When those charged with serving and protecting abandon that call and look away from evil, or actively participate in it, we are called not to submit, but to stand up, especially for those who are unable to stand up for themselves. In those moments, it is not submissive silence, but strong words rooted in a love for justice and mercy, that true womanhood is most eloquently expressed.

 
In the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting and the growth of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, many Christian leaders doubled down on sermons and blog posts referencing Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2. Resisting arrest or even questioning the way a state polices its citizens was tantamount to resisting the authority of God. But just last month, many in that same community responded with horror at a report in the New York Times that the U.S. military in Afghanistan was systematically turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of boys by Afghan militia leaders. Soldiers were instructed to view the abuse they witnessed as within the bounds of local Afghan law, and those who tried to speak up or intervene were disciplined or discharged.

Far from restraining evil, particularly evil committed against children, the U.S. Military was actively complicit in it, punishing as wrongdoers those who attempted to do good to prevent it. Suddenly, the danger of making a human institutional authority absolute was all too clear.

There has been a similar round of conversation lately about submission as it relates to gender. Instead of submission being attached to the specific context of marriage, submission is being attached to womanhood as a defining characteristic, as leadership is to men. In that view, a woman’s submission to her husband is absolute, so as to reflect the church’s submission to Christ. And in life, that view teaches that a woman is to avoid vocations, actions or even words that will in any way guide or correct a man, or in some way dilute his inherent ability and masculine need to lead her.

God’s work through women who lead, and even lead in rebellion, such as the midwives of Egypt, or Deborah or, my personal favorite, Jael, is dismissed as a collection of anomalies from the Old Covenant era. But it’s a New Testament story of God’s punishment of a woman’s submission which exposes clearly the wrong teaching that submission is some kind of definitive aspect of general godly womanhood.

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