index.

In “Habitually Being Wrong,” it was revealed that the folk at Sigma Frame had discussed “Mutual Submission, Part 1” without engaging with me (and if they discussed any other part of the series, they didn’t let me know). So while I wasn’t planning on a 10th entry to the series, I’ve decided to read and respond to the three relevant comments in “Hypocrisy in the Manosphere.” It’s unclear if they meant for me to read these or respond to them, but I will do so regardless.

Comment by Jack

Let’s stop right here. Neither Paul, nor I, said that there is no structure of authority. My argument is that Paul is not talking about authority at all (except for the mutual authority described in 1 Corinthians 7:4). Authority is not being discussed, it is not the topic, it is not the concern, and it is not mentioned. It is orthogonal to what is being discussed. Neither Paul, nor I, are weighing in on the nature of authority, so the ‘structure of authority’ is not in view.

Regarding “this is what it means,” I noted that submission is just one aspect of being filled with the Holy Spirit and just one part of being in the Lord,  explicitly stating that submission joins other aspects of being filled with the Holy Spirit: speaking to one another (in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs), singing, making music, and giving thanks. Moreover, these are obviously not the only ways to be filled with the spirit, but are figurative representations of the fullness.

Submission is part of one’s godly service, along with all the other virtues described in the New Testament: patience, kindness, service, joy, meekness, gratefulness, honor, faith, hope, love, purity, truthfulness, contentment, endurance, godliness, gentleness, prudence, goodness, devoutness, reasonableness, mercy, tenderness, humility, respectfulness, obedience, strength, pleasantness, commendability, worthiness, self-control, affection, etc.

Paul taught that husbands submit to their wives by loving them, not that husbands love their wives by submitting to them. Here is what I said:

Jack has reversed this, and in doing so created an unfortunate strawman:

Men love their wives by submitting to them

Rather than what was claimed:

Men are submitting to their wives by loving to them

In propositional logic, this is the formal fallacy known as “Affirming the Consequent.”

There is really nothing exceptional about husbands having “a greater form of submission.” It is quite common for Red Pillers—especially Christian patriarchs—to note that Paul’s command for them to love their wife is, by far, the harder and greater task than the wife submitting to and respecting her husband (which are relatively easy in comparison).

That does not suddenly become untrue because loving happens to be Paul’s primary example of a husband’s submission. It is equally true that the husband’s ‘role’ is the more difficult one, whether or not you believe that agape love—of a husband towards his wife—is a type of submission. It is as true for the Christian patriarch as it is for the Christian complementarian or the Christian egalitarian.

Given that this conclusion is the result of fallacious reasoning, I suggest continuing to give the benefit of the doubt.

If one applies the Principle of Charity, it will no longer sound like gynolatry or pedestalization, neither of which logically follow from anything that I have presented in my (now) ten part series. If one reads the quote that is at the top of each article in the series, they’ll see that I quite clearly promote unity, not the pedestalization of either sex (which would undermine unity).

Jack’s understanding of submission as ‘obedience’ (an implication of authority) is wrong here, and so his conclusion is incorrect. Paul never tells wives to obey their husbands, because Paul wasn’t discussing authority (or boundaries). In the full context of his letters, he is very explicit and obvious about this. In my opinion, it is not especially ambiguous how Paul carefully avoids the very thing Jack is claiming that he taught. Jack is certainly entitled to his opinion, but the evidence supporting it—which, although I’m familiar with it, he didn’t actually present—is not strong.

Jack’s teaching here is not an argument. It’s a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions. While I respect his right to have and share whatever opinion he wants to have, he isn’t debating. There isn’t much more to say about it.

I have no objection to this. Submission is one of the general Christian virtues, like the others mentioned above. All the virtues—including service, generosity, honor, loving, and not quarreling—work seamlessly alongside submission.

Jack may be concerned with boundaries—a topic adjacent to authority—but Paul wasn’t discussing them. His personal wishes have no bearing on Paul’s instruction.

Jack may be concerned with how couples should deal with “tie breaking” and “conflict resolution,” but Paul wasn’t discussing those directly. A proper submissive attitude would certainly assist with those problems, but by nature of unity, not authority. In any case, because that isn’t the focus of what Paul is saying, it is orthogonal to the debate and so we’ll set it aside.

This is obviously a true statement, so I’m not sure where Jack is going with this. As I laid out in the series, Paul is concerned with a proper submission in Christ. If it is proper for a woman (or man) to submit to a man (or woman) in the church—whether pastor, elder, teacher, etc.—then she (or he) should do so in an appropriate manner. Otherwise she (or he) should not. Wisdom is called for, not blind or absolute obedience to rules, axioms, maxims, and organizational charts.

Inherent in Jack’s comment seems to be the underlying assumption that submission is an imperative—a command—rather than a matter of conscience, discernment, wisdom, or common sense. As we’ve discussed at various points, the language Paul uses (e.g. middle voice) pertains more strongly to the latter rather than to the former.

Comment by thedeti

This last sentence is false, and it is hard to account for Deti making this claim. Paul told husbands and wives to submit to each other. I would like clarification of if Deti has a reading comprehension problem or if he is blatantly lying. I hope, and assume, that he just made a typo or accidentally added an extra “not.” Here is what I said:

There is not a hint of ambiguity here. If everyone is submitting to each other, then wives are submitting to their husbands. Full stop.

But that’s not all! I also said this:

So there we go: Paul implicitly tells wives to submit to their husbands. Full stop.

While Jack was merely wrong about what I wrote, a matter easily corrected by pointing out the logical fallacy, Deti seems to be making no effort at all to accurately portray my viewpoint. He apparently states precisely the opposite of what I actually said quite clearly. If my refutation of a claim is merely to reiterate what I previously wrote verbatim, then something is deeply wrong with the discourse.

Fortunately, things improve in later comments:

I could quibble with this formulation, but as long as we don’t treat this as conveying laboratory precision, I’m fine with this summary. It should be good enough.

Not just phrasing and (lack of) punctuation, but other linguistic features as well, such as verb elision, the use of participles, an inclusio, and a chiastic structure (which I didn’t even bother to mention in this series). There is also the number of words assigned to husbands vs. wives (indicating point of emphasis), as well as “how language functions holistically, particularly at the level of pragmatics and discourse.” In short, there is quite a lot of different linguistic evidence to suggest that “submission” is intended to be mutual between spouses.

Eh, sort of. Paul certainly tailored his general instruction in a sex-specific way, but I’m almost certain that Deti and Paul would not agree on what “submit” means, so I’m hesitant to enthusiastically embrace Deti’s summary here. It’s a bit loaded.

It’s challenging to write about submission in English when the English word is not a great fit for the Greek word. I don’t know of any easy way around that, but it’s neither mine nor Deti’s fault. But as above, let’s just accept it as workable enough and move on.

Just as those who have taken the Red Pill have learned that some pills are bitter and hard to swallow, so too is this reality.

I suggest reading this related comment by John Bradshaw and my responses.

Next, read “The Living Voice” where you can see that the Roman Catholic Church concluded just what Deti fears: that scripture is voiceless and inherently error-prone. But rather than concluding, as Deti does, that everyone must become scholars of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, Roman Catholicism concludes that a Latin translation is authoritative and relies on an external authority to determine truth without the need for a preexisting scriptural backing.

Rather than go in depth on this complicated issue, I’ll merely note that once you acknowledge the realities of scripture, there are various ways that one can approach the problem. Not everyone has to become an agnostic like Bart Ehrman. Not everyone has to go to the other extreme and act as if these issues don’t exist. These need not be impediments to faith, but they are not simple matters either, and the assumption that they must be simple will only lead to error.

It’s the fallacious Appeal to Consequences.

I try to avoid any appeal to anecdotes, but this is going to be very difficult. What Deti believes is, in large part, due to his own personal experiences and assumptions. A person operating under different set of assumption would not see the problems that he sees. His objections are tied to his personal situation, rather than being universal precepts.

The vast majority of the difficulties that Deti faces are in the consequences that embracing mutual submission would have on his assumptions, his worldview, and his life. He’s simply unwilling to accept the consequences, and so fallaciously concludes that the concept is inherently wrong. This is the fallacy.

There is nothing particularly difficult to grasp about the concept of mutual submission. Huge numbers of people have no problem grasping it and implementing it in their own marriages. That’s one reason that I don’t find the “you wrote too much, so it must be false” argument to be particularly compelling.

It could just as easily be flipped around and said that Deti’s viewpoint is too difficult to teach or grasp and requires an entire manosphere to teach it, but that too would be fallacious. Nevertheless, I’ll be honest and illustrate it with an anecdotal personal opinion. I do not find Christian patriarchy to be intuitive in any way, nor do I view its history in a positive light because I don’t come predisposed to spin it in a positive light. Without those assumptions, Patriarchy does not make sense. This will likely shock those who are predisposed to it, but this merely illustrates that it is our assumptions, not the facts-of-the-matter, that desire to determine our beliefs. There is nothing inherently obvious or natural about Christian patriarchy, which is why one must use reason and evidence to determine what Paul was saying.

No, love and submission are not equivalent concepts.

In propositional logic, if A⇒B and B⇒A, you have equivalency. But I’ve only asserted A⇒B, not B⇒A. Thus, Deti is committing the same formal fallacy, “Affirming the Consequent,” that Jack also committed above. They just use slightly different words to make the same claim.

Like Jack, Deti has setup an unfortunate strawman. The rebuttal he makes is against an argument that I didn’t make, and is thus useless.

Love is just one of many possible forms of submission. Jack’s summary is a good example to illustrate this:

I did not say that submission is love (as Jack wrote), but I said that love is (an example of) submission.

Deti asks “Did He ever submit to anyone other than His Father?” without realizing that the biblical answer is a clear and unambiguous “Yes” (as we discussed in both Part 1 and Part 5). In doing so he undermines the very foundation of his argument and his belief.

Deti probably didn’t intend it, but he just proved, by contradiction, that biblical submission isn’t about authority.

The Greek term used in Luke 2:51 of Jesus submitting to his parents is the same term used of husbands and wives submitting to each other in Ephesians 5:21 and that Peter uses in 1 Peter 2,3,5. If Deti were correct that Jesus did not submit to anyone other than his Father, then the term used in Luke 2:51—which is the same as the term used in Ephesians 5:21—cannot imply obedience to unidirectional hierarchical authority. But if Deti is incorrect, then his argument that Jesus did not submit (e.g. feet washing) is false, which also invalidates his conclusion that submission implies authority.

I concluded this:

I do not believe that Jesus was ever under the authority of—in submission to, in the English sense—anyone but the Father, even as he submitted to others—in the Greek sense—at various times throughout his life.

The reason feet washing was an act of love was because it was submissive. The duty of washing the feet of guests would have fallen on the lowest status available member of a household (whether slave or free). Indeed, the washing of feet was among the most servile, subordinate, and submissive acts that a first-century Hebrew male could perform. Yet, Jesus, over the objections of the horrified Peter, cited his own authority to do so, indicating that submission does not imply (the rejection of) authority. In terms of propositional logic, if we take the contrapositive of this, it is thus true that the exercise of authority does not imply that one does not also submit (i.e. submission to authority isn’t strictly unidirectional hierarchical). Thus, it is as I said above:

Paul is not talking about authority at all

Deti’s argument about Christ also self-refutes his claim that a wife must obey her husband in literally everything, including sin. For now, I’ll leave that proof as an exercise for the reader.

I may need to go back and add these arguments to my series. They are a very strong proof of what I’ve claimed.

How does one read the Gospel of John and come to a conclusion like this? Here is what Jesus said:

…and…

…and…

Jesus taught us to obey out of love and friendship. It was about personal relationship. Love in the form of a personal relationship is the essence of the fourth gospel and of the gospel itself:

Jesus replaced Pharisaic legalism with love, and it is this love that Paul—Paul, of the book of Romans—speaks of in Ephesians 5. And, quite notably, the love that Jesus commands is mutual: to love one another.

Deti’s faith appears to be like that of the Pharisees: one of following rules and regulations, of obedience—submission, in the English sense—to authority and law. It is as I said above: Deti’s personally chosen worldview makes accepting mutual submission an untenable proposition. It upsets the very foundation of the faith. It’s not that his arguments are logically invalid, it’s that the worldview assumptions he brings in are so different than my own. We can read the exact same words and conclude something completely different because our very conception of Jesus and his conception of love is different.

I do not do what Jesus wants me to because it is a commandment, I do it because I love him and desire to be in an intimate relationship that was promised:

Our relationship to Christ is like that of a husband and wife, not a parent and child. It is why Jesus described us as brothers and sisters, not fathers and offspring. It is why Paul described the church as Christ’s bride, not Christ’s offspring.

Deti describes the various acts of love that Jesus showed the church. He is, presumably, preparing to stretch the analogy as far as possible so he can then apply it to husbands and wives. But Paul does not tell husbands to love their wives by doing the acts that Jesus did when he loved the church, he just tells them to use Christ’s love as an example of their love.

Let’s repeat that. Jesus loved the church as demonstrated by various actions. Husbands are not told to love their wives by repeating those same actions. The only action they are told to perform is to love. This is what Jesus taught in the gospel of John.

In saying “[they] can leave anytime they want,” I’m not sure if Deti is trying to make a point about divorce. I’d prefer not to get into that discussion here, so I’m just going to move on.

Deti is, ironically, making a strong case that kephale (‘head’) connotes preeminence, as we did in in Part 8, in “Changing Language,” and elsewhere. He even uses the same language that we used! I could probably take this quote wholesale and add it to one of my articles on the topic. The fact that we can use the exact same quote in diametrically opposed ways is yet another example that the primary difference between us is one of worldview—personal assumptions—not of biblical exegesis.

All stop. This is simply false. Husbands are not being instructed to wash their wives in the water of the Word. The subject of the verse is Christ and the church, not husbands and wives. Christ washed her—the church—with “the water of the Word” which John Chrysostom understood to refer to the baptism of faith. Chrysostom understood that washing in the baptism of faith to apply to the husband personally:

Chrysostom—a native Greek speaker—understood that a husband must himself be “washed in the Word” if he is to love his wife as Christ loved the church.

Chrysostom understood, as I explained a few paragraphs above, that it was not Jesus’ actions that were to be emulated, but his love. Indeed, that is precisely what Paul actually said in his own words: love. He didn’t tell husbands to give up, pour out, or wash their wives. He told them to love. The actions of Christ inform the nature of the love that the husband shows, but are not themselves actions to be directly emulated. This is, of course, most obviously seen in the simple observation that there is no corresponding ritual of baptism between a husband and wife, nor are husbands supposed to die for their wife’s eternal salvation.

Deti begs-the-question by presuming the very thing under debate. In like manner, I could just as easily declare that he is simply wrong because submission (like kephale ‘head’) does not imply authority. Both are equally unhelpful to a meaningful discussion.

Deti, unfortunately, makes clear that he is talking about divorce. He may believe, erroneously, that divorce is acceptable (as does his debate partner Red Pill Apostle here), but Paul is obviously not discussing it in his context. Deti has lost the focus on the topic of discussion: mutual submission. There is an even greater irony in that Deti likes to cite 1 Peter 3 to claim that only wives should submit to their husbands, even as Peter forbids divorce in that same passage. I discussed this in Part 9.

If you are interested in going down the divorce doctrine rabbit hole, see the biblical teaching in “On Divorce.”

The problem with inductive inference is that it is a very weak form of argument.

In “Dividing Ephesians 5:21 & 22,” Mike Aubrey says this:

Did you see that part about how language functions? He’s saying the same thing that Deti is saying: that the scholars who agree with Deti’s position are failing to interpret the passage in the way that the mostly illiterate, uneducated people would have understood it when they heard it read out loud.

Let’s emphasize this. It is Deti’s viewpoint that the original listeners would have found to be completely foreign. Remember all that talk I did about elided verbs, participles, inclusios, chiastic structures, and points of emphasis? These are all things that a 1st century native speaker would have intuited automatically. They had no need for a degree in ancient languages because they were native speakers. But you and I are not. That difference is extremely important, no matter how much Deti resists the consequences.

Deti thinks that his view must be correct because he’s interpreted the passage through his own personal biases, but those biases have no bearing on what the original audience would have heard. And the original audience would have found Deti’s understanding to be nonsense, in large part because his understanding of the words used are not the same as the original.

Deti thinks he is making a good point here, but his position falls to his own objection.

Let me pause here to point out one thing: Deti certainly can know that mutual submission is correct, because it has been revealed in scripture by God himself. He doesn’t need an advanced degree to understand it. He just has to be willing to accept it, as millions of other perfectly normal people have. This is not an issue of interpretation, it’s an issue of personal choice, of free will. This is why he makes fallacious appeals to consequences, rather than making strong arguments. Mutual submission challenges his core beliefs, but it isn’t challenging to understand. It may be right or it may be wrong, but the primary difficulty is accepting it if it is true.

Deti is trying to insert a doctrine into Genesis that does not exist. The description of the Fall of Man in Genesis mentions nothing of submission or authority. The entire problem that Deti mentions is not present in the text.

Adam sinned because he disobeyed God. God told him not to do something and he did it. He didn’t command Adam not to listen to his wife. His wife told him to do what God had forbidden and he did was his wife told him to do in that particular instance instead of what God told him to do.

If a husband tells his wife to sin and she does it, the error is in choosing to sin, not in listening to her husband. Yes, she should never have listened to her husband in that particular instance, but listening to her husband wasn’t the problem, it was sinning.

Deti is making an invalid inference by presuming that because Adam was wrong to listen to his wife that one time that he must be wrong to listen to his wife any other time. This does not logically follow from anything presented in Genesis. It is a deductively invalid argument.

Nothing in Genesis states that it was Adam’s role to correct his wife. That fictitious dialogue—and the doctrines of hierarchical authority and correction that it implies—is entirely of Deti’s imagination. Deti has not developed his argument from scripture itself, but has instead invented bespoke stories to support his worldview.

Deti believes that women are supposed to submit to their husbands in disregard of what God says. This aptly illustrates the absurdity of this claim.

Again, we have a worldview problem. Deti has presumed from his extra-biblical belief that both marriage and the church structure must be based on a unidirectional hierarchical authority. His experiences tell him this. So even though Paul and Peter preached something different, Deti can only view what they’ve taught in light of his own experience. It’s self-blindness.

Mutual submission is not chaos, but is the very essence of order that leads to unity:

People who have embraced mutual submission—whether explicitly or instinctively—experience peace in their relationships. I wrote about this in depth in “The Disadvantage of Authority,” where I showed how the emphasis on authority leads to chaos and division, while the deemphasis of authority leads to harmony. I used the example of Anicetus and Polycarp to illustrate mutual submission:

Had either Anicetus or Polycarp viewed submission as a matter of authority, their interaction would have been punctuated by chaos and division. Instead, they had peace and order. By contrast, in the midst of the Filioque Controversy in 1054AD, both sides met in Constantinople and demonstrated the chaos that erupts when submission is rejected:

Both sides held firmly to their authority and this led to the Great Schism.

It is exactly what God intended. It’s why Paul explicitly told us that this was intended.

Deti is correct to qualify this “in English, at least” because ‘head’ in English is not a match for ‘head’ in 1st century Greek. As this series showed, the latter does not connote all of these implications of authority, structure, and hierarchy. For this reason, his conclusion is unfounded.

The biblical interpretation is not determined by how anyone uses—or misuses—it. That’s another appeal to consequences. I’m not interested in this objection because it isn’t relevant to the biblical understanding of mutual submission. Deti is correct to reject this objection, but he should be objecting it because it is irrelevant, not trying to argue against it on its merits:

All of this argument is unnecessary because it isn’t addressing the topic of discussion: mutual submission. If you find this topic of discussion interesting, go ahead and discuss it. I’ll simply move along.

Deti sounds like the atheist who says “how can Christianity be true when there are a gazillion denominations that all disagree?” It’s the same argument that’s been debunked time and time again. I won’t spend any time on this. It isn’t a relevant objection to mutual submission.

Comment by Red Pill Apostle

None of these are especially challenging. As soon as one accepts that submission (and kephale ‘head’) does not imply authority, the vast majority of the “difficulty” vanishes. Indeed, once submission is understood apart from authority, it becomes really difficult to argue for patriarchy.

I discussed 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 in Part 5.

I discussed 1 Peter 3:1-7 in Part 1, Part 2, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 9.

Is this supposed to be Guilt by Association? If so, then we’re not off to a good start. Nothing I wrote in this series interacts with Gregoire or her work, so there is nothing substantive here to respond to.

RPA applies the “twisted scripture” motif that Dalrock applied more than a decade ago. We talked about this in Part 9. It is neither helpful nor convincing.

Claiming to have all the evidence, but providing none of it, is not constructive. Also, my series is obviously not emotionally laden, so it is really weird, irrelevant, and inaccurate to bring that up. Moving on.

After complaining about fallacious appeals to emotion, RPA makes a completely unhelpful and non-substantive objection, using emotionally charged language (“pedantic” and “eyes bleed”). Though there is some irony there, there is also nothing for me to respond to, so I’m moving on.

Using buzzwords in place of an argument is not helpful either. Is there any aspect of my series that is particularly difficult to understand? I wouldn’t know, because no evidence was given of this empty claim.

Is there a problem in something that I wrote that is too difficult to understand that requires clarification? Or is there a problem with the reader’s ability to understand what is made plain? Or is there a different problem that has nothing to do with the substance of the debate (e.g. an unwillingness to debate)?

If it is the last, then it is irrelevant to the discussion and I’ll just move on.

This is begging-the-question. Red Pill Apostle assumes that his version of what I’ve set out to debate is the correct version. This is plainly circular. Thus, as his comment shows, he brings precisely nothing to the discussion. He isn’t here to discuss or debate, he’s here to tell us what to believe.

I have not told you that God did not really say what he actually said. Indeed, I tend to emphasize rejecting those things that God clearly did not say in favor of those things he did say. Recall above how Deti ascribed to God things that Genesis did not say in order to avoid the things that were actually said. The same is true of Paul:

Perhaps someone should answer that question before throwing stones at me, accusing me of working alongside Satan. While I got value from Jack’s and Deti’s comments, RPA’s is proving to be decidedly unhelpful. Indeed, it is a prime example of how not to debate.

Actually, I tell them exactly what God’s Word says…

…while also criticizing proponents of patriarchy for taking Ephesians 5 out of context by slicing and dicing the sentence into incomprehensible sentence fragments that no native speaker could possibly have understood when heard in isolation:

Those who fling stones should be careful that they are not guilty of the very faults that they find in others.

The simple fact is that I’m interested in what the original audience would have understood and I’m exploring the perfectly valid questions about that. You should ask yourself why I am vilified for doing something that is perfectly reasonable.

A large proportion of my series, Part 5 and Part 6 in particular, is based on exploring the actual Word of God. Far from telling people what it doesn’t say, I’m strongly emphasizing what it does say.

Such a spurious accusation has no role in rational discourse.

Do I really need to explain that “she does not have to obey her earthy head (husband)” begs-the-question for the umpteenth time? Do I need to explain, as I did in Part 8, that ‘head’ does not imply authority or obedience? No, because I already did.

One day I hope for a discussion that contains no ad hominem. That’s probably asking too much.

If your concern is authority, hierarchy, submission to authority, and the influence of Satan, consider Paul’s teaching on the subject:

Can we all agree right here and right now that those who are divorced, in troubled marriages, or remarried—a sizable portion of the Christian manosphere—are to be treated as would any new believer: forbidden from teaching, ministering, leading, and exercising authority on Christian doctrine, lest they become conceited and fall into the condemnation of Satan?

See, I’ve been equated with doing Satan’s work on many occasions merely for stating what the Bible actually says. But those who are divorced or remarried or those in troubled marriages are the ones that Paul says are likely to fall into the condemnation of Satan. In fact, it is far more likely that these troubled men—especially those hurling accusations of allegiance to Satan—are themselves serving his will. So a little humility and introspection is in order.

Let’s stop with the personal attacks and ad hominem, please.