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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Commentary and one stop shop for egalitarian opposition research. We hope today to give the best opposition research we possibly can. I'm your host, Jonathan Swan, executive editor of icon, a journal for biblical anthropology. We have a full slate of hosts today. I'm joined by Denny Burke, the president of cbmw, and Colin Smothers, the executive director of cbmw. Guys, I'm dressing down the podcast today. We've got Denny Napolo Collins in a suit. We don't really know who we are, do we, John?
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B
You're keeping us relevant with that hat. Is that the St. Louis Cardinals?
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A
So, St. Louis Cardinals away cap.
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C
Yeah, yeah. I identify as a business casual wearing
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A
the icon polo for those who are listening.
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B
Yeah. Denny, get up a little bit into the camera. Icon logo.
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C
Look at that.
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A
Yeah, the best logo in evangelical anthropology.
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C
That's right.
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A
And maybe the only one. All right, guys. Well, I was on X yesterday, which brings me all kinds of great joy. Among the joy, I came across a tweet from CBE International, Christians for Biblical Equality, and it quoted an article by their president, I believe, Mimi Haddad. And it says, while secular culture may presume and assert authority based on the presumed superiority of gender, race and class, marriages and churches flourish when all believers submit mutually and equally to each other out of love and respect based on scriptures like Galatians 3. 28, a text foreshadowed in the creation account. Denny, I want to first dish this over to you. There's a term there that I actually hear used by both complementarians at times and egalitarians. And that term is mutual submission. When people are using that term, what do they mean? And is it biblical? Is it something we should use?
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C
Yeah, she's picking up on a term that is mainly taken from two different New testament texts. Ephesians 5 first of all, and then probably secondarily, 1 Corinthians 7. But Ephesians 5, it says, this is right before Paul gives those instructions to husbands and wives. Ephesians 5:21. Be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.
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A
Okay.
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C
And so there's. Egalitarians commonly will take this text and say, look, Paul's not talking about women submitting to their husbands. He's talking about men and women submitting to one another. And that's really the main thrust of the verse. So instead of talking about some kind of unilateral submission of wife to husband, what he's commending is mutual submission within the whole church. And he's saying it's a one. Another passage Just like we're supposed to love one another, we're supposed to submit to one another in the sense of serving one another, putting others needs before our own. You have similar. Well, it's not the same language, but it's a concept that they point to in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul's talking about husbands and wives and he says the wife does not have. This is 1 Corinthians 7:4, the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise, also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. And so there it specifically says authority is, you know, a husband doesn't have authority over his own body, his wife does and the wife, you know, likewise. That sounds like mutual submission. And so they'll point to those two passages and say, let's leave aside these notions of male headship and talk about mutual submission. Now here's a little wrinkle that I have to throw in there. If you look at recovering Biblical manhood and womanhood, the guy who wrote the article, the chapter on Ephesians, who was it? Was it George Knight?
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A
I don't recall.
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B
That sounds right.
- [04:23]
C
I forget who it was. I think it was George Knight. He actually argues for the mutual submission interpretation. However, he puts a complementarian spin on it. So there have been complementarians that have tried to put spins on this. I think it's a wrong interpretation. It's just. Yeah, it really misconstrues what the text is talking about here. And the main reason is because if you look at Ephesians 5, it says, be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. And then right after that it says, wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. And so the context of it brings up, what does he mean by one another? Because one another is just sort of assumed by the egalitarians to mean something like total reciprocity. Right. I submit to you, you submit to me. It's reciprocal submission. That's what they mean by mutual submission. The problem is that that word that's there, the one another that's used there is a word that appears elsewhere in Scripture, and it's not always pointing to total reciprocity. In fact, I could point to a number of texts like 1 Corinthians 7:5, 1 Corinthians 11:33, Luke 12, 1, Acts 19:38, Revelation 6:4. What do those texts have in common? Well, they're all using that word one another. But like Revelation 6:4, it says, Then another horse came out A fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. Now, when it says that people killed each other, it doesn't mean that everybody mutually killed each other. Like I kill you, you kill me. That's not what happened there. This was one group of people doing the killing, another group of people doing the dying. So one another doesn't always mean reciprocity. The context determines whether or not it's reciprocal or whether it's from one direction to another. And of course, in Ephesians it says, be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, and it says wives to your own husbands. And so it's not total reciprocity, it's specifying that the submission goes from wives to husbands. So what I think is going on in Ephesians 5 is he's saying, be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. One another means be subject to proper God ordained authorities. In particular, wives to your own husbands. There are other God ordained authorities. But he's wanting to specify wives and husbands. And then when you go over to 1 Corinthians 7, and there's kind of a similar thing, a similar misunderstanding, because, yes, it says a husband doesn't have authority over his own body and a wife doesn't have authority over her own body, but the context is talking about conjugal relations within marriage. And it's just saying, don't claim your own rights, surrender your rights to one another to fulfill your marital duties. That's what he's talking about there. And so a husband is not supposed to put his own needs above his wives, and a wife's not supposed to put her own needs above her husband's when it comes to the marital bed. And so that's the context there. He's not overturning everything else he says about headship, even in the book of 1 Corinthians, because he says in 1 Corinthians 11, the husband is the head of the wife. And he talks more about headship realities in 1 Corinthians 14. So I think the mutual submission interpretation there is off, but the egalitarians try to run with it in a. In a really bad direction.
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A
Denny, what's the best take on the complementarian version of it?
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C
Well, the complementarian version of it would say, and honestly, if you'd have asked me 20 years ago, I might have sounded this way.
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A
I've heard a lot of people say it.
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C
Yeah, influenced by RBMW at the time, but the guys who adopt this don't abandon headship. They'll say there's a sense in which everybody submits to one another and serves one another. However, there's real headship when it comes to husbands and wives. So I think it kind of makes a hash of Ephesians 5. I think it's a wrong way to read it, but that's how they would do it. They would just say it doesn't vitiate headship.
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B
Well, you look at the context of Ephesians 5 and right after that, I mean, this is a household code. It shows up in other New Testament letters as well. It talks about children and parents, and then it talks about servants and masters. And it would be completely, you know, ridiculous to interpret mutual submission in the context of parents and children, that children are instructed to obey their parents. And at least as far as I know, nobody is arguing for mutuality in that relationship. Oh, by the way, parents, you're supposed to obey your children. I mean, that's absurd. But that's the way that, for instance, egalitarians want to read Ephesians 5, 21 and following. And then you, you know, they don't carry in on that mutuality, at least not to my knowledge, into the parent child relationship, the servant master relationship.
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C
Yeah, and I would mention the parallel text. You know, there are a lot of parallels between Ephesians and Colossians. And in the parallel text in Colossians, there is nothing about mutual submission. It just says, whatever you do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to him to God the Father. And then he just says, wives, be subject to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. And then it goes on from there. In other words, there is no mutual submission qualification there in the parallel text in Colossians 3. And when you go to 1 Peter, when Peter is talking about another household code, Peter doesn't have that mutual submission word either, which is telling you that's not what the apostles were trying to teach Paul or Peter or otherwise.
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A
Another critical text in answering this question is of course Genesis 1 and 2, where we think God's design for men and women in authority, submission, headship, helpership is established in this article that we're drawing from today. It's called mutual submission is biblical against by Mimi Haddad. She makes an argument about this term helper, and she says the governance of Eden requires Eve's partnership. The help Eve brings is clarified by God as a strong rescue. This is how God describes woman as ezer, a Hebrew term meaning to be strong and to rescue. Used 21 times in the Old Testament, ezer most often refers to God's rescue of Israel. Psalm 12112 reads, I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help, my easer, comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. So she kind of lands a plan here. She says, given that God sends Eve as a rescuer for Adam, a sinless world includes not Eve's unilateral submission to Adam, but his need for her strength and rescue. Colin, is this a proper understanding of the biblical term helper for Eve?
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B
Spoiler alert. No, it's not. And I think the reason why. Sorry about that. Yeah, trigger warning. No, I think the reason why she goes here, Mimi Haddad, president of cbe, is because she feels the weight of the evidence so firmly against the position. It's like she has to go back and kind of reinterpret Genesis 1 and 2 in order to shoehorn the egalitarian position into meaning something that it completely does not, you know, mean. So, you know, complementarians. I mean, even in your tweet, John, that you were responding to Mimi Haddad and cbe, you mentioned that, you know, when the New Testament talks about male headship, male authority in the home of the church, it's frequently grounded in the creation order. Paul appeals to the creation order in 1 Timothy 2. Paul appeals to the creation order in 1 Corinthians to ground male headship in the not the fall, which this is. The whole. The sum total of Mimi Haddad's argument is that male headship is a post Genesis 3 reality instead of a Genesis 1 and 2 reality, which is simply the opposite of what the New Testament the Apostle Paul argues regarding male headship, and that is God creates Adam and Eve equal in dignity and worth in his image, but also differently, giving Adam headship over his wife Eve, as he unifies them in marriage. And also, the head of the human race is Adam as a man. And so she goes to Genesis 2 and she zeroes in on this term, Ezer, the Hebrew term Ezer. And again, she glosses this term, and she says that this term means to be strong and to rescue. Okay, here's my challenge. Anybody with the Internet can do this. An Internet connection. All you have to do is pull up any translation that you want to look at and double click on that term in Genesis chapter two and find the underlying Hebrew term, and it is ezer and see what is glossed there. What does that word mean? No dictionary is going to say this word means to be strong and to rescue. In fact, right before this podcast, I did it. I double clicked it. Bdb, one of the standard Hebrew dictionaries says this word means to help, to succor, to assist. In fact, I don't even see this gloss anywhere that says to rescue or to be strong nowhere in bdb. So I genuinely don't know where she's getting that term. I think this is some sort of extra step scholarship that she's doing in order to even say that. And it's just she's avoiding the simple term help because she understands the implications. That would mean that God created Eve as a helper. Suitable. Right. This is someone who is a companion that is coming under his authority in order to assist him in the mission that God gave Adam in order to at the beginning of creation. So here's the interesting part about this. She says that ezer means to rescue and Eve was given to Adam as his rescuer. And this is before Genesis 3. My question is, what is he being rescued from? I mean, he doesn't need rescuing. He lives in a perfect world, in a beautiful garden. There's no rescuing needing here. There's assistance needed because he himself cannot procreate and it's not good for him to be alone. So not just their marriage, but their offspring is going to address his alone ship, like we were created for community. But there's nothing that he needs rescuing from in a Genesis 1 and 2 world. So that gloss is completely, I don't know, baffling to me. But again, look up a Hebrew grammar, Hebrew dictionary, look at the gloss. The very first word you're going to see is help. Helper. You don't see that mentioned anywhere in Mimi Hadad's article. I think that's just genuinely dishonest.
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C
Yeah, I think she's probably taken the common egalitarian approach here, which she's noting that in a number of different texts the word azer is used of God. So like in Exodus 18:4, the God of my father was my Azer, my help. Deuteronomy 33:26. There's none like the God of Jeshurun who rides the heavens to your help and through the skies in his majesty. And in those it's translated as help. But clearly God is helping in the sense of rescuing. I think what she's doing is reading that back into Genesis. And as Colin was saying, I think he's totally right. Who needs to be rescued before the Fall. In other words, help is a generic term that can have a number of different references. Sometimes it can refer to rescue, sometimes it can refer to helping somebody who's your superior, like just giving them assistance. But the context is king here, and there's no rescuing that's needed to go to take place in Genesis chapter two. And so if you look at the way the term is used elsewhere, it is often used in other contexts to refer to people who are helping us appear, somebody who they're submitting to, or somebody who's in authority over them. So for example, in 1 Kings 20:16 it says that the king of Aram is an overlord over a group of kings who submit to him and who help him in battle. And you've got that term there. Azer, King David's mighty men submitted to David and it says they helped him in war. In 1 Chronicles 12:1, 22:23, David called the leaders of Israel to help his son and heir Solomon, a king that they would be submitting to at first Chronicles 22:17. So all these people were going to be helping Solomon, but they're going to be doing it as his subordinates. And so the term helper is used in a number of different texts to refer to somebody who was, they were assisting, but they were submitting to them at the same time. And so the context is the king there. And in the context of Genesis, that's what makes the most sense.
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A
Guys, Galatians 3:28 referenced in the article, is often used as a way of saying, hey, there are no God given roles for the genders. So that text, just so everyone listening knows what we're talking about, states this. Paul, Galatians 3:28. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. So Mimi's application of that to this question about submission is this. She says in a profound way. Galatians 3:28 is one of the most radical social statements made in the first century, given that authority was determined by gender, race and class. Yet Paul boldly asserts that our identity in mutual service are not shaped by human birth, but by our spiritual rebirth in Christ. Guys, is Paul talking here about our social service, our mutual service to one another? Something else? Is this a proper application of this text here, that, that she's relying on?
- [19:04]
C
Well, you know, obviously we don't think it is. If you look at Galatians 3:28 he's talking about, context is you are all sons of God through faith In Christ Jesus. You're all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ Jesus have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There's neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. So he's not saying that there's no male and female distinction anymore, period. He's saying that there's no male or female with respect to the inheritance that we have in Christ and with respect to our the inheritance that we have is Abraham's offspring. In other words, he's still going to give gender based commands elsewhere in his writings. He's still going to say, wives, submit to your husbands. He's still going to tell servants to continue to serve their masters. He's still going to do that. So he's not denying that those social distinctions are still there. Some of them rooted in creation order, husband and wife, some of them not like slavery. That's not rooted in creation order. But he's not denying that those things exist. He's just saying that they don't determine your inheritance in Christ. And no matter what you are a man or a woman, a slave or a free Jew or Greek, you get the same inheritance and you're equally connected to Abraham by faith. If you believe in Christ, you're connected to Abraham by faith and you're grafted into the rich root of Israel. Even if you're a Gentile, you receive the same benefits of redemption that the Jews do. And so his point there is that you don't get a leg up based on some characteristic that you have, whether it's your gender or your ethnicity. There's not a leg up that anybody has. You all get the same inheritance in Christ. But he's not obliterating all gender roles in saying that. Because the same Paul who writes this writes Ephesians 5, he writes 1 Corinthians 11:3. And so that's also this is the Magna Carta of egalitarianism in Galatians 3:28. But it's often to the expense of all the other texts that Paul teaches on how men and women relate to one another.
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B
Yeah, and using this as a totalizing text that I think in this article Mimi Haddad calls it a meta analysis or something. And that is like reading every scripture through Galatians 3:28 or something. What it does is it flattens distinctions to the point where you can, if that's genuinely what you're going to say is this text means that you can no longer acknowledge maleness and femaleness for the purpose of your social well being or social status or how you're relating to one another in the church or the home or in society. Like if you can't acknowledge maleness or femaleness, then what that does is that's the pathway, the quick pathway to full on acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism, which is the slippery slope that hermeneutic that way of reading the text, which is to downplay ignore differences between male and female that are continuously upheld in the New Testament and the Old Testament from creation order. If you downplay those, then what you end up with is you can't tell somebody you can't marry a man or a woman because that would be going against God's design. If you're a man, you're supposed to marry a woman. If you're a woman, you're supposed to marry a man. If there's no longer male or female in the way that egalitarians read this text, then that command can't hold sway anymore. You can't tell a male to identify as a man according to your God given identity because there's no male or female. So this way that they read this text is genuinely the pathway to just open affirmation of the LGBT spectrum and it has to be rejected by faithful Christians.
- [23:16]
A
Well brothers, thank you so much for your wisdom today and thank you to everyone watching, listening, make sure to subscribe, share and hey. You can access any of our resources from CBMW at our website cbmw.org.