We rarely hear about biblical headship in the church, at least the headship that follows the biblical standard. You would think this would be included in the concept of “biblical headship”, but most preachers leave it out. One of the reasons we do not hear about it is the fact that feminism has been leaking into the church and damaging the minds of young women [and even young men].
Religious people have been shown to have greater marriage satisfaction than non-religious people. It makes logical sense, then, that if philosophies of the world such as feminism leak into the church, it would cause a reduction in overall marital satisfaction. This is obvious when you realize that women are increasingly unhappy in their marriages, as are the men who are married to those women.
Additionally, many preachers are scared to preach about headship because they are in female-dominated marriages or they are afraid to offend women in the church.
Not only do they not preach the truth about headship, but they avoid the topic altogether! Speaking of offense, make no mistake about it, select, highly vocal women will without a doubt become offended by the truth about the headship message. And also be aware that it is truly a minority of women who will become offended, but they know how to scream the loudest. These contentious women can plague many neutral-thinking women and drag them into poor thinking. Because of all the potential blowback they may receive, most preachers blunt the truth.
We need to realize that the only reason that women can even be this vocal about the issue is due to the overwhelming safety of the modern civilized world.
This is similar to when we wrote about the effeminate man. More and more weak and effeminate men exist because there is no demand for men to be strong. When the demand is not there, the supply will not be there either.
The reason that vocal, contentious women exist is because of the safety of the world. When the world becomes dangerous, and men are called to become strong again, women naturally fall into a submissive role. They understand that now is the time to support their husbands in their marriages as those men have to go out to war and become ferociously violent for the protection of society.
A weak society creates weak men who get married to raise weak sons with nagging wives.
A dangerous society creates strong men who raise strong sons with wives who realize the importance of supporting and submitting to their men.
Back to headship being preached in the church: Let’s get the obvious facts out of the way when it comes to biblical headship.
Women are not less valuable than men.
Men are not less valuable than women.
Women simply have less authority than men.
This is simply the way God designed the authority structure of marriage and the church. But remember that the possession of authority does not equate with greater value. To state it another way, authority is not the same as value. We understand this logically.
The men at the top of businesses such as CEOs do not have more value as human beings than the people at the middle and bottom of the company. The CEO has more valuable skills which translate to a higher income, but they don’t have greater intrinsic worth as human beings simply because of their position and authority. In the same way, men have more authority than women, but they do not have greater intrinsic value. And when you begin to ask why men are given the authority instead of women, it comes down to the individual strengths and weaknesses of each of the two genders.
Women tend to have people-oriented personalities and are more suited to thrive in interpersonal relationships. They also possess excellent nurturing abilities that allow them to keep children alive. Mothers are generally better at keeping children alive than they are at making sure they are properly situated to thrive in the world emotionally, physically, and mentally – this is the role of the masculine father.
The father generally has more command over his emotion, is level-headed, and as such is in a better position to rationally exercise his authority. The mother nurtures and cares for her son, while the father symbolically trains the son for war. Because when his son enters the world, there will be war on every front – from the physical to the spiritual.
Given that men and women are of equal value, we need to address where preachers fall off the path with the biblical headship categories.
Here is the exact point most people and preachers go wrong when talking about biblical headship in the church. These churches/preachers teach variations of egalitarianism about the authority structure in the biblical home. They teach some form of a “50/50” model or something like the following: “husband and wife have equal decision-making authority but the husband has the final word”. While this is beautifully politically correct, it is not the way biblical headship was structured in the Bible, and this can be demonstrated with a few simple thought exercises.
First, we need to understand that marriage was designed by God with biblical headship from the beginning [Gen 3]. This was designed for the benefit of both men and women, to allow for greater marital satisfaction as both the man and the woman are allowed to act in the marriage in ways that best suit their sex-specific nature. [We are happier when we do things we are good at, including marital roles].
Additionally, as marriage is the structure designed by God, we can extrapolate that there must be a logical and beneficial reason for this structure.
We induce this because God does not make stupid, arbitrary laws without purpose – there is a logical root of the law of God that is linked to better life satisfaction when that law is obeyed. Therefore the first reason for traditional, Biblical male headship in marriage is the fact that God designed marriage this way. Of course, the reasons do not stop there. If they did, that would be poor logic and generally blind adherence that is encouraged by many religious people today.
Second, later in the Bible, we have the book of Ephesians which paints a picture of marriage as mirroring the relationship between Christ and the church.
Here are the critical questions that disprove the egalitarian, “50/50” authority structure of marriage that many preachers teach because they do not have the necessary boldness to teach the truth: is Christ’s relationship with His church a 50/50, egalitarian relationship on authority? Do we have equal decision-making authority with Christ, but Christ has the last word if there is a “disagreement”, whatever that might mean? No This is not the case.
Christ has all authority on heaven and earth as the husband of the church [Matt 28:18]. The man has all authority as the husband in the relationship. And if according to Ephesians, marriage symbolizes the relationship between Christ and the church, then the authority structure is the same. Man mirrors Christ and has all authority over his bride, as Christ has all authority over his bride which is the church.
This does not mean that the wife loses all ability to speak or request, talk and communicate or is placed in a subservient slave position in the marriage. We as the church, the bride of Christ, still pray to God and present our communications and our requests for Him to act in a specific way in our lives.
And we even exercise our free will in submitting to Him. And this requires discipline, as submission requires the subjugation of personal wants to align ourselves with the will of God.
Even so, the wife can voice concerns, contribute her thoughts, talk and communicate as one with equal value, but not as one with equal authority to make the decisions. And she must exercise her free will to submit to her husband.
Many Bible teachers are simply too afraid of their wives to act on their authority, so they defer to this egalitarian view of the marriage authority that is simply and logically unscriptural. “I’m too afraid to exercise authority, but I’ll just point to this conveniently created doctrine of men as a good excuse to justify my lack of gonads”.
As men, we have the heavy responsibility to lead our wives, to make decisions for the household, and to bear the consequences for each and every one of them. So lead your wife, make good decisions, and take ownership when your decisions are poor. Because this authority exists not so you can take some power trip and rule with an iron fist over your family. That may be required on very rare occasions with disobedient, rebellious children or wives, but it should be essentially unheard of in scriptural marriages and households.
But your decision-making authority is not something to gloat about.
Rather it is a cumbersome gift with consequences at each and every turn. Men are not sitting around, smoking cigars, and laughing about how much power they have. This may be how feminism perceives them, or men and women who do not understand the structure of marriage. In reality, the weight of authority is a heavy one, and many women do not consider this when they are busy airing grievances about their position of submission. Do not hold this position of authority with pride, hold it with wisdom, fear, rational thinking, and kindness. But hold this position as a man, and do what is in the best interest of the family unit despite the popularity of the decision.
