Piper is presupposing that a wife never more spiritually mature than the husband. Is that not allowed in comp marriages?

Then why call it leadership? Because it does communicate something different when you call it what it really is: Servant.

And it is not as pleasant.

I’ve learned that it’s not about unilateral decision-making, following my husband into sin or enduring abuse. As John Piper and Wayne Grudem write,

Christ is her absolute authority, not the husband. She submits “out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21). The supreme authority of Christ qualifies the authority of her husband. She should never follow her husband into sin….

[A husband] must lead in such a way that his wife is encouraged to depend on Christ and not on himself. Practically, that rules out belittling supervision and fastidious oversight…. He is preparing her to be a “fellow heir,” not a servant girl (Romans 8:17). Any kind of leadership that, in the name of Christlike headship, tends to foster in a wife personal immaturity or spiritual weakness or insecurity through excessive control, picky supervision, or oppressive domination has missed the point of the analogy of Ephesians 5. Christ does not create that kind of wife.”

I thought is was a great quote.

Thanks for protecting women. It is nice to see Christians that allow women to have a will of their own.

I don’t think so. While there is some merit that when one is using allelon in a general sense to a large segment of individuals it will not always mean everyone to everyone, but leaves the determination up to us in that everyone is to look to everyone and see if their help is needed. When we support one another we extend that to the one who needs the support and carry the burdens of those who need the help. In the same way, when speaking in past tense of what one has viewed happening, i.e. people fighting with one another, how else is one to express a group participation without counting heads.

What you will NOT see, is the grouping of one anothers into blacks and white, men and women, etc. This is because if it were that specific, then the speaker would not have used allelon which is not specific. IOW if Paul had actually meant that only those in submission to those in authority were to be submissive, he really would have said that, because the word allelon erases those distinctions making it generally applicable to all.

So women are not to love their husbands? Or do women have to both love and submit? This seems like an extra burden on wives. They carry double the load of men.

Yes, Denny is arguing this,

In each one of these texts, the term “one another” is used, and it is clear that reciprocal action is not in view. One party is performing some action and another party is receiving the action.

What I am trying to say is that it reaches far beyond how women are treated. If the ethic of treating others as if they were born for submission is okay, and if a person believes that they are born for leadership and their other is born for submission, then the foundation of this religion is altered.

If others are deprived of one of the aspects of what a man considers to be essential to his personhood, then there is no need to treat another as one would be treated.

It is not a detail but the foundation of the religion which is redefined.

Calvin did not consider women to be by nature the same as men. However, he had the ethic of mutuality if not the reality. But now I see that the ethic of mutuality is being disgarded.

Only women can bear kids and breastfeed them and only men can impregnate women, so I do not think that EVERY potential role-task among humans can even be made the same, there are physical distinctions that must be respected. But in marriage a couple is free to structure it as best suits them and do not need to conform to any roles other than physical ones.

I do see hierarchy in Paul discussion of masters and slaves and also with parents and kids, this is because of the explicit use of “obey” but this is not found with husband and wife. And this is significant because this is exactly what Aristotle taught, that a wife is to obey her husband; yet Paul declines to endorse this, so his silence given this cultural context shouts equality to me.

To say that Calvin was a man of his time is irrelevant to the discussion. If that is the case, then the egals (which is a very recent phenom) may well be a passing fad and therefore vanish in the days ahead.

BTW nobody is arguing about loving one another or mutually submitting, but that does not leap over into egalitarianism in every task that men and women have undertaken since the dawn of time.

I don’t see any confliction between submission and hierarchy in Ephesians.