Thesis
Scripture treats the household, the church, and the commonwealth as three distinct spheres of ordered relation, each with its own offices, duties, and limits, and yet all sharing a common pattern: equal persons living under God in offices appointed by God, with the duty of submission resting on those whom God has placed under authority and the duty of self-giving service resting on those whom God has placed in authority. A comparative reading of the New Testament household tables together with the related teaching on the magistrate and the congregation reveals a unified doctrine of ordered relations. This paper draws that doctrine out by comparing the five paradigmatic relations—children and parents, wives and husbands, citizens and magistrates, members and elders, and the cross-cutting relations of older and younger, master and servant—and by showing how each one participates in the same Christological pattern established in Paper 1.
Introduction
The New Testament does not treat ordered relations only one at a time. Paul writes household tables in Ephesians 5:22–6:9, Colossians 3:18–4:1, and Titus 2:1–10. Peter writes a longer table in 1 Peter 2:13–3:7 that begins with the magistrate and moves through the master, the wife, and the husband before ending with the whole congregation. Hebrews 13 addresses leaders and led, marriage and money, hospitality and prison-visiting in a single sweep. The apostles plainly thought of these relations as belonging together. They did not write separate tracts on marriage, parenting, citizenship, and church membership; they wrote integrated tables in which the relations were laid side by side so that the common pattern could be seen.
This paper follows their lead. The five relations named in the title are not exhaustive of biblical ordered relations, but they are the five most fully addressed in the apostolic writings and the five from which a comparative doctrine can most clearly be drawn. The paper proceeds in seven sections. The first sets out the common pattern that all the relations share. The second through fifth treat each of the named relations in turn. The sixth examines cross-cutting relations (older and younger, master and servant) that overlap with all of the others. A pastoral conclusion follows.
I. The Common Pattern
Six features recur across all the ordered relations the New Testament addresses.
First, the relations are paired. The apostles never give the duty of submission without giving, in the same passage, the duty of authority. Wives submit; husbands love. Children obey; fathers do not provoke. Servants obey; masters refrain from threatening and remember they too have a Master. Members submit; elders do not domineer. Citizens are subject; magistrates are God’s servants for their good. The duty is never one-sided in Scripture. The one in office is bound as tightly as the one who submits, often more tightly.
Second, the relations are specific. A wife is to submit to her own husband, not to all men. A child is to obey his own parents, not every adult. A member is to submit to the elders of his own congregation, not to every preacher he meets. A citizen is to be subject to the governing authorities God has placed over him, not to every claimant of power. The relational specificity protects submission from being weaponized as a generalized posture of subservience to whoever is loudest. Submission terminates on a particular relation.
Third, the relations are bounded. No human authority is given total claim. Every officeholder is himself under God, and every duty of submission terminates at the line where obedience to the officeholder would require disobedience to God. Paper 9 will treat this limit directly; the present point is that the boundedness of human authority is built into every one of the relations from the start. The wife is to submit “as to the Lord” (Eph. 5:22); the child is to obey “in the Lord” (Eph. 6:1); the citizen is to be subject “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Pet. 2:13); the servant is to obey “as you would Christ” (Eph. 6:5). The Lord is the limit and the standard.
Fourth, the relations are reciprocal in dignity but asymmetric in office. The wife is not less than her husband in dignity; she is differently placed in the household. The child is not less than the parent in dignity; he is differently placed in the family. The member is not less than the elder in dignity; he is differently placed in the body. The citizen is not less than the magistrate in dignity; he is differently placed in the commonwealth. This is the doctrine of Papers 2 and 3 carried through the comparative work.
Fifth, the relations are accountable. Every officeholder must answer to God for the office given. “They are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Heb. 13:17). The masters have a Master in heaven, “and there is no partiality with him” (Eph. 6:9; Col. 4:1). The magistrate is “God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:4). The husband’s prayers may be “hindered” if he fails his wife (1 Pet. 3:7). The parent will answer for the children entrusted to him. The accountability runs through every office, and it is to God, not first to the office’s beneficiaries.
Sixth, the relations are Christological. In every case the pattern is grounded in the relation of the Son to the Father and the relation of Christ to the church. Wives submit “as the church submits to Christ” (Eph. 5:24). Husbands love “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). Servants obey “as you would Christ” (Eph. 6:5). Members submit to elders who answer to the “Chief Shepherd” (1 Pet. 5:4). Citizens obey magistrates because Christ is Lord even over them (cf. Phil. 2:11). The whole architecture is held up by the Christology of Paper 1.
These six features will reappear in each of the relations below. They are the deep grammar of biblical ordered relation. The papers that follow Paper 9 in this suite—Paper 10 on the kingdom pattern especially—will return to them.
II. Children and Parents
The clearest of the relations is the relation of children to parents. It is given the unique distinction, among the household duties, of being part of the Ten Commandments. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you” (Exod. 20:12). Paul, quoting the commandment, calls it “the first commandment with a promise” (Eph. 6:2). The duty of honor is universal—every human being has had or has parents, and the commandment binds upon all.
In the apostolic household tables, the duty of children is stated simply. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1). “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Two qualifiers should be noticed. The obedience is “in the Lord” and “for this pleases the Lord”—Christological in its motive and bounded by the Lord’s own commands. The duty is also universal in its scope (“in everything”) within those bounds, which is fitting for children who are still under formation and not yet able to govern themselves.
The paired duty of parents (and especially of fathers) is given equally clearly. “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (Col. 3:21). The discipline and instruction of the Lord is the positive content; the prohibition against provoking is the negative protection. Fathers are not given absolute discretion. They are given a vocation: to bring children up in such a way that their hearts are formed, not crushed; instructed, not exasperated; disciplined, not embittered.
The relation passes, by stages, into something else. Children grow up. The duty of obedience is, in Scripture’s pattern, the duty of the minor child; the duty of honor remains lifelong. An adult child no longer obeys his parents in the way a young child does, but he is never released from honoring them as long as they live, and indeed beyond. The Lord rebuked the Pharisees who had used the practice of Corban to evade their duty to their aged parents (Mark 7:9–13). Paul commands believers to “learn first to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents” (1 Tim. 5:4). The honor of the fifth commandment is not graduated out of as one ages; it changes shape with the seasons of life but never lapses.
The relation also functions in Scripture as a kind of training school for every later relation. The child who learns to honor his parents is the citizen who knows how to honor the magistrate, the member who knows how to honor the elder, the wife who knows how to honor her husband, the husband who knows how to bear the weight of an office whose holder is fallible. The household is the workshop in which the fundamental postures of structured equality are learned. Where parenting fails, the whole architecture of ordered relations is destabilized; where parenting succeeds, the architecture is reinforced for the next generation.
III. Wives and Husbands
The relation of wife to husband has been the subject of Papers 2, 3, and 6, and it appears here for the sake of the comparative study.
The apostolic instruction is consistent across the household tables. “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Eph. 5:22). “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Col. 3:18). “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives” (1 Pet. 3:1). The instruction is the same in each table; the Christological grounding is consistent; the relational specificity (one’s own husband) is preserved.
The paired duty of husbands is given with even more weight. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them” (Col. 3:19). “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Pet. 3:7). The benchmark for the husband is the cross; the threat for failure is hindered prayer; the standing of the wife is “heir with you of the grace of life.”
Two features distinguish this relation from the previous one.
First, the relation is one of two adults. The wife is not in formation under her husband as a child is under his parents. She is a coheir; she is a partner; she is the “helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18). The submission of a wife is therefore not the obedience of a minor; it is the willing yielding of an equal adult within an ordered partnership.
Second, the relation does not end with the natural passage of time. A child grows up out of the obedience of childhood into the honor of adulthood; a wife does not “grow up out of” being a wife. The relation is permanent within the life of the marriage, and the asymmetry of office is, with it, permanent. The asymmetry has been examined in Paper 3 and does not need to be re-litigated here; the point in the present comparative section is that the structure of the relation differs from the structure of childhood, and the differing structure shapes how the duties play out.
The husband’s duty is to occupy his office in the manner of Jesus Christ (Paper 4): to love sacrificially, to sanctify, to nourish and cherish, to honor as coheir, to refuse all harshness. The wife’s duty is to submit in the manner of the church under Christ: willingly, willingly, with the assurance that her standing before God is not diminished and her dignity not affronted, within the limits that Paper 9 will treat. Neither duty is well held where the doctrines of Papers 1–4 are not believed.
IV. Members and Elders
The relation of members and elders is the ecclesiastical analogue of household order. It is the relation within which the people of God are gathered, taught, fed, disciplined, and guarded.
The apostolic instruction to members is plain. “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you” (Heb. 13:17). “Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders” (1 Pet. 5:5). “Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17). The duty is owed; the duty is owed in a manner that makes the elders’ work joyful rather than grievous; and the honor owed is “double” where the work is well done.
The paired duty of elders is given with corresponding weight. “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:2–3). The qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 describe the kind of man who is fit for the office: above reproach, sober-minded, self-controlled, hospitable, able to teach, not violent, not greedy for gain, not quarrelsome, not a drunkard, not a recent convert. The biblical fence around the office is high; the entry is narrow.
Three features distinguish this relation from the household relations.
First, the relation is spiritual rather than natural. The elder is not the member’s father, husband, or master in any natural sense. The relation is constituted by the calling of the Lord and the recognition of the congregation. The duty is owed in the church and is bounded by the church’s own life.
Second, the relation is plural rather than singular. A wife has one husband; a child has typically one father and one mother; a congregation, in the apostolic pattern, has multiple elders (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5). The plurality of elders is a built-in protection against the concentration of office in a single hand and against the abuse of rank by a solitary leader.
Third, the relation is subject to formal discipline. Elders may be charged on the testimony of two or three witnesses (1 Tim. 5:19); persistent sin is to be publicly rebuked (1 Tim. 5:20); a man no longer fit for office must be removed from it. The office is not life tenure regardless of conduct; the office is a stewardship that can be forfeited.
The relation of members and elders most clearly illustrates the doctrine of authority as service (Paper 4). The elder is a fellow elder with Peter; the elder is a fellow undershepherd under the Chief Shepherd; the elder is to wash feet, not to be honored as a benefactor; the elder is to feed the flock, not to feed himself on the flock. The doctrine has been treated in detail in Papers 4 and 6; the comparative point here is that the ecclesiastical relation, like the household relations, is built on the same Christological foundation and is to be lived in the same manner.
V. Citizens and Magistrates
The relation of citizens and magistrates is the political analogue of the same pattern, and the apostles take it up no less directly than the household and ecclesiastical relations.
The apostolic instruction to citizens is consistent across the New Testament. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment… for he is God’s servant for your good… Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Rom. 13:1–2, 4, 7). “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Pet. 2:13–14). “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:1–2). The duty is owed; the duty is owed under God; the duty includes prayer for those in authority as well as obedience to them.
The paired duty of magistrates is implied throughout the same passages. The magistrate is “God’s servant for your good”; he bears the sword “as the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4). He is to “punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Pet. 2:14). Where the magistrate does the opposite—punishing the good and praising the evil—he has corrupted the office. The doctrine of the abuse of rank in Paper 6 applies as fully to magistrates as it does to elders and husbands.
Three features distinguish this relation from the household and ecclesiastical relations.
First, the relation is broader. A husband, a parent, and an elder are known persons in known relations; a magistrate is often a distant officeholder known by his office rather than his face. The duty owed is impersonal in a way that the duties in the household and the congregation are not.
Second, the relation typically lacks the relational reciprocity of the closer relations. The magistrate’s duties are owed in the office; he is rarely held to the same standard of personal pastoral care as the elder or the husband. The relation tends to be more transactional in its texture, even when the duties on both sides are real before God.
Third, the relation is the most likely to test the limits of submission. Magistrates may command what God forbids more frequently and more publicly than husbands or elders normally do, and the political relation has historically been the principal site of the conflicts that Paper 9 will address. The duty of subjection is the rule; the limit beyond which subjection must yield to obedience to God is the exception, but it is an exception that recurs in every age and in every commonwealth.
It is worth noting, in passing, the way 1 Peter weaves the political and household relations together. Peter begins with the duty of subjection to the emperor and the governors (1 Pet. 2:13–17), moves to the duty of servants toward their masters (2:18–25), and then to the duty of wives toward their husbands (3:1–6) and the duty of husbands toward their wives (3:7). The relations are laid side by side because they participate in a single pattern. The Christian’s whole life is lived in ordered relations, and the apostle does not divide them into separate compartments.
VI. Cross-Cutting Relations: Older and Younger, Master and Servant
Two further relations cut across the others and complete the comparative picture.
Older and younger. “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the LORD” (Lev. 19:32). “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim. 5:1–2). “Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders” (1 Pet. 5:5). The category of “older” in these passages partly overlaps with the office of elder in the church and partly does not; even outside the formal office, the aged are owed a particular honor by the young.
The Titus 2 instructions extend this still further. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness (Titus 2:2). Older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to much wine, and they are to teach what is good, so as to train the younger women (Titus 2:3–5). Younger women are to love their husbands and children. Younger men are to be self-controlled. The relations between older and younger are themselves ordered, and the ordering is reciprocal: the older have a duty of teaching and example, the younger have a duty of receiving and learning.
Master and servant. The relation of master and servant (or, in the apostolic context, master and slave) appears in every household table. “Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ… Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him” (Eph. 6:5, 9). “Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters… You are serving the Lord Christ… Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven” (Col. 3:22, 24; 4:1). “Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust” (1 Pet. 2:18). The substance of the relation is the same as the others: submission of the one and self-giving service of the other, both under God.
The apostolic instructions on this relation should not be confused with an apostolic endorsement of every form the relation has taken historically. The apostles addressed the Christian believer’s duty within a relation that existed in their world; they did not pronounce that the relation, in every form, was a good thing. Paul writes to Philemon to receive his runaway slave Onesimus “no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother” (Philem. 16), which already plants the seed of the relation’s transformation. In the modern Christian world the formal relation of slavery has, by the working of biblical principles, been generally abolished. The apostolic instructions remain instructive for the analogous relations of employer and employee, which inherit much of the practical shape that the apostles addressed.
The cross-cutting relations are important to the comparative study because they remind the reader that ordered relations are not confined to a few formal offices. They run throughout the life of the people of God. The older and the younger, the master and the servant, the teacher and the student, the host and the guest—each pairing is, in its place, ordered before God, and each pairing is to be lived in the manner that Jesus Christ has taught.
Pastoral Conclusion
The comparative study yields one principal lesson. The Christian life is lived inside a network of ordered relations, all of which participate in the same Christological pattern. The husband, the wife, the parent, the child, the elder, the member, the magistrate, the citizen, the master, the servant, the older, the younger—each is found in offices and stations appointed by God, each owes duties to others within those offices, each will answer to God for the manner in which the office or station has been occupied, and each will see the pattern of Jesus Christ either approximated or denied in the daily texture of the relation.
The doctrine of structured equality is therefore not a doctrine of just one relation. It is a doctrine of all the relations together. The man who reads about marriage but not about the magistracy will misread marriage; the woman who reads about the church but not about the household will misread the church; the citizen who reads about the magistracy but not about the master will misread the magistracy. The relations are all of a piece, and the same Lord stands behind all of them.
Two papers remain in this suite. The next will treat the limit beyond which submission within these relations must yield to obedience to God—the case of Acts 5:29, the case of Daniel, the case of the Hebrew midwives, the case of every Christian who has had to refuse an unlawful command. The last will gather the whole into its eschatological horizon and ask how the kingdom of Jesus Christ transforms authority into stewardship, judgment into justice, and greatness into service. The comparative work of the present paper is the bridge to both.
Notes
- All Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV).
- The household tables of Ephesians 5:22–6:9, Colossians 3:18–4:1, 1 Peter 2:13–3:7, and Titus 2:1–10 are treated in this paper as a single body of apostolic teaching, each table reflecting a particular angle on a common pattern. The differences among them are real and useful (Peter, for example, begins with the political relation; Paul typically begins with the marital relation), but the common pattern is the principal subject of this comparative study.
- The duty of children is treated in this paper as continuing in the form of honor throughout life and in the form of obedience during minority. The line between minority and adulthood is not precisely defined in Scripture and varies by culture; the paper does not attempt a fixed age but draws the distinction in principle.
- The treatment of master and servant in Section VI follows the apostolic instructions in their original setting. The paper holds that the apostolic instructions on this relation should not be read as endorsing every historical form of the relation, and that the abolition of formal slavery in much of the Christian world is itself an outworking of biblical principles. The analogous application to modern employment relations is offered as an extension rather than as an identity.
- The exegetical and doctrinal foundations for the marital, paternal, ecclesiastical, and political relations have been laid in Papers 1–4 and are presupposed rather than re-argued here. The comparative work of Paper 8 is to be read in conjunction with those earlier papers.
- The relation of older and younger in Section VI overlaps with the formal office of elder in the church but is not identical with it. Scripture commands particular honor to the aged irrespective of office, and the present paper treats this as a distinct duty within the comparative study.
- The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are referred to throughout by their scriptural names. The Son is named “Jesus Christ” in the form most frequently attested in the New Testament writings.
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