Wives, submit to your husbands

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church. The most-cited verse in evangelical complementarian preaching on marriage.

Ephesians 5:22–24 anchors the traditional argument for male headship in marriage. Read in isolation, it commands wifely submission; read with verse 21, the whole code is grammatically a specific form of "submitting to one another." Three more observations: verses 25–33 spend twice as many words telling husbands how to love their wives as verses 22–24 spend on wifely submission, with the pattern being Christ laying down his life; the verb "submit" is never addressed to husbands as something wives do to them — it is voluntary, not demanded; and the model of headship in the passage is self-giving death, not authority over. The code closes with its most asymmetric line: let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband (v. 33). Paul's own summation names two verbs — agapatō (love) for the husband, phobētai (respect, literally "fear") for the wife. Whatever the mutual submission of v. 21 means, Paul's closing restatement pairs love-command with respect-command, not love-command with love-command.