[ MAUKA MAKAI ]
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY
DAVID SWANN / DSWANN@STARBULLETIN.COM
Wives and
the BibleSome Christians say the Bible
requires wifely submission, but
is the issue really that simple?
YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE what I saw today," I burst out as I walked into the newsroom.
I explained that I had gone to pick up lunch at a Christian bookstore/deli. As I waited for my food, I browsed the "Women's" section where I picked up several books about the role of the Christian wife. Skimming one book, entitled "The Excellent Wife," I realized it was a "how-to" guide calling for wives to submit to their husbands. Each chapter covered a different aspect of the whys and wherefores of submission.
My colleagues were outraged. Forty years after the women's liberation movement began, the women I work with are independent spirits not likely to give back any hard-won gains. Women of today see the world as their oyster. They can lead nations and build empires (look at billionaire Oprah Winfrey). They even head up churches. Why, then, would any woman in this day and age subjugate herself to a man?
My boss (a woman) stated: "That sounds like a story. You do it."
I decided to dive right in, and began with what I least understood. But my research on submission soon led to explorations of the Bible, Christian faith and Christian values.
"Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands."Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. ... In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself."
-- Ephesians (5:22-28)
THE CONCEPT of Christian wifely submission finds its root in this Ephesians passage. For fundamentalist-inclined churches, the passage requires the assignment of gender roles, since these churches take the words of the Bible literally in the belief that the Bible is perfection.
"The foundation for our teachings is directly from the Bible," says Grace Kia'aina, women's ministry leader for the Oahu Church of Christ, where she serves as teacher and premarital and marriage counselor to the women of her church. "And specifically pertaining to marriage, we believe in God-given roles for husbands and wives. God has given husbands the leadership role, and wives are to respect their husbands and be good followers."
Pastor Ron Arnold, of Kaimuki Christian Church, clarifies the marriage roles further. "Paul makes it clear in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there's equality. We're all at level ground at the foot of the cross. Everyone is equal in God's eyes."
RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM
Grace Kia'aina ministers to the congregation of the Oahu Church of Christ with her husband, Rhys. Their daughter, Kala'i, is 20 months old. The Kia'ainas teach that God expects men to be leaders of the family and for women to respect their husband's authority.Most of the time, Arnold says, husbands and wives will "prayerfully make decisions together." It is when a couple can't come to agreement that God's roles for each of them come into play.
"Though people have equal value, we're given different roles by God. It's true in government. The president is no more important than the White House janitor, but they each have different roles. Likewise, that's how it is for men and women."
Both Arnold and Kia'aina teach that God's roles for men and women correspond to their greatest needs: significance for men and security for women.
"A husband is to be the leader the family," Arnold says. "That role is often misunderstood by unbelievers, and many Christians, too. The man is not to be an authoritative, dictatorial leader, but a servant leader. God calls on the man to lead in love."
A woman helps her husband be a better leader by showing him the respect he needs, Kia'aina says.
"What's underestimated is how much men need to feel respected. Submission is looked at as a bad word. We teach that it does take a spiritual woman to embrace her role. It doesn't mean to be a doormat or to say nothing. It means adding to his thoughts and bringing things up in a respectful way and, in the end, trusting that your husband will do the right thing," Kia'aina says.
"It all fits together if the husband and wife serve the role God placed them in," Arnold says. "If a man is esteemed by his wife, he will want to serve her and their family sacrificially. When a woman knows her husband is committed to serving her and the family, she will trust and respond to him. She'll want him to lead her."
"Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives' conduct, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God's sight."
-- 1 Peter (3:1-4)
KATHY FERGUSON, director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, calls wifely submission in marriage a "recipe for disaster for women."
"If the husband and wife can both play these roles and it works for them, I say more power to them. But (these churches') quaint belief that men will take care of things and women will look up to them adoringly is a fairy tale of marriage. The reality of our society is so different from that. If one in two marriages end in divorce, how is a woman supposed to go on from there? It's a dangerous fairy tale.
"I was raised Christian, and most of my relatives were Christian," she says. "There's lots more investment in women being submissive than in men being responsible.
"They're treating women like children, not equal adults. And meanwhile, the man is bigger and stronger and may be beating her up. Is she supposed to just accept that?"
"IF THERE IS ABUSE, we intervene," Kia'aina says. "We encourage the woman to leave if there is physical harm."
But if matters are less than black and white, Kia'aina says her church counsels women on a case-by-case basis. If the abuse is not physical, but rather emotional or psychological, and depending on whether the woman feels "she can handle the situation," Kia'aina may advise the woman to continue in her marriage and in her wifely role.
"The power of how we respond as women is through our faith. Our relationship to God can affect our husbands. A woman hopes and desires that through her devotion and perseverance that her husband will come around ... and he will realize he has to be a leader," she says.
"The point is, even when your husband is not respectable, (a wife) should still give him respect. That's when the relationship really starts growing."
When posed with the fact that some women die at the hands of their partners, Kia'aina responds: "Just because there are bad leaders does not mean that we throw away the whole concept. My husband and I just work harder as leaders of the church."
Kia'aina's husband, Rhys, is lead evangelist for Oahu Church of Christ and oversees sister churches in Hilo, Maui and Guam. That means he's responsible for more than 800 followers and plays the role for men in the Oahu Church of Christ that his wife does for the women.
"If a man is at the point when he has to say, 'Submit,' he's lost already. He's not making her feel loved," she says.
"The whole idea of Christian faith is not focusing on the self, but of meeting (each other's) needs, and your needs will be met."
"But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
-- Galatians (3:25-28)
"I THINK it's such an elaborate alibi for women's subjugation," Ferguson says of the way fundamentalist churches use the Ephesians passage, paralleling men to God and women to the church, to advocate submission. There is a huge disparity of power between women ("the church") and men ("God") when such parallels are made, she says.
"There's not much anyone can do to influence God, but people are always working to change the church," she says.
"The Bible is endlessly interpretable. If you want to find reasons for treating women equally, you can find it in the Bible. Do you know there are two Creation stories? In the earliest version, Adam and Eve were created together. In Catholicism there's a branch called Liberation Theology that's based on equality. In Latin America the revolution is in part because people are embracing Liberation Theology.
"The big point is that when any church looks at the Bible to argue a point, you're going to have selective reading," Ferguson says. "Given that (churches are taking) a direct and obvious interpretation of the Bible, why not take a more open, fair, egalitarian (reading of the Bible)?"
BARBARA RIPPLE, superintendent of the United Methodist Churches in Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, has lived a number of different lives. She was married, became a single mother of five and later joined the ministry.
"As a single mom, I came up against all kinds of prejudice," she says. "Once, the water heater broke and I couldn't get credit. Sears said no, they didn't allow that to single mothers. Through all those times, life was very difficult. Sometimes I didn't know where the next meal was coming from. It was the people in the church, God working through them, who gave me encouragement."
Ripple went back to school and earned a teaching degree so she could support her children. It was then that she committed herself to "whatever God asked me to do," eventually returning to school, this time to a seminary, where she spent four years becoming an ordained minister. That was 23 years ago.
After all that life experience, Ripple says that when she performs weddings, she advises couples that "marriage is a partnership that takes teamwork." No one is unequal to the other, she says. And she doesn't believe that anyone is bound to any specific role in a marriage.
"It's hard to be specific. I know men who love to cook. I know women who love their careers. It seems to be doing God a disservice if we say God can only use a man or a woman 'this' way. God gives both of them full potential. We humans put limitations upon it."
Which specific Scriptures back up her beliefs? "That's called proof texting. I don't do that," she says. "If we really follow that, we must take all of the Bible that way, and there'd be so many contradictions. There are problems with proof texting: Goodness, the Bible was used to justify slavery!
"To my mind, looking at what Jesus' life was like, and even more to the point, what his actions were, is most important. Christ was with men and women exactly the same."
Ripple has worked for 15 years with survivors of domestic violence and says some of those women were previously advised by fundamentalist counselors.
"'Pray to Jesus and go back to your husband,' they told them. It's that idea of keeping a wife barefoot and pregnant. But God doesn't give anyone a right to (hurt another person)," Ripple says.
"Some of us are taught that questioning the Bible is a sin, but that's how we learn and grow. I believe the Bible is God's word to us. But it's not so concrete.
"It's a living Bible," Ripple says. "It speaks to us and lives within us. I can read a passage hundreds of times, and each time it says something new to me. I can understand more of what God wants from my life from it. Following the Bible doesn't mean we throw out our ability to think or reason or question.
"God is immensely creative," she says. "We don't all have to fit one mold, one pattern. Humans have never done that. It'd be nice to say, 'All of this is good, all of that is bad. I'll be good.' But we're humans, we're all of that."
"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit."
-- 1 Corinthians (12:12-13)
IT'S IRONIC that in these modern times, while some Christians are following Scripture requiring women's submission, the earliest writings in the Bible actually promoted women as religious leaders.
"Paul's earliest writings say that women are to be elevated," says Jay Sakashita, a religion professor at the University of Hawaii. "Women are viewed in high regard because they were Jesus' first followers."
Christianity in the early days was egalitarian, and writers spoke to groups, not leaders. But by the time of 1 Timothy, that had changed, Sakashita says. The church began organizing and creating hierarchies, evidenced in the later books in the Bible that were addressed to individuals rather than churches. And women were instructed to be silent, as Christians struggled to survive in a secular world that persecuted them for speaking about their beliefs.
"Paul believed that the world would come to an end within his lifetime, and when it didn't the church had to organize," he says. "The longer the Christian church developed, the more it began to reflect Roman society, which lead to the submission of women."
SAKASHITA SAYS conservative issues, such as submission, have gained prominence in Christianity in recent decades as the result of the fundamentalist movement of the 1980s.
"It happened in every religion, and new religions were created, too, which are very conservative, very controlling and dogmatic. In my opinion it has to do with our world today. There are so many threats and such chaos that it's nice to rely on certainties. People find comfort in that."
Sakashita knows of what he speaks. When he was a young man entering college, he joined a "born again" church.
"It was the era of heavy-metal music being the devil's work and playing records backward," he says with a chuckle. "I believed there was one worldview, that the Bible was perfect and that there was only one way to view God."
In his enthusiasm, Sakashita signed up for religion class with now-retired Fritz Seifert, a longtime professor in the UH religion department and an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ. That changed his life and his faith indelibly.
"I was born again and Fritz helped me die again," Sakashita says. "He told me: 'You can't get access to the truth. The closest you can get to the truth is to make sense of things. Religion helps make truth of nonsense.'"
Today, Sakashita says it's the complexity of the Bible that infuses his faith.
"All the writers had a different relationship with God," he says. "The contradictions don't bother me. They only bother people who want to believe there are none.
"Being a scholar of the Bible enhances my faith. When you begin to understand the complexities of the Bible, you come to appreciate the different levels of meaning. This doesn't make me believe more or less, just differently. In the past it was important that there be only one correct understanding. Now, I just appreciate the different ways of understanding."
Today, as a religion professor, Sakashita tries to broaden his students' perspectives the same way Seifert did his some 20 years ago.
"Lots of people have a personal investment when they come to class. I love to help them appreciate Christianity differently. One woman said her faith was strengthened by my class. I felt like I was doing for her what Fritz did for me."
"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
-- 1 Corinthians (13:2-7)
ULTIMATELY, the ramifications of all the beliefs we hold, the roles we embody, the practices we give action to, will rest in what we pass on to the next generation. What values are Christian parents passing on to their children? Do scripture-based gender roles have any place in what children are being taught?
For Janet Kawabe, who grew up in the Baptist church, Christian values were at the forefront of her mind when her doctor told her the sex of her unborn child.
"When I found out I was having a boy, I was scared," she says. "Society puts such expectations on men -- that they need to be macho, that they cannot cry or show their emotions, that they need to be strong all the time.
"The only acceptable emotion for men is anger, not sensitivity. That's why this is going to be a challenge, raising a caring, sensitive man who respects women," Kawabe says of rearing her son, Luke, who just turned 1. Luke's sister, Eden, is 4.
"So the way I look at it is that I need to raise him -- and Eden -- with Christian values: to love their fellow human beings, have high moral standards and know good from evil, based on the Bible's teachings.
"I think their only saving grace is if I raise them this way," she says.
Lisa Johnson, who has two young daughters (Brianne, 4, and Brooke, 9 months), is also raising her children with Christian values.
"The thing about Christianity is that there is the understanding of being completely loved (by God)," and that loving presence provides a governing force in life, she says.
"It's important to me that they have their own minds. I want to raise girls who can say 'no,' not just to stuff like drugs, but in the sense that they can withstand what the culture says about them as females -- what a woman should look like, etc.
"If they feel that loved, know 'I am so valued,' they will value themselves," Johnson says. "I want them to feel confident enough that if they don't find the right man, they will feel comfortable being just with themselves.
"This goes hand in hand with peer pressure and then marriage. It's part of character building and learning to make healthy decisions."
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