Among Christians who take Scripture seriously, disagreement about marriage rarely turns on whether husbands should direct or dominate their wives. Most contemporary defenders of male “headship” explicitly reject authoritarian or coercive models of marriage, instead emphasising love, service, sacrifice, and responsibility. Under this framework, the husband’s role is not to rule but to lead through loving care and service—following Christ, who leads by giving himself.
This leadership can manifest differently for different couples, but a very common feature is a husband sacrificing his time and comfort for the good of the family, taking on the burden of thankless but necessary household tasks. For other couples, it means the husband leading family prayer, while others might informally delegate the task of representing or speaking on behalf of the family to the husband also. For many couples, the husband’s leadership does not stretch to any type of decision-making or direction of the wife and/or children. Other couples again believe that making final decisions is in the remit of the husband’s leadership, but this occurs only very rarely if at all, and only when husband and wife have discussed the topic at length and genuinely cannot come to an agreement. In such cases, the husband’s decisions must always draw heavily on the important and valuable wisdom and experience of his wife. He should always make decisions with the good of the family in mind, and in many cases may ultimately settle on the position his wife advocates. The wife, for her part, should always submit to her husband’s leadership from a totally free and voluntary posture, from a position of trust that God and her husband have the family’s good in mind, and should always feel that her views have been heard and seriously considered by her husband. A wife should never feel pressured or coerced into accepting an outcome she does not agree with, but rather should trust in the unique complementary roles for husbands and wives, and that the leadership of the husband is in service of peace and harmony within the household, ensuring that all are loved and cared for. In this way, a wife has nothing to fear from her husband’s leadership: it is first and foremost a role of service to her, not of authoritarian rule. When and if she must follow his lead, or defer to him, she can use this as an opportunity for growth, or even embrace it as a release of pressure and responsibility, allowing her to focus on the needs of each individual within the household, while her husband focuses more on the good of the family as a whole.
This essay does not challenge the sincerity or moral seriousness of these positions, nor does it attempt to adjudicate what loving leadership would look like, in marriage or any other context, when clearly prescribed by Scripture. The question addressed here is narrower, but more fundamental: does the New Testament actually teach that husbands possess a leadership role—of any kind—within Christian marriage? The common underlying assumption is that it does, with any remaining debate limited to how that leadership should be exercised.
I contend that the assumption of male leadership itself deserves re-examination. When the relevant texts are read in their literary, grammatical, cultural, and theological contexts, a different picture emerges—one in which Scripture does not merely soften or reframe hierarchical authority from domination to love and service, but rather quietly yet deliberately fails to ground marriage in hierarchy at all.
I argue that what the New Testament consistently emphasizes is not male leadership transformed by love to a role of care and service, but the removal of the authority structures that defined marriage in the ancient world, and their replacement by a model of unity, mutuality, and shared participation in Christ. This claim may be strong, but it is not novel, nor is it made lightly. It arises from attending closely to what the texts actually say—and, just as importantly, to what they conspicuously and intentionally do not say.
In particular, I contend that the New Testament texts that discuss marriage, when juxtaposed against other well-known first-century texts that they reference, have an explicit, and stark, rejection of male authority. I argue that the Greek grammar of the “instructions” to wives to “submit” to their husbands does not fit with an interpretation of obedience. Finally, I explore the use of the word “head” when describing the man as “head of the wife,” which is far more likely to connote unity, mutuality and a levelling of status than leadership or authority.
First-Century Greco-Roman Household Codes
Any interpretation of New Testament teachings on marriage must begin with the social world they presuppose. First-century Greco-Roman society was structured around the paterfamilias, the male head of the household who exercised legal, economic, and often physical authority over wives, children, slaves, and dependents. This authority was not informal or symbolic, but was deeply embedded in law, custom, and moral philosophy and had genuine consequences for subordinates. Philosophers from Jewish and Gentile cultures alike wrote explicitly about this hierarchy with a common and recognizable structure: husbands ruled wives, parents ruled children and masters ruled slaves. These three relationships were discussed in turn. Aristotle states:
Household management falls into departments corresponding to the parts of which the household in its turn is composed; and the household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen.
Hence there are by nature various classes of rulers and ruled. For the free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in a different way (Politics, Part III).
Philo uses the same format to discuss authority and ruling in households. Regarding marriage, he states:
Wives must be in servitude to their husbands, a servitude not imposed by violent ill-treatment but promoting obedience in all things (Hypothetica §7.3).
Josephus states:
The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for the authority has been given by God to the man (Against Apion, Book II §25).
Thus, when New Testament writers such as Paul and Peter adopted this recognizable form by addressing these three relationships in turn, they were not writing on a blank slate but were engaging a well-established structure whose primary function was to explain who ruled whom, and why. Early Christian audiences knew this structure intimately and would therefore have instantly recognized that the apostles were referencing and rewriting these pre-existing household codes. Their attention would be immediately drawn to how the Christian version deviates from, rather than conforms to, the prevailing socio-cultural norms. Pope St. John Paul II explicitly references this:
In the relationship between husband and wife the "subjection" is not one-sided but mutual.
In relation to the "old" this is evidently something "new": it is an innovation of the Gospel. We find various passages in which the apostolic writings express this innovation, even though they also communicate what is "old.”
The apostolic letters are addressed to people living in an environment marked by that same traditional way of thinking and acting. The "innovation" of Christ is a fact: it constitutes the unambiguous content of the evangelical message and is the result of the Redemption (Mulieris Dignitatem §24).
The exegetical focus therefore belongs on the “innovation of the Gospel”—the good news that departs from, rather than conforms to, “that same traditional way of thinking and acting.” This is where the New Testament writers begin to surprise.
Female “Submission”?
Despite operating within a genre defined by authority relations, the Christian household codes consistently avoid instructing husbands to rule, lead, command, or exercise authority over their wives. This absence is not subtle, and would have been greatly subversive, and conspicuous by its absence, to a first-century audience familiar with household structures and codes.
This omission is not because the New Testament writers lacked the requisite vocabulary. The Greek language had readily available terms for authority (exousia), ruling (archō) and leading (hēgeomai). These terms appear frequently elsewhere in the New Testament, including in discussions of church leadership and civil authority, as well as the Greco-Roman discussions of hierarchy in marriage referenced above. Their absence in Christian marital instruction is therefore not accidental: had Scripture intended to teach that husbands possess even a loving, servant-hearted form of leadership within marriage, their teachings on household management and marriage would have been the most obvious place to say so, yet none do.
Instead, the household code in Ephesians begins not with instructions to wives or husbands, but with a universal exhortation: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21). The Greek grammar is such that Eph 5:21 frames rather than merely introduces the instructions that follow, because verse 22 (“wives to your husbands”) contains no verb: it “borrows” the verb in verse 21. This grammatical detail has a simple but important implication: the submission from wife to husband is of the same nature as the submission that all Christians are called to live out, because the same verb is used.
Some modern scholars suggest that this verse be treated as a general heading, after which Paul delineates distinct patterns of submission appropriate to different roles, but this does not fit with the earliest interpretations of mutual submission. First Clement, for example, was written almost contemporaneously to Ephesians (circa 96 AD):
Let us take the body as an example. The head without the feet is nothing, likewise, the feet without the head are nothing. . . . All the members coalesce harmoniously and unite in mutual subjection, so that the whole body may be saved. So in our case let the whole body be saved in Christ Jesus, and let each of us be mutually subject to our neighbor (1 Clement 37:4-38:1, trans. Holmes).
Here, we see the head presented not as leader or authority, but as one part among many: the head without the feet is nothing just as the feet without the head are nothing. There is no sense here of subjection being unidirectional, with some parts of the body submitting to other parts only.
Similarly, in Ephesians 5:21, Paul cannot be describing a unidirectional leadership-obedience relationship, because such a relationship cannot be mutual. The submission of wives is therefore not a separate command to wives but is a specific instance of the mutual submission required of all believers, which either (and, in my view, most likely) does not include obedience at all, or (less likely, when considered alongside other texts that use the word hypotassō) refers to a general posture of obedience that all Christians are to have towards one another. This represents a radical departure from the prevailing Gentile understanding of wifely obedience towards husbands.
Moreover, the verb used is not the verb for obedience (hypakouō) that dominates Greco-Roman household codes, but rather hypotassō, which denotes voluntary self-giving rather than compliance. Furthermore, it is rendered in verse 24 in the middle voice. Most English translations render this verb in the imperative, but this is not accurate. Indeed, through the Ephesians 5 household code, not a single verse is issued in the imperative to women. Instead, the references to submitting to (verse 24) or respecting (verse 33) husbands are phrased descriptively.
Patristic interpretation supports this reading. The earliest treatment of this passage is from Origen. Amoris Laetitia §154). Paul encourages his sisters to live out their subordinated position “as to the Lord,” thus granting them what little agency is available to them in their socially inferior position.
The Metaphorical Use of “Head”
The remaining pillar of the leadership interpretation is the metaphor of the husband as “head” (kephalē) of the wife. It is often assumed—almost reflexively—that “head” means “leader” or “authority.” This assumption however does not sit comfortably with the linguistic evidence. Unlike Hebrew, Latin, and contemporary English, the Koine Greek word for head, kephalē, does not ordinarily have the metaphorical interpretation of ruler or leader. Indeed, when the Septuagint translators encountered the Hebrew word rosh (head) being used in a metaphorical context to convey authority, they overwhelmingly translated it using Greek terms that explicitly conveyed rule (archōn, hēgoumenos) with no reference to the word kephalē. Thus the Septuagint translators chose words that conveyed the literal meaning of ruler or leader rather than using the word “head” as a metaphor about 95% of the time. Paul himself uses such terms elsewhere when authority is his concern, rendering it unlikely that he would choose a Greek word that so rarely had the connotation of “leader” to demonstrate leadership of husbands.
Instead, the metaphor of head and body, as Paul employs it, consistently emphasizes unity, nourishment, and shared life. In Ephesians 4, Christ as head is the one “from whom the whole body . . . builds itself up in love.” Authority is not in view; vitality is.
Even in Ephesians 5, Christ is described not as ruler but as “savior of the body.” The analogy is grounded in what the head does for the body, not what the body owes to the head. As noted above, husbands are not once told anywhere in the New Testament to lead or direct their wives: the only instruction to husbands, phrased in the imperative voice, is to love, not lead. This matters because many defenders of male headship rightly stress that Christ’s authority is exercised through self-giving love. But Paul’s analogy does not move from Christ’s authority to the husband’s authority. It moves from Christ’s self-giving that creates unity to the husband’s self-giving that sustains unity. The text does not employ an intervening category of leadership.
Other New Testament instances of the word kephalē, when used in a metaphorical sense, support this reading. In the cases of Matt 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17, Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter 2:7, which describe Jesus as a “keystone,” a leadership interpretation does not fit at all—stones do not lead or exercise authority over other stones. In Col 2:19, as in Eph 4:15, the “head” is the source of life, growth, and unity, with no sense of leadership in view. In the remaining instances of kephalē as metaphor (1 Cor 11:3, Eph 1:22, Eph 5:23, Col 1:18 and Col 2:10), leadership is a possible interpretation, but a far more likely one is that of first in status (which also fits perfectly with the “keystone” texts). Note that status does not imply authority: for example, a Greek slave charged with caring for a Roman official’s son would have had authority over the son, but the son would have been of higher status than the slave. Throughout the Pauline epistles, the Head, who is of higher status, empties himself of that status, assumes the lowest status, joins himself to the Body, and raises the Body to his higher status and glory. The greatest becomes the least so the least can become the greatest, just as the “keystone” texts show.
In other words, New Testament uses of the word kephalē reference the theological concept of theosis. Christ lowers himself from his Divine Status to that of his lowly Bride, the Church, joins his Bride to himself in a one flesh union, and elevates her to his higher status and glory. Husbands are to do likewise: instead of being instructed to exercise their positions of higher social status by leading those under them, even via loving, servant-hearted leadership, they are instead to empty themselves of their higher status and raise those of lower status, just as Christ did for his Bride.
The structure of Ephesians 5 reinforces this interpretation. The passage is arranged chiastically, with its theological climax at the line “that he might present the church to himself in splendor.” This is the language of unification and theosis. Christ gives himself so that the Church may share in his glory. Marriage, in this account, is not organized around authority and submission but around a shared movement toward unity and equal status in Christ.
This reading aligns seamlessly with Paul’s broader theology (see for example Eph 2:14, Gal 3:28, Phil 2:6-11, Phil 3:20-21). This theological concept of theosis is not merely an abstract spiritual claim disconnected from daily life, but inspires and motivates a concrete reordering of power and hierarchical relationships. Christian marriage becomes one of the primary sites of this reordering.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the content of this article has gone some way to showing that the New Testament household codes quite clearly reject male leadership, especially when read in the context and literary techniques of the time. However, a reader might still question whether the description of female submission to men (e.g. Eph 5:24 and 33) still applies today.
This is, of course, a possible interpretation, but another possible interpretation is that Paul is merely advising submission to the power structures of Gentile culture rather than urging Christians to overthrow those structures. I believe this interpretation to be far more likely than that of a prescription of continual female submission, for three reasons. The first is the lack of any reference to male leadership: telling wives to submit to husbands who have no leadership role is puzzling. Second, Paul’s pastoral strategy regarding first-century power structures closely follows that laid down by Jesus: Jesus advised submission to Jewish religious and Gentile civil authorities, rather than urging Christians to overthrow existing social structures. Given the precarious position of the fledgling Christian churches, teaching Christians to live within, without being defined by, existing power structures was a prudent move.
Finally, the Church currently interprets these passages via mutual submission, explicitly repudiating unidirectional submission from wives to husbands. Pope John Paul II draws a clear analogy here with Paul’s treatment of slavery. Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters, yet the Church eventually recognized slavery as incompatible with the Gospel. John Paul notes that similarly, the Gospel’s call to mutual subjection unfolds historically, challenging each generation anew.
The awareness that in marriage there is mutual “subjection of the spouses out of reverence for Christ," and not just that of the wife to the husband, must gradually establish itself in hearts, consciences, behavior and customs. This is a call which from that time onwards, does not cease to challenge succeeding generations; it is a call which people have to accept ever anew. Saint Paul not only wrote: “In Christ Jesus . . . there is no more man or woman," but also wrote: “There is no more slave or freeman.” Yet how many generations were needed for such a principle to be realized in the history of humanity through the abolition of slavery! And what is one to say of the many forms of slavery to which individuals and peoples are subjected, which have not yet disappeared from history? (MD §24).
The fact that Jesus and Paul accommodated certain social realities does not mean either codified them as a time-transcendent norm. John Paul argues that such accommodations give way in the fullness of time to the abolition of slavery and the realization of marriage characterized by mutual submission, an icon of theosis for the whole Christian community. Christian marriage therefore offers something more demanding and more radical than servant-leadership: a vision of marriage stripped of hierarchical authority, grounded in mutual self-giving, and oriented toward unity in Christ. Love is not the mode of leadership; love replaces leadership as the defining category.
For readers committed to Scripture, this conclusion is not a threat but an invitation—to let the text speak on its own terms, even when it unsettles long-held assumptions. The question is not whether loving leadership can be made palatable, or even whether relationships of leadership and obedience are compatible with Christian living. Nothing in this reading precludes couples from freely choosing patterns of responsibility that resemble or are based on leadership. My claim is simply that such patterns are prudential judgments rather than scriptural requirements. Individual couples should structure their marriages and families in a way that best serves their needs, paying due heed to socio-cultural norms and expectations. The Church allows couples freedom in how they delegate tasks, care, service and decision-making, and this freedom can be embraced in good conscience by the faithful.
