In a healthy Christian marriage, the husband and wife should lovingly and sacrificially put each other first before themselves, as fellow members of the body of Christ. Faithful headship involves creating an environment of openness and communication in which the husband honors his wife and values her opinions, all the while recognizing her equality and the gifts God has given her.

We live in a time in which the meaning of words is shifting. A particular word that meant one thing fifty years ago may now additionally mean something entirely different (e.g. gay, cloud, tablet, viral, to name a few).

A word’s meaning can also be broadened or narrowed. We find this to be the case with the word marriage, which was previously and almost universally defined as a formalized union between a man and a woman. It is now defined by Merriam-Webster as “the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law,” thereby removing the qualifying distinction from the definition that a marriage must involve one man and one woman. We see such shifting meanings today not only in the broader society but also in the church.

The terms “complementarianism” and “egalitarianism” have previously been useful for representing alternate views on male and female roles.

As second-wave feminism pushed its way into the church during the last century, some Christians pushed back in the 1980s with the view known as complementarianism. The complementarian position holds that men and women have equal worth in God’s sight, but different roles according to the Bible. This view is held in opposition to the term egalitarianism, which represents the view that men and women are equal with no differentiation whatsoever in roles or authority; thus, women should be able to do anything that men can do, including holding church offices and having equal weight in all decisions in all spheres of life. Egalitarians often appeal to a verse in the book of Galatians that states:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28; all Scripture verses from the ESV translation unless otherwise noted.)

The question used to be, “Who is right—complementarians or egalitarians?” One problem in answering this question today is that the definition of complementarianism has become somewhat fluid depending on who is discussing the topic. For just a few articles on the active pursuit during the last five to ten years to define—and redefine—the concept of complementarianism, please see here, here, and here.

In the not-so-distant past, it wasn’t even questioned that a complementarian marriage consisted of the man being the authoritative head of the household in his role as a husband and/or father, having the God-given responsibilities of leading, caring for, nurturing, and cherishing his wife and children. Yet, many people are focusing more and more on the aspect of a man’s servanthood in the leadership of his family in such a way that is increasingly diminishing his authoritative role.

Such views hold that the verse about “submitting to one another” in Ephesians 5:21 (“be subject to one another” in the NASB version) and the other “one another” verses supersede the Bible passages that teach the authoritative role of men in marriage. According to this view, a wife submits to her husband in love as he submits to her in love, bringing about “mutual submission” in love to each other. Thus, the headship of a husband is properly expressed in his loving service to his wife, with no need for any authoritative responsibility on his part in the marriage.

Headship played out differently before and after man’s fall in the garden of Eden.

As Denny Burk points out in an article for The Gospel Coalition, one of the key arguments against authoritative male headship is based on an interpretation of Genesis 3:16 that denies the reality of hierarchy before the fall.[1] It is true that the man’s desire to rule malevolently over the woman is a consequence of the fall and not the original design for male-female relationships before sin came into the world. Yet, we must not mistake the distortion of the ordered relationship in Genesis 3 as the origin for order in the relationship when an ordered relationship between Adam and Eve already exists in Genesis 2 perfectly.

We live in a time in which the meaning of words is shifting. A particular word that meant one thing fifty years ago may now additionally mean something entirely different (e.g. gay, cloud, tablet, viral, to name a few).

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