Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
This episode on submission is not about men and women and church roles. ‘Submission’ is a much bigger concept—and bigger problem—than that.
Discussing ‘submission’ and why we tend to recoil from it in most of its forms takes the conversation in this episode to some massive subjects: power, authority, politics, Marxism, capitalism, equality and even singing.
The previous episode is Spiritual Formation or Transformation?
SUBMISSION
Why do we recoil from it?
Phillip Jensen: Here in Australia, our culture is anti-authority and pro-egalitarian. And I’ve been thinking about this because I came across the word ‘submission’ as I was preparing for my next talk, which seems to be a trigger word.
Tony Payne: Yes, people can feel unsafe just hearing the word. It’s certainly a word that often triggers an emotional reaction for contemporary people, and one that we’re wary of as Australians, especially when it comes from the government.
PJ: But even if we look at the Greek word for ‘to submit’, which is ‘hupotasso’, and try to understand it within its context, I don’t think that’s a fruitful exercise for us. I think you need to put your finger on power and authority and define their difference in order to understand submission.
TP: Because power and authority are actually two different things.
PJ: That’s right. How would you explain the differences?
TP: An authority is the ability to call forth action from somebody else. For example, a policeman is given a certain frame of reference and a set of authorities such that he can call upon you to act in a certain way, and rightfully so.
PJ: Yes, it’s rightful, it’s an appropriate ability.
TP: He also has power unlike many forms of authority. He’s got a gun, he can lock you up. He can rightfully take you off and physically or forcibly submit you to his authority. But that’s not quite submission. That would be different.
PJ: So power has got to do with the strength to force someone to do something. So do we want the authorities to have power, or they shouldn’t need to have power because they are the authority?
TP: Well, that’s a complex question, but it comes out of the fact that we’ve now differentiated power and authority as two concepts. Does all authority have power? Well, no. For example, age has a certain authority. It has no power to enforce its authority, but it has an authority all the same.
PJ: And it is right sometimes for us to oppose authority, isn’t it? For example Daniel in Babylon, or the Acts of the Apostles in which the apostles were opposing the authorities in Jerusalem, resisting it. Not all authority should always be submitted to. It’s right sometimes to resist authority. I think part of the reason we don’t like authority is not just the Australian culture, but it’s the fact that authority can be so terribly abused.
TP: It very often is. That’s why for many of us, when we think of ‘authority’, we tend to think ‘power’ almost at the same time, because our experience of authority is often the use of power in authority that’s exercised wrongly or tyrannically over somebody.
PJ: Yes, and at that point you want to say, well, an abuse of something is different to the thing itself. So an abuse, by definition, is referring to the wrong use of authority. You shouldn’t throw authority out with abuse; you should correct the abuse of the authority.
TP: And so when we’re talking about authority forcefully and wrongfully requiring someone to act, that’s more like subjugation than submission, since the person who’s being affected has no choice. They are not acting voluntarily in any way.
PJ: Subjugation is in the New Testament for God does subject authorities to himself, but most of the usages of the word ‘subjection’ is actually in the passive tense. It’s one thing to be subjected or subjugated or subordinated by a superior power or force. It’s another thing to submit, because while there might be force involved, it could also just refer to the willing acceptance of authority. I can submit to power, or I could submit to authority. I’ve got the same word submit, but they’re very different things at that point, aren’t they?
TP: Because with the word ‘submit’, there’s a recognition of a right relationship towards a rightful authority. There is a voluntary element in it.
PJ: Yes, and I think this concept of rightful authority gets our backs up because we don’t like authority, and I presume this is true of all humans and not just Aussies. We would say, “Why have they got authority? Who gave them this authority? How did they come by this authority? Why do I have to submit to them just because they think of themselves as the authority?”
TP: As my father used to say when he was driving and my mother would be pleading with him to slow down, “Those rules don’t apply to me. That’s a guideline for other people, but those rules don’t apply to me.”
PJ: Yes, and it’s also because of our individualism. The classic “This is my car and I am driving it the way I want to drive.”
TP: “I should be able to drive it the way I want to drive it. These stupid people in government who are trying to tell me to slow down, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
PJ: Yes. And so there are all kinds of funny reasons why we don’t like authority—if you haven’t got God appointing authority, which is what Scripture says. Without God appointing authority, how do you come by authority? Well, by winning a war or by a democracy. Yet even a democracy requires the minority to submit to the majority decision. Without that, you have a civil war.
So if you haven’t got God appointing authority, then authorities come by power, by military victory, by economic victory, by electoral victory. But we Australians don’t like it, because we’re confused about meritocracy and egalitarianism. With meritocracy, there is the question of “Why is this person somehow better than me?” Because if they’re in authority, they’re supposed to be somehow better than me. And egalitarianism comes in saying, “I don’t have to submit to him. He’s no better than me because all people are equal.”
But that’s actually a nonsense. People aren’t all equal, and we don’t submit to people because they’re better or because they’re worse, but because they’re in authority. When I meet the policeman, I don’t say, “Hang on. You’re not older than me. You haven’t got more university degrees than me. You’re not stronger than me. So I won’t submit.” It’s got nothing to do with that. He’s got the uniform on. That’s what matters.
TP: He’s been appointed to that role which has authority within our culture. It’s not his innate superiority or even anything he’s done that is superior to you.
PJ: On the other hand, sometimes it is innate superiority or experience—for example, the school teacher. The students should submit to the authority of the teachers who have gone through the training and have gotten the qualifications from the educational system to teach. You can’t just say the student should be encouraged just to explore ideas for themselves, because you don’t know what to explore until you find out what is the truth. Teachers have been appointed by the government or by parents in order to teach.
TP: And should I say, speaking on behalf of all teachers out there, they should be submitted to by the parents as well. You don’t go to a doctor and tell him how to fix your body; you go to the doctor because you don’t know how to fix your body. But when we go in to talk to teachers, a lot of parents seem to think they know more about education and how it should all work than the teacher does, and proceed to lecture the teacher on what he or she should do
PJ: You’ve opened that can of worms. Let’s move on.
TP: Yes, back to the question of submission. Where does sin fit into all this?
PJ: That’s the fundamental of this problem because the essence of sin is autonomy. The essence of sin is rejecting God’s authority over us to know what is good and evil, and say “I am the determinant of good and evil rather than God. I am going to run my life my way.” Whereas actually, it’s God’s life to be run God’s way. And so if you’ve accepted sin, you’ve accepted autonomy as a way of life. Submission is then contradictory to everything you believe in. You can take it in the right wing capitalist end of the spectrum with Ayn Rand, the philosopher who taught ethical egoism.
TP: What’s ethical about egoism?
PJ: It says that if everybody just looked after themselves, the world would be a happier place to live in. It’s a very right wing capitalist kind of philosophy. But the alternative, the left wing Marxism, is no better, because you always have to live in revolt and always have to tear down the system, whether you do it physically like Marx would or the Bolsheviks in Russia did, or whether it’s the cultural tear down of Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, who saw that political revolutions are not going to work in Western civilization, but cultural revolution will. And this is what has been run through our schools and our universities for the last 40 or so years, where all authority is viewed as oppressive and hegemonic. It’s all wrong. It’s all structural oppression. It’s oppressiveness, so the oppressed must revolt against it by tearing down systemic oppression. Once you’ve accepted that as a philosophy, of course you won’t submit. Submission is accepting oppression, which is a terrible thing. So there’s a whole range of reasons why we do not like submission as a concept, be it as right wing or left wing or simply as an Aussie.
TP: Which means it’s a little inconvenient for us that God commands it.
PJ: Yes, and some Bible readers wish that he hadn’t! But God’s commands are always for our good, so we should be doing them. In fact, even our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God the Son–and you can’t have a greater authority than being God the Son, not just the son of God–he becomes a human, becomes a child. And he submits himself to his parents. His parents are good and godly people as best we understand, but they didn’t know what he had come to do. They didn’t understand who he was. They were mystified by him, but he submitted to them because they were his parents. And because he was born under the law, it was his duty to honor his parents by obeying them, and so he submitted himself to them. Well, if God himself is willing to submit himself to human parents, then I think his command for me to do it is something I should be doing.
TP: Would you say that an even greater illustration of Jesus’ submission is his submission to the Father’s will?
PJ: Oh, absolutely. In the Garden of Gethsemane where he says “Not my will, but your will be done even to death.”
TP: He emptied himself and became obedient as a servant, as a slave, even to death on a cross.
PJ: Yes, which is the illustration in Philippians 2 of having the mind of Christ that is needed for counting other people of more significance than yourself and being united in humility. Christianity teaches submission and humility. Being filled with the Spirit will lead you to do several things: giving thanks to the Father, teaching each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and submitting to each other.
TP: You’re talking about Ephesians 5 and that famous verse about being filled with the Spirit—the last of the four participles that flesh out what that looks like is ‘submitting to one another’.
PJ: What does it mean to submit to one another? Does that mean I submit to you and you submit to me? Parents submit to parents, and children submit to parents?
TP: In one sense the “one another” is a reciprocal back and forth thing. But as the following verses make very plain, the manner in which we submit to one another is in different spheres of life. A son submits to his father, but in a different circumstance, the son may be a master, and a slave might submit to him as his master. So depending on which context we’re in and the relationship we’re in, we submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. It’s not that every one of those relationships is reciprocal. The father doesn’t submit to the son because that would make a nonsense of what the word ‘submit’ means—because the son doesn’t have any authority over the father.
PJ: Good, good. I’m glad for that. I think I was wrong in my understanding many years ago in trying to get it to be totally reciprocal. So it is reciprocal, but in a different way, with different relationships, isn’t it? I submit to the policeman when we’re out on the road and I’m driving. He submits to me when he actually happens to be in the congregation and I’m the elder leading the congregation.
TP: He’s sitting under your teaching and listening to you.
PJ: Or, if he’s my grandson, he should submit to me. But in this whole context, it seems to me that people are triggered and upset about submission.
TP: They react against it.
PJ: When actually it is just everyday common sense and it’s necessary.
TP: Yes, because how else do we function in society? How do we get on with each other and function in relationship and recognize the different parts we all play in a social setting without recognizing the authority of some people in some contexts and some in others? If no-one submits to a policeman, or no-one submits to a doctor’s treatment, or no child submits to a teacher, then there’s no authority. We just all make it up as we go along in every individual circumstance. Well, that’s anarchy.
PJ: What happens as an alternative to anarchy?
TP: When you flip up the other end, it’s tyranny, isn’t it?
PJ: If our relationships are based on power, then we will go to tyranny. The other side of the coin is the chaos of anarchy. Authority actually enables society to function peacefully. But it’s something you do all the time and it’s almost unconscious. For example, how does a band play together without submission?
TP: It’s impossible because you’re submitting to two things. You’re submitting to the shape and form that the music itself has, and you’re submitting to one another and to the band leader to direct you and pull you together in the one direction.
PJ: Yes, but it seems to me, it’s fundamentally obvious. If I’m not going to sing the same tune or the same tempo in the same key, we’re not singing the same song. That’s a nonsense. The very activity of singing requires submission. Not only that, what team sport can you play without submission? How do you climb on a bus without submission?
TP: It comes back to our definition of submission earlier, that it’s the response to an authority that rightfully calls forth your action, like a musical score does. Submission is your response to that authority. And in that sense, because everything we’re doing in our society constantly involves actions being called forth from us, quite rightly, by various authorities, then submission is an everyday, almost unthinking thing we do all the time.
PJ: It’s therefore really good for God to command us to this. For it is for our good that, instead of our society being run on vengeance, God has appointed governments so that he will deal with our sins and our crimes on God’s behalf. That is for our good.
TP: Otherwise, we all run around taking vengeance on each other. It’s chaos. But this voluntary nature of submission, of recognizing authority and submitting to it, it’s almost like the concept of ‘consent’, do you think?
PJ: Yes. And consent has now become the really important one moral principle of our educational system that we’ve got to teach, especially to young boys. It’s not that far away from submission, is it? It’s saying that you do not force, you do not coerce another person to do something, because people should be free to consent, to accept an imposition, to accept an action that they are being called upon to do. It’s not the same word (as ‘submission’), but it has a lot of overlaps.
TP: Yes, it overlaps in the sense of recognizing the goodness of something and voluntarily submitting to it, or voluntarily acting in accordance with it. And it’s not the same because often in consent, it is about two people negotiating an agreement together, and we’ve come to use it almost entirely for sexual relationships. But it’s an interesting kind of overlap because what we’ve said about submission being the right and voluntary recognition of authority that we do all the time, and it’s a good thing.
PJ: It’s a very good thing. In fact, consent in wedding services was one of the great advances of the Reformation and of Christianity.
TP: So if submission is such a good thing, why do we have such a problem with it? Why do we react against it, and what kind of alternative is in our mind?
PJ: Well, the big one that’s used is egalitarianism. We pride ourselves on being an egalitarian society. It’s a nonsense because really, we’re not. But in what sense do we mean egalitarianism? The concept is a concept of equal–we’re all born equal, we’re made equal. Which is not true. We’re never equal in our birth. We’re equally human, but not in circumstance.
TP: It lacks a predicate, doesn’t it? You’ve got to ask equal ‘in what’.
PJ: Equal doesn’t mean ‘same’ or ‘equivalent’, which is what people tend to use it as. You’d want to advocate for equality in court, but the reality is, having a very good lawyer increases your chance of winning in court. You talk about equality of basic human rights, but what are basic human rights? We Christians know that humans are equally created in the image of God and therefore should be treated as such, but if you haven’t got God creating humans in his image, who determines what basic human rights are or aren’t? And there’s a lot of discussion between people in our society about equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Because those two things are very different. You can’t control outcomes to create equality. You can, to some extent, have equality or opportunity.
TP: But even then, in a society with a legal framework of equal opportunity (i.e. no discrimination), although the playing field is theoretically level so that everyone has the same access, inevitably, people from better socioeconomic backgrounds with better resources will take more advantage of those opportunities than those who have less. They’ll be able to seize them more readily. So even equality of opportunity is desperately difficult to achieve.
PJ: Yes. It is very difficult to get out of poverty if you are born into it. So I’m not sure we want to treat people equally if you mean in the same way, because there are people who are vulnerable–the blind, the children, the elderly, the sick. I don’t want to treat them in exactly the same way as the people who’ve got good sight and people who are in full adult life and have full strength and energy. The vulnerable need special care. And so I want to discriminate. I think discrimination is a good, godly, humane, proper thing to do. And so at that point, you say, yes, we’re treating them equally. But equality is a very strange word to be using.
TP: Especially to make it your supreme value. It reminds me of the image of the body that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 12. It’s not that we’re all the same body part. We’re all different. In fact, some parts are less honourable than other parts. And we want to treat the less honourable parts with more honour. We want to raise them up. And it’s much the same as the passage we mentioned earlier in Philippians 2 where our goal as Christians is not equality. It’s actually to treat you as more significant than myself, to count your interests and your salvation in Christ and your benefit and your welfare as more significant than mine. We’re not trying to equalize everybody, we’re actually looking to honour and love those around us, which is a different framework.
PJ: Yes, that’s why this word ‘consent’ is being promoted so strongly. But that’s less than Christian. I don’t want young men to see the standard of behaviour as consent. I want them to do much more than that. I want them to love, I want them to lay down their life in sacrifice for the other, whoever that other may be. Consent is just the basic entrance level, but we’ve got to do much better than just treat each other with consent. People can consent to use drugs. I don’t think that means I should give it to them.
TP: So this concept of submission that’s so common in Scripture—all the way from how Jesus submits to his Father down to the way that we submit to one another and to each other in society and within churches in different ways and in different roles and frameworks that we have—it is such a blessing for our lives from our good God. We actually know that in our culture, because it’s a mess if we don’t submit to authority rightfully and voluntarily. And so we’ve got to be aware of how we’ve drunk some of the Kool Aid of our culture if we are anti-submission, and remember that submission is God’s gift to us.
