Book Review with Bible Study and Sermon: Liberated Through Submission

(Edited because, between the day I pre-scheduled this post and the day it went live, I reread the book and think this review really needs a clarifying paragraph, which I'm flagging in the updated text.)

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Liberated Through Submission

Author: P.B. “Bunny” Wilson

Author found on web site: http://familylifetoday.com/guest/bunny-wilson/

Date: 1990

Publisher: Harvest House

ISBN: 0-890-81-843-6

Length: 191 pages

Quote: “[A]s a new Christian, I encountered a Scripture which said: 'Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord'...I suddenly pictured myself...obediently dropping grapes into his mouth as he leisurely reclined...[O]nly one other experience came close to matching my emotional response...morning sickness...!”

Wilson also admits that her husband liked the idea of wifely submission...and it's instructive that my copy came from the library of a male minister. Then again, Wilson was married to the same man for forty years (he died in 2012).

Before readers start throwing their bouquets and brickbats, let me state for the record that the Bible does not, ever, say “Women should be submissive or subordinate or in any way inferior to men generally.” It says, to women living in a culture that did say that, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.”

Service to “gods” other than the Holy One, in the Bible, is considered idolatry; loyalty to kings (or other forms of government) other than your own country's is considered treason; and submission to spouses other than your own is at least a form, if not the physical act, of adultery. Agreed? In ordinary social relationships, if those relationships are hierarchical or “asymmetrical,” the disparity should be defined by considerations like who's been there longer and who's paying whom.

In marriage...Wilson clarifies her use of terms on page 36. “Most people felt that submission was synonymous with being subservient or inferior. The general impression was that a person would be treated like a 'doormat'...Yet Jesus Christ led a totally submissive life.”

Yes, you may reply, and Jesus was on Earth to carry out a totally unique mission of self-sacrifice that was possible because He was the unique incarnation of God in human form, and He submitted to His Father in Heaven, not to some other mortal, and...

Basta ya! What the Bible actually says about marital relationships is more complex than what some Christians have wanted to understand it to say.

In his letters to the “Gentile” churches in places where women had few legal rights or none, Paul advised Christian women married to unbelievers to avoid open rebellion that would have led to more intensive persecution of the church.

In his letters to Jewish Christians, Peter advised those women to “obey their husbands as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him 'milord'.” Those Jewish Christians knew very well how Sarah obeyed Abraham. On one formal occasion, and presumably on others, when they addressed each other by their official titles before strangers, Sarah's role in a ritual of hospitality was to obey Abraham, and she did. In their private life, Sarah was evidently the boss—that's what her name means! Abraham was not exactly a mousy old gentleman. He was the son of an influential family before he left home to become a nomadic prophet and a sheik in the classical manner, the “I'm just an old man living in a tent, who happens to own thousands of cattle, employ hundreds of young people, and be someone kings can call on to furnish the equivalent of a city's military force in wartime” type. Priests and kings and the Pharaoh of Egypt, which was then the dominant nation in the world, treated Abraham as a peer and a teacher. And Sarah, his half-sister who may or may not have literally had royal blood, made the decisions in no uncertain terms, and Abraham obeyed her orders even when they obviously gravelled his soul...Sarah told Abraham to have a son with another woman, rear that son as his heir for fourteen years, and then drive that son out into the wilderness, but at least she didn't disrespect Abraham in public.

Other Scriptures reinforce the idea that, although the ancient world had many sexist customs, God-fearing women always had rights that Pagan women often lacked. They could inherit property, live and travel apart from their husbands, herd sheep, do any kind of job at which they were competent including governing the nation and directing the army, be authoritative enough scholars that the validity of the whole Bible rests on the authority of a woman, preach, teach, and even fight on the home front (although women were barred from the regular army). Bible writers describe women formally addressing men in high-status positions in very deferential terms, as etiquette required, but they also describe a religious person drawing closer to the Holy One by analogy to a wife who “calls her husband 'Man' [or perhaps the word sounded more like 'Dear'?] and no more calls him 'Milord'.” Their ideal girl was strong and sunburnt from outdoor work, and their ideal wife was not so much charming or pretty (“Charm is deceitful, beauty is vain”) as she was tough, smart, and entrepreneurial.

In times other than the very volatile formative years of the Apostolic Church, the Bible gives no hint of any mandate that wives submit to husbands. The book of Genesis taught that, although mortality and the discomforts of childbirth might make it reasonable for women just to opt out of marriage and motherhood altogether and let the species come to an end, “thy desire shall be to thine husband and (he) shall rule over thee”--that most women would voluntarily submit themselves to this funny, foolish, inconvenient thing called love. Sure enough, most did, and most still do. During the “in love” phase of a relationship most women's temptation is to idolize the men they love. Then if they get married they wonder why and whether they have to do all the things they once wanted so much to do...

But, whatever commentators have added to it, the Bible does not actually say that all men are “above” and all women “below.” The father of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, the prophet who ended human sacrifice in the name of the Holy One, was evidently a submissive husband. God made men like Abraham and women like Sarah too.

Even Paul never objected to men's having the right to feel and act submissive. In fact, some of the passages that mention wifely submission specifically advise all Christians to “submit yourselves one toanother”--reciprocally. It was very specifically the Christian wives married to suspicious Pagan husbands who were told to be submissive.

So the position of this web site is that nobody has to be submissive. In our personal relationships Christians can be as dominant, as submissive, or whatever else, as our natural temperaments make us. It's not a moral issue...but if people want to live together for the rest of their lives, it certainly helps if one, or better yet if both, of them feel called to be submissive.

That's a long preamble. That's also the viewpoint from which it's possible for me to review Liberated Through Submission. I think Wilson is in error in saying that all wives “must submit to” all husbands because, just for one thing, when wives genuinely want to defer to our own husbands, what some of us find is that some of them want to defer to us. I think she is correct in saying that wives who want to submit to our own husbands can be both liberated and blessed by doing so.

Some Christians have made a really terrible mistake by interpreting the idea of wifely submission to suggest that wives are still obliged to submit when what their husbands want to do is evil—beating the wives, for instance, or sexually abusing a child. The Bible says no such thing. In fact, when what the husbands want to do is merely stupid, the Bible suggests that wives may be blessed for ignoring or cancelling the husband's bad decisions. In I Samuel 25, a rich farmer called Nabal (possibly a nickname since it means “fool”) refused to feed the future King David and his future army, who had been protecting Nabal from foreign enemies' raids. Nabal's wife Abigail, being wiser, quietly told the hired men to feed David and his army, begged them to forgive Nabal for being a fool, and prayed that David would remember their family when he became king. Not two weeks later Nabal died, probably of an apoplectic fit, and David married Abigail. This story's inclusion in the Bible clearly tells us that sometimes wives can, should, and must overrule their husbands—if the husbands are fools.

The funny thing is that, most of the time, neither wives nor husbands are fools. They disagree. The usual solution for interpersonal disagreement is interpersonal distance. If you don't like the noise of someone else's radio or the smell of someone else's lunch, get out of the room! Go back when you want to talk to, work with, or be close to the other person enough that you're willing to endure the noise, the smell, or whatever, if those things are still present. Sarah and Abraham did not always pitch their tents within a day's journey from each other. 

But marital love offers us another option. We can choose to “be submissive” and learn to put up with our mates' tastes and habits, telling ourselves that loving this person is a package deal and X is part of the package. Husbands can share in the blessing this approach to marriage brings, but as long as wives accept the idea that “femininity” means “being more relational” and caring more about “the relationship,” then wives are likely to claim more of it.

Non-Christians, of course, have long used the idea of submission to refer to the kind of elaborate erotic games described in Fifty Shades of Grey and practiced in “kinky sex clubs.” All that needs to be said about that sort of silliness, here, is that it's not what Paul was talking about, it's not what Wilson is talking about, and it's not what I'm talking about when I say that my husband and I were blessed with a mutually submissive relationship. Some people are excited by the idea of one of two people stage-managing every move in a private, personal act, and others are excited by the idea of mutuality and free-form tickling and pillow-fighting and so on. “Debates” (or pre-courtship displays) about that sort of thing are private and don't belong on this web site.

So what does submission mean? I've used the idea of putting up with someone else's peculiar tastes in food and music, mainly to get away from the Shades of Grey images. Wilson mentions:

* “asking Daddy” [for permission] “to do everything”

* cooking

* “longing to find a man who will take charge”

* “pampering” the husband: “before he can shift the car into park, his smiling wife rushes out to greet him...dressed as if she'd just stepped out of Vogue. The children are right behind her. One of them carries a cool glass of lemonade. The other has his house slippers. Dad is ushered into the house and taken into the family room where the TV is turned to his favorite show. The children...are not seen for the rest of the night. Husband's dinner is placed on a tray, and the TV adjusted for comfortable viewing. Finally...the wife...leads him to a hot bath, washes his back and then joins him in bed.”

* housecleaning

* spending money, or spending less money

* sex “on demand”

* letting the husband invest money without the wife's consent (a bad investment, it turned out)

* not having a job outside the home, being a full-time housewife (Are there any men in Generation X who would ever allow any wife, even if paraplegic, to think of that as an act of submission?!)

* not reacting with anger when the husband utters a “favorite saying, which he reserved for use only when he really wanted to make her angry” (That's Verbal Self-Defense, but is it an act of submission?)

* letting the husband interrupt and distract when the wife needs to focus on a job

* taking back a husband who has committed adultery

* getting up to bring a cup of tea to a husband who's perfectly well able to get it for himself

Even among people who are on the same page with the concept of “submission” as a relationship style rather than a sex game, there's room for variation...because none of what Wilson describes as her acts of submission sounds like any of mine.

The closest might be the question about the timing of sex. Women have a monthly cycle, and some young men seem to have a daily cycle, between maximal and minimal interest. The definition of a submissive relationship is that the submissive partner is excited by giving pleasure to the other. In a marriage this could work like C.S. Lewis's description of how Christians of different persuasions would act if they were in serious agreement about charity and humility—the ones who hadn't grown up “crossing themselves” doing it so as not to tempt a friend into impiety, and the ones who had grown up making that gesture refraining so as not to tempt a friend into blasphemy. Those humble Christians would be practicing submissiveness in the context of fellowship in church. In a mutually submissive marriage a couple can apply the same concept to sex, and I can say that both of those people know they've been well and truly blessed.

[Flag for the clarifying paragraph:] Wilson defines wifely submission as not actually meaning any of those specific acts of submission, but as, in a broader sense, requiring the husband to take full responsibility for the physical and spiritual well-being of the couple. I'm not convinced that that's what the Bible actually teaches, because it fails the reality test--many husbands become disabled first. I am persuaded that it's an acceptable interpretation of what Paul or even Peter would have advised contemporary young women whose husbands were in literal fact "the savior of the body," or bodies, of those women and their children: if the husband was providing for the family (even by his work with non-Christians), or if his non-Christian affiliation was protecting the wife from religious persecution, there were good practical reasons to let him be responsible for whatever seemed necessary at the time, and Paul was a very practical apostle. I'm even persuaded that, for today's wives, in times of disagreement, "Very well, do it your way, and don't blame me  afterward" may be a good practical strategy that worked for Wilson...but not that it's the best or only strategy for all couples. In today's reality, it may be a good strategy for husbands too. As C.S. Lewis observed (he was the able-bodied partner who had to watch his wife die of cancer), one of the crowns the Bible awards to husbands is made of paper (erotic fun'n'games) and the other of thorns; having to choose between what you want, and what you know your Life Partner (or even one of the children) really wants, is that crown of thorns, and nobody is likely to be willing to wear it twice.

Wilson adopts the interpretation of Ephesians 5:21-22 that “the word 'submit' does not mean the same thing in both cases...In verse 21 the word hupodeiknumi means 'to exhibit'...In verse 22 the word hupotasso means 'to place in an orderly fashion under.” This is true, but not necessarily relevant, because the epistle to the Ephesians is at least as much about contemporary evangelical strategy as it is about how all people should always behave.

Wilson would have done better to explain that the “I submitted/deferred to you on decision A, so you should now submit/defer to me on decision B” model is just not what submission is about. Again, couples have to work out for themselves exactly what their mutual submission should look like, but as long as you're thinking “I want to get my way about this” you are not practicing submission. (In some cases you may not need to be.) Mutual submission is more like “The Gift of the Magi.” Each party is thinking “I want a gift for X more than I want this treasured possession of mine; I want to please X more than I want to please myself.”

Baby-boomer feminists may find themselves liberated to be submissive through liberation, actually. I know my own mental path to submissiveness led through a lot of “Left to myself I'd do/buy/eat/read/listen to A...oh blah, I've done that...I'd really rather be with my Life Partner, sharing B with him, instead of being alone with my A.” That, I believe, was mutual.

Then there was the great marital-quarrel-killer premise, “I earn my money and my Life Partner earns his money, and even though he's now earning enough that we can afford to share an 'our house' located in between 'my house' and 'his house,' where he pays all the bills but each of us continues buying our own groceries and cooking them together, we trust each other to handle our own money.” When we met I was comfortable, and he was bankrupt but talented and hardworking. Over the next ten years...both of us were frugal. My rule was to save, spend, and give approximately equal amounts of money. I never asked what his rule was, never insulted him with a question about his bankruptcy. I knew he'd made some bad investments, like his ex-wife, and some good ones, like IBM. When he sponsored a politician in his State I knew he felt that he was back on his feet financially. I knew, also, that we were living like comfortable students by most Washingtonians' standards, living in obscene wealth by global standards, able to afford to do what we chose to pay for what we wanted and support what we wanted to support. Only when my husband was dying did I realize that he'd set up seven bank accounts, one for each heir, and the one for his adoptive son had gone into six figures. I knew we were rich; I'd never imagined that we'd become what most Americans would call rich.

We had exactly one real quarrel, one summer. It fell into the in-law category. How much of that summer would we spend in Maryland, where his ex-wife was neglecting his ex-foster-daughter, and how much in Virginia, where my sister was neglecting our father? Both of us really wanted to be able to defer to the other, if the other could think of a good answer to the problem. There were no good answers. Both of our disabled relatives died, not that summer but in the next few years, and it was a long hard time. Mutual submission doesn't make that kind of thing easy or pleasant but it did keep us from nagging each other about it for the rest of our lives.

I seriously believe that, whether they call it that or something else, any couple who stay together very long have to be practicing mutual submission to some extent. This submission can have asymmetrical qualities—the “traditional” tradeoff where the sole breadwinner became a bit of a visiting landlord in his home, or newer-model tradeoffs where the vulnerable, clingy partner is allowed to act overtly dominant because the more confident partner senses her/his fears, or whatever—but it's unlikely to last long if it's not mutual.

I think, if you have to choose, Marabel Morgan did a better job explaining wifely submission than Wilson does. For some readers Morgan used too many specific examples that related to her own unique relationship with her own unique husband, but at least she presented wifely submission as erotic and romantic fun, rather than leaning heavily on the “Eve sinned and therefore all women are condemned to subordinate positions in life” misinterpretation of the Bible, as Wilson does. All baby-boomers grew up with the “Eve sinned” routine. Those of us who weren't totally turned off the Bible by it noticed that, according to the NT, Adam's sin was considered greater than Eve's. In view of that, any argument that begins with “Eve sinned” is likely to be rejected by serious Bible scholars, or even Bible Mavens.

At the same time, I salute Wilson for having the courage to write about this controversial topic at all.

There is no question that the whole idea of male dominance, worldwide, is based on the fact that men are usually stronger than women at the time of marriage. Men who have thought about this idea have voluntarily rejected it; when you're in love, even if you want your own way, you don't want to get your own way by being able to force or threaten the one you love to go along with you. The Bible encourages young men to rejoice in their youth and strength--and one way they've traditionally rejoiced in those things has been the idea of chivalry.

I propose, however, that the idea of female submission, worldwide, may be more relevant to the fact that women are, more often than not, stronger than men as a couple grow older. (I had a particularly small great-grand-aunt, whose lifespan didn't overlap with mine for very long, who was remembered for telling everyone she'd found a big strong man who could help and protect her. What made this memorable was that, five years later, he'd become a paraplegic, and she had to help and protect him, physically, for the next thirty years. And she did.) Women, too, need to cultivate chivalry.

I don't think it ever has done or will do a young woman any harm to think through the following mental exercise: Picture the young athletic hero of your choice...with both legs broken at once. Right, simple fractures of only one bone in each leg, and he's still young; he won't be disabled and burdensome for very long. But he is those things now. And then while having the casts put on he picks up some boring little infection in the hospital. It responds well to a new antibiotic. There's nothing at all to worry about except that the antibiotic happens to produce acute unpredictable food intolerance reactions, similar to morning sickness only perhaps a bit messier. It would be an awfully lucky couple who stayed together thirty years, or even ten years, without something like this happening. And here I stand to testify that if a woman has accepted, early on, that some day she may need to practice the most abject kind of self-abnegation, then the life passages that are too disgusting for this web site to mention will be much easier. 

Not that it hurts anything for a man to accept that too; not that my husband hadn't had his turn to think of carrying mops and basins as an act of love. But I spent one day in bed with listeria, and he spent six months in bed with cancer...and even when women rack up points for burdensomeness by having babies, that's probably close to a typical ratio. Most bridegrooms are bigger and stronger than their brides, and most old couples have seen for themselves that "the bigger they come, the harder they fall." 

So no matter how much gender parity we may succeed in building into society-as-a-whole--and I say the more the better--I still think it's a good idea for women to think seriously about this idea of wifely submission. Or, if you're not prepared to put your life and thought on hold and wait on him hand and foot when he really needs to be waited on, maybe sleeping alone and being the last in your crowd to get married have more to recommend them than you might have thought they had.

I go into this because I'm following e-friends on Twitter and Google + who are going through that "healthy care giver" stage of life, at the time of writing, and that stage of life stinks. And most women who choose a life partner either become healthy care givers, or become horrible deserters-of-sick-partners. And, like living to grow old, being the healthy care giver is preferable to the only real alternative. 

Be liberated, young woman reader. Be a feminist, or a "post-feminist." Be an entrepreneur. Be a leader. Be strong. Be smart. Be brave. And within marriage, be submissive enough that when your man says "I need to get up, to use a basin, bedpan, whatever, again," in the middle of the night, you've formed a habit of responding with love. 

Liberated Through Submission is a Fair Trade Book, available on this web site's usual terms: $5 per book, $5 per package (up to five more books of this size will ship in the same package), $1 per online payment, from which we'll send $1 to Wilson or a charity of her choice.