Women and the Fundamentalist View of Marriage

Great post, Ian, I agree. I've never been the submissive type and haven't been in a marriage for years, so I don't know how I'd do now, but my picture of the ideal working out of this order of things is that the husband's headship is led by his love for his wife, which doesn't sound like anything oppressive at all. As you say, in reality we're all so flawed anything is going to be a struggle, but before Paul told wives to submit to their husbands, he told husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

Actually I should have mentioned that I didn't think these were good examples of where the husband should rule. But in any case the husband's headship isn't to be a laying down of the law but a decision made when it is hard to make a decision, not when his wife is adamantly opposed to him.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-12-2006 11:46 AM

This idea that the Bible is a throwback is completely wrong. In any area of life whatever, Christ's teaching was a liberalizing influence. In the area of marriage it was a CORRECTIVE to the frequent tyrannical abuse of wives by husbands that prevailed in the pagan world, and in fact still does in many parts of the world. "Headship" is not tyranny. I haven't followed this entire thread but there shouldn't be any implication of the husband's overruling a wife's strong feelings about something. That is not what it means. He's to be a leader, not an oppressor in any way at all. Although in one place wives are told to be submissive to their husbands, in other places the idea is that they are to be submissive one to another. Much of what people seem to be saying on this thread about mutuality in marriage actually comes from the once-Christian culture, and is out of place as an objection to the Bible. This topic somehow got wrongly polarized. Too much heat, little light.

Yes. And some Christians have even misread those terms into the Bible.Certainly your opponents do.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-12-2006 01:15 PM

It's just the generic term used for the entire nonChristian worldThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-13-2006 08:08 PM