The Mystery of Submission - Ephesians 5 (part 6)

Continued from here.

A Look at the Head

Verse 23-24 reads, For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Paul is expanding his reasons on what “submission” looks like and why it is good. The common knee-jerk interpretation is that this verse teaches husbands are leaders of their wives. But a few observations are in order.

“Head” is a metaphor. And, sadly, it’s a dead metaphor today. What is a dead metaphor? It is a word that no longer conjures up an image. We assign meanings to it because we’ve heard it so often. If I said, “I’m hitting the road,” that dead metaphor would only mean, “I’m driving away.” But if the metaphor were alive, we would think up a picture of someone going out to pound the asphalt. [1]

Live metaphors create pictures for us. “The Lord is my rock,” is a live Biblical metaphor as we think of a rock and its qualities that are similar to God. So when we see that the husband is the “head” of the wife, we need to first think about the metaphorical picture before we jump to conclusions. The picture here would be of a head on a body. And if the head is removed from the body three things happen: the head dies and the body dies and the union dies. The picture shows us that the body needs the head and the head needs the body. They cannot exist if the two were not dependent on each other. This is living in the metaphor.

It is overwhelmingly agreed upon by theologians on every side of the debate that “head” in Greek does not carry the same meaning as “head” in English. If we cram our English meanings into the text, we will miss the point. In English, “head” most commonly connotes “authority” and that’s how we often use the word. When we think of “head of state,” we think of the one in charge of the country. Yet in English, we have another meaning for the metaphor “head.” My father-in-law once took a canoe expedition down from the headwaters of the Missouri river. Here we see a lesser used meaning of the metaphor “head” in English: headwaters. When we talk about the “head” of the waters, we aren’t talking about the “authority” of one part of the river over another. We talk about the “source” or “origin” or “beginning” or “first” of the river. Another use is when a situation has reversed, when something on top gets put on the bottom; we say it was “turned on its head.”

What if the Greek word for “head” also carried additional meanings we don’t use in English? Many scholars note that “authority” and “source” are actually rare interpretations of “head” in Greek literature. While there is still much research to be done, it is likely, “head” for Paul carries the meaning of “honor,” more than anything else. [2]

[1] I borrow this idea from an excellent discussion on live and dead metaphors in How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Mark L. Strauss.
[2] Look at 1 Corinthians 11 and see how intertwined honor is with the word “head.” For a survey of the last 30 years of scholarship on this, see “A Meta-Study of the Debate Over the Meaning of "Head" (Kephale) in Paul's Writings” by Alan Johnson in Pricilla Papers, Autumn 2006.