To Love and Cherish
Ephesians 5 and the Challenge
of
Christian Marriage
Elgin L. Hushbeck, Jr
with Hannelore Hushbeck
Energion Publications
Gonzalez, Florida
2019
Copyright © 2019, Elgin L. Hushbeck, Jr.
and Hannelore Hushbeck
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible: International Standard
Version®. Copyright © 1996-forever by The ISV Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INTERNATIONALLY.
Used by permission.
Cover Design: Henry E. Neufeld
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63199-708-2
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-63199-711-2
Energion Publications
P. O. Box 841
Gonzalez, FL 32560
energion.com
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank my wife, who has been very patient with me as I have struggled to learn the lessons of this passage over the last four and a half decades. She is my wife, my friend, and my partner. Together, we truly seek to be one. I also want to thank the many students I have had over the years for their input and challenges as they have helped me think through these issues. I want to thank Helen Wisniewski and Kevin & Larissa Munz whose editing and comments, made this a better book. Finally, I want to thank my friends at Energion, my editor Chris Eyre for his valuable suggestions and my publisher Henry Neufeld for his kind support and encouragement.
Introduction
If you want to strike fear and trembling into their heart, ask a pastor or biblical teacher to speak before a group of women on Ephesians 5:22. This verse is a proof text for many on how the Bible is completely out of touch and archaic. Its teachings are not just to be ignored, but to be actively opposed as patriarchal and oppressive, a dangerous relic of the past. The key offense occurs in the first part of verse 22, with its command, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.” Could anything be more at odds with our modern and enlightened view of equality and relationships?
True, for some Christians this is not a troubling verse at all. In fact, for them, it is a proof text for how the world is corrupt and to be rejected for it is destroying the natural, God-given, order of things. I reject this view. Other Christians, however, view it as a prime example of how the Bible is not to be taken literally and without error. As an evangelical Christian believing in the inerrancy of scripture, while I reject the former view, I reject this view as well, and thus I cannot simply ignore this passage as an archaic relic of our patriarchal past.
I would agree Ephesians 5:22 is a particularly challenging verse, but I would also argue it has a lot to teach us, not just concerning the relationship between wives and husbands, but also about issues with translations, how we understand the historical, literary, and biblical context of a passage, and how we apply the meaning of texts to our own lives. It goes to the heart of who we are and how we should relate to one another. It also goes to the heart of the nature of scripture and how God communicates to us, and thus, how we should read and understand the Bible.
To begin to grasp these issues, one only need look at the underlying Greek text behind the command, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.” A strictly literal translation of this passage would be “the wives to their own husband.” I am not saying the translation is wrong, only that this issue is more complex than it may at first seem, and the passage cannot be correctly understood simply from the passage quoted. This passage has a context, and it cannot be correctly understood apart from that context. This book will be an attempt to understand that context, and in the process what these verses are saying.
The Setting
We will discuss the issues surrounding the historical and biblical contexts as they arise and will start with the literal context. It is easy to see the Bible as discrete units of teaching, digesting them in a piecemeal fashion, because of chapter and verse structure. However, it is important to remember the books of the Bible were not divided up into chapters and verses until the 13th century. While it is true one can understand the book of Proverbs at the verse level and Psalms at the chapter level, most of the books of the Bible were written to be understood as a whole. The book of Ephesians was written as a single letter and should be approached on that basis. There is a reason the material in chapter five occurs at the location it does, before the material in chapter six and after the material in the earlier chapters.
What follows is a brief outline of the letter up to the teaching on marriage. There are several points in this discussion which are disputed by some scholars, such as, did Paul write the letter and was it written to the Ephesians, but I will not attempt to address these or the other issues, nor will I defend my conclusions about them here. These issues are outside the scope of this book and for the most part do not directly concern the teachings on marriage we are discussing. Keep in mind, this is only a brief outline, and I would strongly encourage you to read the entire book of Ephesians and not rely simply on this summary.
The Book of Ephesians is a letter written by Paul to the church in Ephesus. It opens with a mostly standard opening for a first-century letter: From, To, Greetings, though as he does in most of his letters, Paul modifies the Greeting portion to be statements of grace and peace instead. He would frequently follow this with statements of thanksgiving and prayer, but here, Paul has the second longest sentence in the New Testament, a sentence on God’s role in salvation (1:3-14). The sentence emphasizes the Father “chose us in the Messiah before the creation of the world” (1:4), to live for the praise and glory of Christ (1:12) and we “were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (1:13). Following this, Paul returns to his normal thanksgiving (1:15-16) and prayer (1:17-19) ending with a magnificent statement on the power of Christ, making clear God has the power to carry out the plan he has made.
Chapter two continues the discussion but changes the focus from God’s role in salvation to ours; a role dismally beginning with “You used to be dead.” It proceeds to paint a dark picture of the hopelessness of our former state. This all changes beginning in verse four where Paul abandons this dreary line of discussion in mid-sentence with “But God…made us alive.” Verses 8-9 summarize this change, “For by such grace you have been saved through faith. This does not come from you; it is the gift of God and not the result of actions, to put a stop to all boasting.” Here we begin to get an idea of the reason for the letter: evidently some in Ephesus were boasting of their new status.
Paul continues by contrasting his readers with the Jews (2:11) and how his readers were “excluded from citizenship in Israel” but now they have been brought near (2:13). The picture here is very much a Jewish one, where closeness to God is related to physical closeness to Jerusalem. He then calls for the ending of hostilities and for a peace rooted in Christ, who is “reconciling both groups to God in one body through the cross, on which he eliminated the hostility” (2:16).
It would seem, as in many places, there were Gentile – Jewish tensions in the city of Ephesus, but unlike other locations, here the main problem was with the Gentile believers who saw themselves as superior and the Jews as inferior. This would account for the emphasis on God’s role in choosing us before the beginning of creation, and the warning about boasting, along with the calls for peace.
Chapter three starts with “For this reason,” a thought Paul will not finish until verse 14, as he goes instead into discussion of the secret of the Gentiles, a secret made known to Paul (3:2) and which we can understand (3:4); a secret that was hidden but was now being revealed (3:5). “This is that secret: The Gentiles are heirs-in-common, members-in-common of the body, and common participants in what was promised by the Messiah Jesus through the gospel” (3:6). Paul was called to proclaim the secret (3:7-9) the church is the union of God’s people,