Christ Fem Confessions: Learning to Submit
I was writing a paper for class last year about how Christian literature of the self-help genre limits womanhood by putting an overbearing emphasis on the importance of femininity. I called it “The Christian Feminine Mystique,” and planned to compare my findings to the expository work of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963).
In an end of semester frenzy, I went to my local Christian bookstore and bought every book I could find directed at young women - single or dating. The young, male, employee who was helping me stood mute with wide eyes as I stacked book after book, about how to be a godly woman, and how to get a man, and how to live happily ever after, into his once willing arms. I capped off my menacing pile with a book entitled Celibate Sex, smiled, and said “That’s everything, I think.”
As a young Christian woman, I had once read these books hungrily, eager to find a formula to be the perfect Godly woman. Now I read them with increasing anger, and a pencil to mark down my incredulity.
The night I read the chapter “Submission and Beauty” of the aforementioned book Celibate Sex, I became so frustrated that I wanted to scream from the tiny bedroom of my basement suite. It was such a juicy title for a book, and such a disappointing read. It was saying the same things as all the other books I’d read, and I had a moment of great internal strife. I wanted to submit like they were telling me to, I really did, if that was what God wanted me to do. If that was what God had truly ordained. But all the talk of man being created first, thus superior, and man being head of woman, thus superior, and man being leader, and man being strong, and man as God’s image, etc, etc, didn’t feel true to me when it had to be coupled with my quiet meekness. Submission didn’t feel true to me. Submission didn’t feel freeing to me. Submission, as I knew it, never smelled like God to me.
That night I prayed, “God, help me to know if this feeling is of you or of me. I don’t want to be pumping propaganda into the world. I don’t want to be justifying my human nature. God, I need to know if what I feel is truth. Is this of you, or is it of me?”
The next morning I went to church. There was a special speaker there; a self-proclaimed prophet. I was skeptical, but when he called people to the front, I put my big girl pants on and went to the front. There were rows of us waiting to get a word from God. We were a small church, but essentially the entire congregation came forward when he called. He moved down the line, not getting names, not getting details, but simply praying or saying a word from God. He got to me, put his hand on my forehead, and after a short prayer, very undramatically and simply, said “It’s of God,” and moved on.
It was simple. It was stately, and I went home encouraged, knowing that God had more in store for me, knowing that there was a freedom I was getting from my Christian faith that I wasn’t getting from these Christian books.
In retrospect, I’m not surprised that it was the chapter on submission that shook me the most. Submission has long been an uncomfortable word for women. We associate that squirmy feeling we get when we hear that word with guilt. We’ve been taught that this is our “Eve Nature” coming into conflict with God’s will. We’ve never been allowed to question what we’ve been taught in regards to submission. Any discussions that we do have on the topic are too often shaming, dismissive, and conclusive.
The paper that I mentioned writing earlier, led me to seek out scholarship on Feminist Theology. One of the first books I picked up in this field was The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology, edited by Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Sheila Briggs. The chapter, “Beyond the God/Man Duo: Globalization, Feminist Theology, and Religious Subjectivity,” by Ellen T. Armour, talks about a study done by Fulkerson on Pentecostal women who become preachers. She explains that
“[a]ll [the Pentecostal women] describe an initial resistance to the divine call [to become preachers] specifically because of its apparent challenge to the divinely ordered gender hierarchy. However, God’s desires eventually overcome each woman’s resistance. Taking up preaching is an act of submission, not self-assertion.” (374)
Reading this passage was a lightbulb moment for me. This sounded more like the God that I knew and loved. We women were not being called to bury our passion, drive, and abilities. God is a God who will coax and prod these gifts out of us, and push us to be more.
Shortly thereafter I found this little unknown definition of submission from the original greek. The word “submit” comes from the greek word hupotasso; this is not the same word as “to obey,” which is hupakoe. While hupakoe means to “listen to or harken to”, hupotasso means “to get under and lift up.”
In this light, submission is a mutually beneficial act. Ephesians 5:21 (NIV) reads, “Submit to one another in reverence to Christ.” “[Get under and lift up] one another in reverence to Christ” - there’s a different connotation there. Submitting is not an act of servitude, it is not an act of knuckling under. Submitting is an encouraging act, it’s a supportive and enabling act.
This fresh definition of submission comes against the idea that women must be a weaker, lesser version of themselves. If women are to submit to their husbands, if they are to get under and lift up their husbands, then we must allow them to develop the strength of character, the strength of heart, mind, and soul to do this great work. The fear of empowering women is man-made, not God-ordained. God needs women to be strong, steadfast, and empowered in order to serve the Kingdom as God intended.
The short prayer that the prophet said over me that day was for the women of the church. Let our prayer be for the women too. Let’s pray for women to be strong in Christ. As the quote goes, “Here's to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.” Amen.
- NAT
