Love and respect
The Bible does not talk much about marriage relationships and gender roles. There are only a few passages that discuss this in the New Testament. I have tried to catalog most of the important ones here. The fascinating discovery is that women and men in relationships are not told to relate to each other in exactly identical ways. Men are told to “love” women, but women are told to “respect” men.  Look at some of the patterns in the table below. 

This is a key distinction that is overlooked by many in our culture. For men, the equivalent of what love does for a woman is a kind of love that is best called “respect.” Notice that most deep man-to-man friendships are built on this kind of love—gruff, unspoken, yet real and strong. Men are giving each other this respect-ish love. 

This is important because husbands (or boyfriends) in our culture are often expected to accept from their women the exact same kind of love that women receive best. Asking a woman to respect a man is not cool—it sounds chauvinistic and archaic. But I suggest from personal experience (if sola scriptura were insufficient) that the Bible described things correctly. It is immensely empowering, refreshing and delightful when my lady honors me in public, defers the final call on a decision to me, or trusts my judgment. It makes me love her so much when I sense supportiveness, not competition, from her. Although submission has unfortunately been coerced out of women in former eras, the proper manifestation does wonders to the masculine psyche. We are missing some major aspects of how men are wired that I think are necessary for cultivating the healthiest relationships between men and women. 

Equal value, albeit unequal roles
The first objection to the idea of submission is always that it makes women inferior. I suggest that, according to the Bible, women are not at all ontologically subordinate, yet they are at the same time functionally subordinate. In other words, women and men have equal value, but not identical roles. Women are not less important because they are under men in “rank”. We can see this for at least two reasons. First, the top of the hierarchy chain that establishes this functional subordination are God the Father and Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:3), who, although distinctly different in subordination, are nevertheless entirely co-equal.  Second, in God’s economy it is not leaders, but servants, who are “the greatest among you” (Matthew 23:11-12); in this sense, the woman’s position is the one of greater honor. 

Who has the harder role?
It is harder to do the man’s part of loving or the woman’s part of respecting? The answer is, “Yes.” Because both actions are nuanced by the tendencies of manhood and womanhood, this is really comparing apples and oranges. I can only assume that, in some ultimate sense, they are exactly equal in difficulty. But this is really outside the scope of human evaluation.  

It will take sacrifice, not just compromise
When the system of love and respect is broken, one side must go out on a limb to give love that is not guaranteed to return. The simple application for a man is, “love her regardless of whether she respects you, and trust that God will (perhaps gradually) change her heart as you do so.” The application for women is the same. “Respect him regardless of whether he loves you, and trust that God will cause his love for you to grow.” This does not mean that we should perpetually cast ourselves as martyrs into dysfunctional relationships. That is not healthy or helpful. A long period of unreciprocated reaching out might be a red flag to run deeper diagnostics on the relationship. (“Okay, something is broken deep here.”) But we cannot always be waiting for the other person to “come half way” and “meet us in the middle.” No, I suggest that Christ does not model that. He initiated. “We love because he first loved us,” and paid us the intolerable complement of allowing us to never love him back. So, I cannot tap my fingers and wait for my partner to reciprocate. I must give freely. Even if they are in the wrong. (We were in the wrong, not Christ.) This is the difference between simple compromise, which works for most circumstances, and sacrifice, which is the apex and glory of love. 

You can only give that kind of love if you have received it
This kind of love can only be motivated and sustained by someone who has a very deep reservoir of love. The natural heart is incapable; it will run out. But if we have the holy spirit of God as the “fountain of living water” in our hearts, by which we continually receive the incomprehensibly sweet love of God, which he showed us on the cross, then we too can love selflessly. If the Lord is my strength, if I commune with him and confide in him and drink strength from him deep in my heart, then I will be empowered to love my significant other with a wild, dangerous, foolish self-sacrifice.  And God will thus be glorified in my heart and in my actions. 

Gender roles extend into the community
Two passages of scripture, 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 and 1 Timothy 2:1-15, seem to extend these roles to the corporate gathering of believers. As women are to submit to their husbands within the family sphere, so they ought to submit to their husbands in the church sphere, but moreover, women, considered as a group, should corporately submit to men, considered as a group. As a husband leads a wife, so the churchmen lead the churchwomen. Thus, women should not teach the collected church, and when they pray or prophecy, they should do so with a mark of submission. What counts as “teaching” and a “mark of submission” in today’s church is a very difficult question, which I will not attempt to answer here. But the point is clear that the gender roles extend corporately. This is not a popular idea at all, because our culture hates “traditional” gender roles in public even more vehemently than it hates them in the home; but believers today must wrestle with these scriptures and to seek to respect them in contextualized methods.




**Note: read my subsequent post for part two, the role of a man who is to receive submission.**