Submit to One Another
A Grace Hill Library Paper
Submit to One Another
Marriage, authority, and who has the tie-breaker vote.
“Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!’”~ Macbeth
My wife and I recently went through the whirlwind of buying a home for the first time. One moment that struck me during this process happened near the end. We thought we had found the perfect home. We visited it a few times, started imagining our family living there, grew excited about the neighborhood. So we asked our realtors to draft an offer letter. That night, Melanie couldn’t sleep. Something within her said we were going too fast. We had already signed the offer, which might have locked us in, but she asked me if we could reach out to our realtors and tell them to pause anyway.
I had a few choices at that point. In my mind, we had already worked through all the important decisions — good neighborhood, enough space, within budget — and I could have simply told her to go to bed. But Melanie has proven many times that she often has a deeper spiritual sense about the world than I do. Sure, this could turn out to be a case of the jitters or buyer’s remorse, but what if it was something deeper?
Many years earlier, I was applying for an associate pastor’s job at a large church in Southern California. The role fit my experience and talent perfectly, the pay was great, and it had the enormous benefit of keeping us close to our extended family. But Melanie couldn’t sleep then either. Something deep in her soul told her this was not the right move. I didn’t get that job, and within a year, we both realized we had dodged a bullet. The church went through a massive upheaval that revealed a deep stream of unhealthy dynamics. Watching it unfold from the outside was tragic. If I had been on staff through that season, it would have engulfed my family with it. And it all started because Melanie had a sense I’ve come to look for and trust.
Back to that night, the papers already signed. Without hesitating, I calmly said, ‘Let’s call them right now and tell them to wait.’ Thankfully, we were in that liminal space between us signing and actually delivering the document to the sellers. We caught our realtors in time, and they agreed to hold off for as long as we needed.
When I think about what an egalitarian marriage looks like, this is one of the stories that comes quickly to mind. I have learned, haltingly, that when we honor our differences, we are all better for it.
That story might seem far removed from what we usually think of when we talk about submission and marriage. But I think it’s closer than it looks. The Scriptures we will now turn to — Ephesians, 1 Peter, Corinthians — are most focused on marriage. Even some who hold to an egalitarian model within church leadership still wonder about the wife submitting to her husband at home. This article is my answer to that question. And it starts, as so much in this series has started, with a closer look at what these texts are actually doing.
One Man: Three Commands
In the ancient world, household management was a recognized subject of moral philosophy. Aristotle organized it into three relationships: the husband over the wife, the father over the children, the master over the slaves. This authority hierarchy was considered the natural foundation of a well-ordered society — grounded in his belief that men were the most rational beings, women occupying a lesser tier, children still maturing in their reason, and slaves regarded as possessing no meaningful rational agency at all. It reads as repugnant to us now, but it was the philosophical consensus that shaped the world Paul was writing into.
The passages in Ephesians 5:22–6:9 and Colossians 3:18–4:1 are known as the ‘household codes’ and follow this structure recognizably. Wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters — all three pairs, in sequence. Many to this day have simply assumed that Paul was taking the Greco-Roman patriarchy and baptizing it for his New Testament communities. Eduard Schweizer, a Swiss New Testament scholar, argued that by adopting the household code genre at all, Paul was accommodating the Roman world — importing a structure that left the Greco-Roman hierarchy basically intact. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza pressed further, arguing that the household codes were the very mechanism by which the more egalitarian impulses of the early Jesus movement got domesticated and brought under patriarchal control. If you want to understand how women came to be increasingly sidelined in church leadership across the first two centuries, she argued, pay attention to these codes. If Paul was simply fitting in, perhaps it is time to move on with our culture.
But there are several clues that leave this interpretation wanting. When you actually overlay Paul’s household code onto a first-century Greco-Roman household, something interesting appears. There isn’t a husband, and also a father, and also a master. There is one man. The husband is the father is the master. By sheer volume, he gets more ink than any of the other parties combined, and what Paul has to say to this individual reveals just how revolutionary and confrontational his household codes would have been to their world.
Paul addresses the ‘man of the house’ three separate times, each time with an instruction about how to care for and honor those in his charge. That alone begins to subvert what Aristotle would have said. In Aristotle’s framework, the women, the children, and the slaves were ordered to serve the master of the home; the service flowed in one direction. The father ruled, the rest served him. In Paul’s framework, the same man is placed under obligation again and again: husbands, love your wives; fathers, do not exasperate your children; and then the one that, to my mind, deserves far more attention than it usually gets.
Ephesians 6:9: ‘And masters, treat your slaves in the same way.’
‘In the same way’ — the Greek is straightforward. Paul had just finished telling slaves to obey their earthly masters as they would obey the Lord — and then turns to the masters and tells them to treat their slaves ‘in the same way.’ How does one even go about doing that? A Roman master was, legally and socially, the absolute owner of his slaves. There was no category in Roman law for a master’s obligations toward a slave. When Paul drops that phrase, it detonates quietly — a timed charge placed inside the very structure he appears to be borrowing.
We sometimes look back and cringe that Paul didn’t simply end slavery with a word. But slavery in the first-century Roman world was so economically and socially ubiquitous that a direct frontal assault would have been ignored or suppressed before it could take hold. What Paul does instead is more subtle and ultimately far more reaching. The Roman household was the very institution that underwrote the slave economy and the entire political system, and Paul sets mutual obligation as its governing logic and foundation. A seed planted that will make slaveholding incompatible with the gospel. That’s not a concession to culture. That’s the logic of God’s kingdom: the smallest seed planted in the most established soil, that grows into something that changes everything around it.
The same logic applies when we read the wife-and-husband section. Paul is not simply endorsing the Aristotelian household. He is engaging it, and quietly rewriting the terms from within.
Submit to One Another: Ephesians 5:21
The single most important verse for reading Ephesians 5 isn’t verse 22. It’s verse 21: ‘Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.’
Here is why that matters grammatically. In the original Greek, verse 22 has no verb. ‘Wives, to your husbands’ — that’s it. No ‘submit.’ The command is borrowed directly from verse 21, where the verb hupotassō — to arrange oneself under, to yield, to place oneself in service — appears. Paul writes mutual submission in verse 21, and then everything that follows in verses 22 through 6:9 is the working-out of what mutual submission looks like across the relationships of a first-century household.
The way I have come to teach this passage is to see verse 21 as the main heading, and to read six sub-headings beneath it: wives, husbands, children, parents, slaves, masters — each one an answer to the question, ‘What does submit to one another look like in this particular relationship?’ If the passage were laid out visually, it would look something like this:
- v. 21 — Mutual Submission out of Reverence for Christ means:
- v. 5:22–24 — The wife submits to her husband as to the Lord
- v. 5:25–33 — The husband submits through self-sacrificial love
- v. 6:1–3 — Children submit by obeying their father
- v. 6:4 — Fathers submit by not provoking their children
- v. 6:5–8 — Slaves submit by obeying earthly masters
- v. 6:9 — Masters submit in the same way
A note on the children-and-father pairing: we can read ‘parents’ for verses 1–4, and that’s a fair application. But Paul uses ‘fathers’ specifically — more pointed toward the ancient authority of the home — and the passage falls on the one who held that authority.
The ESV, in contrast, separates verse 21 and 22 with a full paragraph and subheading, ‘Wives and Husbands,’ which makes verse 22 incomprehensible on its own. The grammatical clue — the borrowed verb — is the key. Paul isn’t pivoting to a different principle when he gets to wives. He is extending the same principle into a specific relationship.
This is not a minor reading choice. It changes the center of gravity of the entire passage. If you begin at verse 22 and read submission as the wife’s distinctive call, you end up with a structure in which the wife has a particular obligation the husband does not share. If you begin at verse 21 and read the wife’s submission as one expression of a mutual call, you end up with something much closer to what Paul seems to be building: a vision of the whole household reorganized around yielding love, with each member called to place themselves in service of the others.
It is also worth pausing on what hupotassō means, because the English word ‘submit’ carries centuries of baggage that the Greek does not. Hupotassō can refer to a hierarchical arrangement based on rank, but it can also describe a willing posture of yielding service. As we explored in the 1 Timothy article, the posture Paul has in mind is more like a student learning attentively than a subordinate obeying on command. Paul’s call to the whole community in verse 21 is a call away from the instinct to assert oneself and toward the practice of serving. That’s the frame in which the wife’s submission and the husband’s love are both held.
Paul’s parallel passage in Colossians 3:18–4:1 makes a similar case from a different angle. Wives are told to submit to their husbands ‘as is fitting in the Lord’; husbands are simply told to love their wives and not be harsh. There is no mention of headship at all. It helps to read this household code in light of verses 12–17 just before it, which lay out a vision of cross-shaped, God-honoring love and service for the whole community — the code is the application, not a separate set of rules. Masters get a quieter version of the same charge Paul gives in Ephesians: instead of ‘in the same way,’ both master and slave are reminded they serve the same Master in heaven. A Roman master who actually believed that — that he himself was a slave of a greater Lord — would find that conviction doing much the same subversion to the system of slavery that ‘in the same way’ does in Ephesians.
Finally, it’s worth reviewing what we found in our treatment of 1 Corinthians 11 concerning the term head. The short version: Greek writers, unlike Hebrew writers, did not typically use ‘head’ as a metaphor for authority or rule. They used archē for that. Paul reached for kephalē instead, and the word carries its own weight: source, origin, the one from whom life flows. Head as source of life, not chief executive. Paul’s words in Ephesians then, would read something more like, ‘Wives, willingly yield to your husbands in Christlike love, for they are your source, just as Christ is the source for the church.’
The passage goes on to answer what ‘source’ means concretely.
As Christ Loved the Church
If verse 21 is the frame, verses 22–33 are where Paul makes his most striking move. And it’s not the call to wives. It’s the call to husbands.
Verse 25 makes the shape of husbandly ‘headship’ concrete: ‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.’ The model Paul hands to husbands is not management or decision-making authority. It is self-giving love, patterned on the cross. The husband who reaches for Ephesians 5 to claim the tie-breaker vote has found the right chapter but misread the job description. The ‘head’ in this passage is the one who dies for the body.
I resonate deeply with Paul’s words here. As I think about my role as husband to Melanie and father to our four kids, I know deep in my bones that if there were ever a moment where one of us had to risk our life for our family, it would be me. In no scenario would I turn to Melanie and say, ‘Why don’t you take this one?’ And while I’m so grateful I have not had to make that hard choice, this passage speaks to the call for me to look for ways to sacrifice for their sake every day. Melanie absolutely sacrifices more than I could ever recount for our family; I can’t imagine life without her. But when push comes to shove, it’s my job to die for my family before her. That is precisely what Paul is saying here.
That is a harder and more beautiful call than being the one who gets the final say. It asks a husband not ‘do you have the authority here?’ but ‘are you willing to give everything you have for her?’ I’ve now mentioned this ‘tie-breaker’ vote a few times; it’s a good time to unpack what that means and where it comes from.
The Tie-Breaker Vote
Let me name the argument honestly, because it deserves a serious response. The most eloquent version of it I ever encountered was in the teaching of Timothy and Kathy Keller. They co-authored a book on marriage called The Meaning of Marriage. I admired Tim Keller deeply — his theology, his preaching, his pastoral heart — and he represents the most thoughtful wing of complementarian thought. The argument, roughly, is this: marriage requires two people to make decisions together, and sometimes they won’t agree. Someone has to be the tie-breaker. Scripture calls the husband the head, so the final call, in a genuine impasse, is his.
I have sat with this argument for years, and I have never been able to make it work. Not because I think Tim and Kathy were wrong to take the question seriously, but because when I try to imagine the actual situations where a tie-breaker would apply, the framework breaks down.
Think about it in three categories. The first is the trivial and the mundane: where should we go to dinner tonight? I am not sure any couple has ever actually solved this one, but the stakes are low enough that it doesn’t really matter. I can’t imagine Paul wanting to weigh in. The second is the genuinely life-or-death: one of the kids sprints toward oncoming traffic. In that moment there is no decision. Both of us are already moving, and whoever gets there first grabs the child. No framework — complementarian or egalitarian — is operational at that speed.
The third category is the one that actually matters: the large, important, life-shaping decision that requires real wisdom and discernment. And when I review the biggest decisions Melanie and I have faced together, I can’t find a single one that was resolved by a tie-breaker.
When I was hesitant to start a family — I went through a divorce as a child, and it left me with a real fear of what kind of parent I would become — we didn’t resolve that with a vote. We went back again and again to prayer, to each other, to the closest friends who knew us well, and then to more prayer. When we made the decision to uproot our family and move north, same thing. No tie-breaker. More conversations, more prayer, more wise counsel, more waiting.
The clearest example I have is the call to Grace Hill. Melanie and I both believed I was called to full-time ministry, and so I spent a year and a half cleaning up my resume and exploring options. I looked at several churches. I seriously investigated chaplaincy with the Navy and Air Force. Then came a job offer at a wonderful mountain community church — in many ways exactly what our family needed, and financially we couldn’t hold on much longer without something stable. I expected to feel relief when the offer came. Instead, both of us looked at each other and were struck, almost simultaneously, by the same sense: this was not it. We had genuinely thought this place could be the right one, and as soon as the actual offer arrived, we knew differently. I can’t explain it better than that. In faith, we said no — with nothing on the horizon.
A few months later, the call to Grace Hill came.
None of these stories required a tie-breaker because Jesus is the third party in our marriage. When we are both genuinely seeking Him, we find our way to the same place — sometimes quickly, sometimes after a long and uncomfortable process, but we find it. The tie-breaker framework solves the wrong problem. It assumes marriage is a two-person democracy that needs a casting vote. The harder, better reality is that marriage is a covenant in which two people are learning, slowly and haltingly, to become one in Christ. A tie-breaker is only required if Jesus doesn’t speak today.
Marriage is a partnership, not a hierarchy. When Melanie and I got married we amended the traditional wedding vows. We kept all of the great vows of commitment to one another, and added a line about our joint partnership to pursue our image-bearing calling: ‘I promise to partner with you in living out the Good News of Jesus Christ; serving each other, our world, and God.’ We’ve stumbled toward that promise only by God’s grace, but we knew we wanted our marriage to begin with that vision of mutual partnership.
I can already hear some of the objections. And I truly do honor the many different forms of healthy marriages I have witnessed over the years. There are some great relationships where the husband makes most of the big decisions and the wife is eternally grateful. Even in my own marriage, we’ve figured out which areas are my forte and which are my wife’s. We are of one accord, but can also trust each other to make decisions without bringing it to committee. So if the current breakdown of how your family makes tough decisions is the best for you and the most God-honoring, then maybe nothing needs to change. Honestly, one of the bigger issues I have with this whole conversation is how a system that works for one couple is universalized as the only way.
The concept we keep circling around is the question of authority. I went looking for any place in Paul’s letters where he actually applies that word to the relationship between a husband and a wife in marriage. There is only one.
The One Time Paul Names Authority in Marriage
There is one passage that I almost never hear brought up in this conversation. The only text in the entire New Testament where Paul applies the word ‘authority,’ exousia, directly to the relationship between a husband and a wife, is in 1 Corinthians 7. And it doesn’t say what you might expect.
To understand it, you need to know what was going on in Corinth. Paul’s letter is responding to problems at two opposite ends of the spectrum. Chapter 6 addresses a contingent in the church who had gone fully libertine — embracing the surrounding culture’s anything-goes approach to sexuality. Chapter 7 then pivots to the exact opposite problem: a group within the church who had become so ascetically extreme that they were refusing to engage with their spouses physically at all, believing that total abstinence — even within marriage — was the more holy way to live. Paul has to correct both groups and pull them back toward the center.
‘The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.’ — 1 Corinthians 7:3–4
The word is exousia — the standard New Testament word for authority. This is not an obscure or secondary term. It is the word Paul uses for governing authorities in Romans 13, for the powers and principalities of the spiritual realm, for the authority Jesus claimed in his teaching. And the only time Paul applies that word to the relationship between a husband and a wife, he applies it in both directions simultaneously. The husband has authority — and so does the wife. Equal, mutual, symmetrical. It was a radical statement in a world where the man of the household held unilateral power over everyone in it.
I think about what ‘I do’ actually meant on the day I said it. From that moment forward, I committed to always see myself as a married man. In all spheres of my life, I’m not allowed to go out and just start acting or thinking like I’m single, because I’ve entered this covenant with Melanie. Can you imagine the scandal if one day I told her, “You know, whenever I’m at work, I don’t act any different, but I just like to think of myself as single.” No, I belong to her and she belongs to me. That is the covenantal logic Paul is drawing on. Not: the husband holds authority and the wife receives direction. But: we have given ourselves to one another completely, and in that giving, something new comes into being that belongs equally to both of us.
A few verses later, in 10–11, Paul applies the same equal standard to the question of divorce: ‘the wife should not separate from her husband… and the husband should not divorce his wife.’ Same obligation, same phrasing, both directions. No asymmetry.
When we return to Ephesians 5 after reading 1 Corinthians 7, the landscape looks different. The only place Paul explicitly reaches for the language of authority in marriage turns out to be a verse that distributes it equally. That is worth sitting with before we move on to the next question.
Who Answers on Judgment Day?
A close friend of mine who holds to a complementarian theology once pressed me on this. He had already rejected the tie-breaker vote — he didn’t think that’s what headship was about at all. In fact, in almost all respects, he and his wife approached marriage much like Melanie and myself. But he held to this: on the final day, Jesus is going to call him to account for his family. The husband, in this view, is the representative head of the household before God — answerable not just for his own faithfulness but for the whole. He liked relating this to the famous placard Harry S. Truman reportedly kept in the Oval Office — ‘The buck stops here.’ For him, the husband alone was accountable for his family. I usually retorted with a grin that I genuinely didn’t know what the final judgment would look like, and we were able to leave it there as friends.
But the argument deserves a look. The usual anchor text is Genesis 3:9. After the fall, God comes to the garden and calls out — to Adam first. ‘Where are you?’ Eve sinned before Adam did; Adam was the one standing right there when the fruit was eaten. And yet God addresses the man. Some read this as God treating Adam as the household’s representative — the one who will answer for the whole.
It’s not an unreasonable instinct, but it runs into problems when you follow it through the text.
To begin with, Eve is also questioned directly. God turns to her in verse 13 and asks: ‘What is this you have done?’ She is not treated as someone outside the moral frame, shielded from accountability by her husband’s representation. She answers for herself. The sequence — Adam first, then Eve — may simply reflect the narrative logic of the passage, or the fact that Adam was in hiding, or the order of creation. Reading headship over a household out of this story requires more than the text gives.
Genesis 2–3 is also highly poetic, and the flow of the passage reads like a chiasm — a concentric narrative pattern in which the story mirrors itself around a center point. The serpent speaks to the woman, who gives to the man; God then questions the man, then the woman, then the serpent. God curses the serpent, then the woman, then the man. Seen as an intentional, poetic whole, this makes me believe that we’re meant to read the passage as one complete arc, rather than narrowly focusing on any one party. This is the story of the fall and the promised redemption of humanity, not the Bible’s attempt at the first blame game.
I’ve also heard an argument that, because in Genesis 3:20 Adam names Eve, it places man over woman in the same way that man has dominion over the animals. It is true that in Genesis 2 Adam names all the animals. But I find it very telling that the text does not tell us that Adam names Eve until after the curse. Genesis 3:20 is the first application of God’s warning from Genesis 3:16 — ‘and he shall rule over you.’ We discussed this at length in the Origin Story article from this series. If Adam naming Eve was a sign of dominion over her, this is not indicative of God’s design, but a direct result of the Fall.
Some have made an appeal to Romans 5. Sin entered through one man, Adam, and flows to all of humanity. Christ comes as the second Adam reversing the consequence and bringing life. Paul does not say Adam represents all humanity, only that he is a type of Christ. This idea of representation is a principle theologians call federal headship — where one person’s action has consequences for a collective group. Even this is only inferred, it is not precisely what Paul says, and he never applies that category to ordinary husbands representing their wives before God. Importing it from the cosmic stage of redemption to the domestic stage of a marriage is a significant leap.
And the New Testament’s own teaching on the final judgment consistently points in the opposite direction. 2 Corinthians 5:10: ‘We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body.’ Romans 14:12: ‘Each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.’ Revelation 20:12: ‘Each person was judged according to what they had done.’ Three times in three different books, the same word: each. Individual. There is no text in the New Testament that suggests a husband will answer for his wife’s life. The accountability argument, at its best, is an inference from the garden narrative read a particular way. The direct teaching of the New Testament points clearly to individual accountability before God.
It’s certainly possible to imagine standing side-by-side with my wife — God calling both of us to account for how we lived out our covenant, raised our children, and followed God’s purposes. We are co-partners, image-bearers set to exercise dominion over creation together — and I see no reason from Scripture to think that I will hold more accountability than she will.
As I shared above, I committed to live out the Good News of Jesus Christ with Melanie by my side. Not: one of us leading, and the other supporting from behind. Serving each other. That is the shape of the mutual accountability I expect to answer for. On the day I stand before the Lord, I don’t think he will ask whether I used my tie-breakers well. I think he will ask whether I poured out my life in service to my family and my community — whether I loved Melanie the way Christ loved the church, by giving myself up for her rather than presiding over her. And she will be asked the same thing.
Sarah Called Him Lord: 1 Peter 3
We should spend a moment with 1 Peter 3, because it is often read as a clear New Testament passage for marital hierarchy. The text does use the word ‘submit.’ It does hold up Sarah as a model. It is worth taking seriously.
But the context matters enormously. Flip back to 1 Peter 2:13, and you find the hinge on which the whole passage turns: ‘Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority.’ Peter then addresses citizens under unjust government (2:13–17), slaves under harsh masters (2:18–25), and wives with unbelieving husbands (3:1–6). The context is Christians navigating their world among the pagans in power. Unlike Ephesians, there’s no command toward masters in this passage, and the slaves’ treatment is described in far harsher terms — even likened to Christ’s death on the Roman cross. This is likely due to the actual community demographics Peter was dealing with. There were many poor and persecuted Christians, and few — if any — masters to necessitate a separate focus.
1 Peter is a pastoral letter written to people navigating hostile social terrain. It is not a blueprint for the architecture of a Christian marriage. It is counsel for people in genuinely difficult situations: how do you bear witness faithfully when you are in a position of social vulnerability?
The specific audience in 3:1 makes this even clearer: ‘so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives.’ Peter is addressing women married to unbelieving husbands and giving them an evangelism strategy for a context where a wife adopting a different religion from her husband would have been socially explosive and possibly dangerous. Reading this as a permanent, universal structure for Christian marriage requires ignoring the specific situation entirely.
Sarah is held up because she called Abraham ‘lord’ — kyrios. Two observations worth noting. First, Peter’s emphasis is not actually on Sarah’s title for Abraham. It is on Sarah’s faith and fearlessness — Peter does not say, “therefore call your husband, lord,” but, “do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.” Second, this is the only time in Genesis Sarah calls Abraham ‘lord,’ and the actual story is filled with irony and humor. The model Peter is holding up is her trust in God in a difficult situation, not the specific form of her address to her husband.
Then comes 1 Peter 3:7, which deserves more attention than it usually receives: ‘Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as co-heirs of the gracious gift of life.’
The phrase "weaker partner"—also translated "weaker vessel"—has at times been read as a comment on women's emotional, intellectual, or spiritual fragility, which is almost certainly not what Peter meant. In the first-century Roman world, women occupied a subordinate place within civic and public life. They could not vote or hold public office, and social expectations generally placed husbands in positions of greater public authority and physical power. Yet this did not mean women were without agency. Many owned property, managed businesses and households, acted as patrons, and exercised considerable economic and social influence, as figures like Lydia and Phoebe demonstrate. Peter's concern, then, is not that women are inferior, but that wives often occupied the more vulnerable position within the marriage. "Weaker" refers not to intellectual or moral capacity but to physical vulnerability and diminished social power—conditions that called husbands to honor and protect rather than exploit.
In fact, Peter’s words to husbands might be the biblical answer to Genesis 3:16. There, the curse of sin caused the woman to desire her husband in a distorted way, and the husband’s sin was to lord it over her and use it to his own advantage. Peter is telling husbands: you are the one with social and physical power in your world; use it to honor her, not to exploit the advantage. The husband who would exploit his wife will have a distorted spiritual life — it is his prayers, not hers, that Peter warns will be hindered. The spiritual danger in this passage falls entirely on the man who fails to honor her.
And then Peter drops an incredible term: synklēronomos. Co-heir. This is not a casual word. In the ancient world, inheritance was almost entirely the domain of men; women were regularly excluded from it, or received a fraction of what a male heir would inherit. Synklēronomos is the same word Paul uses in Romans 8:17 to describe believers as ‘co-heirs with Christ’ — joint inheritors of everything that belongs to God’s Son. When Peter applies that term to wives, he is making an extraordinary claim: she inherits equally with him. Not contingently on his representation. Not partially. Equally, together, of the same grace.
I need to call out the ESV translation once more. They translate this phrase, “since they are heirs with you of the grace of life.” Heirs with you, rather than co-heirs, might be an innocent translation choice, but the effect seems to lessen what Peter is saying. Elsewhere, in Romans 8:17 and Ephesians 3:6 the ESV translates synklēronomos as “fellow heir” which seems more appropriate.
Whatever social asymmetry the passage acknowledges in a specific first-century context, it ends with a statement of theological equality at the deepest possible level. That is the word Peter leaves with us.
Complementarity Without Hierarchy
I want to be careful about something, because this article could easily be read as arguing that men and women are essentially interchangeable — that the differences don’t matter, or that marriage should be an undifferentiated fifty-fifty arrangement. That is not what I’m arguing.
The mid-twentieth century theologian Karl Barth once said that a world where men make decisions without women becomes ‘demonic and tyrannical.’ That’s a striking word to use. But the logic behind it is sound: the image of God, in Genesis 1:27, is located in male-and-female together — a thread we traced closely in the Origin Story. I cannot be a complete image-bearer alone. We were made for each other as counterparts, not as copies — genuinely different, genuinely interdependent, neither one complete without the other.
And here is where Barth’s complementarity without hierarchy is more useful than the popular complementarianism of our moment. Barth observed — and I think he was right — that whenever we try to rigidly define the difference between men and women, we run into problems. The difference is real. The attempt to freeze it into fixed roles is where things go wrong. What works beautifully in one marriage may not work in another. What one woman is gifted for, another is not. What one man is called to lead, another man would be the wrong person to attempt.
In our own marriage, Melanie and I both lead — in our areas of strength, in the places where God has clearly wired us for it. And we both rely on the other in our areas of weakness. It is not always clean. It is not formulaic. There are areas where I naturally take the initiative, and others where Melanie does, and I would be lost without her. That is not a system we designed. It is what we discovered when we stopped trying to fit ourselves into a prescribed template and started actually paying attention to who God made us to be.
I’ve had conversations with many couples who would describe themselves as complementarian but whose marriages, in practice, look a great deal like what I just described. There are also couples for whom a more structured complementarian framework genuinely works — where the husband’s leading and the wife’s orienting around that feels natural and life-giving for both of them. I’m not here to tell those couples they’re doing it wrong. What I am saying is that their experience shouldn’t be universalized as the biblical pattern for every marriage, any more than my experience should be.
The problem I keep running into on the complementarian side is not the desire for men to step up with courage, initiative, and sacrificial love — I am entirely for that. Passivity is a real problem in men, and the church should name it directly. But the solution to male passivity is not a chain of command. It’s a deeper encounter with the cross — with the Christ who ‘gave himself up for her’ — and a willingness to lead by that example rather than by authority.
Erase the differences between men and women, and we lose something. Rank the differences, and we lose something else. The third way — honor the differences without ranking them — is harder and richer than either. That is what I have found, with a lot of grace, in my own marriage. And it is what I keep finding when I read Ephesians 5 without skipping verse 21.
Putting It Together
Paul’s household codes are not a blueprint for who runs a marriage. They are a picture of what happens when the logic of the cross enters a household — when mutual submission, shaped by Christ’s own self-giving, becomes the governing principle of every relationship. In the first century, that meant addressing the specific power arrangements of Greco-Roman household life and pressing something new into them. The same Jesus who washed feet, who said ‘the greatest among you will be your servant,’ who called the Twelve back from their arguments about rank — that Jesus stands behind Ephesians 5:21: ‘submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.’
What I keep coming back to is that the texts in this article don’t stack up in favor of hierarchy. The single place where Paul names authority in marriage distributes it equally. The ‘headship’ language describes self-giving love, not executive power. The judgment day texts say ‘each of us,’ not ‘the husband for both of them.’ Peter ends a passage about first-century social vulnerability with a word that means full co-inheritance. The trajectory of these passages — like the trajectory of the household codes on slavery — is not toward permanent hierarchy. It is away from it.
There is also a thread back to the church question we’ve been tracing through this whole series. The same reading of these marriage texts that opens toward mutuality is the reading that, in the church setting, makes women in leadership inevitable — and the historical record of women prophesying, leading, hosting, teaching, and overseeing in the early church makes more sense in its light. The two questions are not separate. They are reading from the same map.
Where This Leaves Us
I know that thoughtful people — people who love Jesus, who read Scripture carefully, whose marriages are genuinely flourishing — will come away from these same passages with a different conclusion than I do. I’ve tried throughout this article to engage the strongest versions of the complementarian arguments, not the weakest ones. The tie-breaker argument as Keller frames it; the federal headship argument as my friend pressed it; the appeal to Genesis 3 and Romans 5.
I believe the exegetical case for mutual submission is the more compelling one. But I hold that conviction with the humility of someone who knows the stakes of getting the Bible wrong. What most challenges me is that Paul’s loudest demand in Ephesians 5 is not ‘husband, lead.’ It is ‘husband, die.’ Love your wives as Christ loved the church — not as a president chairs a board meeting, but as the Savior gave everything for us. Whatever authority you believe you carry, the shape of it is the cross.
Next time, we’ll step back from the individual passages and see where this whole project has led us. What has this whole arc been building toward, and what does a church actually look like when it takes it seriously? I also want to leave us with one more scene — a story from the Gospel of John that reads like a parable for today’s church. We’ll get there in the series’ final piece.
A Grace Hill Library Paper
mhgracehill.church · Morgan Hill, California
Grace Hill Edition 2026 · May be freely shared with attribution.
Rooted in Christ · Growing in Grace · Sent with His Light
