So it occurs to me that some of you, in reading yesterday’s post about brides promising to obey their grooms, might think I don’t get the whole “rightful authority thing.”
The problem, though, is that I think I really do, based on Scripture. I absolutely believe that I have to obey those in rightful authority over me, lest I risk God’s disapproval. If a cop tells me to pull over, I’ll pull over. If my professor asks me to hand in a 10-page paper, I’ll hand in a 10-page paper (although you all know that it’d probably be 12 or 14 pages). And if the National Guard orders me to evacuate my house, I’ll start packing up.
They’re all in rightful authority over me based on their roles in my life, roles that are not theirs by ontology — their essential being — but by experience, qualifications, and the endorsement to command my obedience by their superiors, who also are not in their positions by reasons of ontology. Further, my obedience to them is situational — when I encounter their orders — and only when they’re operating in their official, authoritative roles. So the cop might “order” me to pass the half-and-half when she’s off-duty at Starbucks, and my assent is based not on her professional authority over me, but because I believe in submitting to others whenever possible and whenever positive.
Nevertheless, there is no circumstance at all, Biblically, that suggests that you or I need to obey another person simply because of their sex. Which, of course, is “his sex” from the pastors and teachers who ought to know better. Sex, along with economic or social class and race, are distinctions that are acknowledged in the Church — celebrated, even, in the Church — but are never reasons for hierarchical distinctions among Christ’s people. Galatians 3:28 here is not a prooftext but an announcement echoed throughout the New Testament and tantalizingly revealed in the Old that the victory of Christ over sin is the overturning of the curse and the ushering in of the new Kingdom.
In that Kingdom, people lovingly submit to one another. They aren’t taught by masculinist pastors that ontological differences equal permanent subordination, and my prayer is that as the Kingdom grows throughout the world, Christ’s Body would listen to the Spirit and reject such a fouling of the Gospel.