- Women, meanwhile, must "embrace responsibility for respectful, joyful, willing submission and creative assistance in all matters of home and the family," Ware said.
Referring to Ephesians 5:33, Ware called on wives to submit to and respect their husbands. Just as husbands loving their wives counteracts the effects of the fall, he said submission does the same thing for women.
"The fall introduced this illicit urge and tendency toward usurpation -- bucking his authority," Ware said. "What this [verse] calls for is respect for his authority and who he is as husband."
The reason for such a response in women is because it mirrors the relationship of Christ to the church.
"For how much is the church responsible to submit to Christ?" Ware asked. "In everything."
Women should recognize that submission is "Godlike," Ware said. "Christ came in submission to the Father. It's not only Godlike to be the authority. It's Godlike to submit to authority."
As mothers, women are responsible for displaying their respect to the children's father, Ware said, and for requiring the children to respect and submit to his authority.
"Resist the cultural movement to mock husband and father as a mere buffoon," Ware exhorted workshop participants.
This is why I believe this is pagan, non-Christian and not something we can deal with. This is the authorized teaching of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
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This is why I believe this is pagan, non-Christian and not something we can deal with. This is the authorized teaching of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
Compare the teaching of Aristotle (Politics, Book I, Part 7):
"Of household management we have seen that there are three parts- one is the rule of a master over slaves, which has been discussed already, another of a father, and the third of a husband. A husband and father, we saw, rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal, over his wife a constitutional rule. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature. But in most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all. Nevertheless, when one rules and the other is ruled we endeavor to create a difference of outward forms and names and titles of respect, which may be illustrated by the saying of Amasis about his foot-pan. The relation of the male to the female is of this kind, but there the inequality is permanent. The rule of a father over his children is royal, for he rules by virtue both of love and of the respect due to age, exercising a kind of royal power. And therefore Homer has appropriately called Zeus 'father of Gods and men,' because he is the king of them all. For a king is the natural superior of his subjects, but he should be of the same kin or kind with them, and such is the relation of elder and younger, of father and son."
And once upon a time in the United States, some Christians so turned to such a Ware-like Biblical Council argument from Aristotle and from "God-like" submission to keep African Americans enslaved to their European American masters:
"To the modern viewer, slavery seemed to run contrary to the evangelical Protestant faith that most white Southerners shared before the Civil War. In the eighteenth century, however, the most convincing pro-slavery argument for the Southern populous as a whole was biblically based. Many Southern scholars, such as John C. Calhoun, pointed to the Bible as the ultimate justification for slavery.
No where in the scriptures is slavery condemned, but it does give slaves some entitlements. The Southern theologian Robert Lewis Dabney said that masters attempted in every aspect of their relationships with slaves to exercise the golden rule and Colossians 4:1. 'Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a master in heaven.'"
Here's a bit from The Pro-slavery Argument by William Harper, James Henry, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Roderick Dew, published 1852.
"Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of antiquity, and a man of as capacious mind as the world ever produced, was a warm advocate of slavery—maintaining that it was reasonable, necessary, and natural; and, accordingly, in his model of a republic, there were to be comparatively few freemen served by many slaves.
If we turn from profane history to Holy Writ—that sacred fountain when are derived these pure precepts, and holy laws and regulations by which the Christian world has ever been governed—we shall find that the children of Israel, under the guidance of Jehovah, massacred or enslaved their prisoners of war. So far from considering slavery a curse, they considered it a punishment much too mild, and regretted, from this cause alone, its infliction." (page 306).
Ah, I'm so glad you quoted that, JK, because that's what I've been studying of late. I kept thinking that the comp teaching (and the views of women from most church leaders) were almost word-for-word representing the Greek views, and wondering just how much we appropriated from the Greeks when we formed our Christian theology (and am finding more than I bargained for, in areas of gender and beyond).
Keep it up, Sue. You're doing a fantastic job, as usual. :)
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