Michele Bachmann and the duty of a wife to “submit” to her husband became an issue, of all places, in the so-called debate in Ames two nights before the Iowa straw poll.
As reported in The New York Times,
“When Byron York, a conservative columnist at The Washington Examiner who was on the panel of questioners, asked Mrs. Bachmann about her vow to be submissive to her husband, Marcus, the audience gasped and then booed. She smiled, paused and replied, ‘Thank you for that question, Byron.’
“’What submission means to us, if that’s what your question is,’ she added, ‘it means respect.’”
Oh, dear lady, that is decidedly not what the Bible says, not even your Bible.
Let us read together, below the fold ...
From the New Testament, Ephesians, Chapter 5: selections from verses 22-33:
22 Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, ...
24 As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.
25 Husbands, love your wives ...
and
31 "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one."
32 This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the church;
33 however, let each one of you love his wife even as himself, and let the wife see that she respect her husband.
[Before we proceed, that reading is from the Revised Standard Version. There are other versions with other translations and they do vary, but they are in much agreement on this point.]
The words in verse 22 are "subject to". Their plain meaning - in context - is that wives are to be subject to their husbands as the church is subject to Christ. That “subject to” in verse 22, Mrs. Bachmann, is not the “respect” referred to in verse 33. If the two were the same, the author of Ephesians would have used the same word.
“Subject to”, Mrs. Bachamnn, is submission, plain and simple. It means obey, capitulate, yield to authority. It decrees the husband dominates. It most decidedly is not limited to “respect” and those words do not, as a few have argued, mean mutuality of obligations between husband and wife.
My point here is not to argue for the Bible as authority. It is or it isn't, depending. And I don't argue that this idea is sensible or even applicable in our time. It isn't, not in my household.
My point is that that kind of language hounds preachers in modern times, especially fundamentalist "original intent" preachers. Who, in our enlightened day, must struggle mightily to rationalize some less submissive meaning than “subject to”, who comb authorities for some way to read this plain language out of context, to mean something it doesn't say.